Good Trouble

1

I’ve witnessed with anxiety the outpouring of emotions surrounding the protests after George Floyd’s death and the re-arousal of the Black Lives Matter movement. I confess I’ve found myself thinking, why can’t you put all that anger aside, however justifiable, for the larger cause of removing a corrupt and divisive president, Donald Trump, from office? But then my experience at a friend’s wedding in 1982, all of thirty-eight years ago, came to mind.

2

Tom Meyer (as I’ll call him) and I were friends through college, and we regularly saw each other in Boston during the three years afterwards. He was deeply involved in his studies, as was I, but he also had a delightful, wry sense of humor. We fancied ourselves as budding writers. Our conversations seemed full of substance and humor.

The summer I took a job in Wisconsin, I flew down to spend the July 4^th weekend with him in his hometown, St. Louis, where he was recuperating from a vicious bout of hepatitis. I joined him in smoking a cigar, one of the half dozen in my lifetime. An evening out during one of his visits to see me in Brooklyn ended when the restaurant stopped serving us drinks after Tom, sprawled on his banquette with his feet sticking out, tripped up a waiter. It was an accident, for what it’s worth. It didn’t help that we were both laughing.

He met a woman I’ll call Anne. Writing from Florence in July 1982, he was overjoyed at how well their relationship was going. Here’s most of a paragraph from that letter in which his wonderfully convoluted and self-ironic voice comes through. It follows a passage of introspection. The grammar in my transcription is off because the handwriting isn’t clear:

A year ago all that made sense to me, usually only however after a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes. As to my work and my strange contorted sense of written art, novels mainly but I would have included my letters as well. I would be reading a novel by Saul Bellow and suddenly decide on the basis of what I read to change something in my life. Having no solid or enduring sense of self, I would shape a new set of values around the mold of anything—a literary character shoved in front of my face. This still happens, but now [I follow] my urge to change the tint a bit on my palette rather than throw away the whole damn painting and start anew. In other words, Meyer has finally passed the formative Wonder Bread years at the age of twenty-eight and is proceeding to develop a style somewhat his own. Not exactly newsworthy for trans-Atlantic transmission, but perhaps the long-suffering Spratt will find in it some cause for quiet celebration.

With what to me now feels like surprising alacrity, Tom and Anne decided to marry. Although I’d used to write poems nearly every day, by 1982 the spigot had pretty much run dry. But on hearing that news, I was inspired to write one that I aptly called “Epithalamion.”

Tom asked me to be his best man, and I was honored. Why honored? The obvious, and correct, answer is that he was a great friend. The embarrassing, less obvious one, which I kept to myself, was gratification that he hadn’t thought twice about having his disabled friend perform such a public role on such an important occasion.

In truth, I was privately nervous about the logistics. How would I walk up the aisle with suitable dignity alongside Tom? What if I reduced myself to a slapstick comedian by tripping or wandering off-course? When I tried to hand him the ring, would I drop it? Would I require verbal assistance from the wedding’s officiator? Any of that would distract from the significance of the occasion and the focus the bride and groom should have on each other. But experience had taught me that potential pitfalls would be overcome, between unobtrusive help I would, indeed, get from the officiator and my own ability to make on-the-spot adjustments.

However, a few weeks into the wedding planning, Tom told me Anne wanted another mutual friend of theirs to be his best man. Their decision was final. I knew the man’s name, but I’d never met him. From pride and joy, my feelings turned to anger and resentment.

I have some distinct memories of the two-day event in northwestern New Jersey, during which I stayed with the program. But I didn’t feel my spontaneous self. A lasting regret is that I did voice my distress and thus contributed something negative and dark to the occasion.

At the rehearsal dinner the day before the wedding, I was repelled when the replacement best man gave a speech with the recurring phrase “rape and pillage.” It was met with uproarious laughter. Between the distasteful speech and delighted response it got, I should have been glad that I wasn’t standing up there in his place. The next day, my then girlfriend, Jane, came out by train to join me, and her presence helped.

Tom had asked me to read “Epithalamion” at the ceremony. It felt like a consolation prize, but naturally I agreed. Jane helped me figure out in advance the way from the pews to the podium, and when the time came, I navigated the way there and back on my own without a hitch. Such choreography takes up a disproportionate amount of my stress quotient, but it’s how I get past such obstacles.

Later, Tom and I must have expressed our anger over the phone or by letter. I don’t remember the specifics. Twelve years further on, as a pair of letters reminds me, we tried to reconcile, but in vain. Yet I think of Tom with amusement and affection.

Looking back with a mix of clarity and forgetting, I wonder whether I only assumed that, under Anne’s influence, Tom became uncomfortable with the idea of accommodating my limitations. It was never explicit, but no other convincing reason was offered. Perhaps disability had nothing to do with it. Perhaps I only reveal a deep insecurity.

Even if I rightly inferred that my disability lay behind Tom’s change of mind, Anne and he had the right to make all the decisions for their special day.

As soon as I write that, I leap to my own defense. If Tom hadn’t asked me to take on that role, I’d never have been offended. But asking and then reversing himself made me question exactly how he thought about me.

3

The idea for this post came from my recognition that memories of Tom’s wedding, which I hadn’t thought of in years, must have been triggered by my concern that the Black Lives Matter movement could work to Trump’s advantage.

Each of us finds ourselves categorized into this or that group: white immigrant women, Hindu Asian-American men, and so on. I fall into sociology’s white, male, immigrant and disabled categories.

But addressing each of these labels for myself, I immediately take issue. Okay, yes, I’m a man. But when I say “white,” I’m not, for example, from southern or eastern Europe. It’s also too general to say I’m from that northwestern European category that genealogy websites assign me to. I’m from a particular part of the world that has a distinctive history. This leads to my discomfort when “immigrant” is applied to me because, unlike the standard American immigrant story, my family wasn’t pushed out from our home country by poverty or politics: Rather, my father was given an even better opportunity in New York.

“Disabled” is the label that causes me to identify as a part of the population whose experiences are different from those of other groups and whose feelings are thus harder to understand. It’s a part of me I both honor and mock. When I recognize I’m overreacting to this or that seeming slight, the word “victim” comes to the satirical part of my mind. I hate to see myself as a victim. Then a version of Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song” goes around and around in my head, even though “lumberjack” has three syllables and “victim” only two: “I am a victim, and I’m okay, I sleep all night and I work all day…”

The white, male and even immigrant group members in me believe that at Tom’s wedding, I should have evinced no resentment at his change of mind. All that mattered was that the event be joyful, above all for the bride, the groom and their families. Moreover, Tom’s change of mind needn’t have led to a rupture in our friendship. He could have said, “Spratt, you’re a great guy but maybe not such a great speaker, which in your shy heart of hearts you suspect. Public speaking is this other guy’s talent.” Knowing I could never have given a “rape and pillage” speech, I’d probably have gracefully accepted my and my poem’s smaller, but still special, role.

But the disabled group member in me persists in contending that the reason for Tom’s change of mind was anxiety that I might cause distraction at the wedding. The reason why this part of me is agitated seems obvious: Coping with disability and with society’s reaction to it have been at times a struggle, and I’ve had to fight to assert myself. I’d concede that it can be a defensive part of me. It isn’t always as rational as I’d like. It isn’t always as dignified, though it tries and, I think, usually succeeds.

4

Watching the Democratic Convention in August, I felt uplifted by Biden’s speech but sent almost to despair by other presentations. Barely below the surface rippled the anger that has been in full voice in the streets through the summer. The reaction was understandable after the video of George Floyd’s killing, along with videos and reports of other violent deaths, as were the expressions of determination that we get past the violence that bedevils our society. The difficulty is that while society periodically responds sympathetically, waves of public emotion invariably fall back like the ebbing tide. I worried that this focus on the anger of a minority would generate its own angry reaction and undermine Democratic hopes to take back the White House and Senate. Sure enough, sympathy for the BLM movement has dissipated. As just one sign, on Sunday the New York Times carried an article about how Minneapolis’s City Council has retreated from idealistic promises of police reform.

I have no doubt that the demonstrations following George Floyd’s death and the other news this summer turned violent mostly due to the unwanted help of apolitical looters and the provocation of right-wing extremists. Even so, demonstrations imply crowds, and crowds notoriously bring out acts of recklessness that individuals wouldn’t engage in on their own. The “peaceful” in protests is a relative term. They are agitating, and agitation begets agitated reactions.

The white, male and immigrant group members in me want to urge the protesters to hold off so as not to give the president’s allies an excuse to escalate matters, actively turn them violent, and thus create an opportunity, however fraudulent, to promote themselves as advocates of law and order. It’s a rational, persuasive argument.

Meanwhile, the disabled group member in me recognizes the depth of feeling expressed by the black demonstrators and appreciates the support given by other groups, including sympathetic whites. I want African-Americans to get the relatively fair treatment I get as a white male.

There are times when “good trouble,” to quote John Lewis’s now famous phrase, has a chance to make a difference. When I think that, all four group members inside me say, “Hallelujah!”

Postscript: Epithalamion

Even though the poem’s content is irrelevant to the theme of this post, I reproduce it below.

Epithalamion

1

They were amazed that something so abstract

As a contract carried so much joy,

That something less perceptible than mist

Would so affect their separate lives.

But they thought lightly of it when they met

And eased themselves toward it through the months

With afternoon walks and drawn‑out dinners.

One day he proposed and she accepted:

The contract drew around them like a spell.

2

A man who wedded years ago—

Knowing marriage is a monument

Exposed to passers‑by and weather,

Whose mortar threatens to crumble, its bricks

To dislodge, its beams to creak,

And knowing its constant need of restoration—

Said that couples only start to love

Ten years into marriage.

A lovely thought‑‑that something beautiful

Sometimes becomes still more,

If differently, beautiful.

3

Here, at this consecration,

On an ordinary summer’s day,

These two people want us to affirm

Their submission to authorities

Beyond our understanding.

Let him ask once again

And let her answer

To cast the spell forever.