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

The first game went down to the wire, with Katherine eventually prevailing. Luck was on my side in game two. In the third game, Fleet dominated all the way — until the end, when with the very last card I beat him out. Yes, I know, I should have just let my young son win, but as reported, we were playing as if the personal stakes were high and my competitive spirit momentarily trumped my paternal fidelity.

In disappointment and disgust at losing by what in basketball would have been termed a “buzzer beater,” Fleet smacked the folding tray, our card table, with his fist. As everybody knows, those airline trays are rickety. Most of the cards stayed on the tray but Katherine’s recently filled glass of red wine flew off and emptied itself up and down her Easter-white dress, while the other glass and its entire contents landed with a small but portentous splash in my lap.

We sat there momentarily stunned, Katherine and me, soaked with a mediocre merlot, until a flight attendant, after surveying in horror what must have looked like the aftermath of an ax attack, hurried back with a comforting smile — and four bottles (two for each of us) of club soda. Speaking from experience, she assured us that if we immediately doused our garments with the soda water, the wine would not leave a stain. Taking her at her word and having no real alternative, we hustled with the bottles of seltzer to the toilet at the rear of the plane and, squeezing in together, set about resoaking ourselves, skeptically but with determination. And it worked.

It worked. The seltzer actually absorbed the merlot and did it far more quickly than an old wino’s liver might, but it still took a long time. By Fleet’s Mickey Mouse watch, we were jammed in that compartment, scrubbing, for at least twenty minutes. Meanwhile, a line had formed outside the toilet, for it was at that stage in a flight when all the passengers’ bladders seemed to reach flood stage in unison, a renal symphony in P sharp. People began first to sheepishly rap, then to bang with some urgency, on the door.

Imagine the looks on their faces when the toilet door finally opened and out stepped two people, a well-dressed man and woman, both sopping wet, especially below the waist. It makes me smile even now to recall their expressions (children bewildered, adults outraged or maybe envious) as they tried to picture — or tried not to picture — what sort of kinky business might have just transpired in that cramped cubbyhole of a public loo (aware, if only intuitively, that Eros, though a plump little bugger, has been known to unfold his salty wings in some very tight quarters); and wondering if it would be hygienic, or even morally permissible to go in there now.

Although I’d found my first three books to be generally satisfying from an artistic perspective, and though they’d attracted a loyal following among readers who’d discovered a slice of Tibetan peach pie to be their just dessert after far too many predictable potlucks of good old meat-and-potatoes American social realism (how many protagonists can one watch come painfully of age, how many bad marriages resolve or dissolve; and after a while who really gives a damn if the butler did it?); despite those early successes, I don’t think I hit my stride as a novelist until Jitterbug Perfume . Published in 1984, it remains, aside from Still Life With Woodpecker, my most popular novel, perhaps because it explores from a fresh perspective the pervasive human yearning to somehow nullify that death sentence that each of us is handed at birth, and dramatizes without sentimentality the possibility of an eternal romantic love.

Jitterbug Perfume was followed in 1990 by Skinny Legs and All, a novel inspired not by the Joe Tex tune from which I took the title but by a fascination with the biblical bad girls: Delilah, Jezebel, Bathsheba, Lot’s horny daughters, and most especially Salome, upon whose so-called Dance of the Seven Veils the book is systematically structured, the dropping of each veil signifying the casting off of one of the illusions that limit human advancement. Set in modern times against a backdrop of the New York art world, Skinny Legs and All explores the Jewish/Arab conflict from both an interpersonal and a mythological perspective, and shoves so many pies in the collective face of fundamentalist/apocalyptic Christianity that, considering the violent nature of some true believers, I thought it might be a good idea to accept the invitation I received that June to travel to Moscow with a high school marching band.

The opportunity was provided by my friend Lee Frederick, a basketball star at Bradley University who went on to coach in college and with the Detroit Pistons. Lee had given up coaching to form Sports Tours International, a specialized travel company that organizes tournaments and takes U.S. collegiate sports teams to play and soak up a little culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. His clients are mostly basketball and volleyball programs, but he once organized an overseas tour for a chess team, and now he’d been hired to take to Russia a champion high school marching band from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He wondered if I’d like to come along. Well, yeah.

Lee and I hooked up in Amsterdam, where I sometimes go to take the waters, and flew to Moscow together on Aeroflot. His staff had been in Russia for some weeks and everything was organized. The Wisconsin group arrived in Moscow the same day as Lee and I, and all of us were quartered at a quite large and quite bleak (Soviet chic) hotel on the outskirts of the city. That evening, in a dining room nearly the size of Stalin’s paranoia, Lee spoke to the assembly and introduced his staff to the band, its directors, and its entourage: there were seventy-five kids in the New Richmond Marching Tigers and it seemed as if every other one of them had a chaperone. At one point, I stood and was introduced simply as “an American writer” with no hint that I might be on the run from Jerry Falwell.

The following day, the band — all seventy-five uniformed members — assembled on the hotel grounds for a brief rehearsal. It was at that point that I noticed the drum majorette. She was hard to miss: very tall, very blond, striking in her white boots, plumed cap, and short skirt; commanding in the way she twirled, tossed, and caught a baton. She was obviously the prettiest girl in school, the reigning social queen of New Richmond High. As I admired her teen-queen confidence, her regal bearing, her polished moves, I decided to have a little fun.

During a break, I sidled up to her, and with a stern expression said softly, “I know I was introduced last night as a writer, but” — lowering my voice another octave now and glancing furtively over my shoulder — “but I’m actually with the Central Intelligence Agency. My assignment here in Moscow is to protect you .” I paused for her to take that in. “In public you’ll be on my radar at all times. In private, should you ever detect anything even vaguely threatening, my room number here is 804.”

Her blue eyes, naturally large, seemed to widen to the circumference of Frisbees, but before she could utter a word I turned on my heel and strode away. All that week, as the band marched through Red Square, Gorky Park, and along Moscow’s broader boulevards, toodling, tooting, trumpeting, and generally blasting “Jesus Christ Superstar,” its signature number (amazing, baffling, and sometimes obviously disgusting the Russians, who’d never seen or heard anything remotely like it), I, too, marched along — off to the side, over in the gutter — but staying always abreast of the drum majorette, careful to match her stride for stride. From time to time, I’d catch her eye and nod ever so discreetly, indicating that the situation was under control, that I had her back, and by the second day, she would acknowledge me with her schoolgirl version of a conspiratorial smile.