Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

19. love it & leave it

If charm were a bathtub, Richmond could have floated a hundred rubber duckies and still had room for half the Royal Navy. With its antebellum architecture, its broad boulevards (a noted European critic once wrote that Richmond’s Monument Avenue was “the most beautiful street in America”); with its heroic statues, its blossoms, its birds, its boughs, its high-tea manners and grits-and-sorghum hospitality; with its cautiously frisky, intoxicating springs; and its horsey, gilt-edged falls, Richmond was a study in slowly barbecued, lightly salted grace. Ah, but a big front has a big back, and Richmond had a dark side wider and muddier than the James River that cuts through the city with a bourbon track.

Never mind the annual Tobacco Festival that marshaled lavish floats, dozens of marching bands, and a court of competing beauty queens to celebrate — yes, celebrate! — a smelly, highly addictive substance responsible for millions of deaths the world over. And never mind the Civil War Centennial, a fête that was to last precisely as long as the horrific conflict itself, and that would make no effort to conceal — nor spare any expense to demonstrate — Richmond’s pride in having served as the capital of the Confederacy during the most shameful period of America’s history. I’m inclined to set aside those commemorations, and the bloody war and the killer weed that inspired them, to focus on a livelier, more persistent skeleton clacking its bones in Richmond’s charming closet.

There are historians who will point out that some good did result from the Civil War (abolition of slavery for example); and apologists who laud with some justification tobacco’s prominent role in the economic rise of our young nation. There can be no plea, however, on behalf of racism, no defense that isn’t as evil as the attitudes and policies of racism itself. And here let me emphasize that I bring up the subject not to jab a stick in Richmond’s once-blind eye, an orb that while still not 20/20 perhaps, can nowadays distinguish a fellow human being from an inferior subspecies and behave accordingly; but, rather, because Richmond’s racism colors (if that’s not a poor choice of verbs) the two wiggy but consequential stories I wish next to tell.

On my writing room wall there hangs a poster so faded and worn it might have once hung in the men’s toilet at the Crazy Horse Saloon. It depicts a caricature of a horned beast and reads like this: The Rhinoceros Coffee House Presents Tom Robbins / Poetry Reading & Lectures on Alley Culture / Set to Jazz (Paul Miller’s Primitive Four) / 18 Jan. 1961 / 9:00 / 538 Harrison. I’m unsure why that old poster has remained in my possession all these years when I’ve lost so many other doubtlessly more valuable souvenirs and mementos along the way. Yet here it hangs, and from it hangs a tale.

The Rhinoceros was opened a half block from the Village Inn by a couple of acquaintances cashing in — though God knows it made precious little money — on the beatnik coffeehouse fad that had begun a few years earlier in San Francisco. Well, you couldn’t have a real beatnik coffeehouse without beatnik poets, and since Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were permanently occupied elsewhere, I volunteered to substitute, hastily composing a sheaf of poetic rants specifically for the occasion. (As that editor at the New Yorker would attest, I would have had to be as mad as an outhouse rat to fancy myself a true poet.)

While in the course of my reading I confessed my love of the city, I also employed twenty-three shades of satire and twenty-four of hyperbole to box Richmond’s pretty pink ears, box it for its Tobacco Festival, its upcoming Civil War Centennial, its affected anglophilia, and, most resoundingly, its racism. Amateurish though my poems surely were, my metaphors were inventive, my imagery outlandish and funny, and those in the small audience seemed receptive enough — with one notable exception. In the middle of one of my rampaging verses, a young woman got up and stalked out, not unobtrusively, mind you: she was in a huff and made certain everyone knew it.

I recognized the woman, I’d seen her in the Village a time or two, although we’d never met. She was difficult to ignore, frankly, being tall, blond, shapely, and as creamy as a hot vanilla sundae. Her name was Susan Bush (no relation to that nefarious gang down in Texas), and she resided not in the helter-skelter Fan but the formal West End, the daughter of one of those aristocratic old Virginia families that had lost its wealth but not its conceits. She worked for a brokerage firm and her friends (and presumably her lovers) were stockbrokers, bankers, and lawyers; all very Episcopalian and unwilling to let you forget that their colonial ancestors had settled Jamestown and established grand plantations while yours were digging potatoes behind some thatched-roof hovel in the old country.

When she dropped into the Village, regulars believed Susan to be slumming, and to a certain extent that was true, but nobody much minded because she was affable, respectful, could hold her alcohol, and, as no male with sufficient testosterone to sprout a single whisker would have failed to notice, beautiful.

Nine months passed before I saw Susan again. It was an unseasonably warm day in October and I’d gone down to the financial district to argue with my landlords. In Richmond, it was rare to rent an apartment from an on-site owner, a tenant almost always had to go through a rental agency, usually part of a large real estate firm and not given to taking the tenant’s side in any dispute. Whatever our disagreement, my meeting with the landlords had not gone in my favor that day. Overheated by both the dialogue and the weather, I ducked into the closest grill and ordered a beer. I was standing at the bar trying to lower my temperature with a frosty Pabst Blue Ribbon when who should walk in, having just gotten off work nearby, but Susan Bush. I don’t know if she recognized me at first, but within seconds, perhaps by chance, she was right next to me at the bar. We faced one another. She graced me with about 70 percent of a smile. And I proceeded to let her have it.

I mean I really lit into her. I told her that her dramatic exit from the Rhinoceros was not merely rude, not simply crass, but indicative of a level of insensitivity exceeded only by her shallowness and ignorance. I informed her that had she the intellectual wherewithal to distinguish shit from Shinola, she would have realized that I only criticized Richmond because the place was important to me. “Why would I have gone to all that trouble,” I asked, “to illuminate Richmond’s faults if I didn’t love the city and desperately yearn for it to conduct itself in a more enlightened manner?”

Finally, having exhausted my allotment of bile, I stepped back and took a long slow draft of beer. Susan just stood there. She stood there silently, looking at me with considerable focus and intensity, staring as if she were trying to memorize and catalog every pore in the face of someone who had just called her a clueless philistine. Then, after at least a full minute, she revived her 70 percent yet somehow now more creamy smile, and asked softly, intently, without a squib of sarcasm or trace of tease, “Will you marry me?”

I may have been stunned, but I wasn’t totally speechless. “Yes,” I said.

And the next day, we drove to North Carolina, where there was no waiting period for a license, and were married there.

Lest the reader judge me madder than that outhouse rat’s hallucinating aunt (the old garbage-dump rat who thinks she’s Minnie Mouse), let me hasten to supply a bit of backstory.

For nearly a year, I’d been dating an RPI art student named Lynda Pleet. Lynda was smart, confident, a talented painter, and movie-star gorgeous. She also resided in a women’s dormitory and she was Jewish, two conditions that conspired to keep us apart.

Her dorm imposed a strict 10 P.M. curfew on its residents. It was boosted to eleven on Fridays and Saturdays but that extra hour was irrelevant since I worked until midnight except on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Lynda had a studio class until 9 P.M. on Tuesdays. Essentially, we had a Wednesday kind of love. Sure, we could see one another on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but these were not exactly hours suited to romance; and it was as much the result of our conflicting schedules as the moral temper of the 1950s that physically our relationship hadn’t progressed beyond heavy petting in the front seat of my recently purchased Plymouth Valiant.

Lynda’s parents had thought I was cool — until they learned we were serious about one another, at which point, not fancying a goy in their woodpile, they pressured her to start seeing nice Jewish boys. She eventually settled on one, and though she contended that he was but a beard, a decoy, a front, the guy — having a more conventional schedule than my own — was soon seeing more of her than I was.

Somehow Lynda had injured her knee, and during the period between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer school, when RPI was closed for two weeks, she entered the Medical College of Virginia to have the leg surgically repaired. In those days, hospitals maintained very strict visiting hours, and since her family and/or her substitute boyfriend were always in her room during the allotted time for visitation, it sorely tested my ingenuity to find a way to see her there. As fortune would have it, however, a friend of B.K.’s was an intern at MCV, and we convinced him to loan me his white coat and stethoscope for a few hours.

Late that evening I drove to MCV, ducked into a lobby restroom, removed the coat from my shopping bag and put it on. It proved about two sizes too large, but c’est la vie: the mission was a go. I hung the stethoscope around my neck and walked nonchalantly to the elevator. Several people were in the elevator but, luckily, they appeared to be mere staffers: maintenance men, dietitians, lab technicians, and the like. Nevertheless, I averted my eyes, staring at the floor as if contemplating an emergency colonoscopy I’d been summoned to perform.

I got off — alone — on the fourth floor and set out at a brisk pace for Lynda’s private room, where we might anticipate some hours of quality time together in an intimate setting. And, hey, the fact that I was quite literally “playing doctor” served to invoke enough intriguing possibilities (Grey’s Anatomy meets the Kama Sutra) to propel me ever faster down that long, empty corridor.

Just before I reached Lynda’s door, alas, a nurse came around the corner: a uniformed, middle-aged, stern-faced nurse. Her comfortable white shoes practically screeched to a halt. Why was she blocking my passage? Why was she staring me up and down? Maybe it was the baggy coat, so ill-fitting it suggested a horse blanket draped over a poodle. Or maybe it was the fact that at twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, I still looked about nineteen.

In any case, I concluded that an imminent discussion of my medical credentials was likely not in my best interest. The entrance to a stairwell happened to be but a few yards to my left, and propelled now by panic, I dashed for it and ran down three flights, removing my coat as I fled, although the stethoscope was still swinging wildly from my neck like a mutant Nagasaki whip snake when I barged panting into the lobby. Miraculously, I managed to get out of the hospital before an alarm could sound.

I relate this story not to embarrass Lynda Pleet or whatever nice (and lucky) Jewish boy she may have wed in my stead, but rather to convey the state of my frustration — the depth, breadth, and length of it — on that fateful day when I ran into Susan Bush at the financial district watering hole. The fact that I answered in the affirmative when a virtual stranger, a woman to whom I’d never been introduced, proposed marriage to me is both an indication of the size of that frustration and an illustration in action of two basic philosophical principles that came to guide my life.

(1) When a situation has become too frustrating, a quandary too persistently insolvable; when dealing with the issue is generating chronic discontent, infringing on freedom, and inhibiting growth, it may be time to quit beating one’s head against the wall, reach for a big fat stick of metaphoric dynamite, light the fuse, and blast the whole unhappy business nine miles past oblivion.

(2) After making an extreme effort, after pulling out all the stops, one is still unable to score Tibetan peach pie, take it as a signal to relax, grin, pick up a fork, and go for a slice of the apple.

Anyway, when the smoke cleared, when the ash settled, when the pie plate was washed and put away, Lynda seemed as relieved as I that our personal production of Romeo and Juliet had closed its run, though she might have preferred a more conventional ending (minus, of course, the double suicide).

Returning to the matter of racism, I should confess that I have had little or no interest in race per se. My activities on behalf of civil rights were motivated less by a blanket admiration for darkly pigmented peoples than by an innate hatred of injustice. Whenever groups or individuals are subjected to hurtful unfairness, my stomach tends to roil and my blood to boil in reaction. Suffice to say there was a considerable amount of roiling and boiling going on in my corporeal being as I interacted with the South in general and Virginia in particular, 1957–1962, but it was a goofy integrationist accident rather than an overt act of protest that set into motion the events that made inevitable my departure from Richmond as the cannon boom of Civil War enactments echoed all around me.

In most respects, the Times-Dispatch was an excellent newspaper, which is to say its writing and editing adhered to the highest journalistic standards, and this despite the fact that the large dictionary that sat atop a pedestal in the center of the newsroom, serving reporters and copy editors alike, was so out-of-date it defined uranium as “a worthless mineral.” Editorially, the T-D was likewise antiquated in the sense that it reflected the long-standing temperament and ideology of its statewide readership, an audience so conservative it considered Unitarians a satanic cult and the consumption of Russian dressing an act of treason. On its editorial page the T-D was an outspoken advocate of “separate but equal” rights, a gloss for “let the black bastards get their own damn buses”; while in its news columns no African American was ever mentioned by name unless he or she had committed an offense, and even then, no matter how sensational or newsworthy the crime, photographs of the colored perpetrator never seemed to make it into the paper.

On the T-D’s copy desk where I worked, my liberal sentiments were well known, earning me the cute nickname of “Nigger Lover.” This epithet, however, was never vitriolic or hurled in disgust or anger. My coworkers, a sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, crusty crew of grammar guards, were just genuinely puzzled as to how an educated, clean-cut, Southern white boy (whose exploits in the Fan amused and titillated them) could have formed such heretical, unnatural opinions, and they chided me for my misguided views in an easygoing, jocular manner.

Their pet name might have been spoken with a drop more venom had they known that on Tuesday nights in 1961 I attended biracial meetings in the Unitarian church on Grove Avenue, and occasionally joined the group when, at some physical risk, it ventured into King William County to teach clandestine classes to African-American pupils. Rather than obey a federal order to integrate, King William had shut down all of its public schools, black and white. White kids were being tutored in “private schools” that met in church basements (Praise blue-eyed Jesus!), so our group was striving to provide a similar educational service at a black church out in the tick-infested sticks between the hamster-size hamlets of King William and Aylett. The subject I volunteered to teach was geography, it having been of keen interest to me ever since I acquired that world atlas at age seven, but for which these black kids had no more regard than did their Caucasian counterparts, which was approximately the same regard in which they might hold a fat fly sunbathing on a horse turd.

At any rate, my newspaper colleagues knew nothing of my Tuesday subversion (Wednesdays were reserved for Lynda Pleet). I respected and enjoyed them despite their prejudices, and I liked the work, especially writing headlines, a word game of sorts that vaguely resembles playing Scrabble. One of my nightly duties on the copy desk was to edit the Earl Wilson syndicated celebrity gossip column. Wilson was based in New York and his column, It Happened Last Night, consisted of tidbits, meant to be provocative or revealing, about Broadway and Hollywood stars, especially those Wilson or his secret agents would observe misbehaving or celebrating some new deal at Manhattan nightclubs. Part of my job was to select a photo of a mentioned celebrity, which could be inserted into each column.

Well, one night Wilson happened to mention the great Louis Armstrong for one reason or another, and without a second thought I went into our “morgue,” selected a suitable picture of Mr. Armstrong from the photo files, had our staff artist reduce it to the proper size, and stuck it in Wilson’s column. I went to sleep that night as sweetly innocent as a newborn turtle.

I was still in my little shell when, reporting for work the next afternoon, I was summoned to the managing editor’s office, an unexpected invitation I could not easily refuse. It turned out, on the surface at least, to be a cordial meeting. John H. Colburn held up the page of the paper on which Armstrong’s beaming face appeared. He confided that there had been a lot of grumbling from readers about the picture. I expressed genuine surprise — didn’t everybody, except maybe the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, love ol’ Satchmo? — and Mr. Colburn smiled and sent me back to the copy desk, apparently writing it off as an honest mistake.

On the copy desk I was regarded as the resident Asian expert, due to my interest in that region. There was major fighting in Laos at the time and the T-D had been giving it front-page coverage, but the editors were starting to have second thoughts about that level of attention, so I was assigned to telephone Richmond residents at random and ask the question “Do you know where Laos is?” Few did. My favorite response was, “He don’t live here. Try across the street.” The survey should have been both entertaining and disheartening to a geography buff, but all the while, in the cellar of my cerebellum, I was continuing to stew over the Louie Armstrong incident. A couple of weeks later, Earl Wilson mentioned a black woman — I believe it was Pearl Bailey — and I decided to test the waters.

It was on a Monday that I inserted the picture of Pearl into Wilson’s column. Returning to work Thursday afternoon, I’d scarcely hung up my coat and loosened my tie before I was again summoned to the boss’s office, where this time the atmosphere was about as jovial as dawn on death row. It seemed that the T-D switchboard had been lit up like the diamond counter at a Dubai convenience store. Irate callers were demanding to know what that “uppity nigger wench’s” picture was doing in their morning newspaper, and Mr. Colburn had a fistful of letters posing the same burning question.

Some subscribers complained that upon seeing Pearl Bailey’s picture they’d been unable to finish their breakfast, and despite being on the hot seat, I had to smile at the thought of outraged readers cursing the newspaper and shoving aside their uneaten flapjacks, only to glance up to see a big mammy in a do-rag checking them out from a box of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix.

While I wasn’t threatened with immediate dismissal over my indiscretion — after all, the T-D had no official directive prohibiting the publication of likenesses of “uppity nigger wenches” — it was made pristinely clear that were I to repeat my recent errors in judgment, I’d find myself writing obituaries for a weekly rag in Ice Worm, Alaska.

Less than a month later, Earl Wilson had reason to refer to Sammy Davis Jr. Talk about uppity! Davis had recently had the audacity to marry a white woman, the sexy blond Swedish actress May Britt, an act that landed him number one with a bullet at the top of every racist’s hate chart. I thought long, I thought hard. Little devils wrestled with little angels in the innermost chambers of my conscience. The devils cheated, of course, although where my conscience was concerned they were also more familiar with the terrain.

I got up from my seat at the copy desk, crossed the newsroom to the managing editor’s office and gave two weeks’ notice. “I’ve decided to do postgraduate work at the Far East Institute at the University of Washington,” I said. This was a move I’d actually been contemplating ever since my impulsive marriage to the stranger, Susan Bush. Accepting my resignation, Mr. Colburn shook my hand and wished me success — whereupon I returned to my post and proceeded to make certain that the ultra-uppity face of Sammy Davis Jr. appeared in every edition of the next morning’s Times-Dispatch.

I laughed myself to sleep that night. And two weeks later, I packed up my instant wife, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and our belongings, and drove to Seattle.

The day before I left Richmond (January 2, 1962), I dropped in at the Village Inn for a farewell beer, shaking hands with Stavros “Steve” Dikos, the burly, curly-haired, ever-kindly owner, thanking him for maintaining and overseeing so compassionately what many might regard as a kind of wildlife preserve. The wildlife itself took turns, some a trifle enviously, wishing me luck on the road. I even received a catlike nod from “Mona Lisa,” a woman of a certain age who sat nightly at the counter chain-smoking, sipping industrial wine, and never speaking to anyone, just staring straight ahead with a faint, enigmatic smile, as if she and she alone knew when the Other Shoe would drop.

And speaking of enigmas, I’d earlier that day stopped by Il Palazzo della Contessa di Pepsi, wanting one last visit to prove to myself that the place existed outside of my imagination. Naturally, it was closed.

During my residency on this planet, I’ve had only one other encounter with an approach to retail merchandising quite as inexplicably single-minded as the Fan District Pepsi store. It occurred in Gibsonton, Florida, a small town southeast of Tampa that is winter quarters for approximately thirty traveling carnivals. Throughout the late 1980s and most of the nineties, I visited Gibsonton once or twice a year looking for canvas sideshow banners to add to my collection (good ones were hard to find since nowadays banners are made so cheaply they’re usually in a state of ruin after only one season); hanging out in the Show Town Bar, whose walls were adorned with photos of freaks and performers (they’ve now been moved to a newly built carnival museum); and generally absorbing the town’s peculiar ambience.

For a few years, the mayor of Gibsonton was the Human Torso, a woman born without arms or legs. To sign official documents, Mayor Torso grasped the pen between her teeth. Whether or not she was married to a giant as was rumored I couldn’t say, though it was not unusual to see a man, or men, more than eight feet tall about town, and there were plenty of tiny people on the scene as well. However, Gibsonton’s most famous resident, as even the most casual reader of supermarket tabloids may recall, was the Lobster Boy, the victim in a lurid murder case in 1992.

A rare congenital deformity had left the Lobster Boy with fingers and toes fused tightly together in a manner that resembled large claws. Depicted on banners as an actual, regular-size lobster with a human head, lolling on a seaside rock to the stunned amazement of bikini-clad bathing beauties, he was able — in the days before political correctness roamed the earth — to turn his misfortune into a fairly lucrative sideshow career. Walking with difficulty, he spent much of his time offstage confined to a wheelchair. He was seated in that chair watching TV when he was shot in the head by an eighteen-year-old Gibsonton neighbor, hired for the job by Mrs. Lobster Boy, who in court (her trial ran concurrently with the O. J. Simpson trial and was far more interesting) offered a spousal abuse defense. She claimed that every time she squeezed past his chair (they lived in a trailer where space was tight), he would reach out and pinch her with his “claws.”

Let’s try not to picture the act of conception, but the Lobster Boy fathered four children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, inherited his deformity, becoming part of a living sideshow tableau, the Lobster Family. Another son, adopted and anatomically normal, is, to the best of my knowledge, still performing on midways, ballyhooed as the Human Blockhead. In his act, he hammers nails and shoves ice picks up his nose. I guess showbiz just gets in one’s blood. In any case, the people who knew the Lobster Boy regarded him a cruelly mean alcoholic and few mourned his violent demise. Still, he was a major midway attraction for many years and I hope they at least thought to embalm him in melted butter.

Considering Gibsonton’s oddities and wonders, it shouldn’t be surprising that my wife Alexa and I were intrigued when on one of our visits there we came upon a crude handmade sign announcing a yard sale. We set out immediately for the address, and while we were to find no quaint or colorful carnival memorabilia, the yard sale did provide, in its quirky brand-name exclusivity, an experience reminiscent of Richmond’s Pepsi-only store.

The “yard” proved to be a vacant lot adjoining a gas station. Upon it were three long banquet tables. The tables were separated by enough distance that there appeared to be no connection between them or to the lone individuals who stood behind each table. Actually, only two were standing, the third person was not built to be comfortable for long in an upright position. From a sturdy chair, she confided to Alexa that she had been billed as “the Ton of Fun” in a carnival sideshow before an illness caused her to lose more than two hundred pounds. She was still about as big around as the average kitchen refrigerator, though no longer so fat that rubes would fork over cash money to ogle her blubber. The woman’s table was piled high with Butterfinger candy bars. Only Butterfingers. Hundreds of them. Hundreds! In bulk. For sale. We had to wonder if she was liquidating her personal stash.

Another table was equally loaded down with new blue cotton work shirts, all from the same manufacturer, Girbaud. On the third table there was nothing but stacks and stacks and stacks of Metamucil.

And there, folks, you have your yard sale: a specific brand of work shirt, candy bar, and popular over-the-counter laxative, each in massive quantities. Readers of my novels can be forgiven if they think I’m making this up, but Alexa is my witness, and if I exaggerate may the Human Blockhead pound frozen Butterfingers up my nostrils.