Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

12. flames of fortune

For obvious reasons, no talking stick had accompanied me to Hargrave Military Academy either, which is lucky for the stick considering the fate of the items I did bring along. Before describing that fate, in all of its drama, I should probably explain what I was doing at a military prep school in the first place.

The reason is quite simple: like many if not most of the other cadets at Hargrave, I was sent there because I hadn’t distinguished myself in public high school or, rather, had distinguished myself for activities that parents and college admissions offices tend to deem less than desirable.

Commercially, administratively, Warsaw served an assortment of farmers and fishermen, every one of whom resided in the countryside or along the river some miles from town. Warsaw High School served their children, the majority of whom were bused in and out, although it also provided an approximation of education for an assortment of townies, of whom I was one. There were thirty-five seniors (all white, of course) in my graduating class, to give you an idea of the school’s size; and of that number, I alone was to earn a college degree, to give you an idea of its academic thunder, although a more revealing fact, perhaps, is that most of Warsaw’s teachers hadn’t earned degrees either. We were mostly taught by women with but two years of college; women, in some cases, barely older than their pupils — a proximity not particularly helpful when it came to maintaining order in the classroom.

Serious discipline was left to the principal (a cutup such as I wore a virtual path to his office), while punishment doled out by teachers was usually limited to assigning extra homework or making a guilty pupil stay after school. The latter justice could only be dispensed to townies, however, because the other pupils, the majority, had buses to catch, and it was not especially feared by us town boys due to the fact that the teacher with whom we would be privately sequestered was likely to be nubile and cute. Teenage boys notice such things.

Having one’s face slapped by a teacher was quite rare, but it happened to me in Warsaw as it had, the reader may recall, in Kilmarnock. What offense, what outburst of sass, I committed to inspire this particular corporal retribution I cannot remember, though I’ll never forget the aftermath.

Miss Snowden, the history teacher, was probably twenty-four or twenty-five, making her somewhat senior to her associates, though scarcely less attractive: a tall, willowy blonde, whose nickname, we kids somehow discovered and never forgot, was “Choogie.” At any rate, I’d just entertained the class with an egregiously inappropriate bon mot at a disruptively inappropriate moment when Miss Snowden choogied over to my desk and… swack! — let me have it, slapping me with such force that the ringing in my ears might have called whole populations of the faithful to prayer. She also ordered me to remain after school, a rather severe penalty on this fine spring afternoon when our baseball team (never my sport, baseball) was about to play for a conference championship.

The actual bell rang, students scurried out, some to the bus lot, others to the ball field at the far end of campus. Miss Snowden approached the desk where I sat both cautiously defiant and genuinely contrite: I liked Choogie and lacked the sophistication to try to justify my behavior on the grounds that the comedy that really matters in this world is always inappropriate. For a while she just stood there, looming over me in silence. I’d no idea what she was thinking, but I was thinking that if she slapped me again I was going to tell her about Reggie Sulley.

Reggie Sulley was a punk, a crude, cruel, smirky, dishonest creep (and here in the interest of full disclosure I should report that he and I played the same position on the basketball team, competing with mutual hostility for playing time). It so happened that Sulley and I were also among a small number of students in an unsupervised study period that convened each morning in what was Miss Snowden’s homeroom. Like a few teachers and many pupils, Miss Snowden customarily brought her lunch to school in a brown bag. She left the bag on her desk. Well, one day Sulley, in front of the dozen or so study-hall attendees, opened the bag, unwrapped a sandwich, unzipped his fly, and rubbed his penis all over the bread before returning the sandwich to the bag. So stunned were we, boys as well as girls, by the act’s audacity, not to mention its perversity, that we never reported it and discussed it only in whispers. Word spread, however, and during lunch period that day Miss Snowden’s homeroom was unusually crowded, every eye squeamishly fixed on the teacher as she innocently munched her desecrated tuna-on-rye.

Thankfully, Choogie Snowden did not tempt me to spill those sick beans. Instead of a second slap, she, after staring me down for a while, smiled, shook her blond head, and said something to the effect of “Tommy, you are a piece of work.” Then she moved to the door, gesturing for me to follow. That door, near the very front of the school, opened on a long, dimly lit, now-empty hallway that ran the length of the building. Without a word, Miss Snowden inexplicably took my hand. Took my hand! In hers! And hand in hand, like lovers strolling the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we slowly walked the whole length of that hall, at the end of which she pulled away, shooing me outside into sunlight and the noise of the distant ball game.

Let me emphasize that there was nothing the least bit sexual, nothing untoward at all about the incident, yet it was definitely, in its odd way, romantic. It was tender. It was intimate. It was sweet. It was a mingling, however subtle, however cross-generational, of male/female energies. And whatever its intent, if any, it was effective, because for the rest of that school year the angels’ own butter would not have melted in my mouth, so quiet was I in Miss Snowden’s class, so respectful, so appropriately appropriate.

News of my slapped face failed to reach Mother and Daddy, and I never told a single soul, not even my best friend, about the poignant, dreamlike hall-walk with Miss Snowden (it would have felt like a betrayal). However, the negative reviews of my deportment on monthly report cards (a foreshadowing of critiques from the more small-minded members of the literary establishment?), along with the glad tidings (delivered at a PTA meeting) that in the annual popularity poll my schoolmates had voted me “Most Mischievous Boy,” caused the parental unit to wonder if a “talking stick” mightn’t be the least of reasons for concern about the future of Tommy Rotten. Then, there was the great academic flip-flop of 1948.

At the end of the first semester of my junior year, I bore home a report card resplendent with straight A’s: an A (a vowel black in color, according to Arthur Rimbaud) in every subject including algebra. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the report card to its destination without word of its contents being leaked to the crowd of townies in whose company I walked home every day. With scummy Reggie Sulley and tough Lester Scott leading the Greek chorus, I was mocked all the way down the street. They literally jeered me. Even inside the B&B poolroom (an obligatory stop, boys only, after school), the ridicule continued. I was made to feel a sissy, a sycophant, a sellout, an outsider unfit for the company of my proudly anti-intellectual pals.

In truth, I hadn’t even studied particularly hard to earn those A’s. Well, never mind, I’d show them! I’d set new standards for goofing off. And second semester I flunked every subject including English. Straight F’s. For the year, this averaged out to an aggregate C, which meant that I’d passed the grade and hadn’t completely torpedoed any chance of college admission, but finding a minimum of cheer in that, and even less in my having regained my status as a good ol’ Warsaw boy, Mother and Daddy began to think seriously about military school.

“The men in the Robbins family mature slowly,” my mother said once, referring not only to me but my father and his father — and she did not mean it as a compliment. Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child. That said, considering Mother’s views on the subject, considering her critique of the Robbins male, her choice of Hargrave Military Academy as a suitable repository for yours truly made perfect sense. Hargrave’s motto (in those more innocent times) was “Making Men Not Money.”

I’d graduated from Warsaw High at age sixteen, looking — and at times acting — several years younger. I was a virgin, my success with girls having peaked about a decade earlier back in Blowing Rock; but was no stranger to alcohol, having already discovered the joys, though not yet the perils, of frescoing one’s tonsils with the cardinal brush. For some time, I’d been writing a fairly mature sports column for The Northern Neck News, a weekly paper serving four Virginia counties, but my abilities as a scribe could not conceal the fact that overall, I presented a measure of challenging grist for the Hargrave Military Academy man-making mill.

Hargrave sat on a hill overlooking the pretty little town of Chatham, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, about a hundred miles from Warsaw. Across a valley, on the other side of Chatham, atop a hill directly opposite Hargrave, sat Chatham Hall, a high-toned private school for “problem girls” (or so it was alleged) from privileged families. Equally keen on deportment, the two schools were separated by more than terrain. Fraternization of any kind between Hargrave and Chatham Hall students was strictly, absolutely forbidden.

Cadets presumed to know the nature of the girls’ “problem” and fantasized endlessly about exploiting and contributing to it. For their part, the girls surely thought the cadets romantic figures in their dashing uniforms, with their military bearing (so unlike the slouching slobs back home), and air of prospective danger (this even though the rifles we carried, each and every one, had had their firing pins securely removed). The vectors of adolescent sexual longing that crisscrossed that valley must have been so strong, so thick that it’s a wonder any bird could fly through it.

The rule was unwritten, unspoken, yet every cadet was aware that to be caught on the Chatham Hall campus was grounds for immediate expulsion. Hormones are stronger than rules, however, and the powerful allure of forbidden fruit has been documented everywhere from Greek myth to hillbilly jukebox, from grand opera to soap opera, from romance comic books to the Book of Genesis. So, each spring, when the sweet silky air was practically a-wiggle with pheromones, when a young man’s fancies turn to thoughts of stolen kisses and damp panties, a couple of cadets would sneak onto the greening lawns of that quasi-convent across the valley. Most of the time they escaped detection and retribution, though their forays predictably produced no verifiably amorous results. Then there was the case of Stu Seaworth.

Stu (not his real name) had begun to percolate with joy and promise when his presence in the shadows of a Chatham Hall dormitory was acknowledged by a resident of said dorm. The girl waved to him from a lighted third-story window. Stu waved back. Then the unthinkable happened, the stuff of dreams. As Stu stood there gaping, the girl pulled her sweater over her head. Next, she unhooked her bra and tossed it aside. She allowed Stu a good long look at her little moons before beckoning him to come orbit them. He shrugged, threw up his hands, became almost frantic with frustration, there being under the circumstances no way to reach her except by rocket, a moon landing logistically impossible.

Ah, but what was this? The bare-breasted schoolgirl was pointing to a narrow fire escape that ran down the side of the dorm. Stu was a tall lad, yet he could not reach even the bottom rung of that ladder. Not to worry. The siren had disappeared and with her Stu’s hopes, but just then the fire escape began to lower. The girl was operating some kind of lever mechanism. When the rungs were low enough, he climbed aboard, shaking with excitement. He was going to heaven on a creaky steel ladder! However, just out of reach of the third floor, the ascent abruptly aborted. In midair now, and at a forty-five-degree angle, the ladder remained — and remained — immobile. The lights went off in the siren’s room. Stu was stranded. He thought he heard giggles. A chorus of them.

In the desperate jump that followed, Stu shattered his ankle and cracked his femur. He was on crutches when his folks arrived to fetch him home in disgrace one month before he was to graduate.

I never met Stu Seaworth, he’d come and gone the previous year, and for all I know his story could have been embellished or even wholly apocryphal. Still, firmly embedded in Hargrave mythology, it was not without value. It suggested, in an oblique, potentially painful way, a way fraught with consequences, that girlie Chatham Hall — its mystique, its challenge, its looming presence, its moth-to-candle-flame allure — might contribute as much as the military school itself when it came to making boys into men.

Upon arrival at Hargrave, I was assigned the oddest, most isolated room in the academy. What was up with that? Had they heard something? Did they fear I might incite rebellion — or worse, subject innocent cadets to the spectacle of the talking stick?

Tucked away in a remote corner of the third and top floor, the room was exceptionally large: long and narrow with a slanted ceiling and single small window, giving every appearance of having once been an attic. This room was so far removed from administration offices, from dayroom, classrooms, dining hall, gym, and quadrangle that its occupants had to set a clock to alarm at least five minutes before reveille (the actual bugle call that awoke the rest of the cadet corps) in order to fall out on time for morning formation.

I had two roommates. From Virginia peanut country, there was a mild-mannered boy, bespectacled, still freighting half a load of baby fat, and bearing the almost Faulknerian name of Ollie Hux. In the other bunk, from the Dominican Republic, was a handsome, worldly, self-assured Hargrave veteran named Pelayo Brugál. There were quite a few Hispanic cadets enrolled at the academy, largely from the Caribbean and South America, places where the military in particular and machismo in general were the cat’s meow and not a caterwaul less.

Brugál (accent on the last syllable) had seniority among the Hispanics and was their natural leader. He helped them academically, taught new arrivals the ropes. As a result, our big “attic” room was a Hispanic gathering place. Afternoons, it was crowded with boys from Venezuela and Cuba, jabbering away in Spanish, the world’s fastest language, seeming to all talk at once. It was like living in a cage full of parrots whose crackers had been laced with crystal meth. I found it agreeably colorful.

For whatever reason, Brugál had not been home in two years, spending his summers at Hargrave. That year (my year), however, he flew down to join his family for the Christmas holidays. With him, he carried two suitcases, one packed with clothing, the other empty.

It so happened that Pelayo’s father and uncle owned the largest rum distillery in the Dominican Republic. When Brugál returned to school during the first week of January, the previously empty suitcase was now filled. With bottles of rum. Fine Dominican rum. Rum, the higher life-form that crawled out of the primal ooze of molasses.

Every night after taps, when the academy was quiet and dark, Pelayo would steal to our closet and remove a bottle from the locked bag. He, Ollie Hux, and I would each swallow a nice big slug. It was warming. It was uplifting. It was fraternal. It made for sound sleep and pleasant dreams. Happy, well rested, and maybe a trifle smug, we were willfully oblivious to the certainty that we were flirting with fire. Then, on February 19, the school burned down.

When the fire alarm sounded that night during study hour, I, along with other cadets from that end of the third floor, scampered down the nearest fire escape. Even though we caught a faint whiff of smoke, none of us expected the fire, which started in a teacher’s quarters on the floor below, to amount to very much. Believing that we’d rather quickly be back in our rooms, we cheerfully welcomed this unscheduled break from the books. Then we looked up and saw flames. And they appeared to be spreading.

Rescuing the rum was out of the question, but my Warsaw basketball letter jacket was in our room, along with photos of (mostly imaginary) girlfriends, a sweater, and some warm socks: it was fifteen degrees that night and I’d fled in khaki pants, a T-shirt, and bedroom slippers. So, sensing now that the situation might actually turn into something serious, I headed back up the fire escape, and intent on grabbing those items that passed pitifully for my valuables, climbed again through the open window.

On the ground, what had initially been a semifestive atmosphere was digressing into shock and pandemonium. Cadets, faculty, and staff milled about in helpless confusion, awaiting the arrival of Chatham’s one fire engine. Nobody saw me return to the burning building, there were no shouts of warning, no hysterical mother wailed, “Fireman, Fireman, save my child!”

Once inside the third-floor hallway, I crashed headlong into a wall of heated smoke. I’d taken only a couple of steps before smoke filled my eyes, my nose, my throat. It felt as if a troop of Girl Scouts were toasting marshmallows in my lungs. (Sure, it could just as well have been Boy Scouts, but even near death I preferred the company of females.) On the verge of losing consciousness, I managed to execute a clumsy about-face and practically somersaulted back through the window. If anyone noticed my descent, coughing and choking, they gave no indication. In minutes, I was just another figure in the crowd, watching with a mixture of fascination, excitement, disbelief, and dismay, the metastasizing flames. Nobody thought to have me treated for smoke inhalation.

Yeah, impulsive Tommy Rotten had been lucky to get out alive, but I was fortunate in another way as well. Inevitably, sooner or later, that secret stash of rum would have been discovered — it was stupid to think otherwise — and Pelayo Brugál, Ollie Hux, and I would have been given the ol’ spit-shined boot, our names to be chiseled below that of Stu Seaworth in the Hargrave hall of shame. And who can say what trajectory my life might have taken thereafter? No longer admissible to the college of my choice, and at seventeen too young to seek refuge in the army, I… well, I like to think I might have followed Brugál down to Santo Domingo, where I would have written a version of The Rum Diary years before Hunter S. Thompson. It’s debatable whether or not that could be considered a happy ending.

Hargrave rose from the ashes. Like the Phoenix? No, more like the Tucson — at least for the remainder of that school year. Following a month’s suspension, the academy amazingly reopened in March, but with major adjustments. Surrounded by parade grounds, an athletic field, a quadrangle, and an outdoor swimming pool, Hargrave had occupied a single extremely long three-story building, only one end of which had survived the fire. That end contained the gymnasium, now converted to a dining hall, and living quarters for approximately one-third of the cadets. The rest of us were distributed around Chatham in various temporary locations, I being lucky enough to be included in a group of about twenty that was housed in a downtown hotel.

Because our uniforms had gone up in smoke, we now wore civilian clothes. This spelled a blessed end to daily inspections and gave us a newfound sense of freedom, but failed to adequately conceal our identities as cadets. At the insistence of their parents, if not wholly a matter of personal preference, town girls continued by and large to shun us, and Chatham Hall girls remained as distant as ever, although from our hotel rooms we could spy on them during their weekly visits to the business district to pick up girlie items at the drugstore, etc. They came on foot, always in parties of ten or more, and were as heavily chaperoned as a shipment of weapons-grade plutonium.

We still were subject to curfews and to morning formations (now a rather motley agglomeration), but drilling was suspended for the duration, which oddly enough displeased me. I rather liked to drill and was fairly good at it, having been trained in the Boy Scouts. You see, the adult males who organized and presided over my Scout patrol in Warsaw had seemed less interested in making outdoorsmen of us boys than in teaching us to drill, box, and to properly care for the American flag. I can see now that they were out to mold us into little fascists, and recalling their incessant racist and anti-Semitic remarks, I have a suspicion that at least a couple were members of the Ku Klux Klan. There was more Klan activity in 1940s Virginia than people today realize. In any case, my entire Scout patrol was suspended after some of us were caught drinking cheap wine (ninety-five cents a bottle cheap, paid for with our Scouting dues), and peeking in the windows of comely housewives (in lieu, perhaps, of earning a merit badge for bird-watching).

Hargrave was now half military academy, half civilian prep school, and its postfire year passed unsteadily for everyone involved. It did pass, of course, and at graduation exercises on the final day, I found myself summoned by name three times to the front of the assembly: once to receive a diploma; once to accept a Quill and Scroll award, given to cadets who had made exceptional contributions to the school newspaper; and lastly to be presented the coveted Senior Essay Medal, which I’d won not for an essay but a short story entitled “Voodoo Moon,” about some weird goings-on in the Louisiana swamps. The name of no other graduate was called more than twice that day, most only once, and my triple honors served me particularly well since the previous evening I’d smashed in the right front fender on my father’s brand-new Chevrolet sedan, having skidded into a tombstone while joyriding through a local cemetery. Daddy’s anger, his disappointment, was naturally, fortunately, tempered somewhat by pride in my achievements. So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass.