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

This is not an autobiography. God forbid! Autobiography is fueled by ego and I could make a long list of persons whose belly buttons I’d rather be contemplating than my own. Anyway, only authors who are household names should write autobiographies, and not only is my name infrequently tumbled in the lapidary of public consciousness, but those rare homes in which it’s spoken with any regularity are likely under police surveillance. I’ve even made an effort to avoid the autobiographical in my novels, wishing neither to shortchange imagination nor use up my life in literature.

I’d like to think Tibetan Peach Pie isn’t a memoir either, although it waddles and quacks enough like a memoir to be mistaken for one if the light isn’t right. What it is more precisely is a sustained narrative composed of the absolutely true stories I’ve been telling the women in my life — my wife, my assistant, my fitness trainer, my yoga teacher, my sisters, my agent, et al — over many years, and which at their insistence I’ve finally written down. In order to remember events sufficiently, I’ve had to arrange them in more or less chronological order; which, of course, contributes to the book’s resemblance to a memoir, as does the fact that the stories, as I’ve said, relate my own experiences, encounters, follies, and observations, not those of, say, Abraham Lincoln.

If Tibetan Peach Pie doesn’t read like a normal memoir, that may be because I haven’t exactly led what most normal people would consider a normal life. (My editor claims some of this stuff is so nuts even I couldn’t have made it up.) Moreover, my writing style is my writing style, whether it’s in the service of fact or fiction: a pileated woodpecker is a pileated woodpecker no matter if it roosts with the ducks.

Now, despite my contention that the events described herein are “absolutely true,” I’ve never in my life kept anything remotely resembling a journal, so they are at least somewhat subject to the effects of mnemonic erosion, and some folks who were involved at the time may recall them a bit differently. It’s the Rashomon effect. C’est la vie. I do, however, happen to possess a pretty good memory and can at a moment’s notice name the lineup of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers and all but one or two of my ex-wives.

Whatever it may reveal about me and my personal “monkey dance of life,” including how I emerged from a Southern Baptist milieu to write nine offbeat yet popular novels published in more than twenty countries, as well as innumerable pieces for magazines and newspapers, this book also provides (perhaps more importantly) intimate verbal snapshots of, among other settings, Appalachia during the Great Depression, the West Coast during the sixties psychedelic revolution, the studios and bedrooms of bohemian America before technology voted privacy out of office, Timbuktu before Islamic fanatics crashed the party, international roving before “homeland security” threw a wet blanket over travel, and New York publishing before electrons intervened on behalf of the trees.

Oh, about the title: Tibetan peach pie is the pièce de résistance (the Holy Grail, as it were) in an old shaggy dog story, author unknown, that Zen ranch hands may well have told around the chuck wagon; a sort of parable about the wisdom of always aiming for the stars, and the greater wisdom of cheerfully accepting failure if you only reach the moon. I retold an abbreviated version in my second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, back in 1976. Anyone desiring a more comprehensive retelling can write to me at: P.O. Box 338, La Conner, WA, 98257, and sooner or later it will be supplied.

I was seven or eight months old — a creeping, crawling carpet crab — when my father came home for lunch one day and found me covered with blood.

At least, my father, bellowing in horror, believed it was blood. It wasn’t. My mother had briefly left me unattended — always a mistake: even as an adult it’s been risky to leave me without supervision — and in her absence I’d attempted to drink a bottle of mercurochrome, spilling in the process a fair amount of it down the front of my sweet little white flannel baby gown.

One doesn’t see mercurochrome much in these days of various antibacterial ointments, but there was a time when it — cherry red, better smelling and less stinging than iodine — was widely used to sterilize and succor minor cuts, scrapes and scratches. Why was I drinking it? Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, “What the hell? I’ll drink anything .”

As proof, in the months following the mercurochrome fest, I also drank ink (symbolic, perhaps?) and Little Bo Peep Household Ammonia. Ammonia is poisonous, so I doubtlessly swallowed no more than a sip before being repelled by its powerfully astringent aroma. Ah, but the intent was there.

My innate, raging, and indiscriminate thirst nearly came to an end, and my life along with it, at age two.

I’d toddled into the kitchen, lured by the smell of something sweet, chocolaty, and, yes, liquid. The source of this attractant was a pot of cocoa steaming furiously on the stove. Never one for formalities, I, on tiptoes, reached up, seized the handle, and yanked the boiling pot off the burner, emptying in the action its contents onto my chest.

There was no emergency room: this was Appalachian North Carolina in the middle of the Great Depression. The one and only local doctor washed the burned area — and then, not too cleverly, tightly bandaged it. A few days later, my mother, concerned by my high fever and obvious pain, removed the dressing. All the flesh on my chest came off along with it. Not merely the skin but the meat.

At the hospital in Statesville, some seventy miles away, I took up residence in an oxygen tent, my mother in a boardinghouse across the street. At one point, the attending physician telephoned Mother to tell her that I was dead. She picked up the phone after the first ring, but no one was on the line. In the meantime, you see, a nurse had run up to the doctor to say she thought she’d detected signs of life, so he’d immediately hung up to investigate.

By the time my frightened mother, alerted by the dropped call and propelled by maternal intuition, rushed into the ward, I was officially relisted on the scroll of the living. Still in critical condition, mind you. But sleeping peacefully. Probably dreaming of my next adventure in drinking.

While my early passion was for beverages of every description, I also exhibited no small fondness for food and for female companionship, lasting appetites whose satisfaction proved only slightly less fraught with danger.

One sunny autumn afternoon in my third year, Mother heard a commotion outside. She opened a window to see me sauntering down the street, blissfully gnawing on a raw cabbage, its head the size of my own. Several yards behind and gaining on me came a vocally irate housewife.

It seems I had appropriated the vegetable from its resting place on the neighbor’s screened-in back porch. The volume of the woman’s displeasure can be attributed to the fact that in an Appalachian village in 1935, a nice fresh green cabbage was more prized than a kilo of beluga caviar. I was apprehended, of course, and duly punished, though not before I had at least partially pacified my belly lust.