by Tom Robbins
Inspired, I added that I had recently captured a snake and was keeping it in my laundry bag as a pet. It was pretty, I wrote, a cousin of the North Carolina king snake, and that I fed it mice I trapped in a nearby rice paddy, as well as eggs pilfered from the mess hall. Then, as a final romantic touch, I wrote that I (again, Jody) had named the snake “Sue Ellen” in her honor.
He never heard from her again.
Although he whined a few times about a broken heart, Jody soon quickly lost himself -- and Sue Ellen -- in the shuffling and dealing; whereas I felt I’d done a good deed, saving a fellow airman perhaps from marriage to an unimaginative, not to mention unappreciative, wife.
For several weeks, I was detached to a joint armed forces communications center in downtown Taegu, third largest city in South Korea. It was a wonderful deployment in that I got to walk to work every morning through narrow streets paved with stone and raucous with life, a sensorium of undulating exotica. Everywhere there was the rattling of carts, some pulled by shaggy ponies, most by old bearded papa-sans in baggy white britches and stovepipe hats. Pushing aside rice-paper screens, extended families poured from single-story houses, the women in long, very high-waisted skirts and tight-fitting brocade jackets worn under a looser jacket of quilted cotton. (Bargirls and prostitutes, of which there were great numbers in Taegu, wore Western-style dresses -- usually gifts from GI boyfriends who ordered them from Sears catalogs -- but these larks of the night seldom ventured out before noon.)
My nose, even my eyes, filled with smoke from hibachi pots, with the pungent breath of kimchi crocks, and with the sweet-sour redolence of unidentifiable spices, lotions, tonics, oils, dyes, and bodily effluvia: strange smells to complement the strange language whose stick-figure letters jitterbugged on wooden and paper signs in every direction and whose intonations burst in the air around me like invisible cannonades.
Some mornings early on in my deployment, I’d get lost in the alleys and teeming jingle-jangle of it all, and not knowing how to ask directions, would wander in the multitudes until I saw a particular little bridge or an old car without wheels and realized that’s where I must turn left and climb the hill to the communications center. More often than not, I was late for work. As I said, it was wonderful.
On that assignment, I was quartered on an army post, there being no air force presence in the city, and commuting from K-2 would have been a hassle even though it was no more than ten or twelve miles away: too many pushcarts, bicycles, and pedestrians jamming the road. Nights, when I wasn’t on the futon of some cute bargirl, I slept in transit quarters, located on the second floor of a large, ugly, gray stone building, a relic of the Japanese occupation (1910–1945). I shared those temporary quarters -- a long, cold room with about thirty bunks, most of them empty -- with members of the U.S. Army all-Korea boxing team.
Having each won a Korean Command championship in his weight division, the boxers were training to fight the Japanese Command champs, the winners of those bouts then traveling to Germany to take on the top army pugilists in Europe. Trained by an Italian American with a Bronx accent as heavy as a subway car, these guys took their conditioning seriously, some of them perhaps dreaming of a professional prizefighting career once they were discharged from the army. They were good roommates, however, funny and friendly and always trying hard not to wake skinny, noncombatant me when they arose at 5 A.M. to do their roadwork.
Sharing quarters with the military boxers made me feel as if I were living in the pages of From Here to Eternity, the monumental opus by James Jones that critics unfortunately and in some cases no doubt snobbishly never mention when listing contenders for the title of “Great American Novel.” But, then, writing fiction is not a boxing tournament, is it? Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.
Very late one night, well past the Cinderella curfew, our peaceful quarters were invaded by about ten young greenhorn privates, not long in the army and fresh off the troopship from the U.S. Somewhere in their journey from the port of Inchon to Taegu, they’d managed to consume a large quantity of beer, and they were as loud and stupid as nineteen-year-olds can be when inexperienced with the caprices of ethyl alcohol. Add to that the giddiness they surely felt at being left temporarily unsupervised in, for the first time in their lives, a foreign land, and you have a recipe for elevated levels of obnoxiousness. Their horselaughs, their drunken vulgarity, their banging about, their smartass retorts when asked politely to quiet down and switch off the lights, failed to enchant the awakened boxers, whose arduous workday on the road and in the gym would commence with the pink prickling of dawn.
As the juvenile jackassery continued, I, beneath my government-issue blankets, chuckled softly. One needn’t be prescient to know how this was going to end.
It ended quickly. With no wasted motion, boxers slipped out of bed, slowly crossed the room, and WHUMP! WHOOSH! SURPRISE! Single well-placed punches to the midsection let the air out of three or four of the raucous rookies with a sound like that of exploding tires. Deflated, the brats fell backward against their astounded comrades or onto their clattering bunks. Then, piñatas smashed, fiesta canceled, lights summarily extinguished, the newcomers briefly grumbled under their breath and passed out; while the boxers went back to dreaming of title fights, flashbulbs, tabloid headlines, and million-dollar purses, or at least how their fists were going to get them the hell out of Korea. And I, for the second time since arriving in Asia, laughed myself to sleep.
There was something else besides Sears catalog fashions that distinguished Taegu bargirls and set them apart from their more virtuous peers: namely their breath. These enterprising ladies, unlike their fellow countrymen young and old, one and all, did not eat kimchi. Their abstention was a dietary sacrifice of enormous proportions, yet entirely necessary if they wished to socialize with American servicemen, which is to say, if they wished to prosper financially.
Kimchi has been called the national condiment or side dish of Korea, but it’s considerably more than that. It’s a defining characteristic, more gastronomically representative of Korea than salsa is of Mexico or garlic of Italy. Though less so today than in past periods when money and meat were scarce, kimchi has been a Korean way of life.
Traditionally, kimchi was napa cabbage that, seasoned with hot chilies and garlic and soaked in brine, was buried in an earthenware crock for several months or until fermentation occurred. There are variations in which radishes, turnips, and/or cucumbers are added to the cabbage, but the fermentation is essential -- and the effect is the same: after one has eaten kimchi, one’s breath could run a train. It could also run off any GI, marine, or airman -- no matter how romantically inclined, how fervently propelled forward by testosterone -- who happened to find his olfactory receptors enveloped in an alien halitosis so powerful it could pour a tank of herbicide on the reddest rose of passion.
Kissing a kimchi eater is one thing, eating kimchi is another, and while I was not all together unlike my fellow servicemen in my aversion to the former, I came to join the ranks of the latter, introduced at my insistence to the indomitable dish by a darling girl who called herself “Sally” (odds are her real name was Kim), and whose warnings I ignored, creating some displeasure at the weather station since my entire supply of Listerine mouthwash was being funneled to Chairman Mao.
I continue to eat kimchi today, albeit by necessity the made-in-America version. American kimchi? Indeed, it’s possible to find refrigerated jars of the stuff in a fair number of U.S. supermarkets and specialty food stores, especially on the West Coast; and while it can add piquancy to tuna sandwiches or bowls of pork with steamed rice, it’s pretty much a pale shadow of the authentic Korean product. The problem is that here the ingredients have rarely been fermented. It’s possible today to ferment cabbage without burying it in the ground all winter (a Vietnamese woman in La Conner, Washington, made me some in her garage: moonshine kimchi), but in deference to Yankee sensibilities, most pr
eserved cabbage in this country (in Japan, as well) is actually pickled rather than fermented. I call it “kimchi lite.”
Kimchi lite is to authentic Korean kimchi what a lapdog is to a timber wolf, what a billiards game is to a rugby match, what Disneyland is to Burning Man, what a golf cart is to a hot-rod Lincoln, what the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is to the Rolling Stones, what a sparkler is to a thunder cracker, what Curious George is to King Kong, what . . . well, you get the picture. Kimchi lite can enliven a tuna sandwich but hard-core Korean kimchi rocks the world.
“You eat kimchi,” Sally warned me, “you wife-san no like you. She catchy catchy ’nother man.” The petite bargirl had laughed uproariously when I swallowed my first bite of kimchi. (“I cry for funny,” she gasped), but she was seriously prophetic in regard to my wife, although Peggy’s animosity had zero to do with Korean cuisine. Or with Korean bargirls, for that matter. We were drifting -- no, motorboating -- apart before I’d gone abroad.
Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic. Peggy was thoroughly unimpressed when I won an air force short-story contest; I quietly scoffed at her fashion magazines, her fascination with the financial potential of Florida real estate. (I’d been stationed at a base outside of Orlando, tracking potential hurricanes.) The sporadic letters she’d sent me in Korea were approximately as affectionate as a foreclosure notice. Written with a blunt instrument. Dipped in zombie blood.
Returning home aboard a troopship bound for Seattle, I’d scored a gig as editor of the ship’s newspaper (a thin mimeographed rag distributed daily), thereby avoiding both KP and nightly internment down in the fart-infested rat warrens where troops were stacked like cordwood: I instead shared a comfortable cabin with a trio of medics. Under the nom de plume “Figmo Fosdick,” I also wrote a satirical humor column called Shipboard Confidential, which, though popular with the troops, frequently put me at odds with the paper’s adviser, a Roman Catholic chaplin who possessed the purplish physiognomy and perpetually petulant pucker of the overly zealous censor. I wouldn’t insinuate that the good priest ever touched a choirboy, but he certainly molested my prose.
At any rate, I had little time for contemplation during the crossing, so when after a fortnight we docked in Seattle, I elected to take a Greyhound bus to Virginia, thereby saving airfare and giving myself four uninterrupted days on the road to ponder my situation.
Prior to my deployment to Asia, Peggy had been my one and only sexual partner. Now I’d rolled on the futon with five Korean girls -- Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim, and Sally -- and an extremely lovely Japanese woman named Reiko. I’d “sown my wild oats,” to borrow that dated agrarian phrase, and was thinking that I was now ready to “settle down,” to employ another grandpa expression, with Peggy and our son Rip (born just before I shipped out to Korea), and “build a life” (the clichés just kept on rolling). Moreover, when I finally arrived in Richmond, I took one look at Peggy and fell in love with her all over again. Alas, the feelings were less than mutual.
The frigidity of my welcome would have inspired the hardiest Eskimo to huddle with the sled dogs. Peggy had been strewing some feral cereal of her own it seems, and was, in fact, pregnant with another man’s child. Deserved or not, the rejection ripped through my heart like a rusty can opener, wounding me so deeply that for years thereafter it would pop up like a jeering jack in my dreams.
You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.
Hmmm. That last sentence reminds me of my gallbladder.
In 2006, an ultrasound exam discovered enough stones in my gallbladder to pave a Zen walkway. A few weeks later, I had the rock-strewn organ removed. The surgery went well, but I was kept in the hospital overnight. I was also pumped full of happy juice. The drug’s identity I do not know, but with it singing in my veins, pushing my mental pedal to the metal, I was merrily awake all night long, during which time I wrote an entire self-help book in my head.
I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating. Hour after hour, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after chapter, I composed an entire self-help book. Toward dawn, I finally fell asleep, however, and when they woke me several hours later, the only part of the book I could recall was its title: How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner.
That’s correct: How to Lose Every Hand and Still Come Out a Winner. If only I could have remembered the accompanying text, there is no doubt whatsoever that the book would have sold twenty million copies and placed me in the company of mega-motivator Tony Robbins. Maybe that’s why I forgot it.
17
god bless bohemia
Upon returning from overseas in 1955, I stumbled into an America I had barely known existed, a country within a country; or more precisely, a state within a state; a state of being that is usually referred to as “bohemia,” although it has nothing to do with Czechoslovakia, and of which I have remained to this day a denizen. (“Citizen” is too licit a word, and anyway, when necessary I’ve managed to keep one foot in mainstream bourgeois society, which is to say, in enemy territory.)
Now, I’d checked out Greenwich Village in the months before my juvenile marriage, but the place had seemed more foreign to me then than Japan or Korea; and having no guide, no interpreter, no valid passport, nor even a proper frame of reference, I wasn’t merely an outsider, I was like a deaf man at the opera or a blind man at the circus. Ironically, it was my estranged wife who introduced me to what would in a few years be labeled (and often libeled) as the “counterculture.” A materialist Peggy might have been, but she was also a party girl, and in conservative Richmond it was the bohemian artists and intellectuals, genuine or fake, who hosted -- informally, of course -- the liveliest and most frequent soirees.
There’s an area of urban Richmond known as the Fan District, a charming neighborhood, by and large, and home to the largest concentration of artists and arty hangers-on between New York and New Orleans. (Of the Fan I’ll have more stories to tell later: I came to live there in 1957 after my discharge from the air force.) Peggy was taking lessons in ballroom dancing, and it was a gay dance instructor named Chubby, though he was as skinny as a chopstick, who initiated her into the Fan party scene. On my second night back, following my cross-country bus ride, Peggy let me tag along to a gathering at a painting studio. Within an hour, she’d disappeared, and I did not see her again that evening, but the sting of being abandoned was lessened considerably by my acute fascination with the odd new world into which I’d been dumped. It was bohemia, baby, and while I wasn’t exactly wonder-struck, I was undeniably captivated.
In Japan, I’d marveled at wood-block prints, but until that evening in Richmond, I’d seen modern paintings only in reproductions, and not many of those. A Hokusai print is exquisite in its draftsmanship and poignant in the way it penetrates and distills the very essence of nature, but such refinement can be drowned out by the sheer bravura of a big modern canvas, especially one upon which the paint is so fresh it’s sticky to the touch; and in that Fan studio I was surrounded by actual original paintings, some hanging, a couple half finished on easels, some propped against the walls. From
that night on, the mingled aroma of oil paint and turpentine, with its hint of mystery, its suggestion of activities unfolding outside the realm of normal expectations, has been an intoxicating perfume to me.
Furnished with three rickety wooden chairs and a stained sofa that had seen too much and forgotten too little, the studio’s main room, uncarpeted and spattered with paint of various hues, was the epicenter of the party. There, the motley-garbed guests -- not one in a military uniform or “conventional dress” à la W&L -- sipped beer and cheap red wine (marijuana would not infiltrate Richmond for another decade) while listening to an LP recording of a singer with a voice so wretched I thought it must be some kind of joke. (The singer’s name was Billie Holiday, and before my leave was up, having probably heard her a dozen more times, I was so completely crazy about her I’d purchased one of her albums, even though, like the shoplifter at W&L, I didn’t own a record player: for me, disorientation has all too often been the beginning of love.)
The party was only moderately noisy, although the buzz of otherwise serious conversation would periodically be interrupted by shouted non sequiturs, proclamations of a bizarre, surrealistic nature, followed by appreciative chuckling. Between the mad poetic outbursts, ideas were being tumbled like gemstones in a lapidary, discussion salted with names such as Freud, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Since in air force barracks guys talked mainly about cars, sports teams, and girlfriends -- in that order -- this dialogue was a refreshment to me, a tonic; and when I overheard Henry Miller mentioned, I jumped in with a few comments of my own.
Almost nobody else present had actually read Miller (the Grove Press paperback edition of Tropic of Cancer wouldn’t be published until 1961), and my firsthand observations made enough of an impression that when on the following evening, sans Peggy, I knocked on the studio door, I was recognized and admitted. Welcome to bohemia, Tommy Rotten.
