Read Online Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins - Free Book Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
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reached the opposite bank.
Thus are champions -- and legends -- made. Could it have been, I wonder, a similar exhibition that gave McDonald’s the idea for its golden arches?
I don’t suppose there’s a category in Guinness for long-distance urination, though admittedly I’ve not looked to see. Certainly, this was my one and only encounter with the sport. We moved upriver to Kilmarnock, Virginia, late that summer, so I have no clear idea how the youth of salty Urbanna might have interacted upon attaining puberty; how, if at all, the peeing competitions affected later relationships. Maybe, as she grew older, an Urbanna girl would change a guy’s luck by shampooing him.
Despite the brevity of our stay in Urbanna, the place left a mark on me that persists to this day. Fresh from pre–Great Society, pre-network-TV Appalachia, I spoke with an accent that would have made the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies sound like the Royal Academy performing King Lear . There’s no way I can accurately reproduce on paper the way I pronounced, for example, words such as “night” or “ice” or “grass,” although I can report that I said “far” for “fire” and “hain’t” for “ain’t,” which could be a bit confusing since back in Blowing Rock we called a ghost a “haint.” Imagine someone exclaiming, “Looky thar in the winder! Hain’t that a haint?”
Naturally, the pupils at my new school made fun of the way I talked: kids are blunt in their reaction to deviations from their particular social norms. Alas, I was mocked by Urbanna’s adults, as well. Once when Mother sent me to the store to buy a pound of sliced ham for supper, the butcher stared at me incomprehensibly, then demanded I repeat my order again and again. “Slyced hame,” I kept saying, pronouncing “ham” as if it rhymed with “came” or “lame.” Eventually, my order was filled, though not before I had to point at what I wanted and everyone in the store enjoyed a laugh at my expense.
Spurred by ridicule, I soon commenced to devote much time and effort to altering my manner of speech, practicing off and on throughout the day, laboring to talk as if I were somehow indigenous to tidewater Virginia. The results were not pretty. Sure, “hain’t” was no longer in my vocabulary and I could now order flesh of the pig without embarrassment, but overall what happened was that my elocution flattened out permanently into a kind of deflated Okie drawl.
Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear. While to my mind’s ear, I might sound like an Oxford-educated intellectual, I have only to hear myself on tape to realize that in actuality mine is the voice of a can of cheap dog food -- if a can of cheap dog food could speak. It’s a Skippy voice. Not even that, a generic brand with a plain brown label. Thanks, at least in part, to the jeerers and sneerers of Urbanna, I’m going through life with a voice that might be visualized as something scraped off the kitchen floor of a fast-food restaurant by a pimply teenage dishwasher at closing time on Friday night. Or else that little pile of smashed potato chips left on the rubberized seat cushion of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a 365-pound retired female professional wrestler named Grandma Moses. Or else . . . well, you get the picture.
In one of my early novels, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, is born with abnormally large thumbs. Rather than submit meekly to the deformity, she elects to turn the tables on it, exploit it, have fun with it, make an art of it, ride it all the way to glory. I’m not as wise as Sissy, but I have in recent years come to accept my voice, even cheerfully embrace it -- although there are delusional moments (usually while lecturing or reading aloud in public) when I’m still convinced I’m sounding a lot like Jeremy Irons.
There’s an area of tidewater Virginia known widely and
Thus are champions -- and legends -- made. Could it have been, I wonder, a similar exhibition that gave McDonald’s the idea for its golden arches?
I don’t suppose there’s a category in Guinness for long-distance urination, though admittedly I’ve not looked to see. Certainly, this was my one and only encounter with the sport. We moved upriver to Kilmarnock, Virginia, late that summer, so I have no clear idea how the youth of salty Urbanna might have interacted upon attaining puberty; how, if at all, the peeing competitions affected later relationships. Maybe, as she grew older, an Urbanna girl would change a guy’s luck by shampooing him.
Despite the brevity of our stay in Urbanna, the place left a mark on me that persists to this day. Fresh from pre–Great Society, pre-network-TV Appalachia, I spoke with an accent that would have made the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies sound like the Royal Academy performing King Lear . There’s no way I can accurately reproduce on paper the way I pronounced, for example, words such as “night” or “ice” or “grass,” although I can report that I said “far” for “fire” and “hain’t” for “ain’t,” which could be a bit confusing since back in Blowing Rock we called a ghost a “haint.” Imagine someone exclaiming, “Looky thar in the winder! Hain’t that a haint?”
Naturally, the pupils at my new school made fun of the way I talked: kids are blunt in their reaction to deviations from their particular social norms. Alas, I was mocked by Urbanna’s adults, as well. Once when Mother sent me to the store to buy a pound of sliced ham for supper, the butcher stared at me incomprehensibly, then demanded I repeat my order again and again. “Slyced hame,” I kept saying, pronouncing “ham” as if it rhymed with “came” or “lame.” Eventually, my order was filled, though not before I had to point at what I wanted and everyone in the store enjoyed a laugh at my expense.
Spurred by ridicule, I soon commenced to devote much time and effort to altering my manner of speech, practicing off and on throughout the day, laboring to talk as if I were somehow indigenous to tidewater Virginia. The results were not pretty. Sure, “hain’t” was no longer in my vocabulary and I could now order flesh of the pig without embarrassment, but overall what happened was that my elocution flattened out permanently into a kind of deflated Okie drawl.
Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear. While to my mind’s ear, I might sound like an Oxford-educated intellectual, I have only to hear myself on tape to realize that in actuality mine is the voice of a can of cheap dog food -- if a can of cheap dog food could speak. It’s a Skippy voice. Not even that, a generic brand with a plain brown label. Thanks, at least in part, to the jeerers and sneerers of Urbanna, I’m going through life with a voice that might be visualized as something scraped off the kitchen floor of a fast-food restaurant by a pimply teenage dishwasher at closing time on Friday night. Or else that little pile of smashed potato chips left on the rubberized seat cushion of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a 365-pound retired female professional wrestler named Grandma Moses. Or else . . . well, you get the picture.
In one of my early novels, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, is born with abnormally large thumbs. Rather than submit meekly to the deformity, she elects to turn the tables on it, exploit it, have fun with it, make an art of it, ride it all the way to glory. I’m not as wise as Sissy, but I have in recent years come to accept my voice, even cheerfully embrace it -- although there are delusional moments (usually while lecturing or reading aloud in public) when I’m still convinced I’m sounding a lot like Jeremy Irons.
There’s an area of tidewater Virginia known widely and
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