Which Author Do You Most Want to Get With?

 Mine was Tom Robbins.

The sticker of Tom Robbins stuck on my computer stand.

This was not because I thought Tom Robbins had a hot bod or face. I don't remember ever giving much thought to whether he was physically attractive at all.

His writing was hot.

And funny. Funny has always been dangerous for me. I have been "in love" with many funny men who have not much to recommend them in the looks department. Make me laugh, though, and apparently my standards become extremely negotiable.

I wanted to live inside the strange, funny, sexy world of Robbins' books. More specifically, I wanted to be a character in one. And eventually, somewhere between the sentences and the weirdness and the sheer pleasure of encountering a mind that did not seem to travel by any of the usual roads, I developed a crush on the man who was making all of it up.

“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice.”

Learning more about the actual Tom Robbins did not help.

Robbins lived for decades in La Conner, Washington, surrounded himself with wonderfully peculiar things, participated in the gloriously named A Low-Calorie Human Sacrifice to the Goddess Minnie Mouse, and reportedly sometimes wouldn't get out of bed until he'd heard the number 23 on the radio. He was strange.

But accounts of Robbins also describe someone shy, soft-spoken, generous, and kind.

Oh, my, yes.

Of course, I didn't actually know him. For all I know, Tom Robbins had bad breath, belly-button fungus, and weird toes. But I could imagine myself bending around all of that for someone odd and unusual and funny and nice.

“They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again.”

And that makes me wonder: Where does attraction actually live?

We talk about being attracted to faces and bodies, voices and smells. But can we become attracted to the particular way another person's mind works? Can someone's imagination be sexy? Their humor? Their weirdness? Can the way someone arranges words on a page make us want the person arranging them? I just know that, had Tom Robbins ever appeared at my door, I would have been extremely interested in hearing his proposal. And he wasn't an isolated case. My sister once had a boyfriend named Kevin who later became a friend and, eventually, a family friend. He was eight years younger than I was, I was far too married, and he was far too entwined with my sister for anything to happen. But Kevin and I could make each other laugh until we were nearly incapacitated. Every so often, I'd come up for air after a particularly long bout of hysteria and tell him, “Kevin, divorce is always possible.”

Of course, Kevin was cute, but it was the laughter that was so beguiling. With Kevin, I got to experience the thing that Robbins's writing made me imagine: the sheer pleasure of being around someone whose mind delighted mine.

My husband has always known there are a few people on that list. Kevin. Paul McCartney. Tom Robbins. Nick Charles (fictional character, but hey....), Andrew Scott.... okay, time to stop. It's an eclectic list.

With people in our lives, actors, and musicians, it's often easier to understand the attraction. They are people we know, or public figures we get to watch and listen to. Authors give us something more enticing: a look inside their minds, without necessarily giving us much of themselves at all.

So, I'm throwing it out there:

Which author, living or dead, but while living, of course, do you most want to get with?

I'm not asking who you admired, or which writer happened to have a lovely face. I mean the writer that makes you think:  "I know that if I met you, we would go to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, and never look back."

And, much more interestingly, what was it about them that got you?