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

Saint Paul defined faith as “a belief in things unseen.” Well, I believe in unseen things. Don’t you? Love. Electricity. Flatulence. Moreover, a great many of us seem to experience an innate longing to interface somehow with powers and forces we sense but can never fully identify or comprehend: such yearning is the impetus for all spirituality (as opposed to organized religion), and can be intensified and even temporarily actualized under the influence of deep meditation or LSD. If that’s faith, Paulie, we’ll take a half pound on spec and get back to you Monday. But I digress.

Maybe, on the other hand, I never won another prize because I sold that damn radio ten days later.

My parents questioned why I coveted the radio in the first place. It wasn’t as if I listened to a whole lot of music. Neither the Grand Ole Opry nor the Carolina Hayride were my cup of tee-hee (rock and roll hadn’t been born yet) and Captain Midnight came in just fine on the family console. True enough, but that portable box of tubes and wires was beautiful, it was sophisticated, it was sexy; it was totally, aggressively, unspeakably cool . (Not that anybody south of the Harlem jazz scene would have used the word “cool” in that context in 1940.) For more than a week I basked in its consummate coolness. Then one day an encyclopedia salesman came through town.

In addition to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the man was peddling six-volume sets of the works of Mark Twain, leather-bound; handsome ten-volume sets of Children’s Classics, whose titles included Fairy and Wonder Tales, Folk Tales and Myths, Tales From Greece and Rome, and Animal and Nature Stories; and a world atlas. Oh, fickle me! In a fickle heartbeat, those books had trumped the once-adored radio, which I then proceeded to sell to a tourist for twenty-eight bucks in order to buy everything except the encyclopedias.

There were no regrets. Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book. I still believe that today. To quote another famous painter, this time Robert Motherwell, “The best toys are made of paper.”

Incidentally, speaking of paper toys, that soon-to-be-tattered atlas became a favorite plaything, another trough at which I might water the wild horses of my imagination. It also had a practical application. Not only did I ace geography classes in junior high, years later in taverns I won many a beer betting that Reno, Nevada, was farther west than Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, farther north than Portland, Maine. (You can look it up.)

On the blazing, bustling midway of the Northern Neck State Fair (in Warsaw, Virginia), the sideshow barker (now an obsolete term: for years, show people have called them “talkers”) was enticing crowds of gawking rubes with ornate, exaggerated descriptions of the oddities and wonders allegedly assembled inside his tent. Among the attractions was a “genuine living” midget, a rosy-faced, tuxedo-attired gentleman of somewhat less than normal height who had joined the talker out front to personally demonstrate that there truly were “startling examples of Mother Nature’s cruelties” to be seen inside by those rubes who accepted the invitation to step right up and lay their money down.

Talkers obviously talk, and this one talked so rapidly, so incessantly, that when he died I’m sure they had to beat his tongue to death with a stick. In the midst, however, of explaining that despite the midget’s deficiency in stature, he was an intelligent and talented human being (as if to prove the point, the midget lit a cigar), the talker abruptly stopped talking. He stammered a few incoherent words. Then fell mute again.

From the booth where I sold tickets for rides on the Whip, I had a good view of the sideshow tent, and I knew what had silenced the talker. I’d been expecting it.

The tidewater village of Warsaw resembled the mountain village of Blowing Rock in that no persons of color resided there. Unlike Blowing Rock, however, there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of African Americans living in what amounted to rural shantytowns within a couple miles of the municipal limits. While during the week, a scattering of black faces might be seen in Warsaw — cleaning women and laborers mostly — on Saturdays there was an ebony tide. They came into town to shop and to socialize, hanging around the Texaco station talking, laughing, drinking soda pop and brown-bagged whiskey, listening to the soul sounds (called “race music” back then) that blared from the countertop radio until the place closed around 11 P.M. The loosey-goosey Texaco station was the only establishment in Warsaw where Jim Crow constraints went unenforced. As a result, its owner, a white man, was a bit of a pariah in town, but that’s another story.

Residing somewhere in the unlit, unpaved, hoe-chopped, chigger-scratchy environs of Warsaw was a family of black midgets. There were four, maybe five of them: male and female, siblings possibly, though the precise nature of their kinship was impossible to know. They always came to town together, never singularly, accompanied by several full-size chaperones or protectors, and they didn’t come in very often: maybe a half-dozen Saturdays a year. It seems they didn’t appreciate being gawked at, which, though understandable, sprinkles a fine pepper of irony over their visit to the Northern Neck State Fair.

Now, let me emphasize that when I say “midgets,” I mean midgets. I’m talking extreme midgetry. Midgets among midgets. Jaw-dropping diminutive. Seriously, I’ll eat this page and wash it down with raw kerosene if any one of Warsaw’s little people was so much as a mouse hair taller than Michu, for years a star attraction with Ringling Brothers, billed as “the World’s Smallest Man.” Michu’s height was thirty-three inches.

So, when from my fairground vantage point I witnessed the Warsaw midgets slowly approaching the sideshow tent, I fully anticipated the talker’s shock and embarrassment. There he was, raving on in cascading hyperbole about what a rare specimen of humanity his midget was, how privileged were the rubes to behold such a phenomenon, when he — and eventually the rubes — caught sight of a whole troupe of beautifully formed chocolate miniatures, not one of whose head would reach as high as the sideshow midget’s nipples.

Was it pure coincidence, were the gods having sport, as is their wont? Or had our midget family planned the whole thing, either as a silent protest against both the commercial exploitation of the physically peculiar and the dishonesty of ballyhoo; or despite their customary shyness, as a prank, an uncharacteristic display of mischief and fun? Had they gone back to their shantytown that night and laughed their tiny butts off?

We’ll never know, although the gossip among the midway carnies was that the show boss had followed them home, returning there the next day and the day after, ever sweetening his offer to make the lot of them rich and famous if they’d just sign on with him. To their credit, they did not. Meanwhile, back at the fairgrounds, I watched the talker wax visibly nervous each time he was joined out front by the upstaged fellow some of us had taken to calling “the World’s Tallest Midget.”

In 1972, an odd little circus rolled into the fishing village of La Conner, Washington, and erected its big top, which was not very big, on what was then a vacant lot in the center of town. Although I can’t remember the show’s name (a poster in the grocery-store window had only four days earlier announced its arrival), certain other aspects of it are lodged in the folds of my brain like a pressed blossom; still faintly perfumed, still faintly colored, as if reluctant to relinquish its charm. And it did have charm. It was simultaneously the most pathetic and the most engaging circus I’ve ever known.