Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

31. the american way

A foreign visitor can but speculate about what transpires behind the closed shutters and shoji screens of a murky, arcane city such as Kushiro, but someone like me who enjoys living in small American towns (though I’ve also resided years in metropoli such as Richmond, Omaha, Seattle, and New York) can attest that life in these apple-pie hamlets isn’t always reflective of scenes from Norman Rockwell paintings. The face our rural villages present to the world — freckled, pie-stained, pious, and gullible — can hide not only political corruption (or pathological ineptitude: often it’s hard to tell the difference), meth labs, and steamy surreptitious sexual shenanigans — but all manner of just plain quirky behavior.

In South Bend, Washington, where I holed up to write my first novel, it was rumored that the mayor could neither read nor write. In any case, whenever he was presented with a document that required his signature, he’d always claim that he’d forgotten his glasses at home and ask someone to read the document to him.

The mayoral position paying little or nothing, His Honor supported himself by selling men’s suits — not from a shop but from his car: a row of suits, predominately black or dark blue, hung from a rod above the backseat of his vintage Oldsmobile. Apparently, they would be purchased by local loggers or oystermen suddenly in need of proper attire to wear to a wedding or funeral. The story around town was that the mayor acquired the suits from unscrupulous undertakers in Seattle and Tacoma, who would disrobe corpses in their caskets (often dressed in brand-new clothing) once families and friends had had a final look. If the rumor was true, many a Puget Sound gentleman was left to face eternity as buck naked as the day he was born. Unless, that is, they were buried wearing their skivvies. Surely there’s no secondary market in drawers of the dead.

South Bend’s most noted resident was a real estate agent named Helen Davis. Ms. Davis had written Washington’s official state song. She’d also penned a couple of unsuccessful musical plays and fancied herself a concert singer. The mayor and his cronies were decidedly unimpressed with her talents, a fact they took no pains to conceal. The mayor had a hound dog that he’d taught to howl on command. There was a wooden bench on the town’s main street where in good weather older gents — mostly retired loggers or oystermen — would sit, smoke, chew, and swap tales. From time to time, the mayor, accompanied by his hound dog, would join them. Did I mention that he’d named the dog “Helen Davis”?

At an appropriate moment, the mayor would exclaim, loudly enough to be heard at the real estate office just down the block, “Come on, Helen Davis, sing us a song!” Whereupon the dog would throw back its head and commence to bay in a mournful voice that would have made a wailing banshee sound like Shirley Temple. Meanwhile, the two-legged Helen Davis would stand in the doorway of her office, hands on hips, turning various shades of red, purple, and violet. Some local residents found it more entertaining than television.

When I first started hanging out there, La Conner had a female mayor, somewhat of an anomaly at the time, though the fact that the second floor of its two-story town hall was rented out to a sculptor as an art studio was probably a clue that this rural hamlet was not your typical philistine outpost or vapid little Girl Scout cookieville. The town marshal was a man, however, as was his lone deputy. In addition to their police duties, the two were also responsible, due to budget constraints, for maintaining and repairing the sidewalks, gutters, and streets.

One unusually warm summer day, the marshal and his deputy were spreading fresh asphalt over a weather-beaten patch of pavement at the end of First Street when they commenced to argue over something or other. I’d like to believe the disagreement was metaphysical in nature but it likely concerned politics or sports. The topic most assuredly was not religion: to this day, when its population has swelled to approximately a thousand, there are only two churches in La Conner and except for the very occasional wedding or funeral, each is in use only for about an hour on Sunday mornings. In Warsaw, Virginia — as an example of one of the towns Down South where I grew up — there were four churches for white people, one for colored, to serve a mere four hundred souls, and at the Baptist house of worship there was something going on virtually every night of the week, week in and week out, though I cannot say that Warsaw was any more righteous than La Conner. At any rate, whatever the subject, the difference of opinion escalated, and before long it became physical. The two men — marshal and deputy — commenced to grapple, whereupon they toppled down onto the hot, sticky asphalt, and as a crowd of citizens and tourists gathered, they wrestled there. Within a minute, they resembled tar babies out of an Uncle Remus story. Or creatures from the Black Lagoon.

Since nobody dared step in and pull them apart (it would have required a sacrifice worthy of a Nobel Prize), they tussled in the tar until they exhausted themselves and, to a round of cautious applause (speaking of homegrown entertainment trumping TV), sheepishly, separately, slinked away, leaving gummy black footprints downtown that remained until the autumn rains.

Madame Mayor was not amused. Or, maybe she was and just stifled her laughter. Whatever her private reaction, she suspended both combatants for six weeks. And for six weeks there was no law in La Conner. According to full-time residents, the town has never been more peaceful.

In the early 1970s, La Conner, Washington, was the dwarf capital of America. Perhaps of the world. To be sure, there was a greater number of little people in both Sarasota and Gibsonton, Florida (circus and carnival winter quarters, respectively), but Sarasota was a city of nearly forty thousand, whereas even Gibsonton was three times the size of La Conner, whose title — unofficial and unrecognized — was predicated on a per capita basis: approximately seven hundred citizens, three of them dwarves. Nothing in either the water or the gene pool accounted for the ratio, however, because none of the three — not the hippie dwarf, not the straight dwarf, not the Native American dwarf — was related or had been born in La Conner. There was, in fact, nothing one could point to that might explain this small phenomenon, and it’s uncertain that anyone but me paid it any mind. I was predisposed, I guess, having resided my teen years in Warsaw, Virginia, with its magical family of world-class midgets.

The Indian dwarf lived on the Swinomish Reservation and rarely crossed the bridge into town. He was not even Swinomish, I was told, but on loan from another tribe for reasons never explained. On the other hand, the hippie dwarf and the straight dwarf were regular habitués of La Conner’s nightlife circuit, often enlivening the scene by demonstratively trading insults at the 1890s Tavern and the cocktail lounge of the Lighthouse Inn (it was a short circuit). The straight dwarf was Hollywood handsome, clean-shaven, sported a swept-back Michael Douglas haircut, and wore neatly pressed wool trousers and nice button-down-collar dress shirts. The hippie dwarf looked like a Hobbit. His graying hair hung down below his butt, while in front, the tip of his beard preceded his shoes in and out of rooms. The straight dwarf was incensed by the hippie dwarf’s appearance, accusing him almost nightly (after one or two full-size libations) of giving dwarves a bad name, only to be berated in turn for denying his offbeat birthright — his congenitally issued passport to a life of individualism and dissent — and selling out to “the man.”

As befitting his haircut, the straight dwarf was, indeed, involved in filmmaking, although on the production side, and after a time he moved to Utah to work on a series of wholesome nature movies financed by the Mormons. The hipster’s name was Maury Heald, and he possessed a heart, a spirit, a life force, and a résumé that would have dwarfed most men twice his size. In the fifties, for example, he’d traveled to Cuba to join the revolution, living with the rebels in the Sierra Maestras alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. A talented commercial artist, Maury worked as a draftsman for NASA at Cape Canaveral before it became Cape Kennedy, and it was while in Florida that he was saved from drowning by Esther Williams. He’d fallen into a pool, and due to the brevity of his legs, was ill equipped for swimming. Ms. Williams, the champion swimmer turned movie star, happened to be walking by and, fully clothed, dove to his rescue. He claimed he repaid her, though he didn’t say how.

It was at an advertising agency, in San Francisco if I’m not mistaken, that Maury designed the Frito pack, the same red-and-orange motif the package bears today. Obviously, it was a successful design, but one evening — admittedly, we’d had a puff or two of pot — Maury confided that it had wider and deeper implications. He revealed that the design, if scrutinized from a particular angle, held the visual key to the fifth dimension. I assumed he was putting me on, of course, but I must admit that ever since, I’ve found myself staring at Frito packages longer than good sense might dictate or the munchies require. The reader may be inclined to investigate more thoroughly than I.