Two weeks ago, Andrew Essex, a former New Yorker staffer, wrote in to say that, thirteen years earlier, both he and The New Yorker had fallen victim to a prank. In “Godzilla Meets Indie Rockers,” a Talk of the Town story from June 24, 1996, Essex reported that Thomas Pynchon, a notorious hermit, had become a groupie of the nineties New York rock band Lotion. (We recently mentioned the article on the occasion of the release of Pynchon’s new novel, “Inherent Vice.”)
The band members told Essex that Pynchon, wearing a Godzilla T-shirt, had approached them after a concert at a Cincinnati laundromat-cum-rock club; that he didn’t reveal his identity until months later, when he spotted a copy of his short-story collection lying around backstage; and that he always paid his restaurant bills in cash.
It was a great story. It was also mostly untrue. When asked about the article last week, Lotion’s lead singer, Tony Zajkowski, now a graphic designer at Wired, blurted out, “Oh, God, you got the big bullshit story!” Shortly afterward, the bassist Bill Ferguson, who now works on the Times Magazine copy desk, admitted that they had fed reporters at various outlets an account designed to be “as Pynchonesque as possible.” The bandmates had repeated their story to a New Yorker fact checker, who did his best to confirm details. Pynchon, then as now, was unreachable, and when the story came out he raised no public objections.
Here is the band’s current version of events: They had, in fact, met Pynchon, but they did so through his accountant, who happened to be the mother of Lotion’s drummer, Rob Youngberg. She gave Pynchon an advance copy of Lotion’s album “Nobody’s Cool,” and he liked it well enough; at any rate, he agreed to write the liner notes. (Pynchon stalkers responded—at a show in Toronto, Ferguson said, someone approached the stage “with a fucking shoebox” of manuscript pages intended for the master’s appraisal.)
Pynchon did attend some Lotion shows, they now say, but not in Cincinnati. He didn’t wear a Godzilla T-shirt. And he used a credit card like everyone else. “Tom never cultivated his reclusiveness,” Zajkowski says. “We did.” In fact, Zajkowski didn’t find the author all that elusive. “This guy was not Clark Kent.” Maybe not; or maybe Pynchon will finally emerge with his version of the story.
