Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

5. crime, art & death

The Hannah brothers, Georgie and Jimmy, were Iraqi Jews, actually born in Baghdad. Their father was a rug merchant who sold fine Oriental carpets in Blowing Rock every summer, in Florida the rest of the year. The day each June when Georgie and Jimmy arrived back in town was for me an occasion more anticipated and more exciting than Christmas. They were my favorite playmates, for their imagination equaled my own. The Hannah brothers excelled at making wooden swords and ray guns, at piecing together the funky costumes (cowboys, Indians, pirates, spacemen, jungle lords, etc.) apparently necessary for acting out our bizarrely improvised versions of recent movie scenes — as well as at sneaking into matinees at the theater where we studied such scenes far more attentively than we’d ever studied arithmetic.

All summer long we strived to outdo one another with the creativity of our variations on cinematic or comic-book themes, performing in backyards, along mountain trails, on the broken porches of “haunted” houses (daring one another to go inside), around the perimeters of golf courses, and in the gardens of the Mayview Manor Hotel, where we’d sometimes catch glimpses of vacationing celebrities. (We saw Bob Hope there, Jimmy Stewart, and General Eisenhower, but, alas alas, never Johnny Weissmuller.)

When, after Labor Day, Georgie and Jimmy were sadly returned to Sarasota, the limitless galaxy of make-believe all too quickly gave way to the mundane world of school. I still had my reading and writing, however. I also had Johnny Holshauser, a year-round boy, my next best friend, and — oh, the shame! — my partner in actual crime.

One half-warm spring afternoon, Johnny and I were moping about, bored with the accumulated inertia at church and school, despondent over our chronic lack of funds. We had not a dime for a comic book, not a nickel for a candy bar, not even a penny for a gumball — and at age seven going on eight, attempting to barter our pants for financial gain would have been neither cute nor profitable. All at once, or maybe it unfolded gradually, we had an idea, a strategy, a ploy. It was simple. We’d rob a bank.

Of course, it was hardly an original solution. All through the Great Depression, proactive young fellows with neither money nor prospects had discovered that robbing banks could impact their cash flow in a positive if not always sustainable manner.

Johnny and I each owned a cap pistol that fairly closely resembled an actual handgun. Thus armed, we marched into the Northwestern State Bank on Blowing Rock’s main drag, pointed our pieces at an astonished teller, and demanded “a lot of money.” Mind you, this was no prank. We were completely serious. Everything went very quiet for a moment or two. Then the shooting began.

At least, we thought it was shooting. In those days there was an item of fireworks called “torpedoes,” a misleading name since in size and shape they resembled those gumballs we couldn’t afford. They were like dry, gray jawbreakers that when hurled against a hard surface, exploded with a loud report. Obviously unknown to us, the bank had a supply of said torpedoes, and one or more of the employees surreptitiously began throwing them at the marble walls and floor. Johnny bolted for the door, me right behind him, both convinced that bullets were whizzing past our heads.

We hightailed it through town, took a back road up a steepish hill, and barreled into the woods, not stopping until we reached a primitive lean-to, one of our aforementioned hideouts. There, breathless, we collapsed on the pine needles. And waited. Waited. Listening for sirens or other signals that the police or a posse of vigilantes was on our trail.

Hours passed. Darkness fell. A heavy chill, like an ice-hoofed horse, clattered in and out among the rhododendron and huckleberry bushes. Owls hooted. We heard growling that might have been a bear. A mountain lion. Or the bogeyman. Or our empty stomachs. Finally, unable to stand it another minute, we crept hungrily, nervously, sheepishly, back to our respective homes.

News of the aborted holdup had spread quickly through town that afternoon. Most citizens got a good laugh out of it, though my parents could not be counted among the amused. Following a brief lecture, surely to be continued, I was given toast and milk — thanks, perhaps, to the Geneva Conventions — and ordered to bed.

In my room, I lay awake, troubled by guilt, scorched by embarrassment, worried about inevitable repercussions. Yet, with a secret smile, I couldn’t help thinking, If Georgie and Jimmy Hannah had been with us, we could have pulled it off.

Having in my seventies developed a mild and belated interest in genealogy, I hired a professional to look into my ancestry. To my delight she discovered a few odd nuts (if their names be any clue) dangling from the old family tree. For example, there was Smallwood Marlow, Marvel Greene, Mountain Issac Greene, Nimrod Triplett, Commodore (his name not his rank) Robbins, and most intriguing of all, a woman listed as Elizabeth Gotobed. Most of these splendidly christened individuals resided in North Carolina, though none in Blowing Rock per se.

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) obviously didn’t live in Blowing Rock either, but it turns out that I’m a direct descendant of that luminary. Moved by this newfound knowledge to reread Robinson Crusoe, I was dismayed to find that Defoe was an imperialist, a racist, a sexist, and somewhat of a literary hack — which is to say, in his entire book there is not one sentence so daring or so beautiful or so funny or so wise that I’d give twenty-five dollars to have written it (a screwy way to judge talent, I agree, but there you have it).

Ultimately, I’m far less enthused about my kinship with Daniel Defoe than with Polly Elrod (1833–1924), my great-grandmother and arguably the first Pop artist in America.

Polly lived within walking distance of Blowing Rock — if you didn’t mind a two-day walk each way. My father, in the company of his own pa, made the hike when he was a boy. The Elrod cabin was way back in the hills, up one of those deep valleys that we hillbillies called “hollers,” unreachable except on foot. Daddy and Papa crashed in a hospitable farmer’s hayloft their first night on the trail.

A widow by then, Polly and her late husband had built the one-room log cabin themselves. Its most prominent feature was a massive fieldstone fireplace, used for both heating and cooking, that took up one whole wall of the cabin. Now, both Polly and her spouse chewed tobacco. In those days, cured and pressed tobacco meant for chewing came in plugs about the size and shape of a deck of cards. The “chaws” were neither packaged nor wrapped. Brands were distinguished one from another by small tin emblems with prongs on the back, one emblem per plug. The Red Apple emblem was actually shaped like an apple, Red Dog’s like a greyhound.

Polly and her husband favored a brand called Red Jay. Its emblem, scarlet with black lettering, was, not surprising, in the shape of a jaybird. Well, Polly, for whatever reason, had taken those emblems and stuck them one by one into the mud chinks between the stones. Over the years — and she lived to be ninety-one, which allowed for considerable chawing — literally hundreds of shiny little red tin jaybirds were embedded in the wall.

The overall effect, as my father described it, would have been beyond kitsch and into the realm of the genuinely aesthetic. Here in regular lines, there in purely arbitrary arrangements, the emblems in combination would have generated a kind of optical chatter, a visual din both restful and jarring. Repetition would have reduced concentration on the individual unit (the miniature Red Jay icon) and increased apprehension of the display as a whole, a kind of three-dimensional wallpaper quite likely as powerful as it was comic and strange.

Was Polly’s intent wholly decorative? Was it to create a nostalgic record of those countless hours of chawing? Or was her wall a celebration of the pleasure chawing afforded her in a hardscrabble life whose pleasures would have been scarce and lean? In any case, when I envision that fireplace it is difficult not to think of Andy Warhol’s Two Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans or Green Coca-Cola Bottles, paintings that caused such a stir in the art world in 1962. I’m proud that the blood of Polly Elrod runs in my veins. And I like to fancy that the red corpuscles in that blood resemble little tin jays.

My sister Rena never heard about her great-grandmother’s Pop Art masterpiece. For that matter, it’s doubtful if she ever heard the legend of the Cherokee princess, although she surely would have loved its happy ending. Rena was a sweet, sunny, towheaded child, whose life revolved mainly around her family of dolls.

It was a lovely May day two months before my seventh birthday when Rena, age four, was taken to Blowing Rock’s new clinic to have her tonsils removed. “She’ll be home in a day or so,” my mother assured me. Rena never came home — except in a pretty little coffin decorated with cherubs, lined in white satin. She’d been administered an overdose of ether.

To this day, when anyone I love leaves home for longer than a few hours, I’m filled with dread that they will not return.

When Mother became pregnant about a month after Rena’s death, she prayed over and over and with much fervor that she’d give birth to twin girls: a single daughter would have invited inevitable comparisons to Rena, and as for another son, I guess one Tommy Rotten was more than enough for one household. The next March, my twin sisters Mary and Marian were born.

It gives one pause, does it not? You needn’t place it in a religious context, we can argue all night about the true identity of its source, but for me, at least, there is no denying the evidence of answered prayer.

Aside from love, which we may assume everybody except heart-numb psychopaths covet in one guise or another, average Christianized Americans (with whom I’ve a whole abattoir of bones to pick) really desire two things: they want to get rich and they want to go to heaven. (Apparently in that order.) And this despite the fact that their very own Lord and Savior explicitly warned that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

What’s up with that? Do they think Jesus was joking, just kidding around? Or does each would-be wealthy Christian believe that an exception will be made in his or her case; that at heaven’s gates his or her accumulation of property and cash will elicit a knowing, sympathetic wink — as the needle’s eye is temporarily widened to let him or her squeeze through?

Rena wouldn’t have had that problem. The only possessions she left behind were her dolls — and the toy tea set with which she entertained them daily.