The Syrup of Wahoo Keeps Splashing Around

Gary Lippman remembers his friend, the late American author Tom Robbins.

By Gary LippmanMarch 4, 2025

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

“TRUST THE ART, not the artist” goes the old saying, yet so many of us continue to idolize our favorite creators, imitate their work, snag selfies with them, even seek to befriend them. Being a natural-born “trust the artist as well as the art” type, I’ve often been disappointed when I’ve gotten to break bread with artists I’ve admired. (To be fair, they’ve probably been equally displeased with me.) In trusting the artist, I keep forgetting that, while art can be perfect, people are anything but. Which reminds me of something the American novelist Tom Robbins wrote: “[P]eople are never perfect, but love can be.”

When Robbins died on February 9 at age 92, I felt it as a double blow, not only because I have treasured his books for my entire adult life but also because, during the past five years, I became friendly with the man himself. And what a man he was—a living embodiment of his work’s most winning aspects. Whimsical, provocative, funny, wise, language-drunk, and kind, he proved to be every bit as worthy of trust as his art was.

Robbins identified his main themes as transformation, liberation, and celebration, with plenty of paradox and irreverence thrown in. These qualities helped him, as he put it, “bang the Language Wheel like a gong.” The most useful item in his toolbox, he said, was his imagination, which he called his “circus tent-cum-laboratory”—“my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo.”

“Personally,” Robbins added, “I ask four things of a novel: that it make me think, make me laugh, make me horny, and awaken my sense of wonder.” His own productions certainly walk that talk, drawing as they do on psychedelic insights, Tibetan “crazy wisdom,” absurdist and slapstick traditions, and creatively sexy behavior. After the appearance of his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, in 1971, Robbins published seven more delightfully titled seriocomic epics along with, in this century, a collection of nonfiction, Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005); a memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (2014); and B Is For Beer (2009), a children’s book about drinking the stuff.

A hops-sodden tale for tots was typical of Robbins, who served as a tenderhearted version of the trickster figure in American letters. Growing up in Virginia as a self-described “hillbilly” complete with Baptist preacher grandfathers, Robbins forged a colorful résumé for himself even before he appended to it the word “novelist”: meteorologist with the US Air Force, sportswriter, late-night radio disc jockey, poet, and art critic. Once his fiction got cooking, Robbins’s authorial presence seemed as playful yet earnest as any of his often younger readers were—and timelessly savvy about our politics to boot. Quips one of his protagonists, “Both American government and American business—if there’s any difference any more—are rolled in Christian rhetoric like a chicken leg is rolled in flour.”

While I was aware of Robbins’s high placement in the countercultural pantheon during my adolescence, I only dove headfirst into his fiction sometime in August 1981, the month of my 18th birthday. Despite that grand occasion, it was far from a celebratory time for me: my mother was bedridden in a local hospital, dying of cancer, and I was scheduled to leave home soon for my freshman year of university. Most friends of mine were salivating about their upcoming lives as undergraduates, but because of a plethora of fears—of becoming an adult, of being socially rejected at a “serious” school, of flunking out there, of change in general, and, most of all, of losing my mother, who until then had been my only truly close family member—I felt my entire life collapsing around me.

In this distressed state, I went looking for a distraction (plus an improvement in my “cool credentials”). So I picked up a copy of Tom Robbins’s latest novel, his third, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980). What I got from the experience was considerably more than mere distraction. Fifty pages in, I was so enchanted by Robbins’s literary charms that all of my pain and worry (and yearning to be cool) got knocked clean out of my psyche. Temporarily, at least. And by the time I finished Woodpecker, arriving at its luminous final sentence—“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”—I felt emotionally washed clean. Having endured a (mostly) unhappy childhood myself, I stood now on the verge of an adulthood that threatened to be even worse, but Robbins appeared to be confiding to me, with a wink, that I would not just survive the current heavy changes but, with a certain flamboyant emotional jiujitsu to manage those changes, might even thrive.

The trick, Robbins’s questing heroes in Woodpecker suggested, was to cultivate in my life some levity, even some enlightened silliness, which would serve as a bulwark against self-pity. “Joy in spite of everything” was Robbins’s credo, and the way to cultivate such joy, he stressed, was to take nothing too seriously. The word “too” is crucial, because seriousness is indeed sometimes inevitable, necessary, appropriate. But too much seriousness is the ultimate joy-killer, the ultimate life-killer, a psychological brute nearly as ruinous as my mother’s cancer.

Over the next three-plus decades, I read and appreciated Robbins’s new novels as they were published, and early in this century, I briefly met the author after he gave a philosophically nutritious speech at a conference in New York City. Around the same time, I realized that Robbins and my mother had been born within a few weeks of each other in 1932. She had died at age 49, soon after I’d finished reading Woodpecker, yet Robbins had lived on, making creative and pleasurable use of the old age my mother didn’t reach, a fact I found consoling.

Then came 2020 and the pandemic that took the lives of several friends of mine, while the lockdown forced me to live apart from my family. For a few dire months, I felt catapulted back to my edge-of-adulthood crisis in 1981. Those old fears reared up again, the future seemed catastrophic, and I was taking everything much too seriously. In other words, I’d forgotten the lessons I’d learned from Robbins’s novels. So I began to reread his memoir, which is as richly imaginative as his fiction, and soon enough, my head got right again.

Another virtue of that rereading was that I noticed Robbins had printed his mailing address in the text. Hmm, interesting! But did I dare to use this information? Did I dare to write to the author by US mail? After some hesitation, I went for it, sending Robbins a letter that (briefly) expressed how much his literary creations had meant to me. I also mentioned that I’d practiced some journalism in the past and proposed that I interview him for a magazine.

After mailing this letter, I counseled myself not to expect any reply. Simply communicating with the author would be its own reward. Yet, just when I was almost starting to believe this, the man wrote back to me, in an emerald-colored envelope bearing the letterhead of the “Union of Mad Scientists.” In his typed reply, Robbins not only made some winsomely congenial remarks but also accepted my interview proposal. Game on!

A lengthy email correspondence followed, with the author’s casual observations and insights and metaphor-rich wisecracks proving even more delightful than the answers he gave to my journalistic questions. Obviously, Robbins attacked his daily emails with the same no-holds-barred creative zest that he employed for his official prose.

Eager to be a worthy correspondent—and, of course, to personally impress Robbins, if this were possible—I sent him my own occasional insights and observations and wisecracks. I’m sure that my pen pal was not impressed; he might even have noticed that I was unconsciously impersonating his own voice and viewpoint. Even so, his was such a welcoming presence that, regardless of what he might have thought of my trying-too-hard prose, he seemed to accept me as a friendly acquaintance. Then, once our communication changed forums from cyberspace to phone calls, he seemed to accept me as a friend.

Near the start of our phone camaraderie, I had the bonus pleasure of getting to know Tom’s wife Alexa, who was as singular and welcoming a person as Tom himself. Decades into their romance, the pair still seemed crazy about each other. Could theirs be the “perfect” love about which Tom had once remarked? He and his “wolf-eyed love dumpling,” as he referred to Alexa, did seem extremely well matched.

During our calls, Tom and I never spoke about his work—who wants to kvell like a fan?—and I rarely mentioned my writing efforts, although he sweetly gave me a blurb for my second published book. We mostly spoke about our lives, with Tom beginning most calls by saying in a sassy voice, “Speak to me!” and ringing off with the equally sassy but rather cryptic phrase “Don’t try to stop us!” I made damn sure to ring him up each April Fools’ Day, which he regarded as more important than all of our other holidays combined.

Mindful of Tom’s advanced age, I made a point of not bringing up the subject of mortality, but one day, when I asked my buddy how he was feeling, he quoted an old man from his Southern hometown who would always answer the same polite question by responding, “’Bout dead, I reckon.” Another time when the topic of death popped up, Tom said that he planned to elude the Grim Reaper by informing that scythe-bearing party pooper, “Sorry, I can’t go with you today—I left my passport in my sock drawer.”

One afternoon, Tom phoned me out of the proverbial blue right when I happened to be promenading around New Orleans, smack-dab in the middle of a Mardi Gras parade. “Your timing is exquisite,” I said after greeting him, “and your sense of geography too.” If the Crescent City had not existed, Tom would have had to invent it—its carnivalesque qualities make it the most Robbinsesque of places. In the end, everything became ingredients for the “syrup of wahoo” that Robbins called his imagination.

What was the most Robbinsesque locale of all? Why, that would be Tom and Alexa’s home, located in a charming fishing village 75 miles north of Seattle. As soon as my wife Verka and I arrived at Robbins Central for a visit two years ago, our hosts gave us a tour, about which all I will say is that walking through their house felt like experiencing a Tom Robbins novel that had been rendered in three dimensions. Then we sat with our hosts in their garden and chatted for several hours.

My phone buddy seemed slightly more diffident in person; he mostly listened, as did Verka, while Alexa and I chatted about a host of topics. Looking back now, I wish I’d spoken less and let Tom talk more. “If you’re talking, then you’re not learning,” someone once said. (Maybe the same person who said, “Trust the art, not the artist.”) But Tom was plenty verbose the next day, when Verka and I called him and Alexa from the Seattle airport to thank them for their hospitality.

During one of my last phone conversations with Tom, I was sitting in a dog park with my Tijuana-born rescue dog Jennyke and feeling preoccupied by the new novel I was writing. Truth be told, I was stuck, unable to come up with a pithy quote, some words about the pervasive and persistent role that blind chance plays in our lives. No phrase I found online or personally composed seemed apt. I did not mention my literary plight to Tom as we spoke, did not mention my novel-in-progress, did not mention blind chance at all. Still, when the time came to ring off, my friend suddenly said, “Hold on, Gary,” in a slightly urgent tone.

“Yes, Tom?”

“Remember something: The dice are always rolling.”

A bit puzzled by this observation, I thanked him, hung up, and stared at Jennyke for a moment before my eyes lit up and I said out loud, forcefully enough to startle the dog, “That’s it! That’s perfect! That’s exactly the quote I need for my book!”

If I could speak with Tom one more time, giving him a buzz at his new address in the afterlife, I would thank him for the “rolling dice” quote. This quote was a characteristically magical Robbins gift. I would thank Tom, too, for whipping up all that other artistic and personal magic. It is this magic, after all, that has encouraged me to focus on “joy in spite of everything” and to try to make of my adulthood a kind of extended childhood of good cheer.

As for how I would conclude my talk with Tom in the afterlife, I think I’d say, “If you happen to bump into my mother, please take her with you on some goofy, mysterious, meaningful adventures. Oh, and please tell your fellow 1932 baby that her son Gary is now usually much happier than he once was.”

Meanwhile, here on earth, the syrup of wahoo still splashes around inside Tom’s books. If Tom Robbins had not existed, it would have been necessary for a team of muses, trickster gods, jungle heroes, Zen masters, circus performers, seven-veiled dancers, psychedelic questers, New Orleans chefs, and grateful readers to invent him.

¤

Portions of this essay are adapted from the author’s interview with Tom Robbins for Lit Hub.