By Ralph E. Moore, Jr.,
Special to the AFRO
This Is the third and final installment (for the moment) of a fictional account of three Black grads of Loyola High School (1970) looking for their classmate, Vic Thomas, in New York City.
“Sure, when we check out,” I said.
He gave us three keys and assigned us to room 52 on the fifth floor. We thanked the hooker for her invitation to join us but declined her invite.
We showed her Vic Thomas’s picture and asked if she had ever seen him. She said, “I dunno, after a while all my Johns look alike.”
We bid her goodnight and took the elevator to the fifth floor. We have a week to find Vic before we all had to get back to Baltimore and to our summer jobs. Erich and I would be going to Johns Hopkins in the fall, Chris was on to Harvard. Vic was supposed to go to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, if we ever found him. We had wasted our first half-day in New York, but we hoped to get a fresh start in the morning.
We had not been in our double-bedded room long before there was a knock at the door and a hotel worker rolled a folding bed into our room. We were out like a room with unpaid electric bills by 10:30 p.m. that night. Erich snores, I moan and Chris drools silently.
He knocked on our door at 7:00 AM sharp, exactly as we had asked. The hotel worker handed us a telegram which the desk clerk had told him to deliver to us. It was a telegram from Anya Robinson back in Baltimore (Vic’s mom). “Have you found Victor yet? STOP. Why haven’t you called me? STOP. Are y’all up there partying? STOP. Call me immediately. STOP.”
“How in the hell did she know we were here!!!?” Erich asked in that irritated son of an undertaker voice of his. “And why is she nagging us so soon?” Chris asked.
I sent her a telegram last night. I couldn’t sleep. So, after y’all dozed off I sent her a telegram letting her know we were here at the YMCA Hotel in Midtown or thereabouts.
We stopped at the front desk which was dingy in the daylight and asked for our friend. He was off for the dayshift but his sister was there to help us. “I know why you’re staring at me,”she blurted out. “You think I look an awful lot like my brother.”
We were actually more interested in finding a place nearby that was cheap but where we could get a good breakfast and directions to the nearest police station.
“That’s easy. There’s a police station right next to St. Mark’s Hotel on 8th and D and a Bob’s Big Boy pancake place right next to it. All the cops eat there. Why do y’all need the police? Or is that another one of your “secrets”?”
“Mind if I call ahead?”
“Thanks” we said, not really paying attention to her as we wandered out of the lobby and down the street to find out if the police had any information for us.
We decided to ask the police, go over to NYU and ask around and put up fliers on the lampposts in Vic’s last known neighborhood at 10th and Avenue C.
That was our plan. But we had to keep facing up to the fact we had no idea what we were doing. Here we were in gigantic New York City, with little information and with little time. We were asked (ordered?) by a well-meaning but very bossy lady and we only had a week, six days now, before we had to head back.
Help us Continue to tell OUR Story and join the AFRO family as a member – subscribers are now members! Join here!
