Your Guide to the Ultimate TRP Costume

 So Halloween is right around the corner and I’m sure most of you idiots are scrambling for a costume. You’re probably thinking, “Oh, I’ll just go to Party City and pick up a cheap Fatty Arbuckle costume.” But that’s not going to work. There’s no way Party City will have any Fatty Arbuckle costumes left this close to Halloween. But you can still go to any local supermarket and get yourself a brown paper bag, a black magic marker and make yourself your own Thomas Pynchon costume. Just cut some holes for eyes, draw the question mark as shown in the picture and–Voila!–your the TRP. Or, I should say, you’ll look like Thomas Pynchon, but a Thomas Pynchon costume is about so much more than a paper bag over your head.

The inherent beauty of the TRP costume is its elusive nature. People will look as you and not know what or who you’re supposed to be. This ignorance will provide you with ample opportunities to act like a complete prick. Here’s an example of how many conversations will go when you are dressed as the TRP:

SOME DUDE:Hey, who or what are you supposed to be?
YOU: I’m Thomas Pynchon.
SOME DUDE: Who?
YOU: What do you mean “who?” Don’t you know who Thomas fucking Pynchon is? He’s only the world’s greatest living authour!
SOME DUDE: I thought Gabriel García Márquez was the world’s greatest living authour.
YOU: Fuck García Márquez! The TRP could take 7 fountain pens, 13 yellow legal pads and a vial of Liquid Paper, shove them all up his ass and fart a better manuscript than García Márquez could ever write.
SOME DUDE: Whatever. You know, just because you’re wearing a bag over your head in an obscure Simpsons reference, that doesn’t give you the right to act like an know-it-all elitist prick.
YOU: Yes it does so. 

See idiots? The TRP costume is nothing if not a conversation starter. And in order to keep the conversation moving, you’ll need to memorize a few important Pynchon passages. Most notably, you’ll need to learn the dirty limericks from Gravity’s Rainbow:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder,
Who buggered the vane servomotor.
He soon grew a prong
On the end of his schlong
And hired himself a promoter. 

There was a young man from Decatur,
Who slept with a LOX generator.
His balls and his prick
Froze solid real quick,
And his asshole a little bit later.

Those are the important two. There are a couple others you should also be familiar with. Page 334-335 of the 1995 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition should give you all the dirty limericks you need.

Now, for those of you who take Halloween costumes way too seriously, memorizing dirty limericks will not suffice. You’ll need to learn some hardcore Pynchon. Page 547 of Gravity’s Rainbow has some quality stuff, but I suggest memorizing a passage from The Crying of Lot 49. And not just any passage, I’m talking about what might be the third most impressive piece of non-Shakespearean writing in all literature:

Yet at least he believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than himself come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust–and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was not way of telling what things hd been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most if it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or a car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes–it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest. 

Phew! That’s a lot of typing. But if you can remember that at whatever stupid Halloween party you crash, you stand a damn good chance of having the most impressive TRP costume in the room. As for me, I think I’ll save the TRP for next year. This Halloween, I’m a C.H.U.D.