Without apparent guilt or shame, supermarkets from coast to coast regularly post signs reading VINE RIPENED TOMATOES atop produce bins piled high with tomatoes that have never ever experienced the joys of ripening; that, in fact, are hard, usually more pink than red, often streaked with yellow, orange, or even green; and when cut open will reveal pectin deposits of ghostly white. Back when one of those babies last saw a vine, it might have passed for the viridescent apple of Granny Smith’s eye. Merchants who through ignorance, indifference, or outright chicanery untruthfully promise “vine-ripened tomatoes” could and should be prosecuted under truth-in-advertising laws.
Erica Jong is a lusty woman. I can no more believe that she would advise poets to take up residence in some weak, pink, corporate tomato than I, when I opened Jitterbug Perfume with the line “The beet is the most intense of vegetables,” intended for readers to think of any but the reddest of beets. Being a root vegetable, beets aren’t subject to issues of ripening, of course, but still, a yellow beet?! Fie on that craven, that fool’s gold, that ditzy blonde, that impostor, that stand-in (but never stunt double: if you doubt that red beets do their own stunts, check your toilet bowl the morning after). For intensity, one wants a red beet. For delectability, one wants a tomato, authentically ripe. Apparently, both can be inspirational.
11
sticks of wonder
By the time I was ten months old, I was both walking and talking. Scarcely taller than a bowling pin, as fair of hair as one of those Aryan tots with whom Hitler and his henchmen loved to pose, clad only in diapers or rompers, I must have cut quite a figure toddling down Blowing Rock’s main street beside my mother. Looks, however, weren’t the whole of it. Shopkeepers, amused loafers, and other citizens would often fork over pieces of penny candy or even an occasional Popsicle to hear this ambulatory baby speak in complete, if short, sentences. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone that Mother might have been a ventriloquist.
If I was performing like a trained seal, it didn’t bother Mother (blinded, perhaps, by her pride in my precocity), and if it twisted my psyche in some lasting way, I’ve managed to mostly compensate. What it did do was to instill in me at a very early age the knowledge that words have worth, have power; that language can command rewards. And Freud might argue that that was enough to set my course as a writer.
Not so fast, Uncle Sigmund. While the favorable response to my surprisingly articulate jabber could very well have planted the seed from which whole narratives would in a few short years be sprouting -- verbal displays that may indeed have leaned toward attention and approval the way a potted geranium leans toward the sun -- there are also completely private acts of literary creation that seek no audience, deny appreciation, are meant never to be read or heard; and these are not so handily explained. Consider, for example, my “talking stick.”
Although this activity began sporadically a year or two earlier, and continued in an abbreviated, more surreptitious fashion for a year or two thereafter, its golden age was my time in Warsaw, roughly between the ages of eleven and sixteen. It involved me making up stories and telling them to myself while I beat the ground with a long stick.
I’d pace, sometimes back and forth, sometimes in circles, speaking all the while in a low voice, or more usually only mouthing the words, but “writing” scenes in my head and tapping them into being. There was nothing especially outlandish about the stories themselves: tales set in jungles and circuses, foreign spy adventures, sports stories (I created a baseball hero named Tex Halo, a quarterback called Skyrocket McNocket), the kind of fantasizing or daydreaming one might expect from a small-town boy. The oddity was in the execution and its persistence -- although it did occur somewhat less frequently after I began dating and playing basketball.
What must poor Mother and Daddy have thought?! Due to the location of our house, it was fairly easy to conceal my stick sessions from neighbors and the street, but from the kitchen window or the back porch my parents had a clear view of their only son talking to himself for hours on end while attacking the earth with a rough length of sapling. Moreover, there were large patches of bare ground here and there where enthusiastic literary composition had annihilated the grass. I was hell on lawns.
I’ve no idea with what concern, consternation, or wringing of hands they might have discussed my behavior when alone, but to their credit (or was it?) my folks never once ridiculed me, tried to dissuade me, or (to the best of my knowledge) consulted a child psychologist. Neither, however, did they blindly ignore the activity or try to pretend it didn’t exist. Rather, they spoke openly about it, casually referring to it from time to time, calling it “Tommy’s talking stick” -- their term, not mine -- as if it were a quirk they found interesting, perhaps peculiar, but not disturbing.
Imagine my surprise when, some fifty years later, as I was inattentively listening to a program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (my focus was on dinner), I overheard the words “talking stick.” Startled, I cranked up the sound on the radio. Among certain native tribes in Canada, I soon learned, the tribal storyteller traditionally carried a rod called a “talking stick” with which he beat out cadence as he recited his yarns.
Aha! That was it! What I had been doing as a boy was drumming, creating a rhythm for my interior monologues. That could explain why, in my adult writing, in my novels and essays, I’ve always paid special attention to the rhythm of my sentences, realizing instinctively that people read with their ears as well as their eyes. And now I could at last speak openly, even with a modicum of shy pride, about my eccentric past.
What remains unexplained is why I was moved to intentionally, consistently, secretly (God help me if my peers had found me out!) create those insubstantial narratives in the first place. Putting pencil to paper can be tedious, especially for a youngster, so I may have just hit upon a more active, energetic way to escape boredom while satisfying the commands of an excessive imagination. No matter how drab everyday existence, the talking stick allowed me to actively participate in another, more exciting, reality. In a sense, the talking stick was a joy stick; I had invented my own video game, played according to my own rules, decades before the interactive pixel was as much as a twinkle in some nerd’s eye.
In the late 1960s, my girlfriend and I watched a Fellini movie in which the phrase “a life of enchantment” appeared in the English subtitles. Afterward, over beers, Eileen announced that her intention henceforth was to live just such a life, whatever that meant exactly: in the whimsical sixties, goals of that sort were generally taken in stride. In any case, it occurs to me now that “a life of enchantment” was pretty much the very life I, stick in hand, had begun to make for myself as a boy.
Incidentally, you may be relieved to know, when I went away to college I left sticks behind. That era of my life was over. Well, almost. Certainly not a single blade of grass on the campus of Washington and Lee University ever lost its life in the service of my creative imagination. However, there were more than a few times when writing a term paper or an article for the W&L newspaper that I would become so excited in the throes of composition that I’d pace my dorm room while beating on the mattress with a coat hanger. Fortunately, I roomed alone.
12
flames of fortune
For obvious reasons, no talking stick had accompanied me to Hargrave Military Academy either, which is lucky for the stick considering the fate of the items I did bring along. Before describing that fate, in all of its drama, I should probably explain what I was doing at a military prep school in the first place.
The reason is quite simple: like many if not most of the other cadets at Hargrave, I was sent there because I hadn’t distinguished myself in public high school or, rather, had distinguished myself for activities that parents and college admissions offices tend to deem less than desirable.
Commercially, administratively, Warsaw served an assortment of farmers and fishermen, every one of whom resided in the countryside or along the river some miles from
town. Warsaw High School served their children, the majority of whom were bused in and out, although it also provided an approximation of education for an assortment of townies, of whom I was one. There were thirty-five seniors (all white, of course) in my graduating class, to give you an idea of the school’s size; and of that number, I alone was to earn a college degree, to give you an idea of its academic thunder, although a more revealing fact, perhaps, is that most of Warsaw’s teachers hadn’t earned degrees either. We were mostly taught by women with but two years of college; women, in some cases, barely older than their pupils -- a proximity not particularly helpful when it came to maintaining order in the classroom.
Serious discipline was left to the principal (a cutup such as I wore a virtual path to his office), while punishment doled out by teachers was usually limited to assigning extra homework or making a guilty pupil stay after school. The latter justice could only be dispensed to townies, however, because the other pupils, the majority, had buses to catch, and it was not especially feared by us town boys due to the fact that the teacher with whom we would be privately sequestered was likely to be nubile and cute. Teenage boys notice such things.
Having one’s face slapped by a teacher was quite rare, but it happened to me in Warsaw as it had, the reader may recall, in Kilmarnock. What offense, what outburst of sass, I committed to inspire this particular corporal retribution I cannot remember, though I’ll never forget the aftermath.
Miss Snowden, the history teacher, was probably twenty-four or twenty-five, making her somewhat senior to her associates, though scarcely less attractive: a tall, willowy blonde, whose nickname, we kids somehow discovered and never forgot, was “Choogie.” At any rate, I’d just entertained the class with an egregiously inappropriate bon mot at a disruptively inappropriate moment when Miss Snowden choogied over to my desk and . . . swack! -- let me have it, slapping me with such force that the ringing in my ears might have called whole populations of the faithful to prayer. She also ordered me to remain after school, a rather severe penalty on this fine spring afternoon when our baseball team (never my sport, baseball) was about to play for a conference championship.
The actual bell rang, students scurried out, some to the bus lot, others to the ball field at the far end of campus. Miss Snowden approached the desk where I sat both cautiously defiant and genuinely contrite: I liked Choogie and lacked the sophistication to try to justify my behavior on the grounds that the comedy that really matters in this world is always inappropriate. For a while she just stood there, looming over me in silence. I’d no idea what she was thinking, but I was thinking that if she slapped me again I was going to tell her about Reggie Sulley.
Reggie Sulley was a punk, a crude, cruel, smirky, dishonest creep (and here in the interest of full disclosure I should report that he and I played the same position on the basketball team, competing with mutual hostility for playing time). It so happened that Sulley and I were also among a small number of students in an unsupervised study period that convened each morning in what was Miss Snowden’s homeroom. Like a few teachers and many pupils, Miss Snowden customarily brought her lunch to school in a brown bag. She left the bag on her desk. Well, one day Sulley, in front of the dozen or so study-hall attendees, opened the bag, unwrapped a sandwich, unzipped his fly, and rubbed his penis all over the bread before returning the sandwich to the bag. So stunned were we, boys as well as girls, by the act’s audacity, not to mention its perversity, that we never reported it and discussed it only in whispers. Word spread, however, and during lunch period that day Miss Snowden’s homeroom was unusually crowded, every eye squeamishly fixed on the teacher as she innocently munched her desecrated tuna-on-rye.
Thankfully, Choogie Snowden did not tempt me to spill those sick beans. Instead of a second slap, she, after staring me down for a while, smiled, shook her blond head, and said something to the effect of “Tommy, you are a piece of work.” Then she moved to the door, gesturing for me to follow. That door, near the very front of the school, opened on a long, dimly lit, now-empty hallway that ran the length of the building. Without a word, Miss Snowden inexplicably took my hand. Took my hand! In hers! And hand in hand, like lovers strolling the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we slowly walked the whole length of that hall, at the end of which she pulled away, shooing me outside into sunlight and the noise of the distant ball game.
Let me emphasize that there was nothing the least bit sexual, nothing untoward at all about the incident, yet it was definitely, in its odd way, romantic. It was tender. It was intimate. It was sweet. It was a mingling, however subtle, however cross-generational, of male/female energies. And whatever its intent, if any, it was effective, because for the rest of that school year the angels’ own butter would not have melted in my mouth, so quiet was I in Miss Snowden’s class, so respectful, so appropriately appropriate.
News of my slapped face failed to reach Mother and Daddy, and I never told a single soul, not even my best friend, about the poignant, dreamlike hall-walk with Miss Snowden (it would have felt like a betrayal). However, the negative reviews of my deportment on monthly report cards (a foreshadowing of critiques from the more small-minded members of the literary establishment?), along with the glad tidings (delivered at a PTA meeting) that in the annual popularity poll my schoolmates had voted me “Most Mischievous Boy,” caused the parental unit to wonder if a “talking stick” mightn’t be the least of reasons for concern about the future of Tommy Rotten. Then, there was the great academic flip-flop of 1948.
At the end of the first semester of my junior year, I bore home a report card resplendent with straight A’s: an A (a vowel black in color, according to Arthur Rimbaud) in every subject including algebra. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the report card to its destination without word of its contents being leaked to the crowd of townies in whose company I walked home every day. With scummy Reggie Sulley and tough Lester Scott leading the Greek chorus, I was mocked all the way down the street. They literally jeered me. Even inside the B&B poolroom (an obligatory stop, boys only, after school), the ridicule continued. I was made to feel a sissy, a sycophant, a sellout, an outsider unfit for the company of my proudly anti-intellectual pals.
In truth, I hadn’t even studied particularly hard to earn those A’s. Well, never mind, I’d show them! I’d set new standards for goofing off. And second semester I flunked every subject including English. Straight F’s. For the year, this averaged out to an aggregate C, which meant that I’d passed the grade and hadn’t completely torpedoed any chance of college admission, but finding a minimum of cheer in that, and even less in my having regained my status as a good ol’ Warsaw boy, Mother and Daddy began to think seriously about military school.
“The men in the Robbins family mature slowly,” my mother said once, referring not only to me but my father and his father -- and she did not mean it as a compliment. Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child. That said, considering Mother’s views on the subject, considering her critique of the Robbins male, her choice of Hargrave Military Academy as a suitable repository for yours truly made perfect sense. Hargrave’s motto (in those more innocent times) was “Making Men Not Money.”
I’d graduated from Warsaw High at age sixteen, looking -- and at times acting -- several years younger. I was a virgin, my success with girls having peaked about a decade earlier back in Blowing Rock; but was no stranger to alcohol, having already discovered the joys, though not yet the perils, of frescoing one’s tonsils with the cardinal brush. For some time, I’d been writing a fairly mature sports column for The Northern Neck News, a weekly paper serving four Virginia counties, but my abilities as a scribe could not conceal the fact that overall, I presented a measure of challenging grist for the Hargrave Military Academy man-making mill.
Hargrave sat on a hill overlooking the pr
etty little town of Chatham, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, about a hundred miles from Warsaw. Across a valley, on the other side of Chatham, atop a hill directly opposite Hargrave, sat Chatham Hall, a high-toned private school for “problem girls” (or so it was alleged) from privileged families. Equally keen on deportment, the two schools were separated by more than terrain. Fraternization of any kind between Hargrave and Chatham Hall students was strictly, absolutely forbidden.
Cadets presumed to know the nature of the girls’ “problem” and fantasized endlessly about exploiting and contributing to it. For their part, the girls surely thought the cadets romantic figures in their dashing uniforms, with their military bearing (so unlike the slouching slobs back home), and air of prospective danger (this even though the rifles we carried, each and every one, had had their firing pins securely removed). The vectors of adolescent sexual longing that crisscrossed that valley must have been so strong, so thick that it’s a wonder any bird could fly through it.
The rule was unwritten, unspoken, yet every cadet was aware that to be caught on the Chatham Hall campus was grounds for immediate expulsion. Hormones are stronger than rules, however, and the powerful allure of forbidden fruit has been documented everywhere from Greek myth to hillbilly jukebox, from grand opera to soap opera, from romance comic books to the Book of Genesis. So, each spring, when the sweet silky air was practically a-wiggle with pheromones, when a young man’s fancies turn to thoughts of stolen kisses and damp panties, a couple of cadets would sneak onto the greening lawns of that quasi-convent across the valley. Most of the time they escaped detection and retribution, though their forays predictably produced no verifiably amorous results. Then there was the case of Stu Seaworth.