Salon.com > Tracy Johnson http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 10:39:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Tom Robbins http://www.salon.com/2000/03/09/robbins_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/09/robbins_2/#comments Thu, 09 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2000/03/09/robbins Writers can be defined by their fans. Die-hard Tom Robbins fans dwell in the outer reaches of the Internet, swapping recipes inspired by his books. They trade his novels on chicken buses crawling through Third World countries. They want to climb inside the books, light up a joint and join the fun. I met one of them a few years ago in a London pub. He was American, about 45 years old, with long, scraggly gray hair. We somehow got on the topic of Robbins' books and he told me that he thought he was Alobar, a 1,000-year-old janitor that stars in Robbins' fifth novel, "Jitterbug Perfume."

The thing about Alobar is that although he's 1,000 years old, he still has no trouble getting laid. Which was also my new friend's goal. Had he really been living in a Robbins novel, he would have swept the naive 22-year-old Canadian away, fucked me and left me thankful for the experience. I was pretty entranced by Robbins at that point in my life, and had the guy convinced me of his Alobar-ness, he might have stood a chance. As it was, I felt sure that if Alobar existed it wouldn't be in the guise of a pigeon-chested dirty old man holding up the bar in London's tourist district.

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