Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

34. woodpecker rising

Prior to the publication of Still Life With Woodpecker, I had trouble referring to myself as a “novelist” without feeling like a fraud, an attitude engendered less by modesty or insecurity than a respect for the profession, for the craft, for language itself, a reverence that in today’s world may have gone the way of the “vine-ripened” tomato. But, when in 1980 Bantam Books, after paying me a substantial advance, brought out Woodpecker as its very first hardcover publication; and when the large-format trade paper edition — issued simultaneously — shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and I found myself on one of those coast-to-coast book tours, violating flyleaves with my nasty scrawl and fielding questions from the press, well, I could at last look in a mirror and believe that a genuine, full-fledged, full-time author might be staring back at me. It was cool, I can’t deny it, but I also possessed just enough good sense to remind myself that whom the gods would destroy they first make popular.

My initial personal buffeting by the gale of glory, the fickle gusts of literary fame, occurred in Austin, Texas. My appearance for a signing there attracted such an unexpected throng that the bookstore, to accommodate the crowd, set up my signing table in the beer garden next door, and I sat there, without once getting up to stretch or pee, and signed and signed and signed — for five whole hours. It was, as I said, a beer garden, and people were imbibing while they waited in line. Toward the end of the evening, many of those who approached my table, those who’d been far back in the line, were more than a little sloshed, a condition that inspired some interesting conversations. And behavior…

We were about four hours into the event when a young lady, emboldened by alcohol, and perhaps Woodpecker’s audacious male protagonist (she’d been leafing through a copy of the book as she waited her turn), unbuttoned her blouse as she neared the table and requested that I autograph not only her book but her. Always willing, when possible, to accommodate a reader, and suspecting that John Hancock might well have preferred this opportunity to the Declaration of Independence, I brandished my Sharpie and in a jiggling jiffy my signature was emblazoned across two well-formed lumps of what — with the possible exception of mayonnaise and butterscotch cream pie — is the highest known usage of fat: a perfectly matched pair of baby snow pups, or what some of us are inclined to think of as “the twin moons of paradise.”

Well, this fair damsel proved to be a trendsetter. She was a student at the University of Texas, and we know how susceptible college kids are to fads. From that point on, at least four of every ten females in line bared her breasts when she reached the table, asking to be suitably inscribed. Ah, Texas! (A big back has a big front, in more ways than one.) At the conclusion of the event, one of the adorned girls was still hanging around the table, signaling with her eyes that she wished to take me home, perhaps to obtain my endorsement on other parts of her anatomy, but as drained by then as a hemophiliac on a blind date with a vampire, all I could manage was a weak wave as my handlers practically carried me to a waiting car.

On our way to the hotel, Bantam’s regional sales representative, smiling and shaking his head, drawled to no one in particular, “Man, we sure moved some product tonight.” That was, believe it or not, the first time that I ever entertained the notion that novels, especially my novels, could be categorized as “product.” Obviously, I knew that works of fiction were bought and sold, but like goods, like merchandise? The concept so jarred my sensibilities that it wiped much of the shine off the previous five hours, leading me to the unhappy realization, as I fell into bed, that to some people — people who worked for, say Playboy magazine or Hooters — even the “moons of paradise” might be considered “product.”

Terry Bromberg, the Bantam publicist who accompanied me on the Woodpecker tour, shared my enthusiasm for culinary exploration. In every city we visited, we made it a point to sample the local specialties. In Austin, we’d relished a fine, authentic Mexican breakfast late on the morning after the marathon signing, and we were walking back to the hotel to check out when it occurred to us that we’d failed, so far, to experience the pecan pie for which that region of Texas is somewhat renowned. We consulted our watches. It was very nearly noon, our flight didn’t depart until two, and we were already packed. Impulsively, we ducked into a downtown restaurant intent on crossing pecan pie off our “to eat” list.

Spacious, almost cavernous, the restaurant was just starting to fill up with the lunch crowd; lawyers, retailers, businessmen, trickling in a few at a time. A waitress took our order almost immediately, and as we sat awaiting our slices of pie, a different waitress waved to us from the far end of the large room. She left her station and rushed over to our table, where, smiling ever so sweetly, she undid the top buttons of her brown, dotted swiss uniform, and after apologizing, “It got wore off a little during the night, but you can still read it,” revealed to me, Terry, nearby diners, and God himself, my name — slightly smeared but readable as advertised — across her bare and Texas-proud mammaries.

After that, the pecan pie, while delicious, was kind of an anticlimax. And Terry and I left Texas agreeing that the Beach Boys may have been misled in wishing they all could be “California girls.”

Two nights later, my “product” and I again attracted an overflow crowd. This event was in Los Angeles at Papa Bach’s, a popular independent bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard, and there actually were searchlights. That’s right: searchlights for a book signing. And a line that stretched all the way around the block. The aisles in Papa Bach’s were quite narrow, so once more my signing table was set up outdoors, this time in an alley, more appropriate than they could have known for someone who once lectured on “alley culture.” A flatbed truck was parked a few yards behind me, and atop it a country-rock band was playing. Did I mention that this signing was in L.A.?

The table and chair the bookshop had provided was from its children’s section, comfortable enough but quite low to the ground. The employee managing the line had decreed that the line stop six feet from where I sat. People with copies of Woodpecker to be signed were only permitted to approach me one at a time, or two if it was a couple. Because almost everyone wanted a bit of conversation as well as a signature, and because in order to make eye contact with me in my kiddie chair they were forced to squat, it gave the impression that they were kneeling before me.

The bookstore was on my right. On my left was a gas station, in whose parking lot, separated from the alleyway by a high chain-link fence, two or three Mexicans, attracted by the music and those luminous astro tortillas sweeping the sky, were watching with considerable interest. It wasn’t long before there were five or six Mexicans there, and then more than a dozen (the signing lasted four hours), staring at what they must have believed was some sort of high religious figure receiving homage from hundreds of the faithful. But what kind of bishop or saint was this, youngish, with long hair, a big lopsided mustache, wearing a flashy red-and-yellow sweater and fingers full of rings? To compound their perplexity, I would, from time to time, turn, raise my hand to them and genuflect in what by all appearances must have seemed the most heartfelt of blessings. They shook their heads and murmured to one another. Their bewilderment was almost palpable.

Toward the end of the evening, when I turned to “bless” the Hispanic gawkers one last time (by now there must have been twenty of them), I saw, standing in their midst with a grin that could have set off fire alarms all over town, Dr. Timothy Leary.

I’d met Tim Leary briefly during my sojourn in New York fifteen years earlier, but he didn’t recall it and there was no reason why he should: I’d been just a face in the group congratulating him after a lecture at Cooper Union. When he was incarcerated in Folsom, however, a fellow inmate — Sonny Barger, president of the notorious Northern California chapter of the Hells Angels — had pressed a copy of Another Roadside Attraction in his hands, saying, “This is the Angels’ favorite book.” (So who needs Kirkus Reviews?) Tim had also become a fan. I rendezvoused with him that night after the gig at Papa Bach’s and we became friends.

There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish. Like Ken Kesey and Robert Anton Wilson, two other iconically loquacious luminaries of the counterculture, Leary was Irish. Irish! He’d kissed the Blarney Stone. He’d French-kissed it, felt it up, rolled with it in the soft grass on the moonlit banks of the River Shannon. Figuratively speaking. Personally, I found him a generous, stimulating, entertaining, always upbeat companion, as full of challenging ideas, sincere flattery, and surprises as blarney. I never once heard him speak ill of anyone, including those who’d set him up and sent him to prison. No, I take that back. He was merciless in his condemnation of Abraham Lincoln, blaming Honest Abe for the rise of Wall Street and corporate fascism in America.

Sitting in his home one afternoon, not long after Tim and his wife Barbara had adopted a huge shaggy dog, I noticed on the coffee table a book entitled There Are No Bad Dogs, Only Bad Masters. When Tim was summoned to the phone, I picked up the book and was idly leafing through it, noticing that everywhere it said “no bad dogs,” Tim, with a black pen, had crossed out “dogs” and written in “drugs.” As in there are no bad drugs, only bad users.

Like many of Tim’s more playful pronouncements, this one needed to be rinsed for a while in the suds of sober reason. Certainly, the downfall of the sixties, that era of such promise and hope, was due in no small part to the misuse of potentially “good” drugs — such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline — by “bad” imbibers. When Time magazine published its cover story on the burgeoning psychedelic revolution, kids from Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey, from all over blue-collar America; dissatisfied, rebellious kids from broken homes, inept schools, and boring communities, kids who heretofore would have been stealing hubcaps, cadging beers, crashing cars, and getting one another pregnant, flocked to the Haight-Ashbury to become hippies. Their guide to achieving hippiedom, to fitting into this youth-oriented utopia of unbridled freedom and joy, came (usually second- or thirdhand) from Time — and the Time article, although generally positive, got it wrong.

For example, one of the ways the early vanguard of psychedelica — predominately middle class, in its twenties, with at least some college education — expressed its freedom from social norms, its desire for a more natural lifestyle, was to go barefoot. Well, when you tread city sidewalks without your shoes, your feet get dirty pretty fast. Time’s reporters noticed the grimy feet and deduced that these young people, like the beatniks before them, scorned bathing, whereas in point of fact the cliché “your body is your temple” was mouthed consistently in this milieu, whose members bathed ceremoniously, anointed themselves with perfumes and oils, and spent an inordinate amount of time dressing up, choosing their eclectic — and clean — costumes with as much care as a debutante selects her ball gowns. The new wave of Rust Belt and breadbasket kids, however, oblivious to the philosophical underpinnings of this movement they were naively embracing, took Time magazine at its word and thus the myth of the “dirty hippie” became a reality.

It should go without saying, then, that those same boys and girls lacked completely the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional maturity to gain much beyond anxiety and confusion from psychedelics, and Time was apparently incapable of even suggesting (as its older sister Life once had) that in the right circumstances and with proper preparation the experience might have been ecstatically revelatory instead. “Good drugs” perhaps, but “bad masters” all around.

On the other hand, friend Timothy to the contrary, I’d submit that there are some drugs that are intrinsically “bad.” There are, as far as I can see, no hidden virtues, no positive potential whatsoever in methamphetamines or crack, and I’d be inclined to include regular cocaine on the cur list, despite the sorry fact that I extolled the virtues of coke, my biggest regret as a novelist, in Still Life With Woodpecker. Saturday nights in 1978–1979, my beautiful, smart, witty, and thoroughly mendacious girlfriend Ginny Rose and I would sit at her dining room table in La Conner playing cribbage or Scrabble — and tooting lines of coke — until ten-thirty or eleven, then head to the 1890’s Tavern to dance to live music until closing time. I suppose it was because I only tooted once a week, and almost never at parties or in groups, that it took me so long to recognize the hairy truth that cocaine makes smart people stupid and stupid people dangerous. Bad.

Of course, Indians in the Andes have for centuries chewed coca leaves, the mother of cocaine, to relieve hunger pangs and give them needed energy for long treks and hard labor; one example, it seems, of good masters training a bad drug to wag its tail, guard the premises, and refrain from peeing on the rug.

Remembering Timothy Leary now, I’ll contend that even were he wrong about the neutrality of drugs (which sounds uncomfortably close to “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), even were he guilty of the character flaws attributed to him by his detractors, he still stacks up quite well when compared to those shallow, deluded, boring, self-righteous, and often self-appointed watchdogs who are all too willing, especially if there’s a buck involved, to stand guard at the gates of unauthorized mischief.

Still Life With Woodpecker caused me to be investigated by the FBI. Not right away, however, and certainly not for the rosy picture that I (in my own naïveté) painted of cocaine: it’s the substances that enlarge consciousness and open the mind’s eye that worry our government, not the ones that draw down the blinds. No, fifteen years after the publication of Woodpecker — a novel that examines the difference between outlaws and criminals, between redheads and the rest of us, but whose primary focus is the transitory nature of romantic love and what might be done about love’s vagaries — fifteen years after its debut, the book led me to be considered a suspect in the Unibomber case.

When someone from the Seattle office of the FBI telephoned one Thursday in 1995 to say that the agency wished to question me, I knew immediately, though no reason was given, what it was about. I knew because a month earlier, a newspaper reporter in Connecticut had contacted me to report that a college professor in that state was telling law enforcement agencies that it was obvious, from what Tom Robbins had written in Still Life With Woodpecker — the anti-authoritarian sentiments, the warnings against overdependence on technology, the romanticizing of outlaws, and, most tellingly, authentic recipes for homemade bombs — that he (me) was the Unibomber, subject of a nationwide manhunt. The journalist thought it amusing, considering both the humor and passionate reverence for life that also permeate the novel, and I myself paid it little mind until the Bureau phoned. Even then I wasn’t troubled, and pleasantly agreed to receive an agent at my La Conner home on the following Tuesday. But then…

But then, the very next morning, as synchronicity (that boundary-busting logic-mocking clown) would have it, Susan Paynter, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, published in her Friday column the widely circulated drawing of the Unibomber in his hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses, juxtaposed with a recent head shot of me — in a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses. The resemblance was hard to miss. “Could our Tom Robbins,” she wrote, “who wouldn’t hurt a fly, be the infamous Unibomber?” Susan, who knew me, meant it as a joke, but I assumed they weren’t laughing very hard down at the FBI.

My assumption was correct. All that weekend, day and night, an unfamiliar dark sedan was parked in the one spot that would have permitted its occupant an unobscured view of both the front and rear exits of my house. Had I emerged with a suitcase or a backpack, it wouldn’t have been long before some guy in black shoes was reading me my Miranda rights, and not smiling when I asked if those rights granted me permission to wear fruit on my head like Carmen. Surveillance can be boring, however, for both observer and observed, and by Monday I wasn’t even checking to see if I was still being watched.

On Tuesday, without once asking for directions, the agents arrived at my door. Two of them. Young. Female. Attractive. The FBI isn’t stupid, they knew my weakness. And the agents knew I now knew they knew. That established, we settled in for a lengthy chat, during which they never once intimated that I, myself, was under suspicion, but were only hoping that I could provide them with leads to follow up on. Leads such as any fan mail I might have received from a reader who’d professed, perhaps in the Unibomber’s prose style (he’d published extremely long missives in the New York Times), an inordinate admiration for my Woodpecker character and his habit of punctuating social commentary with dynamite. Leads such as my source for those unusual explosive recipes (the bomb made from kiddie breakfast cereal, for example) that I’d included in the novel.

Entirely professional, the women raised not a pretty eyebrow when I answered that, alas, I’d hauled an accumulation of answered fan mail to the county landfill only a week before, and that, sorry, I couldn’t remember the name of the Seattle sound-system engineer who through an intermediary (also forgotten) had passed along those instructions for turning common household products into things that go boom in the night. I was certain, however, that I could detect something subtle, unspoken, pass between them when I unwittingly volunteered that I’d physically demolished the electric typewriter on which I’d begun composing Still Life With Woodpecker and had gone back to writing with a pen, an obvious Unibomber-like retaliation against technology. And then when I asked them where they were from and they both said Chicago, I’d blurted out that I’d spent time in the Chicago area myself. True enough, it was where I’d once attended weather school, but it was also where the Unibomber posted most of his deadly packages.

For whatever Tommy Rotten reason, I was doing a pretty good job of incriminating myself, in addition to which I caught the agents on several occasions eyeing the nutty, cartoonish assemblage of sticks and twine I’d constructed to support a tall, spindly yucca plant in my studio, a contraption that could have led a suspicious mind to equate it with the jerry-built devices the Unibomber mailed to his intended victims. When the fed femmes left that day, I was convinced I’d not seen the last of them, and something perverse in me was actually excited by the prospect, by the drama of it all.

When months passed without a word from my agents, I went so far as to telephone their office in Seattle to inquire how the investigation was going. I just couldn’t help it. A dead-robotic voice informed me that the agent I sought did not work there. I asked for the other woman and got a similar response. No explanation was offered. Curious. Very curious, indeed. Who were those women, then? Who was their actual employer? What did they really want from me? My imagination, that infernal pinball machine, lit up and I had a truckload of quarters.

Then, around Christmas, I received a holiday card from one of the agents, the one with whom I would have flirted more openly had it not seemed somehow in poor taste. She wrote that she and her sister investigator had been transferred to Oklahoma City to work on the federal-building bombing case there. I wrote back but she never responded — and eventually the Unibomber was caught and I ran out of quarters.