Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

afforded by psilocybin’s psychoactive alkaloids, existence itself was so amusing it was a wonder anyone could take it seriously for half a minute. In our altered state of consciousness we seemed to be fortuitously in tune with those Asian “crazy wisdom” sages who have defined life as “the beautiful joke that is always happening”; with the avatar Ramakrishna who, after achieving ultimate enlightenment, returned to say that what Nirvana most closely resembled was laughter.
    Well and good, yet it was our comic sensibility that may well have been the rubber fly in our Halloween ointment, that may have been precisely why we failed to access the Other Side. When we finally gave up and drove back to La Conner, it was starting to occur to us that séance and silliness might not mix, not even in a remote rural graveyard on the thirty-first of October with an elfin choir of sacred toadstools singing in one’s blood. Life may be a joke all right, but the dead are not easily amused.

10
    holy tomato!
    It was said of Cap’n Andrew Garland, he of the walnutted windowpanes, that he walked outside one morning, shook his fist at an uncertain sky, and shouted, “All right, God, I’ve got You now! If it’s sunny I’ll get up hay, if it rains I’ll plant tomatoes.”
    Since tomatoes were the principal cash crop in that area of Virginia, and since Christianity played a significant role in nearly every Warsawian’s life, it’s hardly surprising that the Almighty would be occasionally invoked in a field where the love apples grew. I personally witnessed such an invocation, and a quite effective one, albeit with the opposite intention of the usual agricultural prayer.
    In my teens, I lived for two successive summers on a farm owned by the family of a high school buddy, where I, along with a half-dozen other boys, was hired to pick tomatoes. We were paid ten cents per basket for green fruit, five cents for ripe. The green ones were destined for the grocery stores and produce markets of Florida, its growing season being the reverse of our own, and they had to be unblemished and of a particular size, whereas the ripe ones, which we’d haul at night to a local cannery to be turned into juice or sauce, had no such restrictions and thus were far easier to pick. On a good day, a boy might earn four or five bucks, which could light up a good many pinball machines and add any number of comic books and girlie magazines to one’s Librorum Prohibitorum.
    The camaraderie, moreover, though unspoken, was relished by all of us, and we shared a sod-sullied bond strengthened by the perpetual japes and jabs of inane teenage redneck humor. Ah, but as wise men know, a big front has a big back, and the beefiest backside of this summer job was that on July afternoons it could get hot enough in those low-lying fields to melt the humps off a camel. There were days when the sunshine seemed not only weighty, not only textured, but almost audible: it sounded like drops of oil crackling into combustion, or a bluesman vamping on a harmonica made out of lard. On one of those days, the heat became so unbearable it apparently called for divine intervention.
    Lancelot Delano (that was his actual name, though his friends called him “Gumboot”) was a tall, gawky youth, strong as a mule but sweet as molasses and just about as slow. Lancelot wasn’t really a halfwit, not exactly a simpleton, just . . . well, slow. He was related to two of the pickers, and all of us knew him even though he’d kissed school good-bye in the fifth grade and rarely came to town, even for a movie. Gentle and good-natured, he was never ridiculed, but, rather, elicited from his peers a measure of rough affection -- and, one day, the torturously torrid day aforementioned -- a kind of awe.
    The temperature flirted with one hundred that afternoon, humidity hard on its heels. We sweated like thawing snowmen, and in our wilting ears heat made a faint fuzzy chirping noise, like the spasms