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

There’s a sense in which Hollywood Boulevard is a river, too: and until fairly recently it was a river of celebrity, make-believe, neon, and sleaze; infested with tourists, hustlers, weirdos, petty crooks — and the LAPD. One early evening in the mid-1980s, my agent, Phoebe Larmore, and I were traveling along this Mississippi of misfits (by then the only stars there were the bronze ones embedded in the sidewalk), when as we paused for a red light, a young man came rushing out of nowhere and tried to yank open the door of the passenger side, my side, of our car. I managed to hold the door shut and lock it, but when the light went green and we pulled slowly away (there was traffic), the guy ran alongside the car, yelling and pounding on the door.

I suggested, rather pointedly, to Phoebe that she turn at the next corner, which she did, taking a right, driving a block, then turning left on Yucca Street, a quieter street that runs parallel to Hollywood. Looking back, we saw that our assailant was gone, we’d lost him. But then… but then we heard sirens, close by, and suddenly all around us there began to flash the frantic, no-nonsense red lights of crisis and alarm: authority’s monochrome rainbow. A police car was blocking our progress now, and two more squad cars were right on our tail, blaring and blinking. When we stopped, an amplified voice ordered us both out of the vehicle, ordered us each to raise our arms, ordered us to place our hands on our heads. Hello?

In less than a minute, we were literally up against a wall with three revolvers and a shotgun pointed at us by cops with their fingers on the triggers. There is no beast in any jungle, no rapids on any river (including the lower Zambezi in Zimbabwe, where some of the troughs were so deep and the waves so high that there were moments when the river was actually above our raft), no outdoor adventure that could come close to generating this level of fear.

The cops took turns firing questions — and insults — at us (preferable to bullets, obviously) and at some point in the tone-tough verbal barrage, we learned that two men matching our description (Phoebe had recently gotten an unusually short haircut and the cops were in doubt about her sex, an honest mistake on Hollywood Boulevard), two men had grabbed a woman’s handbag outside a bar and driven away with it. Apparently, the guy who attacked our car was a self-appointed vigilante trying to recover the purse and apprehend the thieves. I guess he hadn’t had time to duck into a phone booth and change into his superhero suit.

We tried to explain to the cops that I was a well-known author, she my agent, but it was a story they were reluctant to buy. “In that fuckin’ jalopy?” Phoebe’s nice car was in her neighborhood repair shop, the owner of which had loaned her a vehicle, a bit of a beater, for a day or two. The three pistols and the shotgun (it must take a lot of firepower to bring down a purse snatcher) remained leveled at us. Then, slower than a bullet but sufficiently speedy to alter the ambience, something occurred to me. “I’m in People magazine this week,” I blurted, not really meaning to boast.

Not only was it the truth, but the issue had just come out: we’d picked up a copy at a pharmacy that very afternoon. And, it was lying on the front seat of the car. I convinced the gendarmes to allow me, covered every step of the way, to open the door and produce the magazine. Voilà! They surveyed the article, a three-page feature, as meticulously as if it were a crime scene, comparing the photos to my in-person countenance and the name in the story to my personal ID. Finally, with what seemed like genuine disappointment (I almost felt sorry for them), they lowered their guns.

At no time, however, did they apologize for needlessly endangering our lives (one slip of a trigger finger…), although they did grow rather jocular once the cops-and-robbers game was over. “We saw Uncle Milty earlier this evening,” announced one, referring to Milton Berle and what for him was now a two-celebrity shift; not bad for a patrolman who’d missed out on the Beverly Hills and Malibu beats.

I have friends and acquaintances who sneer at People magazine, ridiculing the sensationalized attention the publication pays to the heartbreaks and high jinks of film starlets and television actors: the comely, the callow, the craven, and the confused. Perhaps, but People has not only been kind to me and my books, it saved me from a still more prolonged interaction with gunmen of the LAPD, a most direful prospect already proven to offer none of the romantic nor transcendental rewards one receives when outrunning angry hippos or bedding down amidst a herd of wild elephants.

There are highlights and low points in the book-flogging arena, as well. An example of the high was the day I was mobbed by teenage girls in Sydney, Australia. Of the low: the night I laid an egg on the Jon Stewart show.

More of my novels are sold in Australia ( Villa Incognito was number one on the bestseller list there) than in any country outside of the U.S., including Canada. My impression is that the Australian sensibility is generally more Americanized than is Canada’s, which, if true, must suit Canadians just fine. At any rate, I’d been dispatched Down Under (where the sesame seeds are all on the other side of the crackers), and one of my reading and signing events was a midday affair at the main branch of the Sydney Public Library. There was a girls’ school nearby and a contingent of thirty or forty juniors and seniors with a chaperone or two showed up to hear me read.

After the reading, I was escorted to a somewhat smaller first-floor room at the rear of the library and seated behind a long, very heavy wooden table. My mission there was to wallop with my barbaric scribble the flyleaves of purchased copies of my oeuvre. Normally, readers wishing signatures will line up and approach the author one or two at a time. These girls, however, were as wild as dingos. They rushed the table in a disorganized pack, waving books in the air like Meryl Streep’s Outback baby. It was hectic but rather entertaining in its way, and it went well enough until my handler from Bantam signaled that I needed to depart for the radio station where she’d scheduled an “important” interview. There was, in fact, a taxi, its motor running, waiting for me right outside the back door.

When I stood and the girls realized that I was preparing to leave them, all hell broke loose. Waving unsigned books or autograph pads in the air — some had nothing to sign and seemed only to want to touch me — they surged forward with such force that I was literally pinned to the wall by that hefty table. It felt as if the table edge was obstructing my air supply and cutting me in half. I glanced around the room for help, but none was forthcoming. Even Alexa, my loving wife, only grinned and rolled her eyes. Well, I thought, there are worse ways to die.

Summoning all my strength, I managed to shove back the table far enough so that I could wriggle up onto it, where I stood for an instant before taking a deep breath and jumping down into the roiling mass of girl flesh. Grabbing first one girl and then another, I kissed them (sometimes on the cheek, sometimes on the nose, sometimes on the top of the head: it was all very scattershot); and hugging and kissing, made my way to the door and escaped to the taxi. As we pulled away, I waved good-bye, then sat back in a daze. I felt as if I’d awakened from a particularly crazy, bed-rumpling dream. I felt like a Beatle. I felt like the Beatles, all five of them, including Mr. Epstein. I felt like the luckiest writer in the world.

The Jon Stewart show was, as the saying goes, a horse of a different feather, although there was nobody and nothing to blame but me and my naïveté. In my foolish innocence, I hadn’t realized that the banter between hosts and guests on late-night TV — all late-night TV — is to some degree scripted. The day prior to my appearance on the show, its producer had interviewed me for nearly ninety minutes via telephone in my New York hotel room. Mainly, she quizzed me about my LSD experiences and, as also reported in USA Today that week, my “habit” of buying tattoos for female acquaintances. (True, I’d purchased tattoos for several women including an Olympic athlete, but this was before tattoos had become so trendy that every girl next door and her baby sister were inked up like Chinese scrolls; and besides, I was only encouraging their rebellious spirit, not branding them.) My misguided impression was that the producer was just feeling me out, trying to get a sense of my style and personality.