Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: A Novel

by Tom Robbins

But plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.

How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships.

You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your own fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.

In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization! You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

For one reason or another, you look up “thumb” in a dictionary. It says “the short, thick first or most preaxial digit of the human hand, differing from the other fingers by having two phalanges and greater freedom of movement.” You like that. Greater freedom of movement.

(Yes, they grew even as millions of young Americans under social pressure and upon the instruction of their elders, struggled to cease growing; which is to say, struggled to “grow up,” an excruciatingly difficult goal since it runs contrary to the most central laws of nature—the laws of change and renewal—yet a goal miraculously attained by everyone in our culture except for a few misfits.)

and genitals of a size that women don't really mind but that other men often feel compelled to mock.

They would sell you anything they had, which was nothing, and kill you over anything they didn't understand, which was everything.

if rubber tires were meant to roll and seats to carry passengers, then far be it from Sissy Hankshaw to divert those noble things from their true channel.

Remember the words of the painter Paul Gauguin, dear lady. 'The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.' I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

Few were the schoolmates to notice the headlight shine of her eyes and wonder who was driving around inside there.

'The human figure is the ideal ornament for the niche.'

Mrs. Seward would have thought it ridiculous, an homage of tree-bark thumbs waving impertinently in the face of the twentieth century like a forest of prehistoric diplomas that expect no handshake in return. As a matter of fact, it was a bit ridiculous. But because it was ridiculous, we know it must be true.

(some of them clapping with one hand, in flailing and unintentional illustration of Zen Buddhism's most famous proverb).

Ah cha cha, but now there was a choice. Or the possibility of a choice. She was pretty. And a pretty girl can always make her way in a civilized society.

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to utilize such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction.

Suppose you awoke one morning with the uneasy feeling that the world had, while you slept, somehow slipped a-tilt and rose to find that your dresser drawers were mysteriously open a fraction of an inch and that prescription bottles had tipped over in the medicine cabinet (although neither you nor anyone else in your household had ventured since bedtime to get an aspirin, a condom or a Tums) and that pictures on the wall, shades on the lamps and books in the case were askew. Outdoors, the taller buildings were posing à la Pisa, or, should you live in the country, streams were running slightly outside their grooves as fruits dropped like gargoyle ganglia from the uniformly leaning trees. What would be your reaction to such a phenomenon? Honestly, now, and seriously, too. How would you feel? Would you be scared? Confused? Puzzled and anxious? Would you telephone the police? Would you pray? Or would you numbly await an explanation, refusing to attempt to analyze the event or even to experience it with your full emotions until you had read the papers, tuned in the news, heard how experts from the universities were explaining the tilt, learned how the Pentagon planned to deal with it, were reassured by the President, who might insist, as Presidents will, that nothing really nothing had gone wrong? Or instead of fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or in addition to fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or instead of a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual,...

“Freak, schmeek. Most of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian countess into a white middle-class Baptist family in Mississippi and you'll see what I mean.” “I understand that. I was being facetious. You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters—or mice. Anyway, I'm fine. But I've been steady moving for eleven years and some months, you realize, and I guess I'm a tad fatigued. Maybe I should rest up for a spell. Not as young as I used to be.”

There was a long pause, during which the Countess tapped his monocle with his cigarette holder, during which a squirrel successfully crossed Park Avenue, during which the twentieth century flicked its pea under another shell, catching a few million more suckers with their bets in the wrong places.

“Now now. Don't get exasperated. I realize that you've always avoided all but the most rudimentary involvements with men, and, I might add, you've been wise. Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much—then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. Shit O goodness, how I do go on.”

Now Sissy was waiting for an elevator. She waited with a fatigue-induced approximation of that combination of stoicism and anxiety with which people wait for the Big Event that will transform their lives, invariably missing it when it does occur since both stoicism and anxiety are blinders.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (LOVE STORY)

JUST AS a piece of shell can take all the fun out of an egg salad sandwich, just as the advent of an Ice Age can poop a million garden parties, just as a disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business, so can a fit of asthma rather spoil the first date between a young woman and an Indian.

Great Secret (which, as we've determined, is this: one has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter his perception of it; or, more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them).

“There, that ought to beat them bronchial buggers into submission,” he says to Julian. Then, to Sissy, “I was a medic in the Army. I really should have become a doctor. Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers, as it were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society . . .”

Philosophers, poets, painters and scholars, debate all you want on the nature of beauty! Tropical plums. Wine in a rowboat. Clouds, babies and Buddhas, resembling one another. Bicycle bells. Honeysuckle. Parachutes. Shooting stars seen through lace curtains. A silver radio that attracts butterflies; a déjà that just won't quit vuing. Han-shan wrote, after a moment of ecstasy, “This place is finer than the place I live!”

“I don't know anything about this order and symmetry business. I'm a high school dropout from a race—the Poor White Trash race—that has done nothing for ten centuries but pick up rocks, hoe weeds, sweat in factories and march off to war whenever told to; and each generation has begot a smaller potato patch. But I've spent some time in libraries, not all of it asleep, and I have learned this: every civilized culture in history has discriminated against its abnormal members. 'Schizophrenia' is a civilized Western term, and so are 'witch' and 'misfit'—terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people. Yet the American Indian tribes, as you ought to know, treated their freaks as special beings. Their schizoids were recognized as having a gift, the power of visions, and were revered for it. The physically deformed were also regarded as favorites of the Great Spirit, welcome reliefs to the monotony of anatomical regularity, and everybody loved them, enjoyed them and paid them favor. In that ancient Greece that you find so glorious, somebody like me would have been killed at birth.”

But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.

Sissy Hankshaw was one of those mysteries that drop onto Earth unasked, and perhaps undeserved, like grace—like clockworks.

Debbie seconded the motion, and tacked on a Zen proverb: “At the end of the endless game, there is friendship.” “What the heck did she mean by that!” asked Heather, who made use of the privy while Jelly gathered up her clothes. Jelly studied the tired and sopping cowgirls walking arm and arm back to the bunkhouse. “Just that in Heaven all business is conducted this way,” she explained.

Debbie, who, as a vegetarian, would have no part in the slaughter and was even now over at Siwash Lake in the bird blind with a cinematographer, making love not beef.

A lot of life boils down to the question of whether a person is going to be able to realize his fantasies, or else end up surviving only through compromises he can't face up to. The way I figure it, Heaven and Hell are right here on Earth. Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears. It's up to each individual which one he chooses.” Jelly paused. “I told that to the Chink once and he said, 'Every fear is part hope and every hope is part fear—quit dividing things up and taking sides.' Well, that's the Chink for you. What do you think?” “I'd like to hear more,” said Sissy. She was feeling a certain kinship with this duded-up bundle of wild muscle and baby fat. “Can you be more specific?” “Specific. Okay. I'm talking about our fantasies. You know the difference between fantasy and reality, don't you? Fantasy is when you wake up at four o'clock on Christmas morning and you're so crazy excited you can't possibly go back to sleep. But when you go downstairs and look under the tree—podner, that's reality. “They teach us to believe in Santa Claus, right? And the Easter Bunny. Wondrous critters, both of 'em. Then one day they tell us, 'Well, there really isn't any Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, it was Mama and Daddy all along.' So we feel a bit cheated, but we accept it because, after all, we got the goodies, no matter where they came from, and the Tooth Fairy never had much credibility to begin with. Okay. So they let you dress up like a cowgirl, and when you say...

“Cowgirls exist as an image. A fairly common image. The idea of cowgirls prevails in our culture. Therefore, it seems to me, the fact of cowgirls should prevail. Otherwise, we're being ripped off again. I mean, isn't that the way religions mess people's heads around: beautiful concepts without anything factual to back 'em up? When I was a kid and I was told that this role I'd been allowed to love so much was impossible to attain, wow, did I get mad! And I've been mad ever since. So I decided to try to do something about it—to satisfy my own inner needs and to show society it couldn't get away with making me love something that didn't exist.”

But I'm a cowgirl. I've always been a cowgirl. Caught a silver bullet when I was only twelve. Now I'm in a position where I can help others become cowgirls, too. If a child wants to grow up to be a cowgirl, she ought to be able to do it, or else this world ain't worth living in. I want every little girl—and every boy, for that matter—to be free to realize their fantasies. Anything less than that is unacceptable to me.”

“You're political, then?” Sissy had been learning about politics from Julian. “No ma'am” said Jelly. “No way. There's girls on the Rubber Rose who are political, but I don't share their views. I got no cowgirl ideology to expound. I'm not recruiting and I'm not converting. Whether or not another girl chooses the cowgirl path is immaterial to me. It's a personal matter. I'm willing to help other cowgirls; to make it easier for them than it was for me. But don't get the notion I'm trying to create a movement or contribute to one. Delores del Ruby makes a big fuss about cowgirlism being a force to combat cowboyism, but I'm too happy just being a cowgirl to worry about stuff like that. Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.”

sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers—its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.

“That's a good question. You know, Sissy, every sage or holy man or spiritual leader or whatever you choose to call them does not go around preaching, writing books, gathering disciples or holding rallies in the Houston Astrodome. Some remain almost invisible among us. Swami Vivekananda once said that Buddha and Christ were second-rate heroes. He said the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. They put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools or systems in their name. They never create any stir but just melt down into love . . .”

Their lives extended another day, flies buzzed everything within their range, monotonously eulogizing themselves, like the patriots who persist in praising the glory of a culture long after it is decadent and doomed.

love is something to be passed around freely, not spooned down someone's throat for their own good by a Jewish mother who cooked it all by herself.”

Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

The Chink picked up English and other bad habits. He went to high school and other dangerous places. He earned American citizenship and other dubious distinctions.

(Perhaps the author is telling you more about Tule Lake than you want to know. But the camp, in Northern California near the Oregon border, still exists, and while time, that ultimate diet pill, has reduced its 1032 buildings to their concrete foundations, the government yet may have plans for them which may someday be your concern.)

It was in a high-quality garden that the fall of man began. The question is, fall from where into what? Innocence into sin? Substance into form? Primitivism into civilization?

“Even though the Chink was still in the early stages of his development, he was advanced enough to know that freedom—for humans—is largely an internal condition. He was free enough in his own head, even then, to endure Tule Lake without undue frustration.”

These people, these clandestinely exiled Indians, have no other ritual than this one: THE CHECKING OF THE CLOCKWORKS—the keeping/making of history. Likewise, they have but one legend or cultural myth: that of a continuum they call the Eternity of Joy. It is into the Eternity of Joy that they believe all men will pass once the clockworks is destroyed. They look forward to a state of timelessness, when bored, frustrated and unfulfilled people will no longer have to “kill time,” for time will finally be dead.

“There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.”

“You're strong and smart and have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement.” “This movement of yours, does it have slogans?” inquired the Chink. “Right on!” they cried. And they quoted him some. “Your movement, does it have a flag?” asked the Chink. “You bet!” And they described their emblem. “And does your movement have leaders?” “Great leaders.” “Then shove it up your butts,” said the Chink. “I have taught you nothing.” He

“I loved those loony redskins,” the Chink said to Sissy. “But I couldn't be a party to their utopian dreaming. After a while it occurred to me that the Clock People waiting for the Eternity of Joy was virtually identical to the Christians waiting for the Second Coming. Or the Communists waiting for the worldwide revolution. Or the Debbies waiting for the flying saucers. All the same. Just more suckers betting their share of the present on the future, banking every misery on a happy ending to history. Well, history isn't ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second—happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending and always not ending, and both ways there is nothing to wait for. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

while a return engagement by Jesus appears as impossible as worldwide Marxist revolution is improbable, a general disruption of the planet by natural forces is inevitable. The Clock People had narrowed the apocalyptic credibility gap.