Writer Tom Robbins: A Man of La Conner : Books: He tilts at the windmills of American culture. His lance is humor.

This article is dedicated to those times when our spirits ran free, when anything was possible, and when we could put all our possessions in a VW bug and go.

Tom Robbins thrived back in those days--in the afterglow of the 1960s. In four original novels he captured the lingering essence of that epoch--before Vietnam was a movie, before sex could kill you, and when they still talked about drugs as recreation.

Robbins bit into the soft, sweet part of the 1960s-era Oreo cookie--its curiosity and gentleness and spirituality and expressiveness, and yes, dare we say today, its love.

His books were published every few years from 1971 to 1984. But he never changed to fit changing times. And for awhile, the sharp edges and breathless paces of the 1980s threatened to leave him behind as a nostalgic artifact. He was fanciful and fun but surely not to be taken seriously.

“The ‘80s? Frankly, if I had had a choice, I would have switched channels,” Robbins says. “The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.”

It is with some excitement, therefore, that Robbins comes forth now at the opening of a new--and maybe different--decade with the publication of yet another quirky, smiling, how-can-he-do-that novel.

“They say the 1990s are going to be the 1960s upside down. That sounds interesting to me,” he says, grinning.

“Skinny Legs and All” is his strange and euphoric 422-page wonderworks to try and make it so.

On a foggy spring day, we meet Robbins at his whimsical but modest wooden house in the Washington coastal village where he has written--by hand and with painful slowness--his last four books.

He likes lots of little rooms. Real little. There are old-fashioned toys, circus posters, life-sized alligator carvings, crystals, books, a hot tub, exercise bicycle and an ancient roll-top desk where he scratches out on children’s school tablets the fluid, playful and colossally imaginative works that have come to be categorized as “Tom Robbins-style.”

He is nervous, but cheerful. Robbins is only occasionally interviewed. He thinks he is a much better writer than a talker. But his conversation is fluid and filled with imagery just as his books--and Robbins insists on presenting himself as one of those off-center characters he creates.

“On those days when I feel particularly pretentious, I figure I am part philosopher, part storyteller and part prose poet. But most of the time, I just think of myself as a writer on God’s ‘Tonight Show’ . . . One of God’s gag writers. . . . “

Other days, “I am a switchboard operator in the lobby of an old hotel and I send people wake-up calls. A lot of people complain. But it’s a deep secret--down in the velvet of our hearts we yearn to awaken even as we gobble handfuls of sleeping pills.”

The constants in Robbins’ work are two: Humor is serious. And, the high art of writing is stringing one fizzing, luminescent, surprising sentence after another.

And after that, well, the plot will just have to come along. And the reader, too.

Seattle writer Jessica Maxwell made a heroic effort recently to describe the plot of “Skinny Legs”: “Two artists cross the country in an Airstream turkey. An Arab and a Jew open a New York restaurant. A Southern evangelist enlists Israeli rabbis to hurry Armageddon. Five supposedly inanimate objects get to Jerusalem in the nick of time. A teen-age belly-dancer drops the seventh veil during the Super Bowl.”

But describing a Robbins book even in a good paragraph like that is still like pointing to a snowflake and asking someone to grasp the concept of downhill skiing.

Born in 1938, the novelist looks his age in the morning--the blue-white paleness of the Northwesterner, deep crow’s feet draining the corners of red-rimed eyes. But he grows younger as the day goes on. The creases smooth away, the red fades. By evening, subtract 15 years.

His fingers are crowded with snake rings and moon rings, gold rings and silver rings. His sweater reeks of mothballs, his pleated trousers are pulled up over an ever-slightly potting gut. In his pocket is today’s talisman--a 2-inch Felix the Cat.

“Remember what Felix used to say. Life is a bag of tricks. And life is a bag of tricks.”

His voice is Carolina syrup.

He was a newspaper copy editor here and there, and he wrote about the arts. But this was not a man meant for daily mass productions.

The turning point came with a laugh, what else? Our breathless and harried novelist-to-be, then entertainment and arts editor for the Seattle Times, was dashing down a Seattle sidewalk, whereupon he was confronted by a bum. The bum laughed in Robbins’ face.

“He was right . . . I thought about it. The next day I called in well. I said, ‘I’ve been sick for a long time, but now I’m well so I won’t be coming in again.’ ”

On to New York, the early LSD culture, and back to Washington state. His first book, “Another Roadside Attraction,” came slowly and flopped fast.

But he had learned the form, and was unshaken in his technique.

“There is a Geiger counter attached to my brain. As I walk through the fields of life, as it were, I get beeps. And if something beeps loudly, I put a stake in the ground and tie a red flag on it. Then I go back later and dig to see if there is really something there.”

Next came his classic work, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” a sensation on college campuses, particularly among women.

Some critics have described its protagonist, Sissy Hankshaw, as the first real female hero in American literature. Besides a rompish good read, the book remains a manual of feminist expression, honest and fun and juicy.

Women figured he had to be a woman. Otherwise, how could he know what it’s like to have sex with a man? And how could he know that men were basically galoots through and through, if lovable, while women harbored such strength underneath their tender and touchable exteriors? I mean how could he really know, women demanded.

“I got letters saying why don’t you use your real name, Laura, and come out of the closet?” Robbins recalls.

He is delighted to tell that he is the only male author whose works are on the shelves of the Feminist Book Store in Minneapolis. And “Cowgirls” can still be found in the women’s studies section at the University of Washington.

What is not so well known is that Robbins wrote the first troubled 100 pages of the book with Hankshaw as a man named Junior.

“Something was wrong, so I sent him to Denmark and gave him a sex change operation.”

Women are the heroes of all his other books as well, including waitress-cum-artist Ellen Cherry in “Skinny Legs.” Most of his fan mail comes from women, although the audiences at his occasional book signings are 50-50.

Cowgirls was followed by “Still Life with Woodpecker” and then “Jitterbug Perfume.” Both carried the unmistakable Robbins’ philosophy: “Joy in Spite of Everything.”

“Woodpecker” also gave us one of his most memorable musings: His promise to answer the questions of the great philosophers if someone, please, would first tell him “Who knows how to make love stay? . . . Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and end of time.”

It’s a question Robbins has had difficulty answering in his own life.

Through two marriages (he has one son, 18-year-old Fleetwood), the answer eluded him. Now he is in a 38-month affair with a Seattle psychic and would-be actress, Alexa D’Avalon.

She is unable to discern his future, however, Robbins says. In fact, he figures he is such a complex person few people can read him.

Still, there is no quibbling that spiritualism is his fascination.

He has been kicking organized religion in its more-or-less vulnerable soft spots, and hard, ever since “Roadside Attraction,” the story of Christ’s body ending up in a California roadside zoo. And along the way, he has asked readers to employ everything from simple logic to wild imagination to find meaning in their lives.

As for himself, he employs a chant to clear his thoughts, sometimes reciting it to a 3-foot-tall frog statue: “I am not a Buick, I am a Buddha.”

He insists he doesn’t get out of bed in the morning until he hears the number “23” spoken over the all-news channel on his radio. Such a screwy start, he beams, “is my insurance policy against having an ordinary day.”

But what does he really believe in?

He pauses.

“I could say I believe in every drop of rain that . . . Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle--even though it cannot be solved--is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.”

Robbins calls a break for lunch.

“I am cheerful. I don’t know if I’m happy. There is a difference, you know.”

That much becomes apparent during the 50-yard walk from Robbins’ house to 1st Street, La Conner. This used to be a hard working, tugboat town on Skagit Bay. It’s now a brass plaque and lop-eared rabbit tourist trap. “Knickknack Nazis,” snarls Robbins.

He plays volleyball with his local team, the Fighting Vegetables, and longtime residents protect his privacy from star-struck sorority sophomores. But La Conner’s change to a tourist economy has left him estranged from his old waterfront haunts, and he walks down the street unrecognized. “Never look a gift shop in the mouth,” he says, chattily.

If it was not for that old wooden two-story home where all the writing magic takes place, “I’d be out of here in a minute.”

He is trying to tone up for a forthcoming vacation to Europe. So duty tells him to eat vegetarian.

But to hell with duty, he decides. Discipline was for the 3 1/2 years he spent writing “Skinny Legs,” working most every day from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“Wanna greasy cheeseburger?” he asks.

His choler builds perceptibly every minute he is in town, and now it spreads to encompass the dismal condition of American culture.

He says he has been practicing channeling, and has been connecting with the ol’ red-baiter Joe McCarthy. “He is quite happy with American society today, you know. He regrets only that he died before America began the war on drugs.”

These are not the days for friendly jabbering about drug use, at least in public. But Robbins plunges in, his mind recoiling from the authoritarian edict that there is no healthy difference between drugs and drug abuse. And how about a misguided government that subsidizes killer-tobacco but outlaws psychedelics? “That is chemically insane.”

“We’re headed for a showdown between those who love liberty and those who crave certainty. The two are incompatible.”

Ah yes, but paradox is our writer’s lifeblood.

How else would Ellen Cherry go across America to be an artist and end up a waitress? And if not paradox, why would her husband, Boomer, become an artist instead of a welder? And how else could Isaac and Ishmael rebuild their restaurant the same number of times as Solomon’s Temple? For anyone who has even imagined the cruel discipline of the novel, it is a wonder how he pulls any of this off, or even tries.

Perhaps this is the time for the warning announcement: He may make it look like fun, but don’t try it at home.

No outlines, no first, second and third drafts. For him it is sentence by agonizingly crafted sentence, each one written and polished, and then on to the next, at the pace of maybe two glorious paragraphs per day.

“Sentences are what I like,” Robbins says.

As for plot? “I operate by painting myself into corners and seeing if I can get myself out. I carry suction cups in my pockets and put them on my feet, and walk up the wall and out of the room.

“But it’s terrifying, and I don’t recommend it.”

What attracts the eye of profile writers and reviewers are the curious kinks in Robbins’ synapses, the lumps in his brainpan where he lets his ideas “marinate.” But there is a hammer-and-nails craftsman here too, and he is usually overlooked in the notices, to Robbins’ regret.

His books are uncommonly rich with extracts of detail and wisps of history and stubborn nuggets of philosophy. His research is deeper than it reads. “I try not to let it show too much.” Yet, readers who let their imaginations go are likely to finish Skinny Legs and find their perspective on the Middle East slightly shifted.

Robbins on Egypt: Egypt is as hot as a gypsy honeymoon and as dry as scarab breath. Egypt looks at the world through cat’s eyes . . . . With crocodile claws and mummy jewelry, Egypt scratched its name onto the foundation stone of history. Before Islam, Egyptians thought only of immortality. Since Islam, they think only of life after death. What is the difference? . . .

On art: The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.

Why can’t we regard fun more seriously?

Robbins is damned if he knows.

“Life, Death and Goofiness. All serious writers write about life and death. And so do I,” he says. “But they ignore goofiness. And goofiness is 60% to 70% of our lives.”

Seattle critic Irene Wanner once wrote, “Robbins clearly has great ability as a writer, but he is so infatuated with frivolousness.”

Robbins wrote back, in a squib published in Esquire: “How uncharacteristically insensitive, my dear madam, how egregiously presumptuous. I’m not infatuated with frivolousness. We’re just good friends.”

That’s all he can do, make the case for going back to fun in the 1990s.

Robbins is now hot on college campuses again, after falling out of favor in the 1980s. He leaves soon for a short book tour, and then a longer vacation in Europe. He may buy a house in Africa. Hollywood is forever calling about making a movie of Cowgirls.

And then?

Well, then it’s back up the winding staircase into his second-floor studio and the old roll-top, listening to the rain and scratching out those sentences one at a time according to the wild pulses of a cerebral Geiger counter that only he can hear.