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Tom Robbins
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March 9, 2000 | The thing about Alobar is that although he's 1,000 years old, he still has no trouble getting laid. Which was also my new friend's goal. Had he really been living in a Robbins novel, he would have swept the naive 22-year-old Canadian away, fucked me and left me thankful for the experience. I was pretty entranced by Robbins at that point in my life, and had the guy convinced me of his Alobar-ness, he might have stood a chance. As it was, I felt sure that if Alobar existed it wouldn't be in the guise of a pigeon-chested dirty old man holding up the bar in London's tourist district. Another Roadside Attraction By Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues By Tom Robbins Bantam Books, 384 pages
No one writes like Robbins. He once described Debra Winger's voice as follows: It "sounds as though it was strained through the honeymoon sheets of Bogey and Bacall and then hosed down with plum brandy." Robbins doesn't have an imagination. His imagination has him. Here, in "Skinny Legs and All," he sets the scene: "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." And then there's the opening line from "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas," published in 1994: "The day the stock market falls out of bed and breaks its back is the worst day of your life." And yet another singular opening, this one from 1971's "Another Roadside Attraction," the book that first put him on the map: "The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami." It's part of Robbins' mythology that, in 1963, he tried acid for the first time. It was the early days of psychedelics and LSD was still legal. Robbins had coaxed a pharmacology professor into letting him try the drug. He told Rolling Stone magazine that the day of his first trip, July 16, was the most rewarding of his life. Robbins said that after dropping the acid, he sat in a chair for eight hours, not moving except to go to the bathroom. The next six months were, literally, a trip. He couldn't read or write, and he eventually quit his job as an art critic for the Seattle Times and moved to New York to better explore the depth and breadth of acid trips. A few years later he started writing his first novel. Anyone who has read Robbins won't be surprised by that story. He seems to formulate plots while in the throes of a happy acid trip, unlike the paranoid Hunter S. Thompson variety. "Another Roadside Attraction" is about the mummified corpse of Jesus, stolen from the Vatican and put on display in a roadside zoo. "Skinny Legs and All" is partly narrated by a group of inanimate objects, including a pedantic can of beans and a magic stick. Robbins says the key to understanding his books is the Tibetan Buddhist concept of "crazy wisdom" -- though magic mushrooms might also help. What's so attractive about Robbins' books is that they are completely bizarre yet wholly coherent. They appear to have been conceived on the underside of an acid tab but written in the harsh light of morning. Robbins is serious about his writing. Even when he introduces unlikely characters such as an existential can of pork and beans, he explains them. Here's how he justifies his "animate" inanimate characters in "Skinny Legs and All": The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, "dead" to humans only because of our neuro-muscular chauvinism ... Look deeper. You'll need a magnifying glass ... On the atomic and sub-atomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles are spinning simultaneously forward and backward, sideways and forever at speeds so incalculable that expressions such as "arrival," "departure," and "have a nice day" become meaningless. It is on these levels that "magic" occurs. I may have been only 19 when I read that, but it seemed pretty damn plausible to me. As the previous passage suggests, Robbins is an aficionado of compound sentences. He says that when he writes, each sentence is a universe unto itself; that when he starts a book, he has no idea of what the story will be. He simply goes sentence by sentence, writing in longhand, never knowing what will come next, never leaving a sentence behind until it's perfect. Sounds painful, no? It also sounds unlikely. The first time I read that, I figured he was fibbing, trying to create a persona. However, when you look closely at his work, there are virtually no throwaway lines -- they seem crafted. It's no surprise, therefore, that Robbins puts out about 500 words a day. The poor man's probably exhausted. Robbins typically spends a year traveling after completing and promoting each novel. Then he comes home and conceives, researches and writes the next book. To the supreme frustration of his fans, this takes a long time. One Web site keeps count of how many days have passed since his last novel, comparing that with the longest number of days between novels. After 1994's "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas," Robbins' next offering will be "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates," to be released in May. Robbins says he found his voice in 1967 while writing a review of a Doors concert in Seattle. In the review he described the band's style as "early cunnilingual, late patricidal, lunchtime in the Everglades."
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