On Not Fitting In

“I used to try to fit in. I remember doing a thing on stock car racing. I went down to North Wilkesboro, N.C., … and I wore a green tweed suit and a blue button down shirt and a black neck tie and some brown suede shoes and a brown Borsalino hat. I figured that was really casual. After about five days, Junior Johnson, whom I was writing about, came to me and he says, ‘I don’t mean to be rude or anything … but people I’ve known all my life down here … they keep asking me, “Junior, who is that little green man following you around?”’ It was then that it dawned on me that … nobody for 50 miles in any direction was wearing a suit of any color, or a tie for that matter, or a hat, and the less said about brown suede shoes the better. … I was also depriving myself of the ability to ask some very obvious questions … if you’re pretending to fit in, you can’t ask these obvious questions.

—Tom Wolfe