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

By this time, the men had overcome their shyness, the floor was packed, and all the while an elderly female was weaving in and out among the couples, not dancing, just wandering, zigzagging — and looking quite mad. No one acknowledged her presence, not even when she got in their way. The dancers behaved as if she were totally invisible. Which, of course, was standard in that part of the world. They just pretended bizarre behavior was not happening. If someone acted nuts, everybody else hit the delete button.

Eventually, I managed to excuse myself from the frolic and made to rejoin my little group of onlookers. As I sat down beside Alexa, I noticed that the old crone had followed me to the end of the court. Regarding the two of us crazily for an instant, she then hissed and made a swift, cryptic gesture with both hands before turning and disappearing into the swaying, swinging throng.

Neither Alexa nor I thought much about it at the time, but we did start to feel increasingly uncomfortable, sensing that we outsiders had intruded long enough on another culture’s private rituals, and when we suggested to Pasquale, “John Travolta,” and the posse that it might be time for us to leave, they concurred. Just as children like to scare themselves, we imagined all sorts of exotic menace — genies, lions, kidnappers, jilted Tuareg promoters, ghosts of long-dead slavers astride pale camels — as we passed through the velvet shadows cast by those ancient clay mosques and libraries in the still more ancient moonlight. We did not, however, think of the gesturing crone, nor would she really come to mind again until the day nine months later when Jonathan Cott had to go and bring up juju.

Since in all those months our disease had gone undiagnosed, since Western medicine had failed to relieve its symptoms, and since we had, indeed, been somewhat vulnerable in a culture where juju was a fact of life, where things occurred that caused science to look the other way (the Dogon’s detailed knowledge of the Sirius star system, for example), it did not seem wholly unreasonable to consider that our “djiggiebombo” might be, in fact, a curse. If so, then how did one proceed in neutralizing it, in getting it lifted?

As Jon’s seed sprouted, and after hours of reflection, I devised a plan of action. Every day, sometimes twice or thrice a day, I would lie down on the earth. In La Conner, I would recline in my backyard, when in Seattle, I’d find a patch of bare soil in Myrtle Edwards Park. Once I’d established what would have to pass for a connection to the earth, once I’d cleared my thoughts of the customary daily debris, I’d close my eyes and focus on the old witch woman. In my mind, I’d try to picture her as a little girl growing up in Timbuktu, imagining her life back then. Next, I’d picture her as a young woman, maybe going to dances such as the one on which we’d intruded, maybe falling in love at such a soiree. I’d picture her as a bride, perhaps a mother, and then I’d try to imagine what turn of events might have wounded her, caused her to begin practicing the black arts. Had she embraced juju only after she’d become mentally unstable? Or, had the juju itself deranged her?

Next, I’d apologize, begging her forgiveness if our presence at the dance had offended her. I’d tell her that my dancing with the women had been all in good fun, conducted with respect, and that the tittering over a potential marriage was just some girlish joke. I’d express admiration for her city and its people, and romantic that I am, this praise was not insincere. I’d congratulate her on Timbuktu’s rich history and express hope for a restorative future. All this I did day after day, and although I must confess I sometimes felt more than a little foolish, none of my séances were in jest. We were a trifle desperate. Djiggiebombo was peeing in our punch bowl. Djiggiebombo was plucking our bluebird.

So what happened? It may have been a result of the macrobiotic diet we’d temporarily but rigorously embraced, it may have been due to the shiatsu treatments we were receiving from a remarkable Seattle healer named Yasuo Mori, the crone in far Mali may actually have sensed somehow my daily appeals and responded favorably thereto; or maybe the damned disease just finally ran out of gas, as viruses, named or unnamed, sometimes do; but for whatever reason, within weeks of my having first launched my psychic missives toward northwest Africa, our symptoms, mine and Alexa’s (in perfect tandem, of course), began to ebb, to fade. And then one fine day — after nearly a year of wreaking havoc in our twin corporal oases — djiggiebombo saddled its dromedary and rode off into the sunset, never to return. Au revoir, motherfucker! And God bless Timbuktu.

Looking back on my life, as I’ve been doing in these pages, I’m reminded again of my great good fortune to have been a writer during the golden age of American publishing. On second thought, I suppose publishing’s golden age actually was the twenties through the forties; when Maxwell Perkins was bringing out Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Hemingway, not to mention James Jones, Faulkner popping over the horizon; you know, back before television would do to reading what panty hose would do to heavy petting. My period of peak production — the late seventies through the nineties — might more accurately be described as “the golden age of expense accounts.”

During those years, my novels and those of many other authors were launched with elaborate parties in New York clubs. On tour, I was lodged in spacious suites in the best hotels; fed in fine restaurants, where, when I traveled with Terry Bromberg and Barry Dennenberg from the promotion department, we’d sometimes order every dessert on the menu. Barry would read off the desserts to us, one by one, in tones and with emotions that rivaled James Earl Jones reciting the Emancipation Proclamation. (We called it “The Barrysburg Address.”)

I’m still not sure where my agent Phoebe and I got the nerve or how we managed to pull this off, but we somehow convinced Bantam Books that I was dead set against shipping manuscript pages of a book-in-progress to New York for approval. Phoebe would hand-deliver an opening chapter or two, on the strength of which I’d usually receive a contract and a monetary advance against future royalties. After that, when the company felt the need to check on my progress, one or more editors had to travel to me; had to meet me in some location of my choosing, where, once they’d settled down and divested themselves of their New York buzz, then and only then they’d be shown fresh pages to read. They’d make notes, ask questions, and we’d discuss any suggestions they might propose, after which they’d return the pages. It was called an “editorial conference,” and two or more would be scheduled for each novel.

Should this strike you as rather presumptuous on my part, you’re probably not just whistling Sinatra. On the other hand, the halls of publishing houses were not sufficiently insulated from the ongoing amphetamine pace of Manhattan, and while the prevailing physical and psychological hubbub, the busyness of it all, might actually be a fitting accompaniment to the contemplation of fast-paced thrillers, or for that matter, tomes a-twitch with Jewish, Irish, or Episcopalian angst, a meaningful assessment of my sentences, quirky in ways different from Eastern Seaboard quirkiness, required of an editor, if not exactly a West Coast sensibility, at least a mind relaxed enough to follow the charmer’s pipes out of the familiar, well-paved neighborhoods of syntax and story line and into a kind of wild, neo-druidic grove, emblazoned with poppies, woodpeckers, spotted toadstools, and a painted pagoda where the Language Wheel is banged like a gong and no Ivy League creative-writing professor would ever have been caught smiling let alone dead.