Wild Ducks Flying Backward
CONTENTS
The Cannibal King Wants His Din-Din
The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs
Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata
Are You Ready for the New Urban Fragrances?
What Is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?
Leo Kenney and the Geometry of Dreaming
Write About One of Your Favorite Things
How Do You Feel About America?
What Do You Think Writer’s Block Is and Have You Ever Had It?
With What Fictional Character Do You Most Identify?
Is the Writer Obligated to Use His/Her Medium as an Instrument for Social Betterment?
Why Do You Live Where You Live?
What Was Your First Outdoor Adventure?
Do You Express Your Personal Political Opinions in Your Novels?
How Would You Evaluate John Steinbeck?
Tell Us About Your Favorite Car
What Is Your Favorite Place in Nature?
Send Us a Souvenir From the Road
For David Hirshey, who let me run with the bulls, and
for Miss Indiana Cheerleader and the Bat Girl of
Bleecker Street, who threw petals at me along the way.
Your true guide drinks from an undammed stream.
—Rumi
Never enter a house that does not have furniture music.
—Erik Satie
Introduction
I
t’s six o’clock in the afternoon, approximately, give or take a tick or two, and the sun’s attention span is rapidly shrinking. The sun, we might say, should we choose to venture further down the path of anthropomorphic hyperbole, has seen quite enough of you for one day and is entertaining other options. Weary of the old ice-cream castle Judy Collins routine, clouds, too, are shifting priorities, gathering forces, adopting attitudes. By nightfall, you could be in for some rain. Perhaps freezing rain. Even snow. Obviously, we’re privy neither to your whereabouts nor your season. You’re in freaking North Dakota for all we know. November.
What we do know is that you have availed yourself of the most recent book by novelist Tom Robbins, and what we can
assume,
though it may be only a conceit, is that you have every intention of beginning it this evening (you couldn’t very well have begun it at work today), so if external weather conditions prove foul, so much the better. Should it pelt, should it blow, the cozy factor (almost always a boon to literary experience) will increase severalfold, thereby fertilizing the narcotic poppy of reading pleasure.
The climate indoors is another matter. Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there’s some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace. You must take steps to ensure your privacy.
It’s a Monday, so more than likely your male companion and his buddy, eager for three solid hours of beer commercials and televised football, have already commandeered the sofa. Good. That frees up the bedroom.
Or, switching genders (though not necessarily), your girlfriend’s in bed with monthly cramps, a heating pad on that sweet little tummy you so love to nuzzle, medication making her sleepy, soft rock on the radio. You suppress a smile of relief. The sofa is all yours.
Of course, if you live alone, both bed and sofa are available—you have only to choose your spot, change into something comfortable, adjust the lighting, and disconnect the phone.
No, there’s one other thing: this is a Tom Robbins tome you’re about to sit down with, and while special fortification is certainly not mandatory, it wouldn’t hurt to adjust your mental thermostat a bit. Nothing drastic. No overhaul. You know. Just rotate your tires. Yet, while a weak gin-and-tonic might go well with, say, E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, while a tumbler of bourbon might help you wash Faulkner down, Robbins requires a more—shall we say,
exotic
?—accompaniment.
Stealthily, nonchalantly, you make your way to your dresser, open your underwear drawer, dig out that bottle of anaïs nin (green label) you’ve been hoarding there. Careful! Don’t pour too much. Remember what happened that time on your birthday. Besides, ever since the revolution in Punto del Visionario the stuff has been almost impossible to find. And by the way, in case you haven’t heard, it’s been placed on the government’s list of controlled substances.
Okay. At last you’re set. You prop up your feet (we should always read with our feet up, even on the subway or a bus), and retrieve the book, feeling in your hands the weight, the newness, the
bookness
of it. For a brief second you close your eyes, sip your libation (Jesus! Wow! No wonder there’re two dots over the
ï
!), and allow yourself to wonder what Robbins is up to this time around. What strange lights on what distant mountainside have attracted his focus? Over whose campfire—gypsy? guerrilla? Girl Scout? shaman?—has he been toasting his ideas, his images, his figures of speech?
Curiosity suitably aroused, anticipation at a delicious pitch, you take in a small breath and open the book and… Whoa! Wait a damn minute. Hold on. This isn’t the new Tom Robbins novel. Oh, it’s by Robbins all right, but… You look again at the cover.
The Short Writings of…
It’s printed right there on the jacket. Maybe it could have been in bigger type but it isn’t as if you’ve been tricked. It’s your own fault, you should have paid closer attention. This will teach you to dash into a bookshop on your lunch hour.
Wild Ducks Flying Backward
is not a novel at all.
Somewhat disgruntled, you riffle the pages. Hmm? Travel articles. Riffs on various exceptional people. A short story or two. Poems. (Robbins, at any rate, calls them “poems”: your old English professor would probably shake his head and call them something else entirely.) Essays. Responses. Musings. A treatment for a movie you’d wager will never be made.
There are even a couple of examples of the author’s art criticism, included, you suppose, to demonstrate to those who might suspect otherwise that a man’s expressed preference for right-brain activity need not necessarily constitute an admission of weakness on the left. In fact, so sober and coolly cerebral is Robbins’s analysis of the painter Morris Louis that you find it difficult to believe it could have been written in the same year (1967) and by the same person (Robbins) as the overheated, rocked-out, purple-lipped paean to The Doors also contained herein. The contrast both intrigues and confounds you.
About the same time that young Tom was deconstructing modern art and eulogizing psychedelic rockers, he was deciding once and for all to move his professional residence to the land of make-believe, the land of effects as opposed to facts, the country where Style is king and Paradox and Enigma (which must hide between the lines in reportage) are granted diplomatic immunity. He began writing his first novel in 1968 and he’s made it clear that if he’s remembered, he wants it to be for his fiction. Still, for whatever reason—to meet an editor’s challenge, maybe, or to charm the groceries—the novelist has over the years made occasional forays across the inky divide into journalism. Considering the source, aren’t you at least tempted to test the results? And what about that short story, the one he calls “Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata”?
You’re warm, snug, alone, loosely clothed, and the anaïs nin (green label) is working your blood like a Vegas entertainer working a room. If you don’t burrow further into this modest if unusual collection, what else can you possibly do with yourself tonight?
You don’t have to answer that.
TRAVEL
ARTICLES
Canyon of the Vaginas
W
hen one is on a pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas, one has to be careful about asking directions.
I mean, there’re some pretty rough ol’ dudes in west-central Nevada. One knows the ol’ dudes are rough when one observes that they eat with their hats on.
Nine days I was in the high desert between Winnemucca and Las Vegas, during which time I never witnessed a male Homo sapiens take his noontide nor his evening repast with an exposed bean. In every instance, a grimy bill or brim shaded the fellow’s victuals from the vulgar eye of light. I assumed that they breakfasted
en chapeau
as well, but by the hour that your pilgrim sat down to
his
flapjacks, the rough ol’ dudes had already gone off to try to strike it rich.
When a man’s brain is constantly heated by thoughts of striking it rich, thoughts that don’t fade much at mealtime, perhaps he requires some sort of perpetual head cover to cool the cerebral machinery. On the other hand, since they live in relatively close proximity to America’s major nuclear test site, a nerve-gas depot, several mysterious airfields, and numerous depositories for our government’s nasty toxic secrets, maybe the rough ol’ dudes are just trying to prevent their haircuts from ever flickering in the dark. If I lived in west-central Nevada, I might dine in gloves and a Mylex suit.
Naturally, one has to wonder if the men of Nevada also sleep in their hats. More pointedly, do they sleep with their wives, girlfriends, and thoroughly legal prostitutes in their hats? I intended to interview a Nevada woman or two on the subject, but never quite got around to it. However, something at the Canyon of the Vaginas gave me reason to believe that the answer is affirmative. Of that, more later.
Getting back on course, beneath those baseball caps that advertise brands of beer or heavy equipment, under those genuine imitation Stetsons, there’re some rough ol’ hangovers being processed and some rough ol’ ideas being entertained. One simply does not approach a miner, a wrangler, a prospector, a gambler, a Stealth pilot, a construction sweat hog, or sandblasted freebooter and interrupt his thoughts about big, fast bucks and those forces—environmental legislation, social change, loaded dice, et cetera—that could stand between him and big, fast bucks; one simply does not march up to such a man, a man who lifts his crusty lid to no one, and ask:
“Sir, might you possibly direct me to the Canyon of the Vaginas?”
Should readers desire to make their own pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas—and it is, after all, one of the few holy places left in America—they’ll have to find it by themselves. Were one to inquire of its whereabouts at a bar or gas station (in west-central Nevada they’re often one and the same, complete with slot machines), the best that one could hope for is that a dude would wink and aim one at the pink gates of Bobbie’s Cottontail Ranch, or whatever the nearest brothel might be called.
In the improbable event that he fails to misinterpret one’s inquiry, and/or to take sore offense at it, a dude still isn’t likely to further one’s cause. For that matter, save for the odd archeologist, neither is anybody else. The population of Nevada arises every morning, straightens its hat, swallows a few aspirin, and trucks off to try to strike it rich without so much as a nervous suspicion that the Canyon of the Vaginas lies within its domain.
Your pilgrim learned of it from a Salt Lake City artist who has hiked and camped extensively in the high deserts of the Great Basin. The man drew me a fairly specific map, but I, in good conscience, cannot pass along the details. My reluctance to share is rooted neither in selfishness nor elitism, but in the conviction that certain aspects of the canyon are quite fragile and in need of protection.
Not that genuflecting hordes are likely to descend upon it: the canyon is remote; troubled, according to season, by killer sun, ripping wind, and blinding blizzard; and is reached by a road that nobody making monthly car payments should even think of driving. Still, there are plenty of new-agers with the leisure and energy to track down yet another “power center,” and plenty of curiosity seekers with an appetite for the exotic souvenir. Surely I’ll be forgiven if I’m ever so slightly discreet.
Besides, what kind of pilgrimage would it be if it didn’t contain some element of hardship and enigma? The quest is essential to the ritual. To orient ourselves at the interface of the visible and invisible worlds—which may be the purpose of all pilgrimages—we must embrace the search as well as its goal. If our journey into the heart (or vagina) of meaning resembles in any appreciable manner our last trip to the shopping mall, we’re probably doing something wrong.
I can disclose this much: to arrive at the Canyon of the Vaginas, your pilgrim had to travel a ways on Highway 50, a blue guitar string of asphalt accurately described by postcards and brochures as the Most Lonesome Road in America. It will impress some readers as poignantly correct that so many vaginas are reached only by a route of almost legendary loneliness. Others won’t have that reaction at all.
Physically, my pilgrimage commenced in downtown Seattle. Downtown Seattle has long been my “stomping grounds,” as they say, although in the past couple of years it’s lost its homey air. A side effect of Reaganomics was skyscraper fever. Developers, taking advantage of lucrative tax breaks, voodoo-pinned our city centers with largely unneeded office towers. In downtown Seattle, for some reason, most of the excess buildings are beige. Seattleites complain of beige à vu: the sensation that they’ve seen that color before.
In any case, it was in a Seattle parking lot, flanked by beige edifices, that I exchanged cars with my chiropractor. He took my customized Camaro Z-28 convertible, a quick machine whose splendid virtues do not include comfort on long-distance hauls; I took his big, new Mercedes.
If, indeed, the reader should decide to motor to Nevada and it proves to exceed an afternoon’s jaunt, may I suggest swapping cars with a chiropractor? Chiropractors’ cars are not like yours or mine. Theirs tend to be massage parlors on wheels, equipped with the latest breakthroughs in therapeutic seating, lumbar cushions, and vertebrae-aligning headrests. It’s like rolling along in a technological spa. The driver can get a spinal adjustment and a speeding ticket simultaneously.
So relaxed was I in that tea-green Mercedes that I didn’t look around when I heard my chiropractor burn a quarter inch of rubber off the Camaro’s tires. In a certain way, it was reminiscent of the movie
Trading Places
. As the good doctor tore off to drag sorority row at the University of Washington, I oozed through the beige maze with a serene, chiropractic smile, braking tenderly in front of Alexa’s apartment, and then in front of Jon’s.
For days to come, the three of us, Alexa, Jon, and your pilgrim, would take turns piloting the doctor’s clinical dreamboat along tilting tables of rural landscape. Once we’d crossed the tamed Columbia and were traversing the vastness of eastern Oregon, once we were out of the wet zone and into the dry zone, out of the vegetable zone and into the meat zone, out of the fiberglass-shower-stall zone and into the metal-shower-stall zone, we would glide through a seemingly endless variety of ecosystems, most of them virtually relieved of the more obvious signs of human folly, all of them unavoidably gorgeous.
Some of the hills were shaped like pyramids, others resembled the contents of Brunhilde’s bodice. One was so vibrantly purple-black that we suspected we’d discovered the mother lode where eye shadow was mined. There were craters and slumps, stacks and slides, alkali lakes and sand dunes, gorges and passes, fossil beds, dust devils, and enormous ragged buttes that could have been cruise ships for honeymooning trolls. We followed chatty little creeks, spilling their creek guts to anybody who’d listen; we swerved to miss antelope, reduced dead jackrabbits to two dimensions, honked at happy dogs and range steers, photographed gap-toothed windmills and churches in which no collection plate would ever circulate again, inhaled sage until our sinuses gobbled, and cast self-righteous judgment on the bored adolescent gunmen and beered-up Cattle Xing terrorists who’d blown a Milky Way of holes into each and every road sign.
It delighted me that the Canyon of the Vaginas was out here smack dab in the middle of the Wild American West. How swell that in the Old West of gunfights and land grabs, massacres and gold rushes, bushwhackings and horsewhippings, missions, saloons, boot hills, and forts, there existed a culture that celebrated with artistic eloquence and spiritual fervor the most intimate feature of the feminine anatomy.
Imagine Custer’s cavalry troop thundering innocently over a ridge, only to come face-to-face with (gasp!) the pink, the moist, the yielding, the delicately curly. Imagine a Saturday matinee:
Roy Rogers at the Canyon of the Vaginas.
Mentally, emotionally, my pilgrimage began back in my late twenties or early thirties, whenever it was that it first occurred to me that the female genitals were literally divine. In the Orient, especially in the religious systems of Tibet and India, that notion has prevailed since dimmest antiquity, and as a matter of fact, there are yonic symbols in the caves of Paleolithic Europe (dating back twenty thousand years) that are indistinguishable from those venerated today by the tantric cults of the Himalayas.
When I read how, among the practitioners of tantra, the vulva is adored as the organ for the generation of world and time, it struck a resonant chord. From that day on, I have been seeking the American tantra, which is to say, I’ve been seeking American images that promote that inner intensity of feminine sexuality, whose source is the Goddess of Creation.
Among the examples that have caught my attention are the bubblegum-colored underpants that Bonnie Parker left behind to taunt the cops when she and Clyde Barrow flew the coop. I was convinced, you see, that the American tantra must be as different from the Asian tantra as we Americans—sweet gangsters at heart—are different from pious Asians. In the modern sense, I still think that’s true, but until I learned of the Canyon of the Vaginas, I’d neglected to consider the tantric contribution of American Indians.
Having meditated on and received inspiration from such ostensibly profane icons as Bonnie’s panties (she purchased them, by the way, at a small-town Kansas dime store in 1934), it fazed me only a smidgen to discover that what may be the ultimate tantric tribute on our continent is located in west-central Nevada. Even that trace of skepticism vanished when I remembered that the Goddess of Creation also serves as the Goddess of Destruction.
If something is so hazardous and destructive and ugly and spooky that we don’t know what to do with it, we stick it in Nevada. The state is blotched with “Danger Areas,” immense, guarded, off limits, concealing every imaginable kind of high-tech poison, as well as the various weapons systems that sup on or excrete those poisons. In Nevada, a fluffy little cloud can suddenly exterminate a whole flock of sheep. And Nevada is the place the Bomb calls home.
Even the brothels, sanctioned by the state because it’s believed that military men, cowboys, and miners can’t function efficiently without the help of whores, even the brothels are a sort of dumping ground. As for casinos, they could be viewed as dumping grounds for money; at least, that’s been your pilgrim’s experience.