RIP Tom Robbins: Our Boomer Petway

Robbins in 1981

I'm not ashamed to say I was pretty much in love with Tom Robbins, who died yesterday at the age of 92. The only personal ad I ever wrote said, "Ellen Cherry Charles seeks Boomer Petway," naming two characters from his novel Skinny Legs and All. (The paper refused to run the ad because I wouldn't say how old I was, or was looking for. They missed the point.)

The author of nine wild and wonderful novels like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Robbins also penned a memoir titled Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, which describes in a series of stories his “lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder.”

Born and raised in the South, Robbins worked as a copy editor for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a job he continued after graduating with a degree in journalism in 1959. But, according to the New York Times, "he chafed under the restrictions of Jim Crow-era Richmond, including a prohibition at the newspaper against printing photographs of Black people — a transgression he nevertheless committed several times."

He moved to Seattle and worked at the Seattle Times, where he wrote art reviews and unusual headlines for Dear Abby columns during what he calls “that nondescript period between the end of the beige '50s and the beginning of the Day-Glo '60s.” He read about Gordon Wasson’s sacred mushroom experiments in Life magazine and—having explored Zen, Tantric Hinduism, Sufism and the Tao—he sought Wasson’s experience, but was lead to LSD instead.

Describing his first LSD trip in Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins wrote that the session ended with his consciousness entering a daisy’s, described “like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.” He credits this life-changing experience with enabling him to lose his “terror of the eternal,” and finding the connection between modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments:

Each…offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe…

He wrote of visiting Amsterdam “to take the waters,” and recounts his participation in the historic 1963 LeMar (Legalize Marijuana) event organized by Allen Ginsberg at the Women’s Detention Center in Greenwich Village, “to protest that the prison was crowded with females of all ages whose sole criminal act was the private, orderly, nonviolent inhalation of tiny plumes of smoke given off by a smoldering weed.”

Robbins - whose novels also include Another Roadside Attraction, Still Life With Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates - put his name where his pen was, joining Oliver Stone and a host of other celebrities and public figures signing on to a March 2002 New York Times ad promoting medical marijuana.

“What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.”

“I’m descended from a long line of preachers and policemen,” he told High Times magazine in 2000. “Now, it’s common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they’re factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally.”

Robbins said, presciently, "Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy uber alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and driving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming."

Robbins was my Boomer Petway—the artist who never compromised—and all of ours. He will be missed, but his words will never die.