by Tom Robbins
In western Montana, as a setting sun turned a placid river into peach juice, we spotted a motel whose clean white cabins were advertised at four bucks a night. Needing a shower, needing to reconfigure our alignment of intimacy, needing to rest muscles sore from reclining on hard earth -- and figuring that with a big push we could reach Seattle by the following evening -- we splurged.
Scrubbed until we glistened like Liberace’s incisors, we approached the white cloud of a bed with an almost giddy combination of exhaustion and anticipation, feelings that intensified when we noticed that it was one of those newly fashionable “Magic Fingers” massage beds. Once activated by coins in a slot, such a bed would come to life, slowly undulating up and down, side to side, gently kneading the supine bodies of its occupant or occupants. Great! Wonderful! It was an unexpected answer to a couple of weary road warriors’ unspoken prayers.
Well, it might have been bad karma for running out on a lease, it might have been long-distance Puerto Rican Dutchman voodoo, it might have been just one more little joke on the part of the gods (we really shouldn’t begrudge them their fun), but our bed, which was supposed to jiggle for about twenty blissful minutes, got in a groove and wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop! It was as if the thing had been programmed by Bill Haley and Little Richard -- “shake, rattle, and roll” -- or James Bond’s favorite bartender.
After more than an hour of constant jiggling, massaged within an inch of our lives, we were at the point of bailing out and attempting to sleep on the floor (in retrospect, that junkyard turf didn’t seem so bad) when it finally occurred to our numb brains that the manic mechanical masseuse was an electrical device, and thus tethered to a power source. Like a rodeo rider dismounting a bronco, I tumbled off the mattress, crawled around on the floor until I found a cord, traced it to its plug, and disconnected it. The bed shuddered and fell idle. “Wahoo!” I shouted. By the time this cowboy was back in the sheets, Eileen was already asleep.
27
the letter
When had it begun, my fantasy of the golden letter? It was probably in my late teens or early twenties that I first became inexplicably possessed of the notion that one day the mailman would deliver a letter to my door that would dramatically alter my life. For the better, I should add: this conviction was in no way a premonition of misfortune or sorrow. In fact, in my daydream the letter was surrounded by a kind of golden aura.
It was sometime in 1966 that I opened my street-side mailbox to find an envelope with the words “Doubleday & Co.” in the return address. Hmmm? Was that a flicker of gold I detected? Impatient, a teeny bit atingle, I read its contents on my way up the stairs to my aforementioned apartment above the machine shop. A fellow named Luther Nichols and claiming to be the West Coast editor of the famed Doubleday publishing house had written to inform me that he would be in Seattle two weeks hence and wished to discuss with me the possibility of my writing a book. Had he been reading my mind?
Entering through the kitchen, where Eileen was making lunch, I held up the epistle. “I think this is it!” I said. She seemed puzzled. “The letter,” I said.
“What letter?”
“The letter.” I waved the document as though it were the paper flag of an impoverished but prideful country. “The letter.”
Eileen may be excused if she didn’t immediately share my excitement. Not everyone has an eye for golden auras.
A fortnight later, Luther Nichols and I met in the coffee shop of the Benjamin Franklin, long since demolished and replaced by the twin corncobs of the high-rise Westin. A lanky, distinguished-looking gentleman, Mr. Nichols ordered a cup of the hot beverage for which Seattle was not yet famous. I -- then, as now, clean and sober when it comes to Sunday-school-sanctioned addictive drugs like caffeine (Methodist meth) -- I opted for a dish of ice cream.
Following five or ten minutes of small talk, Nichols cut to the chase. Someone had been sending him (he was stationed in San Francisco) my columns -- Tom Robbins on the Arts -- from Seattle magazine, and he wanted me to consider writing for Doubleday a book about Northwest art. My disappointment was as hard to conceal as the bride’s belly at a shotgun wedding. If he had, indeed, been reading my mind, he needed new glasses.
“Uh,” I stammered, “I was, uh, hoping we could discuss me writing a, uh, novel.”
Now it was the editor’s turn to hide disappointment. How many times during a typical week was he subjected to some delusional hack pitching a novel for which he or she lacked the fortitude much less the talent to pull off. Nichols was a true gentleman, however, scrupulously polite, so he stretched a thin film of interest over his letdown, his ennui, and inquired (yawn) what my novel was about.
I didn’t hesitate. I spit it right out. “It’s about the mummified body of Jesus Christ, stolen from its secret hiding place in the catacombs under the Vatican, and its subsequent reappearance in a roadside zoo in the Pacific Northwest.”
The eyelids of Luther Nichols rolled upward with an almost audible force. His nose twitched, rather like the muzzle of a coyote that has caught the scent of jackrabbit. His spine stiffened. He pushed his coffee cup aside. “Tell me more,” he said, his interest now obviously genuine.
There was one small problem: I didn’t know any more. The Corpus Christi germ had infiltrated my brain back in New York, and gradually realizing then that developing it into a novel (answering at last the call I’d been hearing since literally the age of five) was where my true bliss lay, well, that’s why I’d not been loath to abandon the diligently researched dual biography of Soutine and Pollock. Alas, for one reason or another, I’d yet to attend to that development, not even in my musings. So, I didn’t know any more, no more than what I’d just blurted out. Nichols looked so expectant, so eager, however -- and realizing that this was the opportunity the long-awaited golden letter had finally arrived to present -- I commenced to improvise a plot on the spot.
It was helter skelter and definitely unorthodox, but my impromptu synopsis (from which I would ultimately deviate considerably) held the editor’s attention, and when I’d concluded my monologue, he asked, “When can I see it?”
“Well,” I said, crossing my fingers, “it’s still a bit rough.”
We separated with me promising to send Nichols the manuscript as soon as I could make it presentable. And that afternoon I sat Eileen down and announced as solemnly as if I were claiming responsibility for the telltale bulge in the bride’s white gown, “I have to write a novel.”
28
distractions
Despite the impetus -- the interest of a major publishing house -- some months were to pass before I began writing the book. To award it the full focus that any good novel demands, I had to extricate myself from both Seattle’s art scene and its blossoming psychedelic culture, areas in which I’d become increasingly enmeshed since returning from New York. Superficially at least, the two did not seem to overlap and they were never to really merge, but on a deeper level, each -- modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments -- offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe, a perpetually endangered species kept alive -- and occasionally driven quite mad -- by its capacity to love.
But let’s take care not to lose objectivity in a spasm of genuflection or shower of rose petals. Mediocrity is the standard rather than the exception among practicing artists (Sturgeon’s rule: 90 percent of everything is shit), and for the past hundred years art has been increasingly more about money and ego than truth and revelation. The periodic discovery, however, of a peach-size diamond in the dung heap of commerce was enough to keep one digging, never mind the fecal matter that accumulated beneath one’s nails.
As for psychedelics, too many of the sacraments were contaminated or counterfeit, too many of the imbibers intellectually and spiritually unprepared to learn from or even recognize
the gods unmasked in their presence. Still, there were sufficient bolts of wonder to light up anyone’s personal sky, provided one kept his blinds open or didn’t run for cover at the first clap of thunder. (Mainstream media were staffed by copious coops of Chicken Littles, while the police state spun paranoia the way Granny Robbins spun wool.)
In any case, I allowed myself to be distracted from what I secretly knew, had always known, to be my true mission in life, dancing instead to the music of the zeitgeist. And what music, literally and figuratively, it was! From the Beatles to the antiwar movement, from Jefferson Airplane to the swelling tide of feminism, anthems of joy and revolution rang.
I reviewed art for several publications in Seattle and beyond, wrote essays included in museum catalogs, organized gallery exhibitions, contributed to shows (under the pseudonym “Max Saint Cherokee”) several assemblages of my own making, and was a ringleader in a boisterous neo-Dada gang of guerrilla artists, the Shazam Society, whose raison d’être was to disrupt and poke fun at those uptight elements of the Seattle art community that took itself far too seriously for art’s own good. I also participated in “trip festivals” (celebrations of the more external manifestations of the psychedelic experience) for which I created “happenings” (later known as “performance art,” an easy, self-indulgent medium that has continued to attract supremely untalented practitioners) with quaint ironic titles such a “Mommy/Daddy/Bow Wow/I Love You.”
The happening, bastard baby of Mr. Visual Art and Miss Theater, and by no means a by-product of the psychedelic revolution, can trace its origins, under different names, back to Picasso’s Paris in the 1920s. It was reborn, though for years only dedicated avant-gardists heard its squalls, in New York in the late fifties, when serious artists such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine pushed Pollock’s “action painting” to its extreme by eliminating the canvas altogether, moving the action off the wall and off the pedestal, out into the “real” and live space of the room.
By 1966, Seattle’s culturati were aware of the hybrid medium, but few had witnessed an example firsthand, so when the owner of Current Editions, a first-rate print gallery, decided to commission a happening for the entertainment and education of her well-heeled patrons, she turned to me. All too happy to oblige, I created a piece I called “Money Is Stronger Than Dirt.” Modest, if sarcastic and satirical in scope, its central element was an amateur banjo picker in blackface and full Uncle Sam costume complete with patriotic top hat. As, seated on a short wooden stool, our personified national symbol picked and sang -- in a voice that sounded as if it had been run over more than once by farm equipment -- corny old folk ballads, a quintet of Shazam Society artists knelt on the floor at his feet cutting one- and five-dollar bills into bits and dropping the scraps into a glass salad bowl. Did I mention that the theme was sarcastic? The staging modest?
After a half hour or so of this, the audience grew restless, as I’d expected it would, but none more discontent than I. I mean, if the spectators were waiting for something to happen, they were not alone. My pièce de résistance was failing to materialize. Literally. It rested, you see, on the shoulders of a young man I knew who’d recently taken a job selling vacuum cleaners door to door in the area around La Conner. The machine Bruce was peddling boasted a shampoo feature which, if its tank was filled to capacity, generated an amazingly voluminous amount of foam. My intent was that at some point, on cue, Bruce would stride out of the storage room in his salesman suit, launch into his pitch, set up his machine, aim its shampoo nozzle and completely engulf Uncle Sam and the money shredders (of which I was one) in a mini-mountain of suds. That was to be the grand finale. By showtime, however, Bruce had yet to show up at the gallery.
It was no problem to start without him, but as time passed and I waited in vain for some signal that he’d arrived, I commenced to fret. Eventually, I left the tableau and went to the storage room to check on him. No Bruce. Ten minutes later, I checked again, wondering if he might be hiding in there, experiencing a bout of stage fright. No Bruce. My anxiety was starting to inch over the panic threshold.
To bide time, and to relieve the awkwardness, the monotony, I found matches and ceremoniously lit on fire the scraps of money in the bowl. The torn bills flared and smoked. The gallery owner looked worried. Welcome to the club. For entirely different reasons, my own brow was so furrowed I could have screwed a hat on. “Money Is Stronger Than Dirt” was experiencing a kind of aesthetic erectile dysfunction for which a Viagra had yet to be invented.
Time passed. Uncle Sam was now on his third raspy rendition of “Oh! Susanna,” one of the few tunes in his repertoire. So stressed I could barely breathe, I finally rushed downstairs to the street and searched -- in vain -- for Bruce’s van. Arrgh! My impulse was to beat it to my own car and drive away. I felt the need to go home. Or, maybe to Alaska for a month or two, stopping by La Conner on the way to throw a Rotten egg at Bruce Wyman. (Bruce, I was later to learn, had encountered difficulty navigating the streets of Seattle. A small-town lad, he’d become lost in the labyrinth around Pioneer Square. He never did make it to the gallery.)
Reluctantly, I gathered what remained of my integrity and set about to face a roomful of bored, confused, and probably seething art lovers. On my way upstairs, I had a sudden and entirely desperate inspiration. Back in the gallery, where Uncle Sam was playing “Froggie Went A-Courtin’ ” for the third or fourth time, I stopped at the refreshment table and grabbed the plastic squeeze bottle of honey (a tea sweetener) I’d seen there. Resuming then my place at the feet of the great American icon, and smiling as if nothing was amiss, as if this was just the way things happened at a happening -- and too bad for any philistine who wasn’t hip enough to dig it -- I proceeded to squirt honey onto the burned currency in the salad bowl. Next, I scooped up a handful of the now-sticky ashes, stuffing them into my mouth while nodding to the confederates beside me to follow suit. Slowly, one by one, shooting me incredulous glances, they joined in. We ate the money. We just ate it all up. The audience -- presumably unhappily -- got the point. And that was that.
Or, almost. The following night, the conservative commentator on a local TV station devoted his entire on-air editorial to berating me and Shazam, accusing us of a shameful, unpatriotic act every bit as seditious as burning an American flag, suggesting that the scruffy lot of us should face criminal charges for insulting and destroying the currency of the realm.
We were not arrested. And several weeks later, I was commissioned to create a happening at an art center in an affluent Seattle suburb. One more example, I guess, of how nothing sells like controversy.
On August 20, 1966, “A Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice to the Goddess Minnie Mouse” was presented at the Kirkland Arts Center, the opening event of the town’s annual summer arts festival. To prepare the prospective audience, and to ensure that I didn’t find myself in a situation that might prove as stressful, as embarrassing, as the subversive dude at Current Editions, I included the following disclaimer on the flyer that was circulated to announce the event: “It is not the purpose of this happening to be comic, tragic, satirical, political, social, provocative, poetic, charming, enlightening, artistic, entertaining or even interesting. This happening has one purpose only: to happen.”
Well, it happened all right. And while I can’t claim it did prove artistic or entertaining, it was evidently provocative. It also -- from my perspective, at least -- got rather interesting. Especially after the cops came.
I fear I cannot take full credit for the police raid. The event got out of hand, true enough, but only because its sponsors had swallowed whole the misconception that a happening was supposed to be some kind of audience participation affair, and in publicity and at the door had, unbeknownst to me, encouraged spectators to become physically involved in the performance. I’d designed the “Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice” as a considerably more elaborate and nuanced presentation than “Stronger Than Dirt,” had recruited and rehearsed more than a dozen Shazam
Society members (along with an erotic dancer from Seattle’s leading go-go club), and carefully orchestrated the whole show so that it would for all of its unruly appearance unfold in a theatrical procession that even Chekhov could have understood, if not wholeheartedly endorsed. Alas . . .
I’d made a tape loop of Joni James singing “I’m in the Mood for Love,” and as the song played over and over, over and over, my dancer was to periodically deliver, in succession, huge trays of fruit, vegetables, and whole raw fish to the assembled Shazamers, posed formally as if for a group portrait and heavily armed with art supplies. Each participant would select a food item, and eat it or decorate it or both as he or she saw fit. (By the way, each time my dancer emerged from the wings she was to have discarded some of her clothing, and she was hardly overdressed to begin with.)
This business had been under way scarcely ten minutes before spectators, apparently signaled by the well-meaning festival director, began lobbing old wooden printing-press type (thoughtfully supplied by the clueless sponsors) at us. Insulted, one of my performers hurled a turnip in retaliation. Taking this as its cue, most of the audience left its seats and merrily stormed the stage. Alas. It was at that point that my happening became a melee.
No punches were exchanged, no bones broken, but chaos reigned, paint and produce filled the air, and the dry-cleaning bills must have been staggering. At one point I encountered the festival director, the attractive wife of a Seattle surgeon, who was wandering about in the fracas, a dazed and helpless expression on her face. Spattered with green paint, her coif undone, she just kept muttering, “Somebody put a fish down my blouse, somebody put a fish down my blouse.” And all the while, Joni James kept singing “I’m in the Mood for Love.”