Tom Robbins

Free spirited hitchhiker Sissy Henshaw makes her way across the confused and paranoid America of the 1970s, gathering knowledge and experience, friends and lovers, and all sorts of unusual acquaintances

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Travis Todd

jillian tenner

Grace McCarter

What an inspiring drill sergeant curiosity can be.

As for the oyster, its rectal temperature has never even been estimated, although we must suspect that the tissue heat of the sedentary bivalve is as far below good old 98.6 as that of the busy bee is above. Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure?

There is a metaphor here, however strained. The author is attempting to draw a shaky parallel between the manner in which the oyster, when beset by impurities or disease, coats the offending matter with its secretions, thereby producing a pearl, a parallel between the eliminatory ingenuity of the oyster and the manner in which Sissy Hankshaw, adorned with thumbs that many might consider morbid, coated the offending digits with glory, thereby perpetuating a vision that the author finds smooth and lustrous.

THE SURPRISE of Sissy Hankshaw is that she did not grow up a neurotic disaster. If you are a small girl in a low-income suburb of Richmond, Virginia, as Sissy was, and the other kids jeer at your hands, and your own brothers call you by your neighborhood nickname—"Thumbelina"—and your own daddy sometimes makes jokes about your being “all thumbs,” then you toughen up or shatter. 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.

It is all you care about. When the other kids are playing hopscotch or kick-the-can you go off alone to a woods near your home. There are no cars in the woods, of course, but that does not matter. There are cars in your dream.

THE COUNTESS HAD A SMILE like the first scratch on a new car. It was immanently regrettable. It was a spoiler. It was a stinging little reminder of the inevitability of deterioration. As if further vandalizing a marred surface, an ivory cigarette holder periodically pried apart the Countess's prickly jowls. Ashes from French cigarettes sifted onto the white linen suit that he wore daily without respect to season; ashes sifted upon the month-old bloom in his lapel. His monocle was fly-specked, his ascot was steaksauced, his dentures thought that they were castanets and the world was a fandango. 

Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.

“It's a long story and no decent drink to wet it with. Well, I'll try to make it snappy. Sometime ago a cute little hellion, a teen-ager from Kansas City who was dying to be a cowgirl, found out about the Rubber Rose and soft-talked me into giving her a job there. She called herself Bonanza Jellybean, and that should have tipped me off. But like a fool, I hired her anyway and put her to doing odd jobs around the house and stables, sort of a flunky for Miss Adrian. Miss Adrian is my ranch manager; she used to run the Minnie Mouse Beauty Village at Opa Locka, Florida, and really knows the business. Well, it wasn't long before this teenybopper was spending more time in the saddle than she was in the kitchen; she was out riding with the cowhands, going on all the pack trips and taking on more and more responsibility for herself. Julian, it's certainly more pleasant visiting you without that poodle mistaking my left leg for Lassie. Do you hear from old Butty regularly? Good old dog! 

“So. Early spring, just before the season opened, Jellybean and a couple of the younger beauticians—Christ knows how she won them over—barricaded themselves in the ranch house, holding Miss Adrian hostage, and started telephoning demands to me in New York. They demanded that I fire all the male ranch hands and replace them with females. Shit O dear! Jelly claimed that my company had been exploiting women for years. She charged that I've made a fortune off women and said it was time I started doing something for them in return—as if my whole adult life hasn't been devoted to improving the female sex. Talk about ingratitude! Gracious! She said if the Rubber Rose was a ranch for women, then it should be operated exclusively by women; women shouldn't be relegated to menial and effete cosmetic tasks while men got to perform all the exciting outdoor work. These were her actual words: 'I'm not a hairdresser or a fucking scullery maid; I'm a cowgirl. And there's gonna be cowgirls riding this range or there ain't gonna be any range to ride.' 

Now where does a young woman from our Godfearing Midwest learn talk like that? Dr. Spock, I ask you.”

Julian pounded his coffeetable edition of Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation with a soft brown fist. “You didn't let her get away with it, did you? By golly, I'd've . . .” 

“It would have been simple to notify the Dakota state patrol and have them evict the little snots from the spread. Actually, however, Jelly's idea, although selfishly motivated, was rather sound. You see, most of the guests at the Rubber Rose are pretty well fixed, from insurance settlements, alimony and so forth. A shocking lot of my cowpokes proved to be fortune hunters, out to marry those dumb old broads for their money. And even the ranch hands who were honest family men created a problem because during the moonlight trail rides, chuck wagon campouts and other organized recreation the guests were always falling in love with them, mooning over them, following them around, even fighting over them. Dears, the turnover on that ranch was tremendous. It was a mess. But an all-girl staff would eliminate those hassles. And it would eliminate rude cowboys hanging around sniggering outside the building where guests were receiving super-douche, love oil and nipple-wax training; guests and staff alike found that embarrassing. What's more, it would get the dykes of America off my delicate back once and forever. That wasn't the first time I'd been maligned by them. There're a lot of malcontents in this society of ours, if you hadn't noticed. Yes, the more I considered the idea, the better I liked it. In the end, I told Jelly to go ahead and hire me a gang of cowgirls, if she could find any, and that if they handled the work okay I would pay them men's wages and back them all the way. And that's how I've come to be proprietor of the largest all-girl ranch in the West. Come a cow cow hickey, come a yippee ki yea.”

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues quotes

Join the club