Chamblee54

When PG last saw Thomas Eugene Robbins, he was living in Richmond VA. This was around the time Mary Lou, aka the human wrecking ball, went into a crowded bar and yelled “Anyone here want to fuck?” This was the Eisenhower era version. Thirty years before this, Babe Ruth stood up on a chair. “Any girl that doesn’t want to fuck can leave now.”
Fifteen pages later, TER marries another young lady. The proposal came after knowing each other five minutes. Four and a half minutes of that time was TER denouncing her for having the bad manners to walk out of a TER poetry reading. At the time, TER was dating an art student with protective parents. When the young lady was in the hospital, TER decides to impersonate a doctor, so he could give the lady a private exam. To perform this maneuver, TER stole a white jacket that was too big for him. The jacket was so ill fitting as to resemble “a horse blanket draped over a poodle.”
TER worked for a newspaper. One job was editing Earl Wilson’s column, and choosing photographs. This was an entertainment column, about who was doing what where and how. Why was left to the reader’s imagination. Mr. Wilson wrote a three b report, for booze, bosoms, and behinds.
Sometimes, Mr. Wilson wrote about entertainers of color. In many southern establishments, this part was edited out. TER went against the tide, and chose black and white pictures of a sepia trinity: Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, and Sammy Davis. The collective drawers of Richmond twisted into an painful puppy pile. TER hastily moved to Seattle.
Arriving in the Northwest, TER stumbled into a job as a concert reviewer for the Seattle Times. This was despite not knowing what he was talking about. The prose was “colorful,” though not in the Earl Wilson way. TER got into mushroom hunting, and heard tales about magic mushrooms. A bit of checking around ensued, and some learned man told TER to take LSD instead. This substance was still legal, and had yet to develop notoriety. Diane Linkletter kept the window shut.
Here is a bit of confusion. In High Times and Rolling Stone, the date of the first TER trip was July 16, 1963. Tibetan Peach Pie, the book that inspires this orgy of quote abuse, says it was July 1964. Who to believe? Does it make a difference? Actually, it does. In those 366 leap year inclusive days, Martin Luther King had a dream, John Kennedy met his maker, The Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show, and Cassius Clay whipped Sonny Liston. The world was a differnt, less innocent. but more musical place. Ed Sullivan wore a Beatle wig, taking really big shoe tonight into unknown territory.
The psychedelic experience is aggressively non verbal. (p.197) “…even a professional novelist can scarcely write about it it without swathing his observations in the purple cloak of woo woo.” At one point, TER went inside a flower. “The crown of the daisy is a perfect logarithmic helix. My eyes followed that spiral, around and around, until — pop! — I actually went into the flower. What was it like in there? It was a subterranean cathedral made out of mathematics and honey, and occupied — this is the amazing part — by an almost palpable intelligence… Now, a man-made bean can is hardly a living plant, but what I’ve come to appreciate about inanimate objects, aside from their utilitarian beauty, is the whisper of the Infinite in each and every one of them. I’d better shut up now before the woo-woo alarms go off.”
A can of beans was one of the players in Skinny Legs And All. PG read SLAA while working in an architect’s office. A can of baked beans was placed on a shelf for motivation. After he finished reading SLAA, PG ate the contents of the can of beans. A young lady heard about the use of baked beans as a grounding device, and did not understand. After finishing SLAA, PG told the young lady that he had eaten the can of beans. She was not amused.
After that fateful LSD afternoon, TER had little interest in reading or writing. This can be inconvenient for a music critic expecting to get paid. This printed word hiatus was broken when TER read Steppenwolf. This was probably before the band shipped out “born to be wild.” Steppenwolf is a book to read at twnty one, and think you are changed forever, then read again at fifty one, and realize you need to change your underwear.
This business of expanding consciousness is not conducive to the real world. Eventually, TER left Seattle, and took his wife back to Richmond. TER went to live in New York. At a LEMAR protest … something to do with legalize marijuana … TER met Allen Ginsberg. “I glanced around with increasing nervousness as the cameras of a half-dozen law-enforcement agencies flashed amidst the snowflakes like orbs of mad polar bears. … Ginsberg, that magnificent pothead of the godhead, laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it.” … “In the long run, these fuzzy shots in some cop’s folder will do you more honor than the cover of Newsweek.” The poet then kissed TER, who was back in Seattle before you could say Tetra Hydra Cannabinol.
Maybe it was a sermon about mammon. The other day on facebook, someone was ranting about something, and calling his output a sermon. PG wrote a comment… “is there a gender neutral replacement for sermon and mammon.” (PG forgot to hit post, which is why there was no snarky reply.) When Mr. Ginsberg was Howling his way to fame, mammon was regarded as “wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion.” Money is not only the root of all evil, but the stalk, leaves, and, last but not least, the fruit.
Alas, there is no connection between mammon and ma’am. There is no commingled origin for sir and sermon, or, for that matter, amen and men. They are already non binary, and fit for use by both cis and trans. Some people just have to make everything about sex.
Maybe this is a good time to adjourn this meeting. This is part three, of the chamblee54 certification of Tibetan Peach Pie. Parts one and two have already been distributed. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.

In 1977, Rolling Stone did a piece about a “counterculture writer” named Tom 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, through the magic of internet cut and paste, 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, PG has taken to writing down the page number of phrases that catch his eye, tickle his ears, pull his leg, and punch him 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 (the E stands for Eugene) was on an asian honeymoon. A Sing snake crossed their path. A guide invited the snake 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. Later, 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. PG went through sunday after painful sunday, every time the congregation sang “Just as I am” as an invitation to eternal life with Jesus. PG never did take that walk down the aisle, and has 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 PG 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.” TER did not specify the gender.
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 PG 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. (PG has doubts about that one, but will have to take the word of TER) 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, insert pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”, and go forth into the world. Or go second, or third, but not in a Southern Baptist lifetime should PG go fifth. As TER said in High Times, “I’d better shut up now before the woo-woo alarms go off.”