Chamblee54

In 1977, Rolling Stone did a piece about a “counterculture writer” named Thomas Eugene Robbins. This should not be confused for Harold Robbins, a mainstream wordchunker who died in 1997. “Tommy Rotten is known for colorful phrasing. It is as if Vladimir Nabokov caught butterflies with psychedelic juice in their wings, and made a lepidopterist stew that allowed him behind the looking glass.” As it is, we have, a stylistic seraphim from the time of the Carter administration. “You can tell people that my goal is to write novels that are like a basket of cherry tomatoes—when you bite into a paragraph, you don’t know which way the juice is going to squirt.”
Part one of the chamblee54 regurgitation of Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life hit the ether nine days ago. Since then, I have taken to writing down the page number of phrases that catch my eye, tickle my ears, pull my leg, and punch me in the gut. Since a Tom Robbins book is an anarchic army of swinging sentences, only nominally regulated by the discipline of plot, this may be the best way to approach this subject.
On page 25, TER was on an asian honeymoon. A Sing snake crossed their path, and was invited to dinner. The reptile was prepared with enough red chili paste to give heartburn to the human blowtorch. TER felt as though he had gargled napalm. On page 145, TER would describe “many a hot, sticky summer night, when a restless Richmond felt like the interior of a napalmed watermelon.”
Page 63 sees TER at thirteen years old. He has not joined the church, given his soul to Jesus, and been assured of salvation. These are important items on the Southern Baptist bucket list. I went through sunday after painful sunday, every time the congregation sang “Just as I am” as an invitation to eternal life with Jesus. I never did take that walk down the aisle, and have come to see the Baptist ritual of pressuring pre pubescent youth as being just a little bit weird. Yes, this is better than what the Roman Pedophile Church likes to do with little boys, but that’s a technicality.
The man assigned to win the soul of TER was Dr. Peters. “tall, gaunt, and pale, with a weak damp smile and cold damp palms: shaking hands with him was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie….more creepy than refrigerated possum slobber.”
By page 125, TER is out of school, married, and has a son. This is the early fifties, and I will not appear on planet earth for a little while. In those days, there was a war going on in Korea. TER decided that the Air Force would be more pleasant than the army. If he had waited much longer Uncle Sam would have made the choice for him.
TER at some point is on a ship, and editing a newspaper. “… the paper’s adviser, a Roman Catholic chaplain who possessed the purplish physiognomy and perpetually petulant pucker of the overly zealous censor.” Soon TER is in Nebraska, and buys his first automobile, a “1947 Kaiser … looked like the illegitimate child of a sperm whale and a pizza oven.” The gender is not specified.
Six pages later, TER is out of the service, about the divorce wife number one, and living in a hood called the Fan. This was the hippie district of Richmond VA, although the 1954 version was considerably tamer than the summer of love variety. (This is roughly the time when I burst onto the landscape of Atlanta GA) TER was reading books about zen. Learning zen, by reading a book, was similar to learning how to swim by reading a magazine. Or telling time by reading a newspaper. As Ben Hecht put it, “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”
The convergence of zen, swimming, and reading material made TER think of a poem by William Blake. Mr. Blake was a hallucinatory inspiration on Allen Ginsberg, who would later be the only man to ever kiss TER on the lips. (I have doubts about that one, but will have to take the his word.) Anyway, the poem has the Southern Baptist approved title of “Eternity.” “He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”
Maybe this is a good time to edit this, and go forth into the world. Or go second, or third, but not in a Southern Baptist lifetime should I go fifth. As TER said in High Times, “I’d better shut up now before the woo-woo alarms go off.” … Tom’s lifetime subscription to High Times ran out February 9, 2025. Pictures today are from Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library. The social media picture was taken in the 1940s. “Buses full of soldiers outside Fox Theater (“colored entrance” sign visible)” ©Luther Mckinnon 2025 · selah