A Wild Duck Flying Backward: Remembering Tom Robbins

My friendship with Tom Robbins did not get off to an auspicious start.

We were introduced by a mutual friend, the artist Gertrude Pacific. I had been producing and hosting a two-hour talk show, three days a week at KRAB FM, a listener-supported Seattle radio station where Tom once hosted a show nearly a decade earlier. I had been assembling a series of taped interviews with writers who lived and worked in the Northwest. Every one of them—including people like Tom McGuane, Richard, Brautigan (that was a weird one), Ray Mungo, and Jim Harrison—agreed to be interviewed. Everyone except Tom, who sent me a breezy note of refusal, explaining that he didn’t do interviews and if even he did, he was having too much fun hanging around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Sally Kellerman to even consider the idea.

Okay, it was kind of funny and cheeky (two of Tom’s most endearing traits), but I was young and cranky and full of myself and in no mood to be so blithely written off. Instead of being charmed or amused, I was pissed off.

A month later, at an opening night party for an exhibition of her paintings, Gertrude brought Tom over to me, introduced us and said, “I think you two would get along.” Then she waltzed away.

She had no idea that I was nursing a grudge against him. Neither did Tom. But he soon found out. He said hello and smiled, and I snapped, lighting into him about who did he think he was refusing my interview request when all these other writers had, and did he think I gave a damn about his antics at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and all I was asking for was 45 minutes of his precious time…well, you get the idea. It was a ridiculous little hissy fit.

Fortunately, the few brain cells that were still operating in executive-function mode kicked in and I realized that I was being a colossal jerk. Yes, there were a couple of reasons why I lost my temper—I was working two jobs to make rent and I was tired and feeling broke and sorry for myself—but none of them had anything to do with him, nor did they excuse my impulsive and unprofessional behavior. I cut my rant short, apologized for my bad temper, and slunk away.

The next day, my brother who had been visiting me for the weekend, told me that Georgia Pacific had called and said I should call back.

“Why is the paper company calling me?” I asked.

He shrugged. Then I realized he meant Gertrude Pacific. I called her back, and she told me Tom mentioned to her that he and I got off to a bad start, but if I wanted a do-over, I should get in touch with him. I was astonished. I told her I couldn’t imagine why he would want to spend another minute around me after I’d been so rude to him.

She laughed. “Probably because nobody ever tells Tom Robbins off. I think he found it entertaining.”

Suspecting that he was having fun at my expense, and still feeling embarrassed about my behavior, I never contacted him. A few months later, he was taping an interview on KZAM (Yeah, the guy who didn’t do interviews!) with Jude Noland, and he mentioned to her that the next day was his birthday.

“That’s my friend Kathy Cain’s birthday,” she said.

 “Really? I know Kathy,” he said, without providing any more details.  

Having no clue how badly our first meeting had gone, Jude invited him to come to a birthday party our friend Jill Severn was hosting for me at her funky little house surrounded by a big bodacious garden on Bainbridge Island. Of course, he agreed to come. Because that’s Tom.

Imagine this: It’s your birthday—the one day of the year when everyone pays attention to you—and Tom Robbins shows up at your party. Yeah. That’s what it was like. If you’re the kind of attention junkie I am, you’ll understand why I found that a less-than-ideal situation.

The weather was perfect, the party was fabulous. A lot of people showed up, bringing plenty of food and drink and god knows what else. Tom had a great time. Everybody had a great time. Tom especially enjoyed the part where my friend Kim rode through the garden naked on a white horse, with her long blonde hair covering almost all of her. Once I stopped resenting the fact that some of the guests flocked around him like he was magnetized, even I had a great time. Anyway, I didn’t blame them; I blamed him.  

Okay. I’m not a complete moron. I realized that what happened was my own fault and that his little prank was a pretty clever way to bounce my bad behavior back at me. Plus, he was a charming guy. So just before he left with one of the most adorable women at the party on his arm, I thanked him for showing up. He winked at me. As I watched them depart, I thought, “Happy birthday Tom. I guess we’re even now.”

After that bumpy start, we became good friends. He always sent me a bouquet of flowers on my birthday. Not even my boyfriends remembered to do that every time, but Tom always did. Once, after the annual bouquet showed up an my door, I called him to thank him for never forgetting. He laughed and said, “Before you get too excited, keep in mind that we have the same birthday so it’s not that difficult to remember. I just pretend I’m sending them to myself.”

And that’s exactly why I liked Tom.

Things weren’t always sweetness and light banter between us. We had a few disagreements; some were minor and some were serious. After an email argument that began over something pretty insignificant, our exchange of zingers and pointed barbs got way out of hand, and when the pixel dust finally settled, we stopped communicating with each other and that silence lasted for five years.

The emails we exchanged during that argument are still in my computer, and I can assure you that neither of us behaved well in the back-and-forth. But it was Tom who broke the silence. He sent me a birthday card that made no reference to what had happened but put a quiet end to the spat that nearly destroyed our friendship. Like me, he could hold a grudge; unlike me, he knew how and when to let go of one. His gracious gesture didn’t cost him anything, and it proved him the better person.  

Tom liked to have fun and he found it in the most unexpected situations. Once, when he was in between love affairs, he mentioned to me that he was going to take a short vacation in Italy with his 13-year-old son, Fleetwood. I told him my husband Charlie and I were going to be in Italy at the same time for part of our honeymoon. We decided to meet and travel together for five days. Of course that’s weird. But that’s Tom. He loved telling waiters, hotel clerks and passing strangers that the four of us were on our honeymoon just so he could enjoy the looks on their faces as they tried to figure whether we were crazy or depraved or both.

We met up in Venice. When Charlie and I arrived, we discovered that there had been a mix-up in our accommodations. I made reservations for a room with a double bed, but the hotel made a mistake—possibly due to my inventive telephone Italian—and gave us a room with two single beds. How romantic; it was like a 1950’s television show. The hotel where Tom and Fleetwood were staying accidently gave them a room with a double bed instead of two singles, so they had to bring in a cot for Tom to sleep on. Since they were staying at the luxurious Gritti Palace and Charlie and I were at the charming but modest Hotel do Pozzi, I offered to switch rooms with them. Tom declined my offer, reminding me of Dante’s famous maxim that one bed at the Gritti is worth two at the do Pozzi.

For the next four days, the four of us got lost everywhere. We got lost in Venice, which didn’t matter because getting lost is what Venice is for. But then we got very lost in Verona. We managed to get within three blocks of our hotel, but we were at the wrong end of a one-way street leading away from it. No problem. All we had to do was drive around the block and approach it from the other side. For the next two hours, we drove round and round in an expanding and contracting spiral route that led into and away from the center of the city, taking us by every beautiful building and famous landmark in the city except our hotel. And not once did we encounter a street that had a perpendicular relationship to any other street. Ah, Italia!

At one point, Tom announced that he’d solved the mystery: All of Verona’s building and landmarks, including the colosseum that we had driven past many times, were mounted on wheels and someone was moving them around to confuse us. It was a theory that only he, or perhaps Italo Calvino, could have come up with.

Eventually, we ended up back at the same wrong end of the same one-way street we had started from. Once again, we could see our hotel from where we were. Fleetwood suggested that we park the car, grab our luggage and walk the three blocks. (It says everything about our little band of lost souls that the 13-year-old was the most sensible among us.) We were about to take up his suggestion when it occurred to Charlie that when in Verona, you should do as the Veronans do. He turned the car around and backed it down the street until we reached the hotel.

There was not a parking space in sight, except for a big juicy one, right in front of the hotel entrance that was occupied by a small scooter. Without hesitating, Charlie got out of the car, picked up the scooter, and moved it to the sidewalk in full view of two men who were lounging in the doorway, watching in either admiration or horror; I couldn’t really tell which. Just as I was about to get out and stop him, Tom reached from the back seat, patted my shoulder and said, “Leave him alone. Those guys don’t look stupid enough to pick a fight with Charlie.”

Next, we got lost in Mantua. But by this time, we had learned the magical incantation dov’è, which is Italian for “where is.” We passed that phrase around like the short straw, each of us taking his or her turn to dov’è a local whenever we got lost. None of us was happy to be the designated flinger of the dov’è, so we were scrupulous about keeping track of whose turn it was. It was mine when we became hopelessly turned around on our way to a restaurant. I was about to dov’è this beautiful young woman who was walking toward us, when Tom quietly said, “You can skip this turn. Redheads are my specialty.”

“Dov’è si trovo il ristorante Il Cigno,” he asked her, in his unmistakably southern American drawl.

“Oh, it’s right around the corner,” she said. Immediately recognizing her accent, Charlie said, “You’re from Glasgow!” Immediately recognizing his accent, she responded, “You’re from Belfast!”

That led to the kind of animated conversation that—although they are famous for their tendency to move anywhere else in the world in order to escape their Saxon oppressors—always happens whenever one emigrant from the North Atlantic encounters another of his own kind in a foreign land, like it was some kind of miracle instead of something that’s as common as getting lost in Italy.

We all fell in love with the lovely Glaswegian and we all did our best to persuade her to ditch her waiting dinner date and join us for dinner. We failed. But not for want of trying, especially on Tom’s part. As usual, he remained cheerfully undaunted and philosophical about our joint failure to woo the fair maiden, and we went on to eat and drink and even do some bad singing on the way home. If Fleetwood ever got tired of hanging out in Italy with three adult children who sometimes sang badly in the streets, he never let on. Like his dad, he was an agreeable traveling companion.

For our final act, we got lost in Bologna, dov’èd our way to another fine restaurant, and enjoyed an epic lunch. The next day, Tom and Fleetwood flew back to Seattle. The day after that, Charlie and I drove to Brittany to catch a ferry to Ireland, and to finish our honeymoon on our own for a couple of days before traveling to Belfast so he could he introduce me to his family.

The next time we traveled with Tom, it was fourteen years later. This time, we went to Ireland. Tom had always wanted to go there, and I had been making the problem worse by telling him that everyone in Ireland was slightly off his or her rocker. He couldn’t wait to meet his spiritual tribe of moon-mad fools and poets. Tom and his wife Alex flew to Dublin from Germany, where he had been doing a talk at the Frankfort Book Fair. Charlie and I were staying in the Glens of Antrim, north of Belfast. Our plan was to make the relatively short drive to Dublin, meet them, and then drive around as much of the island as we could cover in four days.

Calculating driving times in Ireland is an inexact science on a good day. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that the country is (more or less) paved with narrow two-lane roads that are actually only 1.5 lanes wide. The second, is that time is an extremely fluid concept to the Irish. Those two problems are compounded when you leave the house at pretty much the time you are supposed to be at your destination, which is my husband’s habit. We showed up at the agreed-upon meeting place in Dublin about three hours late.

In the temporal anomaly that is Ireland, three hours is considered a slight delay. Tom and Alex, who had given up on ever seeing us, didn’t think so. I didn’t blame them. (The singer Sabrina Carpenter has recently described this problem succinctly in her song Please, Please, Please: I tell them it’s your culture and everyone rolls their eyes.) That near disaster set the tone for the rest of our adventure. In Italy we were forever lost. In Ireland we were forever late.

From the moment he landed, Tom got to work trying to out-pixilate the Irish. He had a natural talent for that job; making mischief was his métier. Whenever we stopped to have an Irish coffee or eat a meal or gawk at truly breathtaking scenery, he would disappear on some pretext like cashing traveler’s checks (remember those?) or looking for a portal to a parallel world. He must have fallen through several of those because he was always gone far longer than his errands should have required, and he always returned with a tale of some strange and wonderful conversation he’d had with a local lunatic. Alex and I suspected he was making them up; Charlie assured us that he was most certainly not.

As Tom fell in love with all the small towns of Ireland, we fell further behind schedule, arriving late at each destination and departing even later. He fell in love with Killorglin when he discovered that they crowned a goat king every year at their Puck Fair. He fell in love with Ballylickey simply because of its name. He started telling everyone that he was from Ballylickey, just so he could say it, over and over. He loved Youghal, especially when he learned that it’s pronounced Y’all. He talked the owners of Aherne’s Restaurant there to feed us even though we arrived, late again, just five minutes before they were about to stop lunch service.

We took a detour to visit a small ancient stone circle near Kenmare. The very air there was buzzing with a mystical effervescence that he picked up on immediately. His silliness turned to stillness as he wandered in and around the ancient stones, transported by the mystery and absorbing the cosmic rays in silent bliss. So, of course, we were late getting to Galway.

In Galway, we had a picnic sitting on the stone steps leading down to the water’s edge next to the Spanish Arch in a light drizzle that turned into a downpour that sent us sheltering under the Arch where we fell into animated conversation with several slightly inebriated students who were celebrating passing their leaving certs. They had just returned from a bout of what they called “bushing,” which is drinking in a secluded lane until you fall into the bushes.

When they learned we were from Seattle, they became very excited because they had all read Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs. “And you’ve got Tom Robbins there too,” one of them added.

“As a matter of fact, you’ve got him right here,” Tom replied.

This guy’s eyes popped. His mouth dropped. He asked me if we were having him on. I assured him that we were not. Once he processed the fact that he’d run into one of his literary heroes under a bridge in the west of Ireland, he insisted that we come back to his flat because his roommate would never believe that he’d met Tom Robbins under a bridge in the west of Ireland unless he produced him in person. I explained that we couldn’t possibly do that because we were already late getting on the road to Dublin.

He begged. He pleaded. “Well then, would you wait here while I go there and bring him back?”

When I pointed out that wouldn’t take any less time than all of us going back to his flat, he pondered that for a moment and said, “I think you have a point there.”

Tom pulled out one of his blue calling-cards that read Tom Robbins, Admirer of Clouds, signed it for him in his distinctive fifth-grader scrawl, shook his hand, and apologized for not being able to meet his roommate. We left the kid standing there, mouth still agape, and hit the road to Dublin, late again.

On the road or anywhere else, Tom was incurably blithe and lighthearted. It’s why he was so much fun to hang out with. It was also why some critics wrote him off. What the detractors of his style get wrong about his work is that wrote with a light touch about heavy things. He avoided seriousness because he believed in yin and yang, in balancing everything with its opposite. Sometimes he could get a little preachy on the page, going on about things he cared deeply about, but that was a minor flaw. And it didn’t matter because it didn’t make a dent in his genius. He flaunted the guardians of so-called literary fiction, and his many readers loved him for it. He was very good at what he did, and his success was his payback.

One of the best gifts Tom ever gave me was introducing me to Ginny Ruffner. Echoing the circumstances that had cemented our friendship, he invited me to a birthday party that she threw for him on our mutual birthday. Those two amazing creatures were together for a while before moving on to other romances, although they remained close friends and confidantes. Soon after their breakup, Tom met his future wife and soulmate, Alex, and spent the rest of his life with her. Ginny and I became fast friends until she passed away in late January, a little more than three weeks before Tom did. It was difficult to lose both in such a short time.

So now he has boarded the astral plane to embark on his next adventure, and the world has lost the best Tom Robbins character. Anyone who thought his books and the people who partied through them, were over the top didn’t know Tom. He outdid them all. He was the prototype for every magician, salty sage, clever lass, Can o’ Beans, or Dirty Sock he invented. He was the example they all tried to live up to. They were created to entertain him, to please him and to enlighten him. The happy side effect was that they did that for everyone who read and loved his books.

Tom was the most vivid of all his creations. But like every storyteller who ever lived and spun alternate realities, he was also the most transitory. That’s the final irony of being human. His characters will live forever because they lived on the page. He lived in the slippery, sliding, evanescent, and allegedly real world with the rest of us, where nothing lasts forever except for the things we imagine.