Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

16. cry for funny

The evening of my twenty-first birthday found me not in a festive bar enjoying the first legal cocktail of my shiny new adulthood, but perched instead in saggy underwear atop an olive-green footlocker shining ill-fitting new black shoes to a gloss lustrous enough to satisfy the perverse demands of a uniformed sadist who’d be in my face berating me ere the cock crowed thrice on the morrow. No, a bar it surely was not, yet there was live musical entertainment of a sort, and in a peculiar sense it affected my life in ways beyond the reach of any lounge singer in any gin joint this side of Casablanca.

Two weeks earlier, I had enlisted in the United States Air Force. Why? — one might fairly ask. Well, for precisely the same reason that 90 percent of all enlistees join the military, which is to say, I was at a point in my life when I didn’t know what else to do.

Professional patriots, religious demigods, and politicians of all stripes are wont to shine the shoes of their public image by periodic references to “the heroic men and women who sacrifice so much in order to keep America safe and preserve our freedom.” There may have been a few times in our nation’s history when such tribute was accurate and deserved (in the days and weeks following the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, for example), but I have to say that during four years in the air force, including posting at an army base in Korea; and during numerous conversations with both veterans and those on active duty, I never once heard a serviceman or — woman claim that he or she had joined up in order to preserve American values and keep their countrymen free. By and large, young people have enlisted in order to escape boredom, financial difficulties, bad relationships, and general stagnation.

The travel and adventure promised (and, yes, often delivered) by the military is not a component of basic training. From the hour one lands in boot camp all thoughts of future fun and past attachments are pounded out of one’s consciousness; one is locked in a perpetual present designed to purge one of any trace of individuality and extract from one any erg of energy with which one might presume to resist. Talk about a makeover! It can leave the new recruit feeling exhausted, beaten down, lost, apprehensive, and that he’s probably made a terrible mistake. That, as a matter of fact, fairly accurately describes the state most of my platoon mates and I would be in when, slumped on our footlockers at Sampson Air Force Base, New York, buffing our ugly brogans and dreading the too-soon-upon-us dawn, we’d be treated to the aforementioned “musical entertainment.”

Almost to a man, the two dozen or so recruits in our platoon had lived their entire lives in the racially segregated South, only to find themselves now in a freshly integrated military, spending days and nights in close company and on equal footing with members of a familiar yet alien race. There were only three or four blacks in our unit and the attitude of the white guys seemed one of passive curiosity rather than hostility or resentment, although frankly we were all too tired and distracted to give racial differences much thought. There was at least one prominent difference, however, and it asserted itself in a manner whose benefits the Pentagon could not have foreseen.

We honkies would be sitting there by our bunks, shining and whining, enveloped in a forlorn funk, when down the center aisle would come one of the black guys on his way to the latrine, the water fountain, or the bulletin board; and he’d be all grinning and relaxed, just snapping his fingers, shaking his booty, and, singing; not showing off, mind you, or seeking attention, just unself-consciously lost in the music he was hearing in his head and his heart, a music that toil and trouble could not silence — and perhaps made necessary. It never failed to lift our spirits or send us to bed in a rosier mood. I report this not to perpetuate the myth of racial specializations — the musicality of African Americans doubtlessly owes far more to environment than to genetics — but it’s impossible to recall those moments in my barracks without thinking of the Revue Nègre, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker et al, and how expatriate black American jazzmen put a smile back on the sad face of a Europe chronically depressed in the years after World War I.

Two centuries earlier, America itself began to be slowly uplifted by a people they had enslaved. Our nation was settled, remember, by emotionally constipated Puritans and purse-lipped prudes; expanded by brutish fortune hunters with a taste for hardtack and genocide. It would be insensitive to say in regard to something as evil as slavery that it’s an ill wind that blows no good, but it’s a fact that in addition to their other contributions, former African slaves managed over time to bring joy to a dour, priggish population which danced, when it deigned to dance at all, with heavy feet and a guilty conscience.

In any event, that experience in air force boot camp stayed with me, doubtlessly affecting in some way my unpopular stance as an integrationist in 1950s Richmond.

By the way, I alone among the white recruits actually recognized those songs that the black recruits were singing. There was a catchy one whose refrain went, “Ain’t that crazy, crazy, crazy?” A question apropos to so many situations in life. And there was “Work with Me, Annie,” whose lyrics had almost as many lives as a cat. Etta James recorded a supposedly cleaned-up version called “Roll With Me, Henry,” but even that proved too risqué for white radio. Eventually, Georgia Gibbs scored one of the very first hits in the new genre of rock and roll with a further sanitized version entitled “Dance with Me, Henry.” Needless to say, the original song’s sequel, “Annie Had a Baby,” was too earthy — and too scary — to be even considered for Caucasian transliteration.

How did blue-eyed Tommy Rotten happen to know those songs? Why, I’d heard them back in Warsaw at that little black-friendly Texaco station where the radio on the counter was always tuned to minority broadcasts from D.C. and Baltimore. Kid pops into a gas station to play the pinball machine and is subliminally radicalized. Ain’t that crazy, crazy, crazy?

By 1953, the Korean War had wound down, but conscription remained in effect and I was about to be drafted into the army, a prospect that held a minimum of charm for me since I fancied neither shooting nor being shot. The air force seemed a more peaceable alternative, and I wasn’t strongly averse to enlisting for the reason I stated earlier: I was bereft of appealing options.

In the year after severing ties with W&L (I didn’t hate the place, it just wasn’t the best fit for someone with my funky orientations and anarchic aesthetic), I’d done a bit of pre-beatnik hitchhiking (even writing a few pre-beatnik poems), labored briefly in the mail room of the Life Insurance Company of Virginia; and worked construction helping build and maintain electrical power plants and substations. I actually enjoyed construction, primarily for the camaraderie.

My fellow workers, though uneducated and unsophisticated, were funnier than a ruptured pipeline of laughing gas, offering witty and often insightful commentary on nearly every misstep, local and national, in life’s passing parade. Not one of them gave a braised pig’s knuckle that I could read Rilke in German, but they were loyal, stand-up guys who respected the fact that I’d dabbled in higher education, and who, I knew, always had my back. Going to work each morning was akin to attending a staff meeting of the Harvard Lampoon, if there were Harvard men who could keep you in stitches while threading pipe expertly or digging a ditch.

Enjoyable it might have been, but as I possess less mechanical aptitude than a rheumatoid squirrel monkey, my future in the construction trade was limited at best. Oh, and lest I forget, there was one other sharp stick prodding me toward enlistment: I’d recently gotten married.

The summer I turned twenty, I’d lost my virginity to a fetching, likewise virginal, Warsaw girl three years my junior. It being the 1950s, and it being rural Virginia, and we, Peggy and I, being middle class; well, in that time and under those circumstances, the popping of the cherry more often than not led to the popping of the question. Granted, I’d been a nonconformist practically since birth, but in this case I don’t know if I was rebelling against convention or bowing to it; yet for whatever reason, the prospect of a teenage wedding (and this was years before Chuck Berry sang about one) struck me as kind of cool, kind of wild.

I definitely wasn’t driven by conscience, by the shameful feeling that my wonton lust had soiled an innocent flower. Peggy wasn’t pregnant, and the truth is, she craved sexual intercourse as fervently as I. I’d say she craved it even more, except that such a claim would likely annoy Terry Gross.

Ms. Gross, of course, is the host of Fresh Air, the fine interview program on National Public Radio. The time I was a guest on the show, she seemed incredulous if not outright indignant when she asked if I really believed that women are more interested in sex than men are, as I’d had a character say in my novel Skinny Legs and All. I replied, “I don’t know but that’s what my women friends tell me.”

It was an honest answer, if a trifle incomplete. I should have said, “… that’s what my married women friends tell me.” As we’ve established in these pages, the second his biological urge is satisfied, many a husband is mentally if not physically out the door, lugging his bag of clubs. Especially if a ray of daylight persists in the sky. And when he yells “Fore!” you can bet your bottom credit card he isn’t crying out for more foreplay.

On a humid, blustery day (it was typhoon season) in the autumn of 1954, I landed in Japan. Two nights later, I landed again — this time without benefit of aircraft. The second landing, though unaffected by storm winds, was rougher, more perilous than the first. Let me explain.

While awaiting transport to various assigned installations in Korea, hundreds of us airmen were temporarily quartered in what amounted to a tent city, although the structures weren’t tents in the usual sense in that their bottom halves were wooden and seemingly permanent. From a height of about six feet upward, they were canvas, a heavy olive-drab tarpaulin material. Each unit slept twenty airmen, the cots lined up in two rows of ten with an aisle down the center. There were scores, maybe hundreds, of these half tents, and they all looked exactly alike. Only an identification number at each entrance distinguished one from all the others, but the numbers could be difficult to read in the dark.

Somewhere in the midst of Tent City, next to the huge mess hall, there was a canteen, the Pentagon being ever thoughtful when it comes to providing its troops with easy access to beer. By my second night in Japan, I was already so in love with the country (despite having thus far experienced precious little of it) that I downed an imprudent amount of suds, toasting my good fortune in finding myself in such an ancient and fascinating culture. At closing time, I went weaving back to my tent, where I quickly fell asleep, dreaming no doubt of geishas and Mount Fuji, in scenes resembling wood-block prints.

At some point during the night, a full bladder awakened me. I arose, located the latrine building, and proceeded to off-load my cargo. Now, my cot was immediately inside the entrance of my assigned tent, very first bunk on the right. Upon my return, I threw myself down on what I believed to be my mattress — only to land right on top of a sleeping man. The man screamed. Literally screamed. He believed, I’m sure, that he was being attacked by a Communist, or worse, was the victim of an attempted homosexual rape.

I pulled myself off him as quickly as I could manage it, being somewhat entangled in the man’s flailing arms and legs. Once free, I raced in a panic to the tent next door, which, luckily, proved to be the correct one, and dived into bed with my shoes on. There was some commotion outside, but it soon died down, and once my heart quit pounding and my breathing slowed, I quietly laughed myself to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, I turned my head and discreetly chuckled again when I heard airmen asking, “Did you hear what happened to Sergeant Johansson last night?”

Later that day, just outside his tent, I came upon Sergeant Johansson himself. A gruff, tough-looking fellow in his thirties, he outranked me by three stripes and outweighed me by at least thirty pounds of what looked to be more muscle than fat. Walking ever so nonchalantly past him, I had no trouble suppressing even the faintest sign of amusement, though there definitely was a big red Japanese sun of a smile on the face behind my face.

In Korea, my assignment was to teach members of the South Korean air force the techniques of weather observation, including registering prevailing atmospheric conditions and encrypting, decoding, and plotting on maps meteorological data transmitted via shortwave radio from various observation sites around western Asia. To prepare me for this duty, the U.S. Air Force had sent me to its school near Chicago, where my classmates and I took two years of college meteorology in four months, attending classes eight hours a day, six days a week. This saturation process is called a “crash program,” and I can testify that it is a highly effective way to learn a subject.

I had arrived in Illinois in the middle of a program, so my future weather classmates and I had to wait eight weeks for the next program to begin. To keep us occupied, useful, and out of mischief in the interval, our commanding officer made certain we were available daily for either mess hall duty (KP) or something called “base beautification,” this latter consisting of tasks ranging from scouring every inch of the sprawling base for cigarette butts and other litter to raking leaves, heaving sacks of compost, and planting shrubbery. Base beautification could be sweaty physical labor or it could be a piddly existential bore. And while in both cases it was preferable to KP (The horror! The horror!), it was hardly the sort of mindless grunt work we’d envisioned we’d be performing when we eschewed the army for the air force. Guys were always faking toothaches or upset stomachs, or inventing other lame excuses to get out of it. To that end I hit upon a novel tactic that in certain circles might be regarded as brilliant.

When our unit would report to a noncommissioned officer in charge of a particular base beautification project, each of us, individually, would be required to sign his name on a duty roster. At noon, we’d break for lunch, after which there’d be a roll call to assure that every one of us had returned to work as ordered. At no point in this operation were IDs checked. So one morning I signed the roster not as Thomas E. Robbins but as “R. M. Rilke,” betting that not one of the authorities involved would have heard of the Austrian poet. After lunch, I slipped away to the base theater and watched a matinee.

The following day, at my unit’s early-morning formation, nobody noticed the twinkle in my eye when our own NCO ordered “Airman Rilke” to report to the orderly room, presumably to defend his unexcused absence from base beautification. Perfect! And the next time we future weathermen were assigned to a laborious beautification detail, I signed in as “Feodor Dostoyevsky.” After lunch, I traipsed over to the gym and shot baskets, knowing that I might have to bite my tongue to keep from snickering at the way our sergeant would pronounce “Dostoyevsky” the following morning. I only regretted that I couldn’t be privy to the consternation “Rilke” and “Dostoyevsky” surely must have caused in our orderly room.

Not wishing to arouse suspicion. I skipped a day or two now and then and returned to the shovel and the rake, but over the following weeks “Alexander Pope,” “Leo Tolstoy,” and “Oscar Wilde” were all cited for being AWOL from base beautification — while I passed sweet afternoons seeing the latest Hollywood films and improving my jump shot. Who says a literary education doesn’t have practical applications?

Any American air force pilot, having been alerted in a weather briefing to the presence of a storm system in his flight path, would take pains to circumnavigate it. South Korean pilots, on the other hand, being fatalistic both by temperament and religious training, would just fly right into the storm.

At least that was the case in the 1950s. With that stoic approach to aviation prevalent in their officers, my students could be forgiven for caring no more about meteorology than kittens might care about string theory.

Nevertheless, we had to go through the motions, which we did in rotating eight-hour shifts: day, swing, and midnight (weather doesn’t sleep). The question soon became, “What to do,” my students and I, “to keep from boring each other to transcultural tears?” I’m unsure whose idea it was, but for a while — in between recording and transmitting temperatures, dew points, and wind directions — the locals amused themselves by teaching me to swear in Korean. More than a half century later, I still remember those naughty words, which is a trifle odd as I’ve had scant opportunity to put them into practice and have been known to criticize profanity as representing a paucity of vocabulary and destitution of wit.

Eventually, however, we discovered a diversion that was not only mutually satisfying but profitable. Moreover, it struck a symbolic blow against Cold War communism, being a working example of capitalistic principles on a democratically fundamental plane. We took up black marketing.

The PX at K-2 Air Force Base occupied a Quonset hut set on treeless, ever-brown land, presenting a rigidly militaristic demeanor to the world: no nonsense, no frills. Inside, though, it offered for sale at discount prices a fair number of the familiar items that average Americans considered essential to their pursuit of happiness if not their actual survival. These would include Camel, Pall Mall, Kool, and Marlboro cigarettes. Regulations permitted each airman on K-2 to purchase two cartons of cigarettes a month, a rule irrelevant in my case since I didn’t smoke. Well, one day a student named Kim (come to think of it, each and every one of my students was named Kim; in fact, I believe every man, woman, and child in Korea was named Kim in 1955, and that may still be the case for all I know); this particular Kim fellow came to me and very shyly suggested that were I to provide him with a carton of Marlboros, he would pay me more than twice the price charged by the PX.

Now, I’m not much of a businessman — life is entirely too short to be used up in shallow pursuit of monetary favor — but this transaction sounded easy enough and, hey, this Kim, though not uniquely christened, was a good-natured soul who’d giggled like a schoolgirl when instructing me how to say “motherfucker” in his native tongue.

Let’s not drag this out. Soon I was supplying Kim with not only my two monthly cartons but cigarettes I’d purchased at face value from other nonsmokers in my outfit. Before long, we were dealing in toilet articles as well. They, in fact, commanded a better price than the smokes. Bear in mind that South Korea at that time was an impoverished, war-torn country with nothing remotely resembling a modern manufacturing sector, and from its sheer volume, it was obvious that the stuff I sold to Kim was being resold to a third party or parties.

Conducting business at the weather station would have been risky for us both, so I’d conceal the merchandise in a laundry bag and schlep it to a rendezvous at a Korean civilian laundry located some twenty or thirty yards down the unpaved road that led in and out of K-2. Most of the airmen had their clothes washed there, and guards at the gate didn’t notice that I seemed to be soiling my duds at many times the rate of the average airman.

I suppose I should emphasize that this enterprise was wee potatoes. Bantam feed. A mafia don wouldn’t have wiped his wife’s poodle’s butt on it. But entertainment was cheap in those postwar years in Asia, and my illicit earnings, meager as they were, afforded me excellent sukiyaki dinners, Kabuki performances, and lovely female companionship when I would travel to Japan on leave. It wasn’t until near the end of my tour of duty that I learned that most of our contraband, especially the toilet articles, was ending up behind the bamboo curtain in what was then Red China. Brand me a traitor if you must, but I figure that for eight or nine months I was supplying Mao Zedong with his Colgate toothpaste.

In the weather observers’ barracks at K-2, a poker game was almost always in progress. One of the most ardent poker players was an affable, roughhewn Southern lad named Jody. Between weather station duty and incessantly chasing a royal flush, Jody hadn’t time for much else, including writing to his girlfriend back in North Carolina, so he offered me five bucks (his luck had been good that week) if I’d write to Sue Ellen in his stead.

Since my interest in cards has been pretty much limited to wild cards (figuratively speaking), I rarely sat at the poker table, preferring to spend my leisure hours at the service club, flirting with bargirls and drinking beer; or, when in the barracks, pursuing my newfound interest in Japanese aesthetics, including trying to understand and assimilate such concepts as wabi-sabi (the art of finding beauty in things that are imperfect, incomplete, humble, or unconventional), a practice, with its undertones of “crazy wisdom,” that continues to absorb me today. However, a young American male can only wabi so much sabi, and my rinky-dink black-market ring wasn’t time-consuming, so I consented to write to the fair Sue Ellen on Jody’s behalf — on one condition: he must sign and post the epistle without reading it. He agreed.

Refraining from waxing so poetic as to arouse her suspicion, I told Sue Ellen how much I (Jody) loved and missed her, but that I (Jody) was proud to be serving my country so that American values might endure. Skipping any reference to poker, I included a few lines about the base and work, but they struck me as dull. I felt that the letter could use a bit of color, some tidbit to intrigue and delight.

Inspired, I added that I had recently captured a snake and was keeping it in my laundry bag as a pet. It was pretty, I wrote, a cousin of the North Carolina king snake, and that I fed it mice I trapped in a nearby rice paddy, as well as eggs pilfered from the mess hall. Then, as a final romantic touch, I wrote that I (again, Jody) had named the snake “Sue Ellen” in her honor.

He never heard from her again.

Although he whined a few times about a broken heart, Jody soon quickly lost himself — and Sue Ellen — in the shuffling and dealing; whereas I felt I’d done a good deed, saving a fellow airman perhaps from marriage to an unimaginative, not to mention unappreciative, wife.

For several weeks, I was detached to a joint armed forces communications center in downtown Taegu, third largest city in South Korea. It was a wonderful deployment in that I got to walk to work every morning through narrow streets paved with stone and raucous with life, a sensorium of undulating exotica. Everywhere there was the rattling of carts, some pulled by shaggy ponies, most by old bearded papa-sans in baggy white britches and stovepipe hats. Pushing aside rice-paper screens, extended families poured from single-story houses, the women in long, very high-waisted skirts and tight-fitting brocade jackets worn under a looser jacket of quilted cotton. (Bargirls and prostitutes, of which there were great numbers in Taegu, wore Western-style dresses — usually gifts from GI boyfriends who ordered them from Sears catalogs — but these larks of the night seldom ventured out before noon.)

My nose, even my eyes, filled with smoke from hibachi pots, with the pungent breath of kimchi crocks, and with the sweet-sour redolence of unidentifiable spices, lotions, tonics, oils, dyes, and bodily effluvia: strange smells to complement the strange language whose stick-figure letters jitterbugged on wooden and paper signs in every direction and whose intonations burst in the air around me like invisible cannonades.

Some mornings early on in my deployment, I’d get lost in the alleys and teeming jingle-jangle of it all, and not knowing how to ask directions, would wander in the multitudes until I saw a particular little bridge or an old car without wheels and realized that’s where I must turn left and climb the hill to the communications center. More often than not, I was late for work. As I said, it was wonderful.

On that assignment, I was quartered on an army post, there being no air force presence in the city, and commuting from K-2 would have been a hassle even though it was no more than ten or twelve miles away: too many pushcarts, bicycles, and pedestrians jamming the road. Nights, when I wasn’t on the futon of some cute bargirl, I slept in transit quarters, located on the second floor of a large, ugly, gray stone building, a relic of the Japanese occupation (1910–1945). I shared those temporary quarters — a long, cold room with about thirty bunks, most of them empty — with members of the U.S. Army all-Korea boxing team.

Having each won a Korean Command championship in his weight division, the boxers were training to fight the Japanese Command champs, the winners of those bouts then traveling to Germany to take on the top army pugilists in Europe. Trained by an Italian American with a Bronx accent as heavy as a subway car, these guys took their conditioning seriously, some of them perhaps dreaming of a professional prizefighting career once they were discharged from the army. They were good roommates, however, funny and friendly and always trying hard not to wake skinny, noncombatant me when they arose at 5 A.M. to do their roadwork.

Sharing quarters with the military boxers made me feel as if I were living in the pages of From Here to Eternity, the monumental opus by James Jones that critics unfortunately and in some cases no doubt snobbishly never mention when listing contenders for the title of “Great American Novel.” But, then, writing fiction is not a boxing tournament, is it? Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.

Very late one night, well past the Cinderella curfew, our peaceful quarters were invaded by about ten young greenhorn privates, not long in the army and fresh off the troopship from the U.S. Somewhere in their journey from the port of Inchon to Taegu, they’d managed to consume a large quantity of beer, and they were as loud and stupid as nineteen-year-olds can be when inexperienced with the caprices of ethyl alcohol. Add to that the giddiness they surely felt at being left temporarily unsupervised in, for the first time in their lives, a foreign land, and you have a recipe for elevated levels of obnoxiousness. Their horselaughs, their drunken vulgarity, their banging about, their smartass retorts when asked politely to quiet down and switch off the lights, failed to enchant the awakened boxers, whose arduous workday on the road and in the gym would commence with the pink prickling of dawn.

As the juvenile jackassery continued, I, beneath my government-issue blankets, chuckled softly. One needn’t be prescient to know how this was going to end.

It ended quickly. With no wasted motion, boxers slipped out of bed, slowly crossed the room, and WHUMP! WHOOSH! SURPRISE! Single well-placed punches to the midsection let the air out of three or four of the raucous rookies with a sound like that of exploding tires. Deflated, the brats fell backward against their astounded comrades or onto their clattering bunks. Then, piñatas smashed, fiesta canceled, lights summarily extinguished, the newcomers briefly grumbled under their breath and passed out; while the boxers went back to dreaming of title fights, flashbulbs, tabloid headlines, and million-dollar purses, or at least how their fists were going to get them the hell out of Korea. And I, for the second time since arriving in Asia, laughed myself to sleep.

There was something else besides Sears catalog fashions that distinguished Taegu bargirls and set them apart from their more virtuous peers: namely their breath. These enterprising ladies, unlike their fellow countrymen young and old, one and all, did not eat kimchi. Their abstention was a dietary sacrifice of enormous proportions, yet entirely necessary if they wished to socialize with American servicemen, which is to say, if they wished to prosper financially.

Kimchi has been called the national condiment or side dish of Korea, but it’s considerably more than that. It’s a defining characteristic, more gastronomically representative of Korea than salsa is of Mexico or garlic of Italy. Though less so today than in past periods when money and meat were scarce, kimchi has been a Korean way of life.

Traditionally, kimchi was napa cabbage that, seasoned with hot chilies and garlic and soaked in brine, was buried in an earthenware crock for several months or until fermentation occurred. There are variations in which radishes, turnips, and/or cucumbers are added to the cabbage, but the fermentation is essential — and the effect is the same: after one has eaten kimchi, one’s breath could run a train. It could also run off any GI, marine, or airman — no matter how romantically inclined, how fervently propelled forward by testosterone — who happened to find his olfactory receptors enveloped in an alien halitosis so powerful it could pour a tank of herbicide on the reddest rose of passion.

Kissing a kimchi eater is one thing, eating kimchi is another, and while I was not all together unlike my fellow servicemen in my aversion to the former, I came to join the ranks of the latter, introduced at my insistence to the indomitable dish by a darling girl who called herself “Sally” (odds are her real name was Kim), and whose warnings I ignored, creating some displeasure at the weather station since my entire supply of Listerine mouthwash was being funneled to Chairman Mao.

I continue to eat kimchi today, albeit by necessity the made-in-America version. American kimchi? Indeed, it’s possible to find refrigerated jars of the stuff in a fair number of U.S. supermarkets and specialty food stores, especially on the West Coast; and while it can add piquancy to tuna sandwiches or bowls of pork with steamed rice, it’s pretty much a pale shadow of the authentic Korean product. The problem is that here the ingredients have rarely been fermented. It’s possible today to ferment cabbage without burying it in the ground all winter (a Vietnamese woman in La Conner, Washington, made me some in her garage: moonshine kimchi), but in deference to Yankee sensibilities, most preserved cabbage in this country (in Japan, as well) is actually pickled rather than fermented. I call it “kimchi lite.”

Kimchi lite is to authentic Korean kimchi what a lapdog is to a timber wolf, what a billiards game is to a rugby match, what Disneyland is to Burning Man, what a golf cart is to a hot-rod Lincoln, what the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is to the Rolling Stones, what a sparkler is to a thunder cracker, what Curious George is to King Kong, what… well, you get the picture. Kimchi lite can enliven a tuna sandwich but hard-core Korean kimchi rocks the world.

“You eat kimchi,” Sally warned me, “you wife-san no like you. She catchy catchy ’nother man.” The petite bargirl had laughed uproariously when I swallowed my first bite of kimchi. (“I cry for funny,” she gasped), but she was seriously prophetic in regard to my wife, although Peggy’s animosity had zero to do with Korean cuisine. Or with Korean bargirls, for that matter. We were drifting — no, motorboating — apart before I’d gone abroad.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic. Peggy was thoroughly unimpressed when I won an air force short-story contest; I quietly scoffed at her fashion magazines, her fascination with the financial potential of Florida real estate. (I’d been stationed at a base outside of Orlando, tracking potential hurricanes.) The sporadic letters she’d sent me in Korea were approximately as affectionate as a foreclosure notice. Written with a blunt instrument. Dipped in zombie blood.

Returning home aboard a troopship bound for Seattle, I’d scored a gig as editor of the ship’s newspaper (a thin mimeographed rag distributed daily), thereby avoiding both KP and nightly internment down in the fart-infested rat warrens where troops were stacked like cordwood: I instead shared a comfortable cabin with a trio of medics. Under the nom de plume “Figmo Fosdick,” I also wrote a satirical humor column called Shipboard Confidential, which, though popular with the troops, frequently put me at odds with the paper’s adviser, a Roman Catholic chaplin who possessed the purplish physiognomy and perpetually petulant pucker of the overly zealous censor. I wouldn’t insinuate that the good priest ever touched a choirboy, but he certainly molested my prose.

At any rate, I had little time for contemplation during the crossing, so when after a fortnight we docked in Seattle, I elected to take a Greyhound bus to Virginia, thereby saving airfare and giving myself four uninterrupted days on the road to ponder my situation.

Prior to my deployment to Asia, Peggy had been my one and only sexual partner. Now I’d rolled on the futon with five Korean girls — Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim, and Sally — and an extremely lovely Japanese woman named Reiko. I’d “sown my wild oats,” to borrow that dated agrarian phrase, and was thinking that I was now ready to “settle down,” to employ another grandpa expression, with Peggy and our son Rip (born just before I shipped out to Korea), and “build a life” (the clichés just kept on rolling). Moreover, when I finally arrived in Richmond, I took one look at Peggy and fell in love with her all over again. Alas, the feelings were less than mutual.

The frigidity of my welcome would have inspired the hardiest Eskimo to huddle with the sled dogs. Peggy had been strewing some feral cereal of her own it seems, and was, in fact, pregnant with another man’s child. Deserved or not, the rejection ripped through my heart like a rusty can opener, wounding me so deeply that for years thereafter it would pop up like a jeering jack in my dreams.

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Hmmm. That last sentence reminds me of my gallbladder.

In 2006, an ultrasound exam discovered enough stones in my gallbladder to pave a Zen walkway. A few weeks later, I had the rock-strewn organ removed. The surgery went well, but I was kept in the hospital overnight. I was also pumped full of happy juice. The drug’s identity I do not know, but with it singing in my veins, pushing my mental pedal to the metal, I was merrily awake all night long, during which time I wrote an entire self-help book in my head.

I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating. Hour after hour, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after chapter, I composed an entire self-help book. Toward dawn, I finally fell asleep, however, and when they woke me several hours later, the only part of the book I could recall was its title: How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner.

That’s correct: How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner. If only I could have remembered the accompanying text, there is no doubt whatsoever that the book would have sold twenty million copies and placed me in the company of mega-motivator Tony Robbins. Maybe that’s why I forgot it.