Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

29. the book

Throughout all those diversions — the art columns, the happenings, the radio show, rock concerts, protest marches, pot parties, etc. - the old literary pulse continued to throb in my blood. On occasion it would reverberate like a musical saw, but most of the time it beat like tom-toms: distant, faint, mysterious, yet persistent, somehow urgent, prompting my left brain to murmur, “The natives are restless tonight.”

A novel had announced itself. It was coming to town. Posters were plastered on every wall in my cerebellum, a vacant lot in that vicinity had been reserved. The date of the first performance, however, was continually postponed. Obviously, annoyingly, there remained issues to be resolved.

I had my center pole, had had it for two years or more. The stolen corpse of Jesus and its reappearance in a funky roadside zoo: those elements could definitely support a literary big top. But a tentpole was not a tent and it certainly wasn’t the show itself. I needed wider context, a backdrop, a milieu; needed atmosphere, subplots, and a company of performers. Embedded in it as I was, it took time to recognize that the show I sought was unfolding all around me. Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafés, Melville his New England with its tall ships: I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.

Now, not to belabor the circus analogy, but I must mention that I’d also recently found a ringmaster, a music director, a designer to set the overall tone of the show; which is to say, I had at last found my voice. I discovered it very late one night in July 1967, while writing a review of a Doors concert for the Helix, Seattle’s underground newspaper. My review and the tone I found myself adopting in its composition were not derivative, not specifically influenced by Jim Morrison’s blood-dark, leather-winged poetics. Rather, it was that the concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions. When I read over the paragraphs I’d written that midnight, I detected an ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax simultaneously wild and precise, a rare blending of reckless abandon and tight control; and thought, Yeah, this is it. This is how I want to sound. I’d broken on through to the other side.

Even so, writing a novel set in the sixties presented a challenge on at least two fronts: one was immediate and obvious before I even began. The other — reactive and unforeseen — inexplicably persists to this day. Of that, more later.

Tom Wolfe, my old schoolmate, has lamented that there has yet to be written a definitive novel of the sixties. Wolfe, of course, is an outspoken advocate of the nineteenth-century approach to the novel, the reportorial approach that amounts to journalism with a thin fictive gloss. I’d instinctively realized, however, that the Dickensian method, while it has its virtues, was simply inappropriate to the material at hand. It could not possibly crack the nut of the period, penetrate its essence; or untangle the multicultural, multicolored web of myth that enwrapped its heart. The sixties, you see, were characterized not by manners but by fantasy.

Fantasy being inscrutable under the microscope of social realism, I (again, instinctively), knew I must compose Another Roadside Attraction (I’d recently decided on a title) in a fashion for which there was no satisfactory model. My intent therefore became not so much to describe the sixties as to re-create them on the page, to mirror in style as well as content their mood, their palette, their extremes, their vibrations, their profundity, their silliness and whimsy (for despite the prevailing political turmoil, it was a highly whimsical age). Professor Liam Purdon of Doane College, addressing me personally, has written, “You committed to becoming a novelist during turbulent times. When the blank page offered resistance to the vortex of your imaginative creation, you began, as Burroughs did later in his writing career, simply to alter the novel form itself.”

Traditionally, a novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax along a gradually inclined plane. But while 95 percent of all novels are constructed this way, it was not a form that could possibly generate the plexus of effects, let alone evoke the gestalt, necessary to unveil the sixties and make them palpable, to coax them into giving up their secrets great and small. Eventually, it became clear to me that I must construct Another Roadside Attraction in short bursts, modeled perhaps on Zen koans, on Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes, and on the little flashes of illumination one experiences under the influence of certain sacraments. My book’s goal, then, was not so much to simulate reality as to become reality, a reality paradoxically steeped in fantasy.

Needless to say, such a novel — a novel constructed of zip and zap and zing and zonk, a novel that does its own stunts — seemed destined to test the mental agility of the critical establishment, but that was hardly my concern, particularly since I’d yet to put a word of it on paper. The tom-toms were nearer, louder now, however, the gong was interrupting my sleep; and the morning after I’d kissed off Charles Manson, as my new girlfriend and I motored down Highway 101 in a 1949 Dodge panel truck (hand-painted silver), the opening lines of Another Roadside Attraction were crawling along the screen behind my eyes.

Eileen had decamped a few weeks prior. We had an intense relationship, she and I, a union in which we seemed constantly competing to see who could most successfully blow the other’s mind. We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other’s garde. It was exciting, stimulating, but also draining, especially when coupled as it was with mutual romantic jealousy, arguably the dumbest, most useless of human emotions. In the end, Eileen trumped me, captured the flag, by packing up and moving to San Francisco, the epicenter of the new American revolution. Touché!

Eileen’s car was barely out of the driveway before — vacillating between heartbreak and relief — I drove over to the Pizza Haven in the University District and (figuratively speaking) wrapped up the joint’s cutest waitress in a checkered napkin and brought her home. Terrie Lunden had been flirting with me outrageously every time I went in for a pizza. She’d attended a lecture on experimental theater I delivered at Seattle’s Free University and had developed a crush on me that evening. I didn’t remember her from the class, but at the Pizza Haven she was hard to ignore. Always smiling, constantly cheerful, Terrie was as easygoing and uncomplicated as Eileen was challenging and complex. As an anecdote, a relief package, she struck me as an ideal companion for my projected road trip to the Southwest desert.

We never made it to Arizona. Stopping by San Francisco to pay respects, we remained there for a month, sleeping and eating (tomato sandwiches, naturally) in the back of that old silver panel truck, parked on a side street in the Haight-Ashbury, too mesmerized by the scene thereabouts to any longer consider Tucson or Sedona. We visited museums, City Lights Bookstore, and the waterfront; danced to throbbing amoebas of light at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms (children and dogs scampering in and out among the dancers), but mostly we wandered the Haight, where there seemed to be no end to the spectacle, the psychedelic parade, the blossom-choked river of liberated meat. More than the ubiquitous costumes representing a multitude of periods and exotic lands; more than the relaxed smiles, blatant sexuality, and free-flowing gender-bending tresses, what impressed me most was the genuine spirit of caring and generosity emanating from virtually everyone I met.

Should I admire a passerby’s Edwardian waistcoat or Japanese silks, that fellow would insist that I have it, a stranger would literally give you the shirt off his back. If, on a hot street, I’d glance appreciatively at someone’s ice cream cone, she’d offer me a lick or else thrust the whole cone in my hand. The Haight was awash in Christian charity. These kids, simultaneously jubilant and introspective, were practicing what their elders preached. The Haight was the New Testament: animated, activated, brought to life in living color. The naïveté was so thick you could cut it with a Popsicle stick — but so apparently was Christ’s. Years later, on a wild African savannah a hundred miles from even the crudest settlement, a pride of lions on one horizon, a solitary giraffe on another, I said to myself, “This is the way the world was meant to be and everything else is a mistake.” I’d thought the exact same thing in San Francisco during the Summer of Love.

Oh, and yes, by the way, I did search for at least a glimpse of Eileen in the exultant throngs along the Haight. She never appeared.

When, upon my return to Seattle, I actually sat down and commenced writing that first novel, I set no scenes in Haight-Ashbury. There were no light shows in my narrative, no love-ins, street theater, free clinics, demonstrations, rock festivals, or other public celebrations. My goal, as previously stated, was not to describe the sixties phenomenon as a journalist or historian might, but rather to encapsulate it, privatize and personalize it; boil it down to a reduction, distilling its esoteric yet peculiarly American rapture and uncorking that essence within the confines of a hot-dog-stand-cum-roadside-zoo in rural, rainy Washington state.

To fortify that distillation, I did from time to time make use of a collage technique, whereby I would skim through the underground press, KRAB radio program guides, political and poetry broadsides, concert fliers, even letters from friends, and try to pluck some quaint item or revealing image that, though taken out of context, might add historical weight when pasted into my more intimate, internalized portrait of the period. (In my second novel, the twilight-of-the-sixties’ Cowgirls, I would continue to collage occasionally, but only in regard to the book’s male protagonist, the Chink, who was partially inspired by R. Crumb’s crusty old cartoon antihero, Mr. Natural, and partially based on the subject of a prank “news” article that Paul Dorpat anonymously wrote and planted in his Seattle alternative weekly, the Helix.)

As Professors Purdon and Torrey suggest in a lengthy interview with me (Conversations with Tom Robbins, University of Mississippi Press, 2010), much of the content and style of Another Roadside Attraction, as well as of the anthropological and mythological aspects of the age in question, are personified in the novel’s two main protagonists, Amanda and John Paul Ziller. Both characters could be considered archetypes: the loinclothed, flute-tooting Ziller an Orpheus figure, using his music, his art to simultaneously charm the world and retaliate against it, all the while identifying with another place, a distant time; Amanda, a manifestation of the universal goddess (maiden, slut, and mother/wife), as connected to the earth as any mushroom, though given to innocently flitting about its posies like a butterfly. She’s wise, yet also naive, he’s playful yet also dark; and something strangely meaningful seems to cling to them.

All that sixties phantasmagoria was well and good — fun to write, important to consider — but remember, the center pole supporting this show, its fulcrum, was to be a certain mummified corpse. Since the very foundation of what many call Western civilization is its faith in the divinity and immortality of the man some call Jesus Christ, what would it say about the future of that civilization, about its ethics, morality, belief system, history, moods, and general psychic health if it could be irrefutably demonstrated that Jesus was not immortal, had not risen from the dead, and that the Church of Rome had been concealing proof of its presumed Savior’s fallibility for more than seventeen hundred years? My goal was to examine the ramifications of that question, and to incorporate them within a lively narrative constructed of incremental flashes, some which would illuminate and advance the plot, some which (I hoped) would illuminate and advance the reader.

Distractions still abounded, but in the autumn of ’67 I mailed off thirty pages to Luther Nichols in California. He read them approvingly and sent them on to New York. I was fishing for a monetary advance. It was only then that I learned that Doubleday had begun as a Roman Catholic publishing house. A number of senior editors, holdovers from that period, were appalled by my manuscript’s premise, baffled by its form. So, no contract, no money. Encouraged by Mr. Nichols, however, I persisted — until eventually, sometime in ’68, I had written seventy pages more. These, too, Luther Nichols forwarded to New York.

This time I was told that the younger editors at Doubleday loved what and how I’d been writing, but had failed to convince their superiors to spring for it. The elders had softened their initial objections, but complained that they couldn’t tell where the book was going. Really? Welcome to the club. Except perhaps down in the shadowy catacombs of my subconscious, I didn’t know where it was going either. Moreover, I didn’t want to know. Discovery was part of the process, was what enthralled me, made writing an adventure instead of a drudgery, a journey instead of a job. It was V. S. Naipaul who said, “If a writer knows everything that’s going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.” In any case, my disappointment was offset by the fact that now, a hundred pages into the book, it had taken over my life, had assumed a life of its own. I couldn’t have stopped it with an atom bomb.

At this juncture, to move forward, two things were required. I needed to pry myself loose from Seattle’s art community and I needed sufficient income to charm the groceries. As if on cue, the gods grinned. First, I landed a weekend gig on the copy desk of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Then, Terrie’s sister offered us cheap living quarters in the little town of South Bend, Washington, a waterfront village physically not unlike La Conner (where I hadn’t been able to find a rental I could afford), but almost La Conner’s opposite in temperament, the one boasting a concentration of artists and an unusually high level of sophistication; the other quite crimson in the hue of its necks, populated with hard-drinking loggers freighting a logger’s sublimated guilt.

On our first night in South Bend, we were kept awake beyond midnight by teenagers driving past the house, honking horns and yelling “Hippies! Hippies! Dirty hippies!” Terrie was quaking, but I calmed her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Not a problem. It’s the beginning of love.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before kids started dropping by two or three at a time, sheepishly curious; and ere a month passed before our living room was filled virtually every night with teenage boys digging our record collection, questioning us about current events (including the Vietnam War), sex (evasively), drugs (we never gave them any), and rock and roll (through my KRAB connections, I always had the latest albums). We might as well have been the local Boys and Girls Club. I considered requesting funding from United Way.

Terrie took a job waiting tables at a nearby seafood restaurant, from where she would fetch home leftovers off her customer’s plates. Indifferent to germs, we dined heartily and happily on slops de la mer. Is it any wonder that I’ve maintained a soft spot in my heart for waitresses? Many writers subsist on grants from foundations. Mine have been from the waitresses of American. The Daughters of the Daily Special.

As my contribution, I drove to Seattle and the P-I copy desk every Saturday morning, returning to South Bend late Sunday night, except during summer vacation periods or holiday weeks when I would sometimes work three or four days in a row. In the city I’d take a room at the Apex Hotel, located on a dull, pregentrified block of First Avenue. At three dollars a night, the Apex was kind of an upper-story flophouse, but operated by a Japanese couple who kept it orderly and clean. Still, it reeked of cigarette smoke, its mattresses felt like sacks of softballs, the bedsprings squeaked like thickets full of mating chipmunks, and the wallpaper would have given Oscar Wilde a heart attack.

In the Apex’s favor, aside from its rates, was the privacy it afforded. I always signed the guest register as “Picasso Triggerfish” (the English name of the neon rainbow-hued fish the Hawaiian’s call “humuhumunukunukuapua-a”), and declared my place of residence as “Victoria, BC” (I guess I was Victoria’s secret). When friends would come to the Apex looking for me, the owners would claim, “No such person here.” A war protester and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, I enjoyed a certain sense of security (as secure as one could feel sleeping on beds that creaked all night like Frankenstein’s shoes) to think that even the FBI probably couldn’t find me at the Apex Hotel.

In those days, the P-I newsroom was as divided as the nation itself. An uneasy truce existed between the old guard of Hearst hirelings and the mostly younger employees who marched to different, more progressive drummers. The latter were tolerated only because we did good work. Weekly prizes were awarded for the best headlines, prizes which Darrell Bob Houston (an unruly genius Blue Moon denizen and Tarzan lookalike) and I won so consistently that other copy editors were inclined to just stop trying. The parent Hearst Corporation frequently praised the P-I’s headlines, which kept the bosses content. Our work, moreover, seemed to suffer not at all when on slow nights between editions Darrell Bob, a couple of others, and I would sneak up on the roof to smoke a joint.

One night, however, a coworker brought in some blond Lebanese hashish, just off the boat, which we felt compelled to go up and sample. Back at the desk, I recall staring at the copy in front of me for an inordinately long time, as if it were the footprint of some alien life-form that I was ill equipped to identify. I don’t believe I won any prizes that night.

Which reminds me, I’m always astonished when readers suggest that I must write my novels while high on pot or (God forbid!) LSD. Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication. Not one word of my oeuvre, not one, has been written while in an artificially altered state. Unlike many authors, I don’t even drink coffee when I write. No coffee, no cola, no cigarettes. There was a time when I smoked big Havana cigars while writing, not for the nicotine (I didn’t inhale) but as an anchor, something to hold on to, I told myself, to keep from falling over the edge of the earth. Eventually, I began to wonder what it would be like to take that fall. So one day I threw out the cigars and just let go. Falling, I must say, has been exhilarating — though I may change my mind when I hit bottom.

Indicative of the cultural schism at the newspaper was the response to the death of Jimi Hendrix. When the report of the rocker’s untimely demise came over the Associated Press wire, our news editor snarled, “Who cares?” He wadded up the copy and tossed it in a trash can. Incredulous, I retrieved it and carried it into the managing editor’s office, explaining that Hendrix was not only an international star, he was a Seattle homeboy. The story ran in a prominent spot.

The P-I’s managing editor (he happened, luckily for me, to be Louis R. Guzzo, my former boss in the arts and entertainment department at the Times) was adept at keeping peace between the factions. I’d had an artist friend make me a mouse mask: not just any mouse, not that twit Mickey, but one of the long-nosed secret-agent mice featured in the Mad Magazine strip “Spy vs. Spy.” One evening I wore the mask to work. As I sat at the copy desk, doing my job, the radically stylized rodent nose protruding a good twenty inches from my face, an undercurrent of murmuring coursed through the newsroom. At one point, the managing editor passed by and, inescapably, noticed my paper proboscis. Guzzo stopped in his tracks. He just stood there staring at me, his hands on his hips. A hush fell over the room. All typing ceased. My cohorts were fearing for my job, my detractors were hoping I’d be summarily sacked. After a long pause, the boss said, “Robbins, you’ve never looked better.” He walked away. And that was that.

A month later, however, I was sent back to the Apex to change when I showed up for work in a gorilla suit.

It was at the P-I copy desk that I received the phone call from Luther Nichols telling me Doubleday had accepted Another Roadside Attraction for publication. This was around the middle of 1970. I’d finished the novel all ashiver one frigid midnight (we’d run out of heating oil) that January, and over the next six weeks or so slowly retyped the handwritten manuscript on my rackety little Olivetti portable, then paid a professional typist to render an even cleaner copy. This I’d mailed to dear Mr. Nichols, who forwarded it to New York, where, at Doubleday headquarters it was once again the subject of considerable debate. This time the younger editors prevailed.

Subsequently, a contract arrived, offering me an advance of $2,500, modest even for the time, along with a basement-level royalty percentage, standard for a first-time novelist lacking an agent to negotiate for him a sweeter deal. Not that I gave a large rat’s poot, understand. My motives for writing fiction — which, of course, date back to early childhood — have always been kindled by a runaway imagination and a love of words, rather than any banal craving for fortune or fame. Believe me, I take no credit for that attitude, and would never attempt to attribute it to strong moral principles. Fate just happened to have wired me that way.

A hardcover edition of Another Roadside Attraction was published (“printed” may be a more accurate term) in 1971. Only six thousand copies were run off and there was little in the way of promotion: no signings, book tours, interviews, or public readings. (I just felt grateful there wasn’t a public hanging.) Despite acclaim from authors as diverse as Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the critical establishment either dismissed the book curtly or ignored it altogether. Its first published critique appeared in Kirkus Reviews, in whose pages some sage declared that ARA wasn’t a novel at all but, rather, a lot of record album titles strung together as prose. Is it churlish of me to smirk ever so slightly when I point out that forty-three years later, the book is still in print, continuing to sell?

It was neither surprising nor particularly vexing that the hardcover edition was generally panned or ignored by reviewers: ARA was a radical departure in both content and form, operating outside the comfort zone of the typical critic. What has been unexpected is that so many members of the academic and journalistic establishment continue to this very day to hang that first novel around my neck like some literary albatross.

Since ARA, I’ve published eight more novels, most of them international bestsellers, and featuring such protagonists as CIA agents, stockbrokers, freelance perfumers, mythological figures, and U.S. airmen missing in Southeast Asia. Not one of these books is set in the sixties. Yet I’m regularly identified in the press as a “counterculture writer.” Now, if by “counterculture” they mean “bohemian,” that I’m ever reluctant to submit to the constraints of mainstream culture (the mainstream being too often shallow and prescribed), I accept the designation with pride. Alas, in an example of typecasting unprecedented in literary history, they seem always to be referring to the sixties, as if still so threatened, so spooked by that era and its liberties that they fear, decry, and resent it even when it isn’t there. It was an extraordinary, magical, even heroic time, that much I’ll never deny, but in my novels and in my life, for better or for worse, I moved on from the sixties decades ago. Wouldn’t one think the era’s detractors in the media could get over it as well? One can’t help but be amused.

I confess I was somewhat surprised and disappointed that not one reviewer had the courage or curiosity to ponder in print the question of what repercussions might be engendered by the proven mortality of Jesus, but my biggest disappointment in the wake of my novelistic debut lay somewhere else. In ARA, one of the characters steals a baboon from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Well, three weeks after the novel came out, someone did steal a baboon from the Woodland Park Zoo. I’m not kidding. You can look it up in the archives of the Seattle Times, it was all over the news. I was totally convinced that my buddy Darrell Bob Houston had snatched the baboon in order to call attention to my book. He was entirely capable, in the name of friendship, of pulling such a caper. However, the animal was recovered unharmed after a couple of days and the thief proved to have no awareness that his life had been imitating art. Now that was a letdown.

The hardcover edition of Another Roadside Attraction didn’t exactly fly off the shelf, but the mass-market paperback enjoyed an enduring and profitable fate, though from an appropriately quirky beginning it traveled a slow and winding path. In those days, major publishing houses produced only hardcover books. Paperback rights of the more successful books would be auctioned off to paperback publishers, who’d bring them out in smaller, cheaper editions once hardcover momentum had flagged. Paperback specialists would also pick up less successful hardcover titles they felt might stand a better chance on drugstore and supermarket racks.

Ballantine Books was one such mass-market publisher. One Friday afternoon, an editor there named Leonore Fleischer filled a shopping bag with orphaned hardcovers to take home and read over the weekend on the chance that she might find something worthy of a Ballantine reprint. That night, Leonore stacked a half dozen or so books on her bedside table. Then she got into bed and smoked a joint. As she shuffled through the books at her side, looking for the most promising read, her eyes — her now stoned eyes — became fixed on Another Roadside Attraction. Well, if you’ve ever seen the bizarre hardcover jacket of ARA (I designed it personally), and if you’ve ever been stoned, you will understand completely why Leonore selected my book from the other more conventional candidates.

Championed by Ms. Fleischer — to her (and perhaps to marijuana) I owe an undying debt — Ballantine published ARA in 1972. It sold not steadily but in spurts, fueled strictly by word of mouth, the most flattering of all forms of advertising. Just when it would appear to be on the verge of disappearing, I’d receive a note from Leonore advising me that we were going into yet another printing.

Occasionally, I’d get a whiff of the novel’s underground reputation. One day in La Conner, where I’d moved soon after completion of the manuscript, a local painter brought by my house a couple, two old friends of his from back east, who’d just driven cross-country in a VW bus and who had a story to tell.

It seemed they had stopped for a few days at a roadside campground in New Mexico. Also camping there was a solitary man in his twenties. This stranger sat at a wooden picnic table most of the day, every day, reading a paperback book with a weird cover. The tome, they eventually noticed, was Another Roadside Attraction by someone named Tom Robbins. When, on their last day there, the man finished the book, he slammed it down on the table with a resounding swack. To no one in particular — to the sky, the pine trees, the jaybirds, and squirrels — he exclaimed, “Fuck man! The novel is NOT dead!”

With an endorsement like that, who needed Kirkus Reviews?