Dear Tom Robbins

a love letter

Dear Tom Robbins (may I call you Tommy Rotten?),

Inhale.

Exhale.

You died last month, Tom.

I heard the story on NPR while I was driving out of my neighborhood. I stopped and pulled over. It’s not the shock of your death, exactly, that knocked the wind out of me. You were 92 years old, after all. It’s that, in that moment (not the moment of your death but the moment of my experiencing it), I felt you split apart, explode with a POOF into a cloud of feathers, or maybe with a BOOM into fireworks, or with a symphony into floating flower petals, or with complete silence into swirling particles. I felt you leave in a river raft on the rapidly-escaping streams of my tears. I felt you go. I felt you go from being a man who touched pen to yellow legal pad, a man with a body and a wife and literary agent and a car, who lived out his madcap retirement in La Conner, Washington, to being a… a something that is everywhere now.

You went. You’re gone. You went wherever Bonanza Jellybean and The Chink went. You went wherever Alobar finally went at the end of his incredible thousand-year, beet-and-jasmine scented life. The fundamental makeup of this place is different without you here, and I mourn. My face scrunches up and I sob.

It’s not exactly that I needed you to stay. Because for all of my own personal intents and purposes, you are still here, of course. Despite my questionable attempt to stalk you that one time in La Conner, I have never laid eyes upon you in person, never spoken to you. I never even wrote you a fan letter; this is my first time contacting you. I definitely was not one of those babes on your book tour for Cowgirls who had you sign their breasts instead of their books. I wish.

I have the full Tom Robbins bibliography on my bookshelf (minus your countless periodical pieces but including Wild Ducks Flying Backward, which is a selection of those), and I turn to it whenever I need it, and I still can, even though you have finally lifted off to that great bookstore-brothel-movie theater in the sky. Your giant aluminum turkey has ridden off into the sunset. The seventh veil is down.

It’s more that, as long as you were alive, you were still churning out magic. You were still spewing crazy wisdom. You were in your eighties when you published your memoir, and I had no good reason, really, to believe there mightn't be one more book before you left us to turn into the pure light that weaves the universe together.

Is it that? No. Not really. Not really because in your eight novels and one memoir and one short writings collection and one children’s book about beer, you’ve given me sustenance. Asking for more would be greed, honestly. It’s not that I need more.

What is it, then? Is it that I never will run into you now? We’ll never grab a cup of coffee, or mug of beer, or vial of mercurochrome, or finger of Al Pacino’s cologne together? I’ll never tell you that your imagination makes me laugh and cry and snuggle into it with a familiarity that has felt like home since my first reading of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas in 1999? Is it that I’ll never hear what comes out of your mouth or pen when faced with me (*stands up taller*), a fierce and adventurous take-no-shit woman who studied science and believes in faeries and fancies herself a heroine not unlike the ones you wrote? Is it that I’ll never get to marry you, which I’ve threatened to do every time I’ve read your work, never mind the facts that (1) you’re almost half a century my senior, (2) you’re quite married already, and (3) I don’t really believe in marriage?

Maybe. Maybe it’s that I wasted my chance to thank you. Your work has touched me like nothing else, ever.

Your books have held the most prime real estate on every bookshelf I’ve had: in Florida, Hawaii, South Carolina, Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin. In my tent on Kapou island, a tiny 3.5-mile-circumfrence island, a thousand miles from the nearest hospital, where I lived for a couple of summers, a volume or two of your work sat on my makeshift bookshelf made out of a marine debris fishing tote.

When I read Frog Pajamas, my first of your books, I felt I had found in your work such a treasure as must be savored, not hastily consumed, even though the urge was there. I wanted to devour the whole collection like a pig at the trough, but I wisely predicted that if I did that, I’d get through them all and be very sad to be finished. So I vowed to only read one of your books per year, to sip slowly. Linger. Revel. Marvel. I stuck to my vow, and thank goodness you published a few more after I started reading them. When I got through them all, I started over.

Each one of your stories is a cornucopia of fanciful language and unexpected imagery. Each one takes the most meandering, sensual, awe-inspiring scenic route to a profound truth about the way the world works. Each one makes me say aloud, “Yes, exactly!” Each one makes tears spring into my eyes. I giggle, snicker, and snort through every page. I read your paragraphs (packed to the brim with $25 sentences) aloud to anyone who will listen.

Once, over a decade ago, I was at an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with aerial and fire dancers. I was chatting with a friend about the show, something about a goat. I said, “…but no ordinary goat, more of a…” and a man I’d never met strolled right into the conversation, interrupted me and said, “more of a Tom Robbins kind of goat?” My response was something along the lines of, “Yes! Also excuse me, did you, a handsome stranger, just walk up to me and cold open with a TOM ROBBINS REFERENCE? Will you marry me?” [We did not marry, but what ensued was easily one of the sexiest trysts of my life so far.]

Forgive me for quoting you back to you, Tommy, but it turns out that there are folks reading this who haven’t yet read you. I feel compelled to give them the lightest sprinkle of your work:

“It was a bird-chirpy morning in early May. Sunshine elbowed through the stained-glass windows of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve. Sweet smells rose stiffly from the fields outside and unfurled above the cafe like banners. Random notes of cheerfulness sailed through the air like paper airplanes. One landed in the steam pot among a logjam of sausages. Ziller brushed it aside and went on with his cooking. Another crashed into Amanda’s hair. She removed the wreckage tenderly and deposited it inside her blouse between her sun-warmed tits. She hummed as she swabbed the L-shaped counter. The front door was ajar and she could see (across the Freeway) rhinestones glittering on the rain-swollen wrists of the slough. Indians of the Northwest used to sprinkle tiny flakes of mica over their well-greased bodies so that they would sparkle in the firelight. This May morning was such a dance.” -Another Roadside Attraction

“The sky was as tattered as a Gypsy’s pajamas. Through knife holes in the flannel overcast, July sunlight spilled, causing Sissy’s eyes to blink when she stepped outside the long, dark corridors of O’Dwyre VA Hospital. The air was so humid, she felt orchids growing in her armpits.” -Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Smelt-nibbled, duck-dotted, rain-swept, and muse-blessed, La Conner, Washington is a collection of frontier north-to-Alaska false fronted stores (interiorly gentrified but externally little changed since the 1890s); most of which are perched over water on pilings, the buildings looking a bit rickety and forlorn in the mist, yet echoing a certain boldness of spirit they seem to share with the gulls that attend them the way bees buzz about a hive.” -Tibetan Peach Pie

“It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.” -Skinny Legs and All

“October lies on the Skagit like a wet rag on a salad. Trapped beneath low clouds, the valley is damp and green and full of sad memories. The people of the valley have far less to be unhappy about than many who live elsewhere in America, but, still, an aboriginal sadness clings like the dew to their region; their land has a blurry beauty (as if the Creator started to erase it but had second thoughts), it has dignity, fertility and hints of inner meaning - but nothing can seem to make it laugh.” - Another Roadside Attraction

“If charm were a bathtub, Richmond could have floated a hundred rubber duckies and still had room for half the Royal Navy…with its high-tea manners and grits-and-sorghum hospitality; with its cautiously frisky, intoxicating springs; and its horsey, gilt-edged falls, Richmond was a study in slowly barbecued, lightly salted grace. Ah, but a big front has a big back, and Richmond had a dark side wider and muddier than the James River that cuts through the city with a bourbon track.” -Tibetan Peach Pie

“On the list of the world's greatest inventions, the mirror is surprisingly high. As invention goes, the genesis of mirrors didn't exactly require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond-surface, made portable and refined. Yet, because it is consulted with such frequency and anticipation by the three billion souls who animate our ball of clay, consulted almost as if it were a powerful deity that can grant favors or take them away; because, whereas most matter absorbs light, the mirror returns light to the world (it arrests light but does not book it, releasing it on its own recognizance); because it also returns, however briefly and superficially, the individual identity that people are prone to surrender to the orthodoxy of the state and its stern gods; because it never fails to provide us with someone to love and someone to hate; the mirror, on the list of great inventions, is rated higher than the thermos bottle, though not quite as high as room service.” -Skinny Legs and All

“I simply glimpsed the stupid little packs of inferior soy sauce sitting at the divine feet of the Buddha and suddenly felt giddy, felt in instant total harmony with that Indian swami who defined life as “the beautiful joke that is always happening.” The roof had been blown off of the cellblock of consensual reality and I was escaping, climbing toward the stars, trailing tatters of abandoned orthodoxy, surfing a tide of higher wisdom that is forever off-limits to the sober and the prudent. Figuratively speaking, obviously. I hadn’t spilled a drop of my Pepsi.” -Tibetan Peach Pie

And my most favorite passage, the one that said what I’d been trying to be heard saying, the one I maybe would have written one day if you hadn’t beaten me to it:

“Suppose you awoke one morning with the uneasy feeling that the world had, while you slept, somehow slipped a-tilt and rose to find that your dresser drawers were mysteriously open a fraction of an inch and that prescription bottles had tipped over in the medicine cabinet (although neither you nor anyone else in your household had ventured since bedtime to get an aspirin, a condom or a Tums) and that pictures on the wall, shades on the lamps and books in the case were askew. Outdoors, the taller buildings were posing à la Pisa, or, should you live in the country, streams were running slightly outside their grooves as fruits dropped like gargoyle ganglia from the uniformly leaning trees. What would be your reaction to such a phenomenon? Honestly, now, and seriously, too. How would you feel? Would you be scared? Confused? Puzzled and anxious? Would you telephone the police?

“Would you pray? Or would you numbly await an explanation, refusing to attempt to analyze the event or even to experience it with your full emotions until you had read the papers, tuned in the news, heard how experts from the universities were explaining the tilt, learned how the Pentagon planned to deal with it, were reassured by the President, who might insist, as Presidents will, that nothing really nothing had gone wrong? Or instead of fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or in addition to fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or instead of a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, or in addition to a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, do you imagine that a bright trace of delight, unnamable and indefensible, might tickle your spine; could you feel in an odd way elated, perhaps, because, in a rational world where even disasters are familiar and damn near routine, something of almost fairytale flavor had occurred?” -Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

You took the pieces of life that are absolutely paisley with indescribability and you described them. You took nebulous wonders that have danced around my own brain without quite sitting still long enough for me to assign words to them, but which danced so beautifully that I had long and deeply loved them, and you cemented them to the page. You pinned them down like butterflies, like photographs, like songs, like prayers, so they’d never fly out of reach again. You packaged them and served them to me, and to others like me, and to others still who perhaps hadn’t yet experienced the magic for themselves, but now they would know what to look for as they set off on their own fresh new journeys. What an immeasurable gift. What a singular purpose. What a shining legacy.

In a time when so many of our favorite authors and luminaries are turning out to be monsters, you lived and died my hero. Thank you, not only for the jewels that are your stories, but for being an outstanding human being. I’ve learned, all too painfully, that a writer can write beautiful things and still be a very ugly person.

Thank you for being an antiracist activist. You’re a straight white guy who was born in the 30s. You used your privilege for good. While attending Richmond Professional Institute, you received your only C in a straight-A record because of your subversive determination to sneak integrationist messages into the student newspaper. You taught clandestine geography classes to young black students in church basements in 1961 when the public schools (both black and white) in a neighboring county chose to shut down rather than integrate. At your newspaper job at that same time, your actual office nickname was “N***** Lover” because of your radical views for that time.

Thank you for being such a clear feminist that for years, Cowgirls was the only novel by a male author in some feminist bookstores.

Thank you for your unwavering celebration of diversity, global cultures, weirdos, queers, freaks, hippies, and nerds like me.

I went into this letter with a mind to eulogize you in the style of you, Tom, to write my own $25 sentences. I waited till the moment was right. I gathered up as many of your books as I could fit into my bag and took to the coffee shop. I posted up in a big leather chair with a vat of a latte laced with cinnamon and honey.

I soaked in a warm tub of your writing all day. I laughed and cried and laughed and cried as I flipped through these books, the first time I’d ever opened more than one of them in a single year. It was like flipping through old photo albums, filled with immortalized visions of my most favorite times. I’ve read your books over the course of so many years, in so many different places and phases and reincarnations of my own life, that looking back at you is also looking back at me.

I wanted to study the sentences, the style, and try to emulate it. I wanted to make you proud.

I wanted to find the quote about the $25 sentences, but I couldn’t. The Internet was shockingly unhelpful. It was something like this, right? If you read a book and there wasn’t at least one sentence in it that you’d have paid $25 to have written yourself, then it wasn’t a book worth reading. But, hell, maybe you were quoting someone else saying that. I couldn’t find it.

Instead, I just fell in love with you all over again, and was so sad that you’re gone, and was so happy that I got to live and read at the same time that you lived and wrote. A little bit of me is indulgent in the idea that you’re everywhere now, because that means a little bit of you is here with me. I hope, sincerely, that you get the gravestone you asked for, with the inscription a throwback to your son Fleetwood, age 3, listing your job title as “Mad Magician”, as there is not a better descriptor for your work here on earth.

With all of my love, from inside the flea circus to the far reaches of the cosmos,

Bane