Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

17. god bless bohemia

Upon returning from overseas in 1955, I stumbled into an America I had barely known existed, a country within a country; or more precisely, a state within a state; a state of being that is usually referred to as “bohemia,” although it has nothing to do with Czechoslovakia, and of which I have remained to this day a denizen. (“Citizen” is too licit a word, and anyway, when necessary I’ve managed to keep one foot in mainstream bourgeois society, which is to say, in enemy territory.)

Now, I’d checked out Greenwich Village in the months before my juvenile marriage, but the place had seemed more foreign to me then than Japan or Korea; and having no guide, no interpreter, no valid passport, nor even a proper frame of reference, I wasn’t merely an outsider, I was like a deaf man at the opera or a blind man at the circus. Ironically, it was my estranged wife who introduced me to what would in a few years be labeled (and often libeled) as the “counterculture.” A materialist Peggy might have been, but she was also a party girl, and in conservative Richmond it was the bohemian artists and intellectuals, genuine or fake, who hosted — informally, of course — the liveliest and most frequent soirees.

There’s an area of urban Richmond known as the Fan District, a charming neighborhood, by and large, and home to the largest concentration of artists and arty hangers-on between New York and New Orleans. (Of the Fan I’ll have more stories to tell later: I came to live there in 1957 after my discharge from the air force.) Peggy was taking lessons in ballroom dancing, and it was a gay dance instructor named Chubby, though he was as skinny as a chopstick, who initiated her into the Fan party scene. On my second night back, following my cross-country bus ride, Peggy let me tag along to a gathering at a painting studio. Within an hour, she’d disappeared, and I did not see her again that evening, but the sting of being abandoned was lessened considerably by my acute fascination with the odd new world into which I’d been dumped. It was bohemia, baby, and while I wasn’t exactly wonder-struck, I was undeniably captivated.

In Japan, I’d marveled at wood-block prints, but until that evening in Richmond, I’d seen modern paintings only in reproductions, and not many of those. A Hokusai print is exquisite in its draftsmanship and poignant in the way it penetrates and distills the very essence of nature, but such refinement can be drowned out by the sheer bravura of a big modern canvas, especially one upon which the paint is so fresh it’s sticky to the touch; and in that Fan studio I was surrounded by actual original paintings, some hanging, a couple half finished on easels, some propped against the walls. From that night on, the mingled aroma of oil paint and turpentine, with its hint of mystery, its suggestion of activities unfolding outside the realm of normal expectations, has been an intoxicating perfume to me.

Furnished with three rickety wooden chairs and a stained sofa that had seen too much and forgotten too little, the studio’s main room, uncarpeted and spattered with paint of various hues, was the epicenter of the party. There, the motley-garbed guests — not one in a military uniform or “conventional dress” à la W&L — sipped beer and cheap red wine (marijuana would not infiltrate Richmond for another decade) while listening to an LP recording of a singer with a voice so wretched I thought it must be some kind of joke. (The singer’s name was Billie Holiday, and before my leave was up, having probably heard her a dozen more times, I was so completely crazy about her I’d purchased one of her albums, even though, like the shoplifter at W&L, I didn’t own a record player: for me, disorientation has all too often been the beginning of love.)

The party was only moderately noisy, although the buzz of otherwise serious conversation would periodically be interrupted by shouted non sequiturs, proclamations of a bizarre, surrealistic nature, followed by appreciative chuckling. Between the mad poetic outbursts, ideas were being tumbled like gemstones in a lapidary, discussion salted with names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Since in air force barracks guys talked mainly about cars, sports teams, and girlfriends — in that order — this dialogue was a refreshment to me, a tonic; and when I overheard Henry Miller mentioned, I jumped in with a few comments of my own.

Almost nobody else present had actually read Miller (the Grove Press paperback edition of Tropic of Cancer wouldn’t be published until 1961), and my firsthand observations made enough of an impression that when on the following evening, sans Peggy, I knocked on the studio door, I was recognized and admitted. Welcome to bohemia, Tommy Rotten.

I spent the last three weeks of my leave in that milieu, most particularly with the two painters who lived and worked in the studio I now visited daily, a larger-than-life pair named William Fletcher Jones and William Philip Kendrick, and with whom I would establish lasting friendships.

Jones looked like Dylan Thomas with a receding hairline and an exceeding waistline. A big brooding hulk, he would puff his jowls malevolently and bulge his hyperthyroid eyes until he resembled a hippopotamus rising from the ooze, then unfold his meaty lips to emit one of those nervous little nearly silent giggles with which certain jazz drummers vent their ecstasy at the terminus of an especially complicated riff. The giggles customarily followed some nonsensical — obtuse, at any rate — remark about life or art, though for Jones the line between the two was virtually nonexistent. He was to become rather well known for semiabstract cityscapes, charged with tension and electricity and executed in brilliant, juicy hues, although at the time he was painting courting lovers, realistic couples in every aspect except for their heads, which were featureless eggs.

As for Kendrick, whom his friends called “B.K.,” he was obsessed with the image of the dancer Nijinsky in the role of Petrouchka, the brokenhearted clown who for one shining moment sat upon the golden throne of God, a subject he has painted literally hundreds of times. B.K. was (and is) himself a clown, albeit a shy one: at odd moments he would jump up, click his heels together, and pirouette in a silly little dance, at the conclusion of which he would glance about the room with an anxious smile, like a child half expecting to be punished for inappropriate exuberance. Indeed, his round face almost perpetually exhibited the wide-eyed gaze and surprised smile of an astonished child, one who might have had his blindfold removed to find himself in a castle filled with ice cream, puppies, and toys.

B.K.’s sensitive baby face was all the more incongruous in that he was a state champion weight lifter, bulky muscles like hibernating armadillos concealed in the folds of his baggy duds. When ten years later we would move to New York together (I detoured to Richmond to pick him up on my way from Seattle), he would cadge drinks for us by walking the length of cocktail bars on his hands, somehow managing not to tip over any of the beverages resting thereupon. A one-hand stand on a bar stool was almost always good for a rum-and-Coke or a pint of Guinness, which we’d divide into two smaller glasses. It was in token repayment for this procurement that I partially dedicated my first novel to him in 1971.

At this writing, B.K. is well past eighty and we’ve been pals for more than half a century, a friendship that some may find a bit… well, bohemian; considering, as I eventually learned, that it was B.K. who had impregnated my wife when I was in Korea.

One morning when I was six, I awoke to find it spring. When I’d fallen asleep it was winter still, but sometime during the night, like a tipsy debutante sneaking home late from a ball, her hair undone, her green gown billowing, a song in her heart and a dreamy yet defiant smile on her face, spring had returned to Blowing Rock.

I’d been sick for nearly a week with the flu, and my mother, ever the nurse, thought I needed at least one more day in bed. Maybe, but when I saw through my bedroom window that the world outside had come alive, that it had taken on an insect quality, everywhere buzzing and budding, I wanted to claim a place in the sun. So, I opened the window (my room was on the first floor), jumped outside, and to Mother’s horror, went running, cavorting, and cartwheeling around and around the yard in my underwear.

For those high jinks, I paid with a scolding, a denial of promised ice cream, and an extra day in bed under observation to assure that my little escapade hadn’t brought on pneumonia. It was totally worth it.

My encounter with bohemia and the bohemians was to have a similar effect on me. Herb Gold, the late San Francisco author, wrote this: “In all the interstices of a society that still requires art, imagination, laziness, adventure, and possibility unwilled by family and employment, the bohemian unpacks his tender roots.” Is not Gold’s expression “tender roots” suggestive of spring?

From the stuffy sickroom of button-downed 1950s America, a vanilla-flavored, beige-draped decade whose lodestar was the pine-scented patio candle, I looked out on what appeared to be a kind of behavioral springtime — a metaphoric season of irrepressible renewal; fertile and wild and green and free — and felt an urge to go running around in it in my underwear. Alas, barely had its first robin chirped before my bohemian spring was replaced by regimental winter. Leave having expired, I now reported for duty to a base outside Omaha, Nebraska, where for the next twenty months I would work three stories underground in a theoretically nuclear bombproof building, a Cold War fortress without a single window to jump out of.

Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, is headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, whose mission during Cold War tensions was to be poised and prepared for Hot War every minute of every day. At all times, day and night, weekends and holidays (including the alleged birthday of “the Prince of Peace”) there were SAC bombers in the air, each freighting a payload of atom bombs, their crews awaiting the signal to proceed to a selected target and blow it into radioactive dust. Once the U.S. president had hung up the iconic red telephone, the next call, the order from Washington to let the hell begin, would be answered in the building where I worked.

There would be any number of potential targets blinking on the giant electric wall maps inside the SAC nerve center, and among the factors involved in determining which one or ones to actually bomb would be the prevailing flying conditions in the vicinity of each site. Pilots would need to know what the weather would be like in obscure corners of the Eastern Bloc, and it was up to my Special Weather Intelligence unit to supply them with the most recent information. If, for example, a cold front with heavy snow appeared to be moving in on a missile base near Cheboksary, reducing visibility, a strike might be diverted to a submarine station at Sevastopol, where winds were favorable and the ceiling high.

How would we know? Meteorological espionage. Clandestine ham-radio operators in inner Outer Mongolia or some Podunk part of Pskov would transmit — in code — the amount and type of cloud cover, wind speed and direction, temperature, dew point, barometric pressure, and ground-level visibility (how, or if, they were compensated for this secret and certainly dangerous work, nobody ever said) to us boys at Offutt; where we would then decode it, encrypt it in a code of our own, and plot the numbers and symbols with fountain pens onto paper maps. From that information, our forecasters would connect the dots to develop a pretty good picture of present and near-future atmospheric conditions throughout the Soviet Union and beyond. All that was missing was a jolly TV pitchman to advise the husbands of Nizhny Novgorod that “Tuesday might be a good day to dust off those golf clubs.”

Despite the high security and overtones of high drama (Dr. Strangelove would have felt right at home there), my work in Special Weather Intelligence was for the most part as routine as it was cloistered: as I’ve said, much of my time was spent in a bunker deep underground. An escape hatch, however, like bohemia itself, can be a state of mind, and in the midst of SAC’s ongoing dress rehearsals for nuclear war, surrounded by Nebraska’s ubiquitous feedlots and cornfields, there did exist opportunities to unpack one’s “tender roots.”

Back in Richmond during my leave, B.K. - the painter — weight lifter — bashful clown — had given me, offhandedly, an introductory course in art history. As we strolled the cobblestone alleys of the Fan District, drank beer at Eton’s on Grace Street, or leafed through coffee-table books and art magazines at his studio, B.K. prattled on and on about Rembrandt, Cézanne, Caravaggio, et al, seeming at times to be astounded that such men had actually existed. Though he particularly liked recounting gossip, probably fictionalized, about the artists’ personal lives, B.K. also had been able to explain to my satisfaction the differences between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, and how the Impressionists were able to lead the viewer into mixing color in his or her own eye. Not long after arriving in Nebraska I discovered to my delight that Omaha’s Joslyn Museum was home to an impressive collection of everything from ancient Greek pottery to Renaissance masterworks (Titian, El Greco) to Impressionist gems by Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir.

After I had purchased my first car — it cost fifty bucks, worth every nickel — I took to spending free days wandering the Joslyn galleries, where, among other things, I tried to reconcile Renoir’s plump and rosy, wine-warmed wenches with the graceful if sinister beauty of the B-47 bombers nurtured and nourished at my air force base, eventually concluding that anything that says yes to life (a Renoir) is automatically saying no to war, regardless of how attractively its weapons and justifications may be packaged. Thus, like those bohemians with whom he was feeling a growing kinship, Airman Second Class Tommy Rotten woke up one morning to find himself once and for all a pacifist.

There was also music in Nebraska. Specifically, there was jazz, long the official sound track to all things bohemian in America, except for the years roughly between 1962 and 1980, when rock and roll ruled the waves. (Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight” is modern bohemia’s national anthem.) More specifically, there was the incongruously named New York Jazz Workshop, an ensemble whose founding members each had at one time played with big-name jazzmen in Manhattan, so the name was not entirely presumptuous. Headquartered in Omaha, the New York Jazz Workshop (very contemporary, very cool) traveled all over the Midwest, playing mostly college venues, but every Sunday afternoon it held forth in Omaha’s Red Lion Lounge — and every Sunday afternoon when I wasn’t down in the bowels of the earth, plotting weather maps, I was at the Red Lion at a table near the bandstand.

It was my disorienting relationship with Billie Holiday (first mocking, then adoring) that had yanked me through jazz’s swinging door (another boon from that transformative leave in Richmond), and by my second year in Omaha, I’d become so immersed in the medium — in its audacious bending of notes, yo-yoing of pitches, and rainbowing of rhythms as it determinedly explored new ways to play and hear music — that I naively presumed myself qualified to write something about it. When word reached me that the New York Jazz Workshop was in the process of recording an album, I sat at the little government-issue desk in my barracks and penned what I presumed to be liner notes.

The next Sunday, at the Red Lion, I handed the pages to the group’s ostensible leader. Apparently, he perused my notes, and favorably so, during intermission because after the break he read aloud what I’d written, verbatim, over the bandstand microphone. The audience applauded. The musicians applauded. The jazzmen I’d been applauding every Sunday for a year or more were now applauding me. It’s hard to describe the elation I felt. Vaulted to a peak of pleasure, my heart took a drum solo worthy of Joe Morello.

Several years passed before it dawned on me that they were applauding my use of language, itself rather audacious, rather than my woefully inadequate knowledge of jazz. Nevertheless, that experience was a pivot point for me. After a lengthy absence, I began to write again, and shortly before leaving Offutt and the military, I entered and won another air force short-story contest. This story concerned a man who first psychologically and then physically turns into a mosquito. A month or so later, I submitted it to Weird Tales magazine — and received my first ever rejection slip.

Incidentally, I’ve been fortunate enough to garner only one other rejection notice in my literary careen (a term I prefer to “career”). It arrived the following year in response to a poem I’d submitted to the New Yorker. As I recall, the poem went something like this:

At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen.

Peacocks preen, elephants remember,

camels go for days without water,

and dinosaurs of all types become extinct.

Although I’ve never pretended to be a poet, I’m still on the fence about whether or not the New Yorker poetry editor made the right decision.

My first car, that fifty-dollar hummer, was a 1947 Kaiser. A what? Yeah, a Kaiser, a six-cylinder folly (mine seemed to hit on no more than three) manufactured near Detroit between 1945 and 1953. It looked like the illegitimate child of a sperm whale and a pizza oven, and was built so low to the ground you actually had to step down to get into it: it was not unlike entering a sunken living room or boarding one of those Tunnel of Love boats at an amusement park.

At the time, I was dating a cute little WAF, and when I say “little” I’m not being colloquial: measuring just four feet eleven inches, it’s surprising Bunnie was allowed in the air force. When she sat beside me in that low-riding Kaiser nobody could tell she was in the car. From outside, you couldn’t even see the top of her head. As a consequence, rumor spread through my squadron that “Robbins drives around all over Omaha yakking to himself.” It’s fortunate, I guess, that they were unaware of my history with the talking stick.

If that rumor contributed to the fact that I was the only airman in my unit not to receive a reenlistment lecture, I couldn’t say. There were, however, reasons why my extended military service went unsolicited. I was good at my job, always arrived on time, and despite a couple of citations for refusing to wear a hat (I felt like a Tijuana bus driver in those low-class lids), I presented a clean, neat, pleasant countenance to my comrades and superiors. True, but a cheerful, generally compliant disposition apparently could not disguise the irrepressible bohemian vapors that now wafted from the pits of my flesh, effluvia interpreted by some as passive insubordination and others as covert anti-authoritarianism. It didn’t help matters that names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky were occasionally popping up in my conversation. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t American. It wasn’t right.

Charges of “intellectual snobbery” escalated after I innocently asked a sergeant which he considered worse, conspicuous consumption or conspicuous nonconsumption. (I’d been reading Margaret Mead.) From the way the guy waxed livid with hostility, one would have thought I’d inquired if he believed Uncle Sam was a lesbian.

On the other hand, I may not have received a reenlistment sales pitch because it was so obviously a waste of time, and never mind that the prospect of wasting time has rarely if ever stopped anybody in the military. At any rate, the air force awarded me an honorable discharge (poor compensation for the fact that I’d received only two promotions in four years); I shipped my belongings to my parents’ address, sold the Kaiser to a junkyard for fifteen bucks, shook hands with my buddies, kissed the little WAF good-bye, and hitchhiked back to Richmond, perhaps passing on the road Neal Cassady or Jack Kerouac, an exciting and soon-to-be-famous new breed of bohemians.

If I, indeed, crossed paths with representatives of the Beat Generation while thumbing from Nebraska to Virginia, I failed to recognize them as such. I did, however, encounter an old gentleman whom the Beats might well have found worthy of praise.

On a chilly morning (despite it being early June) in eastern Kentucky, I was stranded on the outskirts of a small city, stranded because it was Saturday and all the traffic was heading into town so that the coal miners, moonshiners, hardscrabble farmers and their families could attend to their Saturday shopping (a weekly ritual), while I was heading in the opposite direction. Pickup after pickup passed me by, the cab of each one crowded past the point of legality with parents, grandparents, and perhaps other kin; the truck beds full of children, bundled against the fresh mountain air. More often than not, drivers honked at me and their children waved. Occasionally, one of the kids would shout, “Hey, soldier boy!” Although I was officially now a civilian, I was wearing my uniform because it helped in getting rides.

The friendly reception warmed my heart — these were in a sense my people — but the rest of me was becoming chilled to the marrow. Eventually, I turned on a numb heel and took temporary refuge in an unpainted old general store a short way down the road. General stores, all but extinct now, differed from today’s convenience stores in that they stocked considerably less junk food, considerably more household staples. This one in Kentucky sold everything from sacks of potatoes to gallons of kerosene, from flour and school notebooks to mousetraps and sugar. I bought a Milky Way candy bar and was eating it beside the potbellied stove when the aforementioned elderly gentleman walked in.

If central casting had been searching for a man to play opposite Granny Robbins, this was their guy. Tall, lean, stubble-faced, and gray, he was clad in faded bib overalls and actually carried a squirrel rifle. He was chewing a “chaw of ’backy,” and, as he possessed a deficit of teeth, tobacco juice dribbled in brown rivulets down his chin. When he shuffled up to the counter, the clerk smiled hospitably, and asked, “How are you today, Uncle Ben?” Whereupon Uncle Ben replied, “ ’Bout dead, thank ye.”

There was not a spot of self-pity in his answer, not a hint of despair, and while there was a detectable twinkle in his eye, it was the glow of equanimity not the glint of irony. Throughout the history of Zen, there’s been an emphasis on the impermanent nature of all life, all things, and though I surely don’t wish to portray Uncle Ben as some kind of camouflaged Zen master, there was in his tone and his being a good-natured, slightly amused acceptance of inevitable impermanence.

It was the briefest of moments and more than five decades have passed, yet I’ve obviously never forgotten Uncle Ben because when I’m laid up with the flu or some other affliction and a friend calls to ask how I am, I automatically answer, with an appropriate twang, “ ’Bout dead, thank ye.” It never fails to make me feel better.