Kenneth Giuffre MD

American Author Tom Robbins has been around as long as my own father. I discovered him at Schiller’s, a long-since closed NJ mall bookstore. Remember those places. You could spend hours hanging around, lost in the shelves without being asked to buy something? Neither were there cell phones to interrupt an Saturday afternoon literary expedition. Maybe it would bore someone born in the age of the Internet and Amazon.. I’d get lost diving into real live books, freshly bound with that newly-printed smell.

That’s where, on one particular Saturday, some time in my teens, I sat on the floor and read at least a couple of chapters of a the featured Robbins book then, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues.

Book cover of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues-Tom Robbins

What kind of creative nut would write an entire novel recounting the oft salacious adventures a slutty post-teen who capitalized on a conspicuous birth defect. Born with abnormally massive thumbs, commercial feminine hygeine spray-model Sissy Hankshaw, devoted her life between photo shoots to what else? Hitchhiking all over the US.

I sat reading, caught in the maniacal prose, long enough for my legs to fall asleep. I also wondered if this crazy author, Tom Robbins, who I’d never heard of before, was some kind of demented new version of Vonnegut.

Two years later I saw Robbins in person. I watched him do a reading of the first chapter of his early 80′s “last quarter of the twentiethcentury…” opus of political incorrectness, the still insane. “Still Life With Woodpecker.” He also gave a talk that foreshadowed the evil future of political correctness, indirectly I now realize is probably the underlying theme of the novel.

Original cover version of Still Life With Woodpecker-Tom Robbins

The next day, I purchased the book, and read it in its entirety. It cemented Robbins in as my favorite. I relished his ingenious ability to craft almost continuous strings of metaphors, literary amalgamations of previously-unrelated subjects meeting for the first time on a written page, usually in a manner that these days would certainly offend someone.

“Still Life” contained still what is one of my favorite printed passages in the English language:

“Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time. Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.”

-Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Robbins has since written a string of equally good books eg. Jitterbug Perfume,Skinny Legs and All. None disappoint.

Tom Robbins Books

Most recently Robbins has penned his autobiography, Tibetan Peach Pie in the same outrageous style as his prior fiction. You get a hint that his own many colorful years, even if embellished a tad, supplied plenty of material for his outrageous fiction themes, and is somehow responsible for the fact that in person he looks nothing like an octogenarian. He’s a year younger than my father .

Cover of Tibetan Peach Pie-Tom Robbins

One chapter relate how as a young hormone-raging teen, his folks granted his request to travel with a local circus, his secret agenda, to fulfil a mad obsessive crush on the lion tamer’s beautiful daughter.

I recently enjoyed a video of him speaking to a crowd on YouTube [1]. He complained how people repeatedly show up at his readings expecting to see the actor Tim Robbins, “We’re separated by one vowel. He’s the richer one!”

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