Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Still Life With Woodpecker caused me to be investigated by the FBI. Not right away, however, and certainly not for the rosy picture that I (in my own naïveté) painted of cocaine: it’s the substances that enlarge consciousness and open the mind’s eye that worry our government, not the ones that draw down the blinds. No, fifteen years after the publication of Woodpecker — a novel that examines the difference between outlaws and criminals, between redheads and the rest of us, but whose primary focus is the transitory nature of romantic love and what might be done about love’s vagaries — fifteen years after its debut, the book led me to be considered a suspect in the Unibomber case.

When someone from the Seattle office of the FBI telephoned one Thursday in 1995 to say that the agency wished to question me, I knew immediately, though no reason was given, what it was about. I knew because a month earlier, a newspaper reporter in Connecticut had contacted me to report that a college professor in that state was telling law enforcement agencies that it was obvious, from what Tom Robbins had written in Still Life With Woodpecker — the anti-authoritarian sentiments, the warnings against overdependence on technology, the romanticizing of outlaws, and, most tellingly, authentic recipes for homemade bombs — that he (me) was the Unibomber, subject of a nationwide manhunt. The journalist thought it amusing, considering both the humor and passionate reverence for life that also permeate the novel, and I myself paid it little mind until the Bureau phoned. Even then I wasn’t troubled, and pleasantly agreed to receive an agent at my La Conner home on the following Tuesday. But then…

But then, the very next morning, as synchronicity (that boundary-busting logic-mocking clown) would have it, Susan Paynter, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, published in her Friday column the widely circulated drawing of the Unibomber in his hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses, juxtaposed with a recent head shot of me — in a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses. The resemblance was hard to miss. “Could our Tom Robbins,” she wrote, “who wouldn’t hurt a fly, be the infamous Unibomber?” Susan, who knew me, meant it as a joke, but I assumed they weren’t laughing very hard down at the FBI.

My assumption was correct. All that weekend, day and night, an unfamiliar dark sedan was parked in the one spot that would have permitted its occupant an unobscured view of both the front and rear exits of my house. Had I emerged with a suitcase or a backpack, it wouldn’t have been long before some guy in black shoes was reading me my Miranda rights, and not smiling when I asked if those rights granted me permission to wear fruit on my head like Carmen. Surveillance can be boring, however, for both observer and observed, and by Monday I wasn’t even checking to see if I was still being watched.

On Tuesday, without once asking for directions, the agents arrived at my door. Two of them. Young. Female. Attractive. The FBI isn’t stupid, they knew my weakness. And the agents knew I now knew they knew. That established, we settled in for a lengthy chat, during which they never once intimated that I, myself, was under suspicion, but were only hoping that I could provide them with leads to follow up on. Leads such as any fan mail I might have received from a reader who’d professed, perhaps in the Unibomber’s prose style (he’d published extremely long missives in the New York Times), an inordinate admiration for my Woodpecker character and his habit of punctuating social commentary with dynamite. Leads such as my source for those unusual explosive recipes (the bomb made from kiddie breakfast cereal, for example) that I’d included in the novel.

Entirely professional, the women raised not a pretty eyebrow when I answered that, alas, I’d hauled an accumulation of answered fan mail to the county landfill only a week before, and that, sorry, I couldn’t remember the name of the Seattle sound-system engineer who through an intermediary (also forgotten) had passed along those instructions for turning common household products into things that go boom in the night. I was certain, however, that I could detect something subtle, unspoken, pass between them when I unwittingly volunteered that I’d physically demolished the electric typewriter on which I’d begun composing Still Life With Woodpecker and had gone back to writing with a pen, an obvious Unibomber-like retaliation against technology. And then when I asked them where they were from and they both said Chicago, I’d blurted out that I’d spent time in the Chicago area myself. True enough, it was where I’d once attended weather school, but it was also where the Unibomber posted most of his deadly packages.

For whatever Tommy Rotten reason, I was doing a pretty good job of incriminating myself, in addition to which I caught the agents on several occasions eyeing the nutty, cartoonish assemblage of sticks and twine I’d constructed to support a tall, spindly yucca plant in my studio, a contraption that could have led a suspicious mind to equate it with the jerry-built devices the Unibomber mailed to his intended victims. When the fed femmes left that day, I was convinced I’d not seen the last of them, and something perverse in me was actually excited by the prospect, by the drama of it all.

When months passed without a word from my agents, I went so far as to telephone their office in Seattle to inquire how the investigation was going. I just couldn’t help it. A dead-robotic voice informed me that the agent I sought did not work there. I asked for the other woman and got a similar response. No explanation was offered. Curious. Very curious, indeed. Who were those women, then? Who was their actual employer? What did they really want from me? My imagination, that infernal pinball machine, lit up and I had a truckload of quarters.

Then, around Christmas, I received a holiday card from one of the agents, the one with whom I would have flirted more openly had it not seemed somehow in poor taste. She wrote that she and her sister investigator had been transferred to Oklahoma City to work on the federal-building bombing case there. I wrote back but she never responded — and eventually the Unibomber was caught and I ran out of quarters.

In the years since the selling of Still Life With Woodpecker, I’ve finally had the wherewithal to indulge, pretty much at will and in relative comfort, those urges kindled by that world atlas I bought at age eight. When I wasn’t absorbed with writing (including research, editing, and some publisher-generated promotion); and/or extracurricular activities such as reading for pleasure, attending movies, following the Sonics, playing organized volleyball, practicing yoga and Pilates, and periodically running away with Cupid’s circus (knowing full well I’d probably end up selling peanuts or watering the elephants), I was off to foreign lands in pursuit of fresh experiences: cultural, culinary, or simply thrilling (such as the African treks or the white-water rafting I’ve enjoyed on three continents).

My wife Alexa, the wisest person I know, says that all those pursuits of mine, including the love of words and the loving of women — and certainly not excluding my involvement with psychedelic drugs and Tibetan/Zen “crazy wisdom” philosophies — have been part and parcel of the same overriding compulsion: a lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder. I’m prepared neither to argue with that observation nor advance it; any reader who’s so motivated can draw his or her own conclusion. My immediate intention is to say a little something about Cuba.