My freshman year at university, I received an unusual call in my dorm room. I had just written my first published piece as a college student, an analysis of campus jargon for the alternative paper – the one that was always getting sanctioned for running Tom of Finland art and porno stills on the back page, though by the time I ascended to the EIC chair they’d more or less given up trying to discipline us. I don’t remember how I got that first Nassau gig (probably my hallmate John Buntin jumped me in), but I do remember section editor Dave H. standing up during edit board to say he’d heard a ton of people speaking well of the piece.

I do remember Professor Brombert calling my room to compliment me on it. I remember my roommate, who happened to be in Brombert’s comp-lit survey class that semester and adored it like it was a human friend, taking the call and popping a brow before handing me the receiver: “It’s Brombert, and he wants to talk to you, luck-out.” (We had landlines and said things like “luck-out.”) I remember sitting at my dinged-up desk, facing a sweaty brick wall in an uggo dorm they tore down a few years ago, as Brombert told me how smart and compelling the column was, and that I had a great future as a writer.

I remember, after I hung up, making some self-deprecating crack about Brombert needing a hobby, “I bet he says that to all the girls,” eg., and Supersize snapping that Brombert was a bad-ass and better positioned than most to gauge good writing. “It’s a big deal that he did that. You should be honored.”

I was. I’ve never forgotten it. 

We didn’t know then about his storied past, which per the Times obit is how Brombert wanted it; I didn’t take his class for another couple of years (I too adored it), or read his lyrical memoir Trains of Thought (ditto) until the aughts. In theory, Brombert’s literal courage under fire should have made his reaching out to me even more meaningful – but already it was meaningful enough, even if he did maybe need to get cable or if he did maybe call everyone with a Nassau byline, because he took the time to do it. He supportively read the performatively outré alt weekly (“oh, he’s the one!”), he saw some work he liked, and he took a minute to phone the author, the overmatched froshling who like everyone else in her class had been a medium-to-large fish in a small pond at that time last year but was now a non-special impostor who’d had to explain more than one Meisterbrau-scented C-minus to her parents. 

Brombert didn’t need me to know who he was. He needed me to know who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted to be; writing was…just this thing I could do, well enough anyway. Brombert saw it differently: writing was the thing I would do. 

I did get to thank him for that call, one day after lecture, so this isn’t a “dang, I wish I’d said it to a face and not a cold stone” remembrance. But I wrote this on New Year’s Eve for a reason: in 2025, let’s all Brombert. Let’s tell the folks who made the things we love, “I love this. Great work.” Let’s tell the new kids, the beginners, the first ones in their families, “You nailed it. Keep going.” The world’s a bit dimmer and less interesting without Victor Brombert in it, but he’d have liked becoming a verb, and it’s the least I can do. RIP to a treasure.

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