Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

41. swan song

For decades, I’ve handwritten (yellow legal pad, ballpoint pen) my manuscripts, and this one is no exception. At week’s end, I dictate the accumulated paragraphs to my assistant, Julie, and she transcribes them onto the computer. Thus, it is Julie’s hand that hovers now above the send key, awaiting the signal that I’m through swinging this monkey by its tail, that Tibetan Peach Pie is done. Hold on, Julie. Not yet. As you know, I write slowly — despite the comic overtones in my fiction, I’m no less conscientious about my craft than James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or any other literary obsessive one might name — and there are a couple more stories I want to tell.

In the early eighties, I had a little crush on Linda Ronstadt. I didn’t know Linda Ronstadt, understand, I’d never met her or even seen her in concert. She was awfully cute in photos, though (this was before the combined forces of enchilada and Wiener schnitzel escalated her dress size), and I was particularly enamored of the way she sang certain words and phrases: “sweetie pie,” for example, in her rendition of (appropriately enough) “I’ve Got a Crush on You.”

One day my ex-spouse Terrie said to me, “If you like Linda Ronstadt so much, why don’t you manifest her?” So I told her why, told her in effect that they’d be serving liver and onions in every school cafeteria in America before people started actually “manifesting” the objects of their desires; told her that if “manifestation” worked, there’d be world peace and half of the New Age naïfs in California would own peppermint helicopters and million-acre sprout farms; told her that while there was something to be said for the power of positive thinking, what she was advocating was amateur juju. Nevertheless, I promised to give it a try. And in a half-assed way, I sort of did.

A year passed and it was 1984 when I received an invitation to Joseph Campbell’s birthday party. The venerable mythologist, with whom I’d traveled in Latin America, and whose writings had so often turned the spit in my cognitive barbecue, was turning eighty, and there was to be a celebratory dinner in San Francisco. Of course I accepted. My flight was a trifle delayed, so by the time I entered the upstairs banquet room at the waterfront Italian restaurant, many of Campbell’s guests were already seated. Checking the place cards, I located my seat at the end of one of the two long tables. The chair to my immediate right was still vacant. When I casually glanced at the place card there to see who would be sitting next to me, I was startled to read, “Linda Ronstadt.”

Manifestation? Coincidence? A practical joke? So distracted was I, trying to make sense of it, that I almost didn’t hear the man seated directly across from me when he introduced himself. It was George Lucas, who, for an instant seemed to be speaking from a galaxy far, far away. Now, I knew that Joseph Campbell was a scholar fixated exclusively on timeless universals, that he refused to read newspapers or watch TV and that he claimed not to have seen a motion picture in thirty years, so my second big surprise of the evening was learning that Campbell had spent the day — his eightieth birthday, remember — at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where he’d watched Star Wars in the morning, Return of the Jedi after lunch, and The Empire Strikes Back later in the afternoon. I was so amazed and delighted by this information that it took me a few minutes to make the connection to Linda Ronstadt. She, according to the gossip wire, had been dating George Lucas.

For better or for worse, Ms. Ronstadt never did take her place at the table that evening (I didn’t allude to her absence or inquire of her whereabouts, not wishing to embarrass Lucas, with whom she possibly had quarreled), and I’ll submit that it was just as well. What would have been the point? For one thing, the notion that she might ditch a wealthy visionary film tycoon for the likes of me, might start calling me “sweetie pie,” was ludicrous. For another, I cannot be counted among the tens of millions of Americans who are so gaga over celebrities they’d exchange their soul for a rubber dog biscuit just to be cuddled by — or better yet, seen in public on the arm of — a popular star. Beware, folks! Many, if not most, celebrities come with a metric ton of emotional baggage, and neither their talent nor their success will rub off on you in bed.

Having said that, it would be dishonest of me to claim that not once during that very long dinner party (it was close to midnight when Joseph Campbell led the guests in singing a pagan parody of “Gimme That Ol’ Time Religion”), that not once did I look to my right and think that if I’d just put a tad more effort into my manifesting, I’d have been sitting next to sexy Linda Ronstadt instead of an empty chair and a dumb little card with her name on it.

I bring up the subject of celebrity primarily because for an offbeat fiction writer out of the North Carolina hills, who has chosen to live his life far from the centers of power and ambition, I’ve crossed paths with an extraordinary number of famous people (painters, photographers, writers, actors, directors, and rock stars), a few who’ve become cherished friends; and I know that certain of my readers will be disappointed that I haven’t written more about those figures in these pages. Sorry. To tell stories that involved them would run the risk of violating their privacy (perpetually under assault as it is), and if I haven’t good stories to tell, simply alluding to them could only be construed as an unseemly exhibition of name-dropping. I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum.

Not surprisingly, the clear majority of notables I’ve met has been on or around movie sets — as I’ve had small speaking parts in several Alan Rudolph films, and spent two weeks on location while Gus Van Sant was shooting Even Cowgirls Get the Blues — or else in meetings where potential screen adaptations of various other of my novels were being discussed. Some of the actors with whom I’ve interacted proved as interesting and as nice as they were gifted, but the Tinseltown individual who made the deepest emotional impact on me was a marginally successful screenwriter whose name I cannot even recall.

Like many Vietnam vets, this guy had come home from that disgraceful and wholly unnecessary war psychologically vulnerable, but he’d convalesced by writing a screenplay about his boyhood. Clint Eastwood bought the script and turned it into a decent film, and now someone else had hired the fellow to adapt Still Life With Woodpecker. Unfortunately, he wasn’t up to the challenge, but in our meetings I couldn’t help but notice that he always had a toothbrush protruding from the left breast pocket of his sports coat.

One day my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him about it, suspecting he might be suffering lingering post-traumatic doubts about where he would be spending his nights. That’s when he revealed that his girlfriend had moved out a few months before, and the only thing she’d left behind was her well-used toothbrush. Ever since, everywhere he went he carried that intimate implement of personal hygiene in his pocket next to his heart. I imagined that on particularly lonely nights he might even brush his own teeth with it, its presence in his mouth re-creating the sensation of her kisses. There’s not a romance novelist on the planet who could come up with something one-tenth as touching as this. But — one last time — I digress.

Aside from the opportunity to explain my general reluctance to write about celebrities, I had an additional motive for recounting my nonmeeting with Linda Ronstadt. To wit: The subject of manifestation offers a fairly smooth segue into the subject of imagination, which, after all, figures prominently in my life, not to mention the title of this tome.

Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one’s will on tangible reality for one’s own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live — against all evidence — as if advances in fortune were already here.

Arising late one morning in Washington, D.C., a stop on one of my cross-country book tours, I cleaned up and set out in search of sustenance. I’d walked not much more than a block in the quiet neighborhood around my hotel when I noticed something rather odd. There had been a downpour during the night, and a few yards ahead of me, a man was squatting on the sidewalk staring into a rain puddle. What the…? It couldn’t have been a congressman because while many of them are known psychopaths, they’re seldom deranged in such an interesting way; and anyhow, this man, I saw as I drew closer, was of a Middle Eastern ethnicity.

I slowed my pace for a better view, and when he noticed my attention on him, the fellow broke into a wide — and, I thought, conspiratorial — grin. Pointing into the rain puddle at his feet, he said enthusiastically, “The swan!” I must have looked bewildered, because, still gesturing at the puddle, he said it again. “The swan, the swan, the black swan.”

He had a nice face, no shrill in his voice, no hint of madness in his eyes. So what could I do but squat beside him? I squatted. I stared. And I have to say that so convincing was he that I half expected (maybe fully expected) to observe a miniature swan, a waterfowl (he surely wasn’t referring to a ballerina), the size and color of a licorice drop swimming around in the puddle on the street.

To his obvious disappointment, I at first saw nothing, however, and when I regarded him quizzically, he regarded me as if I were thick. “The black swan,” he repeated. This time his tone was patient, as if speaking to a child. “The swan is dead.” Oh? The swan was dead! Maybe that was the problem: the poor swan could have been partially submerged or even floating upside down, not immediately recognizable. I gazed into the puddle again, and this time I actually could see a dark shape, a shadow in the rainwater, could see what could have been the drowned corpse of a tiny swan just below the surface. And the question that came to my mind was not what a teeny-weeny black swan was doing in a rain puddle in Washington, D.C., but what had caused it to die?

It was then that it dawned on me that at the same time the gentleman had been pointing down at the puddle with his right hand, his left had had been pointing upward at the sky. And at that moment — bing! — something else occurred to me. I suddenly recalled hearing on the news that there was to be a solar eclipse that day. The nice man from Lebanon or Iran or wherever, aware that looking directly at a solar eclipse could permanently damage the eyes, was cleverly watching its reflection, its dark shadow in the puddle. I’d been fooled by his accent. He’d not been saying “swan” at all, but rather, “sun”: the black sun. The sun is dead.

We were both relieved that I’d finally understood. As the moon slid on by, though, and the sun reemerged, seeming none the worse for the brief if dramatic interruption, I couldn’t help but be somewhat disappointed. There’d been moments, even after I’d become aware of the eclipse, when I’d imagined that I could actually detect a little bitty swan in that puddle. You see, such is my disposition that I could hold both eclipse and swan in my mind at the same time.

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. I’m in my eighties now, and if there is one thing of which I am most proud, it’s that I have permitted no authority (neither civilian nor military, neither institutional nor societal) to relieve me — by means of force, coercion, or ridicule — of that gift. From the beginning, imagination has been my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo; and I plan to stick with it to the end, whenever and however that end might come, and whether or not there is another act to follow.

The French say that the best part of an affair is walking up the stairs. I say that it’s probably better to imagine heaven than to go there.