Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

  Since tomatoes were the principal cash crop in that area of Virginia, and since Christianity played a significant role in nearly every Warsawian’s life, it’s hardly surprising that the Almighty would be occasionally invoked in a field where the love apples grew. I personally witnessed such an invocation, and a quite effective one, albeit with the opposite intention of the usual agricultural prayer.

  In my teens, I lived for two successive summers on a farm owned by the family of a high school buddy, where I, along with a half-dozen other boys, was hired to pick tomatoes. We were paid ten cents per basket for green fruit, five cents for ripe. The green ones were destined for the grocery stores and produce markets of Florida, its growing season being the reverse of our own, and they had to be unblemished and of a particular size, whereas the ripe ones, which we’d haul at night to a local cannery to be turned into juice or sauce, had no such restrictions and thus were far easier to pick. On a good day, a boy might earn four or five bucks, which could light up a good many pinball machines and add any number of comic books and girlie magazines to one’s Librorum Prohibitorum.

  The camaraderie, moreover, though unspoken, was relished by all of us, and we shared a sod-sullied bond strengthened by the perpetual japes and jabs of inane teenage redneck humor. Ah, but as wise men know, a big front has a big back, and the beefiest backside of this summer job was that on July afternoons it could get hot enough in those low-lying fields to melt the humps off a camel. There were days when the sunshine seemed not only weighty, not only textured, but almost audible: it sounded like drops of oil crackling into combustion, or a bluesman vamping on a harmonica made out of lard. On one of those days, the heat became so unbearable it apparently called for divine intervention.

  Lancelot Delano (that was his actual name, though his friends called him “Gumboot”) was a tall, gawky youth, strong as a mule but sweet as molasses and just about as slow. Lancelot wasn’t really a halfwit, not exactly a simpleton, just . . . well, slow. He was related to two of the pickers, and all of us knew him even though he’d kissed school good-bye in the fifth grade and rarely came to town, even for a movie. Gentle and good-natured, he was never ridiculed, but, rather, elicited from his peers a measure of rough affection -- and, one day, the torturously torrid day aforementioned -- a kind of awe.

  The temperature flirted with one hundred that afternoon, humidity hard on its heels. We sweated like thawing snowmen, and in our wilting ears heat made a faint fuzzy chirping noise, like the spasms of wounded crickets. Bending over the tomato vines as we worked our way down the rows, we were sinking ever more deeply into a miserable stupor, when suddenly we heard Lancelot Delano’s voice, addressing the heavens: “Good Lord, if it’s in Thy power,” he intoned, “send us that knocking-off shower.”

  What happened next strains credibility, but I swear to the truth of it. Within fifteen minutes or less, the pale blue sky broke out in bruises, dark tanks of cumulus came rolling in, bucking and heaving like a Russian rodeo. Claws of lightning ripped a turbid bodice, thunder neighed like all the czar’s horses. Farmer Packett, our boss, kept glancing up nervously, and by his fourth or fifth glance he had rain in his face.

  The downpour didn’t last especially long, but afterward conditions in the field were too muddy for effective picking. We happy boys piled into and onto a big farm truck and sped off to the Rappahannock River, where we frolicked in the cool, salty water until suppertime. I’m unsure if any of us questioned our goofy liberator about his cosmic connections, but for weeks thereafter I’d catch boys, including myself, looking at him with something akin to wonder.

  On several overheated occasions later in life -- laboring on a construction site, drilling on a military parade ground, trekking in sub-Saharan Africa -- I attempted to duplicate that little meteorological miracle, lifting my eyes and muttering, “Good Lord, if it’s in Thy power, send me that knocking-off shower.” Nothing happened. Not one drop. I’d lacked both the courage and conviction to speak my prayer aloud; I’d lacked the pure heart and spirit of Warsaw’s sweet Sir Lancelot, Saint Gumboot of the Tomatoes.

  Summer, tomatoes, religion, the river -- and the actress Natalie Wood -- are all tangled up in the web of my memory. Let me see if I can separate the strands.

  Had the summer I turned thirteen been the Kentucky Derby, it could have been won by a hobbyhorse: that’s how slowly those months dragged by. Too young for gainful employment, even in a tomato gang, I passed the long, steamy days reading, napping, attending Vacation Bible School (yawn!), composing with my “talking stick” (about which, I’m afraid, I’ll have more to say later); impatiently waiting for a Tarzan movie, a circus, or a traveling carnival to find its way to town. Other than that, my primary activity was hiding from Dr. Peters.

  Pastor of the Warsaw Baptist Church, Dr. Peters was tall, gaunt, and pale, with a weak damp smile and cold damp palms: shaking his hand was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie. And he did always want to shake my hand. Whenever he managed to corner me, that is. I considered Dr. Peters more creepy than refrigerated possum slobber, an opinion not shared by my mother, who found him John the Baptist incarnate and the ideal shepherd to steer my soul to Jesus.

  The two of them, Mother and Dr. Peters, believed that very summer -- the summer when testosterone first barreled into my plasma, piloting a red speedboat and scattering large pieces of childhood in its wake -- to be perfect timing for redeeming Tommy Rotten, and they conspired to facilitate my salvation. At Mother’s invitation, the good pastor kept dropping by for a glass of iced tea, intent on engaging me in spiritual conversation. Rather quickly, I developed a sense of his impending arrival and a strategy for avoidance that more often than not consisted of me vanishing into the thicket behind our garage, pretending not to hear my name being called.

  A weeklong revival meeting was scheduled for mid-August at our church and on those occasions when I failed to elude him, Dr. Peters would solicit my pledge to come forward during one of the evening services and commit my life to Christ. I wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea. While I would have preferred that Jesus be a lot more like Tarzan, I had nevertheless bought into the prevailing view of him as the greatest figure who ever trod the earth, the heroic loving martyr who would return someday to dispense to true believers their personal slices of sky pie. Certainly, I didn’t wish to burn, Warsaw’s summer was plenty warm for me; and although descriptions of heaven made it sound disturbingly similar to Vacation Bible School, only an imbecile would trade a little boredom for the fires of hell. I convinced myself that I loved Jesus and might be worthy of his love in return -- but why did Dr. Peters have to be the matchmaker?

  There was a livelier preacher in the area: a rather flamboyant African American who drove a light blue panel truck upon whose sides were painted in fiery red letters several ominous Bible verses, along with the preacher’s name: THE REVEREND EVER READY. This is not a joke.

  Every so often, the Reverend Ever Ready would drive up to the little black-friendly Texaco station, fling open the rear doors of his van, and step aside as six or seven noisy children, all seemingly under the age of ten, swarmed out and began running wildly hither and yon. The good reverend would oversee the filling of his tank, the checking of his motor oil (this was prior to the advent of self-service), then go inside to swill a Coca-Cola, dig some soul tunes, and shoot the breeze with the proprietor. After a quarter hour or so, he’d emerge, and bellow in his powerful pulpit voice, an operatic baritone so volcanic it could be heard blocks away, “All aboard! If you can’t get a board, get a plank! If you can’t get a plank, get your ass in the truck!” The kids would come racing from all directions and dive for the doors just before he pulled away.

  Now, I never heard the gentleman preach: this was racially segregated Virginia, remember, and there was nary a white face in his congregation. Nevertheless, had it been the rambunctious Rev. Ever Ready rather than the cadaverish Dr. Peters offering to drive me to Christ, I’d have been considerably more
eager to get aboard. To get a plank. To get my ass in the truck.

  On a sweltering August night, I sat in a sticky pew, nervously awaiting the call. When it came, I walked to the front of the church (the lights were low, the congregation was softly singing), and along with a handful of other repentants surrendered my life to Yeshua bin Miriam, the radical itinerant rabbi known to English-speaking Christians as Christ Jesus. My mother was overjoyed, my father pleased enough, Dr. Peters carved another notch in his pastoral pistol, and I was . . . well, kind of on pins and needles.

  What exactly was I expecting? I could not have said with any degree of articulation, I just thought I’d feel somehow different. Oh, I felt good about myself, felt a certain sense of accomplishment, felt marginally safer even; but when I awoke the next morning, there was no aura around the objects in my room, no radiance in my mirror, I was unmotivated to go forth and help the sick and needy (not that I’d had a clue where to begin), and instead of turning for guidance to the family Bible, I found myself reaching for the Hardy Boys mystery novel I’d started a day or two before. Maybe, I thought, nothing has changed because I haven’t yet been baptized.

  I didn’t have long to wait. Within a fortnight, I was wading fully clad (I argued for old clothes but Mother insisted I don my very best) into the Rappahannock River, in which Dr. Peters stood up to his skinny thighs. When it was my turn, he told me to hold my nose, placed a hand in the small of my back, another behind my head, said a short prayer, and completely immersed me. I waded to shore, soaked, dripping, uncomfortable, but pretty confident that henceforth I would live my life in virtue and light.

  Impatiently, I waited to be transported, to be transformed, to be illuminated (whatever that meant precisely). A day passed. Three days. A week. Was my soul so wicked it was beyond redemption? Had they shrunk my favorite pants for nothing? Was I damned? Then it happened: I was struck full force by spiritual lightning.

  As it turned out, Dr. Peters had nothing to do with it, Rev. Ever Ready was not even remotely involved, nor had Lord Jesus himself hurled the bolt from above. No, my sudden spiritual awakening was precipitated by Miss Natalie Wood.

  Leaving my twin sisters with a sitter one evening, my parents had allowed me to accompany them to a movie in Callao, a town about a dozen miles from Warsaw. The film, entitled Tomorrow Is Forever, dealt with the shock, confusion, and heartache that ensues when a soldier, thought to have been killed in battle, returns alive years later (his war-disfigured face unrecognizably altered by plastic surgery), to find that in his absence, his wife and presumed widow has married another man. Natalie Wood, then eight years old and pretty, sweet, and vulnerable, played the adopted daughter of the resurrected man, trying to be brave as her young life is squeezed through one emotional ringer after another.

  Okay, it was a Hollywood tear pump, a celluloid onion chopper, yet the film was skillfully executed (Orson Welles had a hand in it), and from young Natalie there rippled echo-circles of such genuine poignancy that they melted the shadow between make-believe and the real world. I doubt that I cried in the theater -- it would have caused me terminal embarrassment -- but on the drive home, as I sat alone in the dark backseat, a few drops leaned their slick bald heads over the window ledge of my tear ducts, glancing around to see if the coast was clear. And then . . . something else happened.

  My sorrow unexpectedly widened and deepened, became less focused on the Natalie Wood character, become increasingly comprehensive -- enveloping not only hurt children and suffering innocents everywhere but also Hiroshima victims, Huck Finn’s Jim, our neighbor’s recently euthanized cat, and so on and so forth. Natalie’s character also embodied a stubborn, contagious hopefulness, and in me that hope commenced to expand geometrically, as well, eventually morphing into something akin to universal love.

  My scruffy whippersnapper heart opened like a sardine tin, my impressionable kiddish brain sidestepped the domination of cognitive experience; I sensed the world in me and me in the world, felt fundamentally connected, saw the many as all and the all as one; one and all bobbing along forever and ever in an unending, indestructible river of tears and tickles, breath and meat. In this totally unfamiliar oceanic state, momentarily free of self-involvement, conventional knowledge, and pedestrian consciousness, radiating such a vortex of woo-woo love it would have made Saint Francis of Assisi seem like a mink rancher, I finally felt “saved.” And while it was not quite the salvation Mother and Dr. Peters had in mind, I was certain it suited God and Jesus just fine. Blessed be Natalie Wood.

  School opened in Warsaw that very week, and I, entering eighth grade, was soon caught up in activities curricular and extra that left scant time to reflect on my cosmic illumination. The clear light slowly faded and I was not to experience anything similar until, decades later, I was introduced to meditation and the psychedelic sacraments. It was hardly the last time, however, that I was affected profoundly by cinema.

  A film that comes immediately to mind is François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, which I watched alone at a private screening in 1963, having gone to review the movie for the Seattle Times. After leaving the theater, I did not -- could not -- speak for three whole days. The unexplained silence caused my baffled wife to flee, moving into a motel until I recovered my voice. Susan never understood and I’m unsure if I can explain it adequately even now, except to say that Truffaut’s daring artistry validated unexpectedly yet completely my nascent literary vision, giving me the confidence to bring it, in time, to fruition.

  In one amazing scene, a young woman about whom Truffaut has led us to care deeply, is shot by gangsters who are hiding out on a French farm. It’s winter, and when the dear girl topples, her body goes sliding slowly, gracefully, on and on, down a long slope covered with snow. Our hearts are breaking over the girl’s death, yet the long snowy scene (shot in black and white) is, from an aesthetic perspective, breathtakingly beautiful. The audience is pulled in two directions at once, and it was this dichotomy and others like it in early Truffaut that led me to accept and eventually act upon my own life view, my native hardwired inclination to mix, intermingle -- even fuse -- in my novels the tragic with the comic, the ugly with the beautiful, the romantic with the gritty, fantasy with reality, mythos with logos, the sensible with the goofy, the sacred with the profane. Hidebound critics experience some difficulty with this approach, finding it challenging to comprehend, for example, how writing can be simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, although to the nimble-minded among us it seems every bit as appropriate as it does surprising.

  In any case, while Shoot the Piano Player may have had the more obvious effect on my life, it would be wrong to dismiss that awakening precipitated by Tomorrow Is Forever and little Natalie Wood. Natalie, whose birth name, incidentally, was Nikolaevna Zakharenko, grew up to be a major Hollywood actress, starring in such memorable motion pictures as Splendor in the Grass and Rebel Without a Cause. According to gossip, she was also quite naughty in her adult life, though far be it from me to hurl any stones. In an interview, her friend and fellow actor Dennis Hopper told how Natalie had to be rushed to a hospital emergency room because during one of their wild parties she’d had champagne poured on her vagina. Bull! I’m not defending Natalie because once upon a time she brought me closer to Love and Truth and God, but Hopper was a creative artist who could sometimes be creative with facts, and I can tell you from personal experience that champagne, however directly or copiously applied, causes neither pain nor injury to a woman’s treasure, her salty peach, her rosy aperture, her nether diadem.

  While I won’t claim that tomatoes have brought me closer to Love and Truth and God, they have enriched my life on countless occasions, especially when sliced, salted, and laid between two slices of soft white bread slathered edge to edge with mayonnaise.

  My passion for the tomato sandwich, which persists to this day, blossomed in Warsaw, hardly a coincidence since prior to our settling in Virginia I could be counted among the millions of Americans who’ve never t
asted a proper tomato. In the Puget Sound area, where I now reside, summers aren’t hot enough, soil lacks the proper acid content and holds too much water. As a consequence, the tomatoes grown here taste only marginally better than soggy Kleenex. Many other parts of the U.S. also roll out tomatoes consistently deficient in both flavor and nutrition. In Virginia’s Richmond and Hanover counties, heat, sandy soil, and high pH factors combine to produce love apples that lend credence to Erica Jong’s otherwise cryptic line, “If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.”

  I cannot speak for female poets, their abodes or their education, but during my summer of avoiding Dr. Peters and embracing Natalie Wood, the two summers I worked in the fields, and many summers thereafter, I did dwell in the house of the tomato sandwich, though it was less a house, I suppose, than a boat: a modest yet spunky little raft in a sea of culinary confusion, defiantly flying a flag foreign to canapé-snapping gourmets and junk-food junkies alike. Long may it wave. On the other hand, maybe my favorite sandwich -- indeed, my all-around, all-time favorite food -- has been less a barge than a temple, say; a shrine, a zendo, a pantheon. If a boy wants to be a writer, must he worship in the church of the tomato?

  I would be derelict did I not point out that these days, even in perfectly suited eastern Virginia, it’s nearly impossible to find a worthy, healthy, full-flavored, densely pulped, intoxicatingly pungent tomato for sale in any public market. The reason is that our shoddy, fast-buck, rush-to-profit economy encourages growers to pick and ship fruits much too soon. Many people hold to the belief that a tomato, especially if left to rest in a sunny place, will continue to ripen once picked, an assumption that is patently false. A picked tomato may continue to “redden,” true enough, but as any plant biologist will tell you, reddening is not the same thing as ripening. Outwardly, a prematurely harvested tomato may be blushing like Natalie Wood in the emergency room (Dennis Hopper’s little fantasy), but inwardly its sugaring process -- so essential for flavor -- has come to a screeching halt.