I am not sure if I bored you with this story before. Don’t know why I would have, except one of the players just passed the vil at age 88. It was only a glance, waiting for a light in amazing New York City a very long time ago.

Let me frame it properly: Our little 1960s family was visiting my Grandma, great-grandmother to the children she never met, and the great great grandmother to my precious grandkids. We were at her wonderful home on the bluff in Maplewood/Millburn, NJ, overlooking the River and the magic points of light of The City.

Mom and Dad were gobsmacked at the chance to plunk the kids on the train and go to Manhattan to share stories of (young, hip) Sinatra concerts, beer jackets, life in the Chrysler Building’s ornate deco spires in wartime, and dating when the bombs had been dropped and it was all done Overseas and The Boys came home.

I think I might have been ten or eleven…interested in the Esquire magazines Dad subscribed to, and which not only feature some semi-racy pictures and real literary articles. It did not have to be hidden, like his Playboys (we found them, of course!).

Anyway, the folks are blushing that day with memories of young romance as they dragged the three of us little ones around the sites they remembered so fondly.

Truth be told? Lafayette Park? Life Magazine had just run an article that told me it was “Needle Park,” filled with junkies. Sort of a vision of America’s metropolitan life today. It was stunning to a boy my age. The amazing rush of the crowds, the squalor and urgency of the City and the sheer numbing impact of Manhattan’s bustle was quite daunting to us mini-sophisticates from suburban Detroit, where things were mostly quiet and green.

We were being towed, young, tired, cranky and more than a little intimidated through MidTown, maybe to get back to Grand Central Station and the rails back to New Jersey. We were waiting for a light at an anonymous busy corner near 34th St, and I happened to look up.

Yep. Big as freaking life was a slight man with longer sandy hair, wearing an ice-cream colored three piece suit, and a proud foulard of delicate hue you would never see in the Motor City.

I think there was a flower in his lapel. The ensemble was perfectly tailored. And yes, I knew him immediately because I read his stuff in Dad’s Esquire: “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers,” “Jousting with Charlie and SAM” and the early material that showed the genius this foppish man would later demonstrate in “The Elelectiric Colored Tamgerine Flake Baby” and later, his transformative book “The Right Stuff.”

He demonstrated a primal understanding our culture and its manifold contradictions. Not to mention the raw rush of what it was like to be an American in the days when we did things like go the the Moon (because we felt like it) and we still had heroes..

Then the light changed, and the memory of standing next to Tom Wolfe, and the brief flicker in the eyes between us, young Turk of literature and a Midwest kid, that showed that he knew that I knew who he was.

He was a stranger in that place too, but unafraid.

His death hit me harder than I would have thought. I read all his books. He was one for the ages.

Rest in peace, Tom. You made a difference in my life. A big one. I don’ think there was more a Man in Full than he was.

Copyright 2018 Vic Socotra
Www.vicsocotra.cm