Thomas and Evelyn

Thomas and Evelyn

By Garrison Frost

When you get to be older, have some pictures taken of yourself. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Go to Sears or Target or enlist a family member or friend who is handy with a camera. The older you get, the more important this is, particularly if you notice that you’re visiting the doctor more frequently.

The reason you should have these pictures taken is that, upon your death, they will be immensely useful to your family, who will be scrambling – amid all the funeral preparations – to get a halfway decent obituary into the local newspaper. If they are unable to find a good portrait in the one or two days they have to look, these friends and relatives will have to make do with the most recent photo they have, inevitably the one where you posed with ten other people at the last family gathering – a holiday, birthday party or wedding. And then this photo will be your legacy – the one where your image had to be cropped and blown up all grainy, the one where you are red-faced holding a martini glass, slightly angry about having to be in this picture at all. This will be the photo everyone presses into their family scrapbooks, the one in the little frame on your casket at the memorial, the one your long lost friends – who have not seen you for years – will come across in the paper, and it will be this image that these people will hold in their minds of how you must have spent your final years.

I believe it was a photograph like this that announced to me the death of Evelyn Guy some years ago. I was the editor of The Beach Reporter, a weekly newspaper that covered the small beach towns just southwest of Los Angeles. I used to get a lot of these photos, not merely because few people think to get good pictures of themselves in their later years, but also because we has a policy of running obituaries free of charge for members of the community. I probably got five a week.

This was a long time ago, so I don’t recall all the details, but it is likely that I didn’t spend too much time with the photo. In fact, I can’t even recall with certainty that Guy’s was one of those photos. Instead, I almost certainly focused on the letter that came with it, the few paragraphs that attempted to give meaning to her life. I probably read this a few times. I say this because of all the things I have forgotten about this moment, this is where the few specific bit of memory are located. In particular, I remember reading her name, I remember that her family planned to scatter her ashes at sea in a private ceremony and I remember thinking that I should probably rent a boat to get as close as possible to this ceremony. This wasn’t because Evelyn Guy was a friend of mine – I only spoke to her once, briefly, on the phone. It wasn’t because she was a local celebrity – she wasn’t. No, the reason I contemplated crashing her burial at sea was because, at one point in time long before, Evelyn Guy and her family had been friendly with Thomas Pynchon. There was legitimate, if remote, chance that Pynchon might attend her burial. If he did, and I got photos, it would be a huge scoop.

In truth, I don’t remember much about the photograph of Evelyn Guy. The details of it faded from memory seconds after I sent it to layout (even now I’m asking myself if this photo actually existed), replaced by the mental image I formed of her seconds into the my one and only phone call with her. Her voice was raspy, strong and confident, the kind of voice that comes from cigarettes, cocktails, laughter and conversation. I immediately pictured the woman on the other end of the line: one of those tall, elderly women with freckled skin, white hair and a beautiful face lined from decades of sun worship. I could see the tight flowered sundress and I listened to the humorous, honest cadence of a woman of some wealth who had spent years on the beach, a matron, with generations of children, grandchildren and, hell, maybe even great grandchildren who adored her and savored every minute in her home.

“I saw your article and thought I should fill in some of the details for you,” she said.

I had recently written a long piece in The Beach Reporter about how Pynchon lived in Manhattan Beach while he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, the book that many critics would eventually consider his masterpiece. Pynchon’s avoidance of the public eye is now legendary, so it was interesting to learn a little more about the author.

I had been able to find Pynchon’s former apartment at 217 33rd Street, and talked to a few people who encountered him in the counterculture environment that was north Manhattan Beach at the time. A guy who had dated a friend of author’s described him as “interesting, very intense, really smart,” but also intensely private and extremely paranoid. The owner of Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach claimed to have seen Pynchon browsing in the store.

In my article, I took Pynchon’s connection to the beach cities a little further, identifying sections of his books that recalled the area. For instance, the description of San Narciso in “The Crying of Lot 49” was clearly north Manhattan Beach, and there are numerous references to local towns such as Torrance, Hawthorne and Hermosa Beach in “Vineland.”

Evelyn Guy had read my article and realized that she had much to add. Before moving to the place on 33^rd Street, Pynchon had lived in a small bachelor apartment behind her house on The Strand.

“We knew him real well,” she told me. “We were always trying to figure out why he was so private. He seemed lonely.”

She ventured a guess that one of the reasons he was so uncomfortable around people was a speech impediment. “I think the reason he was so private was that he was a bad stutterer,” she told me. “Around us he didn’t have that problem, but it happened when he was around people he didn’t know.”

Guy went on to talk about Pynchon like he was a member of her family. “He was a darling and nice man” who loved kids and helped her children with their homework.

She told me that, when she knew him, Pynchon was very thin and full of eccentricities. He would let his rent lapse three or four months and then pay it all at once. For a while he carried around a Russian history book that he was translating with a Russian dictionary. He once gave her a deck of Tarot cards as a gift, saying that he had to part with them because they were always true and scared him to death.

“We would argue all day about politics,” she said. “He was liberal and I was conservative. But he was a lot smarter than I was.”

Guy told me that when Pynchon moved out of her place, he continued to have his mail sent to her because he didn’t want his agent to know where he lived. She told me he was in the place on 33^rd Street for a few years before he moved to Big Sur.

I remember that I asked Guy if she had any pictures of Pynchon, knowing that they would be gold to aficionados. She told me she did have some family photos, but wouldn’t share them “because he obviously doesn’t want that kind of thing out.”

A few years later when I received word of Guy’s passing, I immediately thought of her close relationship to Pynchon. Whether or not that relationship had survived the 25-plus years since he left Manhattan Beach for good, I had no idea, but I figured there was nonetheless a decent chance that Pynchon would return for her memorial. Given the high level of interest in cracking the author’s invisibility, I figured it probably would be worth taking a chance and renting a boat to be close by when her family scattered her ashes. Imagine what a photo of the present-day Pynchon would fetch. It would be a real scoop.

But I had never been that kind of journalist. And although I had read all of Pynchon’s books, I had never been that kind of fan. Renting the boat, getting the photo, finding the recluse – that all sounded very exciting. But it wasn’t the kind of thing I was going to do. So I typed up the obituary, ran it in the following Thursday’s paper and never gave it another thought.

(Sept. 5, 2007)