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

The location I selected for almost all of those editorial conferences was Two Bunch Palms, a health spa near Desert Hot Springs, a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. Like Timbuktu, Two Bunch is an oasis. Unlike the potable spring around which Timbuktu had sprung up, the spring at Two Bunch is hot, laced with minerals, and continually gurgles up what tests have shown to be the second most therapeutic waters on earth, second only to Baden Baden. The natural mineral pool lies in a rustic grotto, lushly surrounded by palm trees and other semitropical foliage, and by moonlight verges on the genuinely magical.

Early in its history, Two Bunch Palms was the desert hideaway of the gangster Al Capone, who operated a private casino there. The small rooms beneath the former casino, where nowadays the finest massage practitioners in America perform their restorative rub-a-dub-dub, were, during Capone’s tenure, cribs for prostitutes. This history lends a faint air of naughtiness to the otherwise relentlessly wholesome place and acts as a defense against forebodings of woo-woo.

If one can’t relax at Two Bunch Palms, one can’t relax anywhere, but in the beginning my editors from Bantam put up a valiant resistance. The evening that Steve Rubin and Matthew Shear arrived there, for instance, they were not only almost audibly crackling with New York intensity, they broadcast ill-concealed vectors of resentment: not exactly thrilled about being lured into that all-too-alien environment. Despite having fortified themselves with martinis on the plane, they were poised to get right to work. I, however, refused to allow them even a peek at my pages until they’d had at least one massage and a soak in the pool.

The editors somewhat begrudgingly complied, and by the second day, each of them was walking around about two inches off the ground, hanging from a smile. In their central nervous systems you could have heard a pin drop. Steve, who had never before been massaged and who was initially suspicious of the very idea, would go back to New York and hire a masseuse to work on him twice a week. Our editorial sessions progressed as smoothly as massage oil, and thereafter I never had to petition for a meeting at the spa. Word spread at Bantam, creating some jealousy, and periodically I’d receive calls from Matthew, Steve, or a successor, asking how the book was coming along and, almost plaintively, if it wasn’t about time for another conference at Two Bunch.

Bear in mind that Bantam was picking up the tab for those sessions, including transportation, lodging, meals, and spa treatments (usually two daily), for the editor or editors, for me, my agent, and whatever wife or girlfriend I might have invited along. It’s safe to say that in today’s economy such lovely expense-account indulgence is a thing of the past, especially since that upstart pair of dinky little digits — the insubstantial 0 and the barely substantial 1 — rode the e-train into the publishing world, with its alphabets and vocabularies, its warehouses of wood pulp and reservoirs of ink, and turned it sideways if not upside down.

When in 2000 it came time to edit Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates — my novel about the CIA, the Virgin Mary, and the maverick operative who loves, hates, and redefines them both — well, things having already changed, I shipped all the pages to New York via FedEx, massaged my wife’s neck, and ran myself a bath in our tub. Tibetan Peach Pie? When I’m convinced that it’s finished, I’ll hit the send key on the computer and, both wistfully and with some trepidation, leave it up to the 0 and the 1 .

For decades, I’ve handwritten (yellow legal pad, ballpoint pen) my manuscripts, and this one is no exception. At week’s end, I dictate the accumulated paragraphs to my assistant, Julie, and she transcribes them onto the computer. Thus, it is Julie’s hand that hovers now above the send key, awaiting the signal that I’m through swinging this monkey by its tail, that Tibetan Peach Pie is done. Hold on, Julie. Not yet. As you know, I write slowly — despite the comic overtones in my fiction, I’m no less conscientious about my craft than James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or any other literary obsessive one might name — and there are a couple more stories I want to tell.

In the early eighties, I had a little crush on Linda Ronstadt. I didn’t know Linda Ronstadt, understand, I’d never met her or even seen her in concert. She was awfully cute in photos, though (this was before the combined forces of enchilada and Wiener schnitzel escalated her dress size), and I was particularly enamored of the way she sang certain words and phrases: “sweetie pie,” for example, in her rendition of (appropriately enough) “I’ve Got a Crush on You.”

One day my ex-spouse Terrie said to me, “If you like Linda Ronstadt so much, why don’t you manifest her?” So I told her why, told her in effect that they’d be serving liver and onions in every school cafeteria in America before people started actually “manifesting” the objects of their desires; told her that if “manifestation” worked, there’d be world peace and half of the New Age naïfs in California would own peppermint helicopters and million-acre sprout farms; told her that while there was something to be said for the power of positive thinking, what she was advocating was amateur juju. Nevertheless, I promised to give it a try. And in a half-assed way, I sort of did.

A year passed and it was 1984 when I received an invitation to Joseph Campbell’s birthday party. The venerable mythologist, with whom I’d traveled in Latin America, and whose writings had so often turned the spit in my cognitive barbecue, was turning eighty, and there was to be a celebratory dinner in San Francisco. Of course I accepted. My flight was a trifle delayed, so by the time I entered the upstairs banquet room at the waterfront Italian restaurant, many of Campbell’s guests were already seated. Checking the place cards, I located my seat at the end of one of the two long tables. The chair to my immediate right was still vacant. When I casually glanced at the place card there to see who would be sitting next to me, I was startled to read, “Linda Ronstadt.”

Manifestation? Coincidence? A practical joke? So distracted was I, trying to make sense of it, that I almost didn’t hear the man seated directly across from me when he introduced himself. It was George Lucas, who, for an instant seemed to be speaking from a galaxy far, far away. Now, I knew that Joseph Campbell was a scholar fixated exclusively on timeless universals, that he refused to read newspapers or watch TV and that he claimed not to have seen a motion picture in thirty years, so my second big surprise of the evening was learning that Campbell had spent the day — his eightieth birthday, remember — at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where he’d watched Star Wars in the morning, Return of the Jedi after lunch, and The Empire Strikes Back later in the afternoon. I was so amazed and delighted by this information that it took me a few minutes to make the connection to Linda Ronstadt. She, according to the gossip wire, had been dating George Lucas.

For better or for worse, Ms. Ronstadt never did take her place at the table that evening (I didn’t allude to her absence or inquire of her whereabouts, not wishing to embarrass Lucas, with whom she possibly had quarreled), and I’ll submit that it was just as well. What would have been the point? For one thing, the notion that she might ditch a wealthy visionary film tycoon for the likes of me, might start calling me “sweetie pie,” was ludicrous. For another, I cannot be counted among the tens of millions of Americans who are so gaga over celebrities they’d exchange their soul for a rubber dog biscuit just to be cuddled by — or better yet, seen in public on the arm of — a popular star. Beware, folks! Many, if not most, celebrities come with a metric ton of emotional baggage, and neither their talent nor their success will rub off on you in bed.