Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (34 page)

Even barricaded, we didn’t get much rest -- and neither did poor Pasquale. When sometime after dawn I opened the door just a crack, I saw that the raging assailant had finally departed and that our game-saving “Magic Johnson,” having stood guard through the night, lay fast asleep (at least his head was attached and I didn’t notice any blood) on a narrow wooden bench. It was enough to temper, however briefly, my hatred of the Lakers.

Due to depart later that morning, we packed and left for the little airport right away, partially for fear that the sword-wielding solicitor would stage another encore, but also to ascertain if someone from the airfield would remember to go out on the runway and flag down our plane, as the scheduled flight from Gao to Bamako would only stop in Timbuktu if the pilot could spot someone below waving his arms.

In what passed for the waiting room, we were soon joined by a half-dozen Tuareg, resolutely intent on selling us more souvenirs (I’d previously purchased a hunk of desert rock salt and a carved gourd) before we got away. They hustled, hassled, and harangued, interfering with our attempt to hold a farewell conversation with Pasquale, to copy correctly a postal address where we might send him a pair of Nike athletic shoes like my own. Finally, annoyed to a level of inspiration, I stood up and announced in a loud voice, “I don’t want souvenirs. I want hashish.”

The Tuareg looked stunned, so I said it again. “No, no,” they cried, “Hashish bad. Hashish bad.” Plainly, my request had rattled them, so pushing the envelope, I now commenced to dance around wildly, like a mandrill with its butt on fire, waggling my arms as if I were one of those extraneously limbed Hindu gods directing the orchestra of the spheres or the traffic in downtown Calcutta. The hawkers moved away. In Mali, it’s considered very bad juju to make eye contact with the mentally ill, and the more I carried on, the more distance they put between themselves and me; until finally, in the middle of a particularly paroxysmic pirouette -- “Hashish! Hashish!” -- they bagged their imitation artifacts, slipped out of the terminal, and did not return.

Successfully signaled, an Air Mali plane did eventually land and take us aboard. We’d get off in Mopti, from where we’d call on the Sirius-minded Dogon and Bozo, but we were done with Timbuktu. Alas, as it turned out, Timbuktu was not done with us.

The first symptoms tagged us in Paris, where we’d stopped for a few days of joie de vivre before traveling on to the U.S. We were dining in an Alsatian restaurant on rue de Buci when both Alexa and I experienced a simultaneous hot flash. I say “flash,” but the feeling that we were standing against our will before the open door of a blast furnace lasted for ten or fifteen minutes. No one else in the room appeared similarly affected, and the source of the heat seemed definitely internal. The next day on the plane home we experienced an identical episode. Our faces turned strawberry red and the jet might have borrowed our plasma for extra fuel.

Back in Seattle, we were tested for malaria. The results were negative, but our relief was short-lived. During the next ten months -- that’s how long we were ill -- we would be host to a peculiar panoply of symptoms, including chronic fatigue and spontaneous panic attacks, often coming on in the middle of the night. The hot flashes continued periodically, Alexa experienced hair loss, her ovaries hurt and so did my testicles. The most persistent and unsettling feature, however, was the ache that racked every joint in our bodies and led us to be temporarily diagnosed with dengue, an ailment known colloquially for that very reason as “bonebreak fever.” However, when the tropical disease unit at the University of Washington Hospital, where we’d become familiar faces, sent samples of our blood to the Center for Tropical Diseases in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the experts there found no evidence of dengue. Stumped, the UW even tested us for HIV.

Katharine Hepburn said once, “Men and women weren’t meant to live together. They should live across the street from one another.” For the first few years of our relationship, before we bit the sugarcoated bullet of matrimony, Alexa and I did exactly that. In the late eighties and early nineties, I had an apartment adjacent to Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market (spending just two days a week at my house in La Conner). Alexa lived a clam’s throw away on Western. Our symptoms were sporadic yet remained strangely coordinated. When an episode would visit me, I’d ring up Alexa across the street and ask, “Are you feeling . . . ?” Invariably, she’d respond, “Yeah, it just started.” It was like synchronized swimming in a pool of pathology.

About six months into the disease, I consulted the pope’s doctor. The offices of Dr. Kevin Cahill were in Manhattan, where he served the health needs of the cardinals, bishops, priests, and lay holy mackerels of the New York Diocese, and had been medical consultant to John Paul during the pontiff’s visit to America. Dr. Cahill also happened to be the world’s leading authority on West African diseases. Although I was never examined or diagnosed by Cahill, he informed me during a telephone conversation that “We have names and medical profiles for only about one-eighth of the viruses one can contract in West Africa.” Since Alexa and I apparently had one of the anonymous seven-eighths, I decided to name it, christening it “djiggiebombo” after the village where we had rested, half dead from heat exhaustion, before climbing down the Bandiagara escarpment into Dogon country. Once named, the virus was a bit easier to deal with: I could talk to it, flatter it, encourage it to take a hike of its own.

Djiggiebombo lingered on, nevertheless, and three more months would pass before another phone conversation with another New Yorker led to a startling resolution. This time I’d been speaking with Jonathan Cott, a senior writer for
Rolling Stone
. Jon had recently returned from Niger, a neighboring country to Mali, where he’d been reporting on the location filming of
The Sheltering Sky,
Bernardo Bertolucci’s big-screen adaptation of Paul Bowles’s harrowing novel. While in Niger, Jon had unintentionally offended a local witch doctor, who cast a spell that caused him -- a gentle, sophisticated, worldly fellow -- to roll around in the hot sand off and on for three days, begging Tuareg extras to chop off his head with one of their long swords: big bad juju. Jon assured me that in West Africa black magic is a flourishing reality at which only fools scoffed, and encouraged me to consider it as a possible cause of our so-called djiggiebombo.

Consider I did, and at one point in the deliberation my memory bank, like a constipated slot machine, expelled a single tarnished but negotiable coin. I turned it over and over and slowly the hairs on the back of my neck stood in their follicles and looked around in vain for an exit. A particular occurrence in Timbuktu, previously filed under the label “Interesting but Insignificant Local Color,” was now petitioning for a front-page headline in my mnemonic tabloid.

The moon had been full that night -- and believe me, Timbuktu under a full moon lives up to its billing as a metropolis of mystery. All around us the mystique was so thick you could have sliced it with a Tuareg sword. With nary a mountain, a skyscraper or even a tree to impede its ascent, the desert moon seemed to pop up fast, like a flat-faced rabbit some magician has pulled from a hat, and earth’s phantom lover was already high-beaming its sweet, fey mischief when Pasquale and the boys interrupted our early supper to invite us to a dance. On such a night, only a wimp would have refused.

As the moon would have it, the dance was an open-air affair, the dance floor itself a concrete slab the size and shape of a tennis court. On its right side, a band of musicians was warming up, their instruments consisting of a couple of Western-style acoustic guitars and an array of strange African contraptions, both wind and percussive; made from gourds, goat bones, wires, bottles, and sticks; all polished, painted, played with expertise and accorded utmost respect. Next to the band there sat on wooden benches the eligible bachelors of Timbuktu. Across the court from the men, twenty or twenty-five young women had gathered, exuding all the poise and assurance the males appeared to lack. Tall, stately, fine-featured, garbed head to toe in those West African fabrics that could make a rainbow blush, the women looked like fashion models, each and every one. Small wonder the men were intimidated.

Once the band commenced to play in earnest, a number of women, impatient with the time it was taking the men to get up their nerve, took to the court and began dancing with one another. It reminded me of my junior prom in rural Virginia. We rubberneckers were huddled at one end of the slab, just taking it all in, when one of those statuesque beauties approached us and beckoned me onto the floor. When I looked to Pasquale for guidance, he indicated that I should oblige. So, I danced with her for a while, and then a second woman cut in and took her place. After that, a third. The band just played continuously, there being no individual numbers as such. I asked my third partner why the other women were laughing at us -- I thought maybe my moves were awkward, too Western, too white -- but she replied that Partner Number 2 had announced that she was going to marry me. (Alexa! Help!)

By this time, the men had overcome their shyness, the floor was packed, and all the while an elderly female was weaving in and out among the couples, not dancing, just wandering, zigzagging -- and looking quite mad. No one acknowledged her presence, not even when she got in their way. The dancers behaved as if she were totally invisible. Which, of course, was standard in that part of the world. They just pretended bizarre behavior was not happening. If someone acted nuts, everybody else hit the delete button.

Eventually, I managed to excuse myself from the frolic and made to rejoin my little group of onlookers. As I sat down beside Alexa, I noticed that the old crone had followed me to the end of the court. Regarding the two of us crazily for an instant, she then hissed and made a swift, cryptic gesture with both hands before turning and disappearing into the swaying, swinging throng.

Neither Alexa nor I thought much about it at the time, but we did start to feel increasingly uncomfortable, sensing that we outsiders had intruded long enough on another culture’s private rituals, and when we suggested to Pasquale, “John Travolta,” and the posse that it might be time for us to leave, they concurred. Just as children like to scare themselves, we imagined all sorts of exotic menace -- genies, lions, kidnappers, jilted Tuareg promoters, ghosts of long-dead slavers astride pale camels -- as we passed through the velvet shadows cast by those ancient clay mosques and libraries in the still more ancient moonlight. We did not, however, think of the gesturing crone, nor would she really come to mind again until the day nine months later when Jonathan Cott had to go and bring up juju.

Since in all those months our disease had gone undiagnosed, since Western medicine had failed to relieve its symptoms, and since we had, indeed, been somewhat vulnerable in a culture where juju was a fact of life, where things occurred that caused science to look the other way (the Dogon’s detailed knowledge of the Sirius star system, for example), it did not seem wholly unreasonable to consider that our “djiggiebombo” might be, in fact, a curse. If so, then how did one proceed in neutralizing it, in getting it lifted?

As Jon’s seed sprouted, and after hours of reflection, I devised a plan of action. Every day, sometimes twice or thrice a day, I would lie down on the earth. In La Conner, I would recline in my backyard, when in Seattle, I’d find a patch of bare soil in Myrtle Edwards Park. Once I’d established what would have to pass for a connection to the earth, once I’d cleared my thoughts of the customary daily debris, I’d close my eyes and focus on the old witch woman. In my mind, I’d try to picture her as a little girl growing up in Timbuktu, imagining her life back then. Next, I’d picture her as a young woman, maybe going to dances such as the one on which we’d intruded, maybe falling in love at such a soiree. I’d picture her as a bride, perhaps a mother, and then I’d try to imagine what turn of events might have wounded her, caused her to begin practicing the black arts. Had she embraced juju only after she’d become mentally unstable? Or, had the juju itself deranged her?

Next, I’d apologize, begging her forgiveness if our presence at the dance had offended her. I’d tell her that my dancing with the women had been all in good fun, conducted with respect, and that the tittering over a potential marriage was just some girlish joke. I’d express admiration for her city and its people, and romantic that I am, this praise was not insincere. I’d congratulate her on Timbuktu’s rich history and express hope for a restorative future. All this I did day after day, and although I must confess I sometimes felt more than a little foolish, none of my séances were in jest. We were a trifle desperate. Djiggiebombo was peeing in our punch bowl. Djiggiebombo was plucking our bluebird.

So what happened? It may have been a result of the macrobiotic diet we’d temporarily but rigorously embraced, it may have been due to the shiatsu treatments we were receiving from a remarkable Seattle healer named Yasuo Mori, the crone in far Mali may actually have sensed somehow my daily appeals and responded favorably thereto; or maybe the damned disease just finally ran out of gas, as viruses, named or unnamed, sometimes do; but for whatever reason, within weeks of my having first launched my psychic missives toward northwest Africa, our symptoms, mine and Alexa’s (in perfect tandem, of course), began to ebb, to fade. And then one fine day -- after nearly a year of wreaking havoc in our twin corporal oases -- djiggiebombo saddled its dromedary and rode off into the sunset, never to return. Au revoir, motherfucker! And God bless Timbuktu.

40

two bunch, too

Looking back on my life, as I’ve been doing in these pages, I’m reminded again of my great good fortune to have been a writer during the golden age of American publishing. On second thought, I suppose publishing’s golden age actually was the twenties through the forties; when Maxwell Perkins was bringing out Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Hemingway, not to mention James Jones, Faulkner popping over the horizon; you know, back before television would do to reading what panty hose would do to heavy petting. My period of peak production -- the late seventies through the nineties -- might more accurately be described as “the golden age of expense accounts.”

During those years, my novels and those of many other authors were launched with elaborate parties in New York clubs. On tour, I was lodged in spacious suites in the best hotels; fed in fine restaurants, where, when I traveled with Terry Bromberg and Barry Dennenberg from the promotion department, we’d sometimes order every dessert on the menu. Barry would read off the desserts to us, one by one, in tones and with emotions that rivaled James Earl Jones reciting the Emancipation Proclamation. (We called it “The Barrysburg Address.”)

I’m still not sure where my agent Phoebe and I got the nerve or how we managed to pull this off, but we somehow convinced Bantam Books that I was dead set against shipping manuscript pages of a book-in-progress to New York for approval. Phoebe would hand-deliver an opening chapter or two, on the strength of which I’d usually receive a contract and a monetary advance against future royalties. After that, when the company felt the need to check on my progress, one or more editors had to travel to
me;
had to meet me in some location of my choosing, where, once they’d settled down and divested themselves of their New York buzz, then and only then they’d be shown fresh pages to read. They’d make notes, ask questions, and we’d discuss any suggestions they might propose, after which they’d return the pages. It was called an “editorial conference,” and two or more would be scheduled for each novel.

Should this strike you as rather presumptuous on my part, you’re probably not just whistling Sinatra. On the other hand, the halls of publishing houses were not sufficiently insulated from the ongoing amphetamine pace of Manhattan, and while the prevailing physical and psychological hubbub, the busyness of it all, might actually be a fitting accompaniment to the contemplation of fast-paced thrillers, or for that matter, tomes a-twitch with Jewish, Irish, or Episcopalian angst, a meaningful assessment of my sentences, quirky in ways different from Eastern Seaboard quirkiness, required of an editor, if not exactly a West Coast sensibility, at least a mind relaxed enough to follow the charmer’s pipes out of the familiar, well-paved neighborhoods of syntax and story line and into a kind of wild, neo-druidic grove, emblazoned with poppies, woodpeckers, spotted toadstools, and a painted pagoda where the Language Wheel is banged like a gong and no Ivy League creative-writing professor would ever have been caught smiling let alone dead.

The location I selected for almost all of those editorial conferences was Two Bunch Palms, a health spa near Desert Hot Springs, a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. Like Timbuktu, Two Bunch is an oasis. Unlike the potable spring around which Timbuktu had sprung up, the spring at Two Bunch is hot, laced with minerals, and continually gurgles up what tests have shown to be the second most therapeutic waters on earth, second only to Baden Baden. The natural mineral pool lies in a rustic grotto, lushly surrounded by palm trees and other semitropical foliage, and by moonlight verges on the genuinely magical.

Early in its history, Two Bunch Palms was the desert hideaway of the gangster Al Capone, who operated a private casino there. The small rooms beneath the former casino, where nowadays the finest massage practitioners in America perform their restorative rub-a-dub-dub, were, during Capone’s tenure, cribs for prostitutes. This history lends a faint air of naughtiness to the otherwise relentlessly wholesome place and acts as a defense against forebodings of woo-woo.

If one can’t relax at Two Bunch Palms, one can’t relax anywhere, but in the beginning my editors from Bantam put up a valiant resistance. The evening that Steve Rubin and Matthew Shear arrived there, for instance, they were not only almost audibly crackling with New York intensity, they broadcast ill-concealed vectors of resentment: not exactly thrilled about being lured into that all-too-alien environment. Despite having fortified themselves with martinis on the plane, they were poised to get right to work. I, however, refused to allow them even a peek at my pages until they’d had at least one massage and a soak in the pool.

The editors somewhat begrudgingly complied, and by the second day, each of them was walking around about two inches off the ground, hanging from a smile. In their central nervous systems you could have heard a pin drop. Steve, who had never before been massaged and who was initially suspicious of the very idea, would go back to New York and hire a masseuse to work on him twice a week. Our editorial sessions progressed as smoothly as massage oil, and thereafter I never had to petition for a meeting at the spa. Word spread at Bantam, creating some jealousy, and periodically I’d receive calls from Matthew, Steve, or a successor, asking how the book was coming along and, almost plaintively, if it wasn’t about time for another conference at Two Bunch.

Bear in mind that Bantam was picking up the tab for those sessions, including transportation, lodging, meals, and spa treatments (usually two daily), for the editor or editors, for me, my agent, and whatever wife or girlfriend I might have invited along. It’s safe to say that in today’s economy such lovely expense-account indulgence is a thing of the past, especially since that upstart pair of dinky little digits -- the insubstantial
0
and the barely substantial
1
-- rode the e-train into the publishing world, with its alphabets and vocabularies, its warehouses of wood pulp and reservoirs of ink, and turned it sideways if not upside down.

When in 2000 it came time to edit
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
-- my novel about the CIA, the Virgin Mary, and the maverick operative who loves, hates, and redefines them both -- well, things having already changed, I shipped all the pages to New York via FedEx, massaged my wife’s neck, and ran myself a bath in our tub.
Tibetan Peach Pie?
When I’m convinced that it’s finished, I’ll hit the send key on the computer and, both wistfully and with some trepidation, leave it up to the
0
and the
1
.