by NANCY FABER
Photographs by Bob Peterson
Son Fleetwood, 6, admires his father, novelist Tom Robbins, who served in the Air Force but did not win those medals.
"July 16,1963," author Tom Robbins recalls, "was the most rewarding day of my life-the one I wouldn't trade for any other." That was the day he first tried LSD. "I was holding a daisy and I actually went inside the flower. it had an identity as strong as my own. That's why everything in my books, in- cluding inanimate objects, seems alive. I think everything has a secret life." Robbins calls that kind of insight "crazy wisdom," and it helps explain why he has become a new literary sensation with a cult as loyal (if not yet as large) as those of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon and Richard Brautigan. In Robbins' case, his reputation is based on only two novels, Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. His first book is a bizarre story of dropout Americans who kidnap Jesus' body and bring it to a U.S. roadside zoo. Cowgirls details the adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, a girl with outsized thumbs Who turns hitchhiking into an art. She is seduced and educated by a Japanese-American fugitive from a World War 11 internment camp. He lives in a cave where one wall is inscribed "I believe in everything; nothing is sacred" and the other with "I believe in nothing; everything is sacred."
The philosophy that emerges in Robbins' books is a mad mixture of Christianity, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, animism and mysticism. He developed that philosophy in the '60s as a "psychedelic revolutionary" who frequently visited Haight-Ashbury in its bloom. Sadly he watched the decline of what he hoped would be a golden age. He knew it was over when a Hindu holy man was brought onstage to pray at a rock festival and somebody in the audience shouted, "Screw you, let's boogie." "My comrades moved on to politics," the author remembers, "or turned themselves into mushpots on drugs and booze or went into fundamentalist Christianity. Those in politics became more and more involved with violence. I couldn't buy any of it. I have tried to be an alternative to the new politics and new mysticism. What people respond to in my work is a kind of liberating effect that they are not finding elsewhere."
Robbins, 41, was born in North Carolina "on the cusp between Cancer and Leo. An astrologer told me it was the strangest, most auspicious day (July 22,1936) in the zodiac. A palmist once looked at my hand and almost fainted. She said it was a Cecil B. De Mille spectacle of lines." Robbins'father was "an electrical genius" who became vice-president of a large utility. "I spent my first nine years in the hills of Appalachia and then we moved to eastern Virginia to live among the aristocrats," says Robbins. "It made an interesting contrast."
In the hope of turning a rambunctious boy into a Southern gentleman, young Tom was packed off first to a military school in Chatham, Va. and then to Washington and Lee University. "I threw biscuits at my fraternity housemother," he says, "and was kicked out. Without a fraternity you couldn't live at Washington and Lee." He left after two years, hitchhiked around the U.S., working on construction, and in 1956 drifted into New York's Greenwich Village. "I was a 20-year-old from the rural South, practically a virgin, pretending to be a poet."
Then, about to be drafted, he joined the Air Force and was sent to Korea, where he taught meteorology and on the side operated a black market in cigarettes, soap and toothpaste. "But no drugs," says Robbins. "Most of it ended up in Red China. I'm sure I probably supplied Mao Tse tung with his Colgate toothpaste."
When he was discharged in 1961 Robbins went back to college and studied art, dramatics and music. "I was active in all of them," he says. "My paintings are very strange-large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy."
When he graduated Robbins settled in Washington State. Home since 1970 has been a "semi tree house" at the mouth of the Skagit River in LaConner,a fishing village 70 miles north of Seattle. "People are tolerant of eccentric dress and behavior. Artists are not put on a pedestal or attacked, just accepted."
In 1968 Robbins married Terrie Lunden, a student at the University of Washington who moonlighted as a pizza parlor waitress. "I guess we're still married," says Robbins. "We don't live in the same house, but I see her almost every day " Their 6-vear-old son, Fleetwood Star Robbins, is "my Zen master. When he was 3 years old some one asked him what his daddy did and he said,'My daddy makes magic.' I burst into tears when I heard that."
Although Robbins'magic earned good critical notices when Roadside was published in 1971, he says, "I got virtually no money. Now I see the hardback selling in stores for $15 when it originally was $4.95." As an author with a growing audience, especially on campuses, Robbins is doing better with Cowgirls, which has nearly a million copies in print. His first royalty check was for $50,000, followed by two more for $47,000, and the movie rights have been bought. His yet unfinished third novel earned him an advance of $165,000
More than the money, Robbins claims, he is delighted with mail from his readers. "It makes all those long, lonely hours sitting at a desk worth while. Writing is the hardest physical work there is. At the typewriter you find out who you are."
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