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by Wendell Carter '83
By mid-October, I'd recently suffered more calamities than I had all year. I got hit by the biggest SUV on the road while riding my bike without a helmet. The thing pulled right in front of me doing about 45. I was just entering the crosswalk doing about 30 myself -- downhill. Nothing to do but slam into it. Momentarily knocked unconscious, I spent the next five hours on a hospital gurney in a close encounter with a neck brace. My just-moved-in lover, a man I thought was the greatest thing since the class of '85, turned around and not only moved out but basically vanished. I'd planned to spend the rest of my life with him. My car was towed to the impound lot, victim of the only DC government entity that's truly effective. Not the best moment to compose my thoughts on life as a black gay Haverford graduate on the verge of 40.
Then again, maybe it's exactly the best time. After all, wasn't life at Haverford as a black gay man about not only providing diversity but surviving adversity? Not much diversity but plenty of adversity at the 'Ford. Being gay at Haverford was a trip all its own. In the early years of coeducation, the mostly all-male environment was still a haven for closet cases, latent types, and the "questioning." But for the gay man the social milieu was incredibly oppressive. I was a born again Christian when I arrived on campus in the fall of 1980. The Presbyterian response to my awakening gay identity was to let God solve the problem. God had other plans. Soon I was choking down my one and only valium to overcome a psychological crisis. Although emotionally involved with no fewer than three "straight" guys on campus, one each year from 1981 to 1983, those entanglements were draining and ultimately fruitless.
I emerged from five years of grad school in the late 80s well, if not victorious, at least not much worse for the wear (I quit). The early 90s found me plundering the depths of New York City. Then came stasis: spending my late 30s in that social cesspool known as the nation's capital. Is there a better place to be when one is no longer enamored of one's own potential, when the daisies have grown more than a little like three-day-old foccacio? A better place from which to launch oneself into the new millennium, toward a new ceiling of consciousness? For if I can be said to be doing anything, it must be that. Yes, I write penetrating and provocative theater featuring African Americans as universal characters with depth and agency for a country that creates space only for mindless melodrama about marginalized morons.
The truth is, after years of imagining myself in the counter-cultural revolution, I'm not sure I've seen any of it and I'm not even sure what it is. At Haverford, the enemy was pretty obvious. One could take aim at various incarnations of 'the establishment' and be pretty sure of hitting the piñata. But out here, it's much more difficult to measure success in terms of change. Change in society, change in the city in which you live (unless, woefully, you are Rudolph Guliani), even change in your own circle of friends, is extremely difficult to effect. The brilliant literary stuff is easy. What I find myself struggling to do are the so-called ordinary things: doing meaningful work, finding someone to love, finding the right tennis partners, riding a bicycle in the city, getting out of bed in the morning looking forward to the day.
What does some college I attended 16 years ago have to do with that? I don't know. I'm forced to admit I don't know a lot of things. I've stepped back from the cultural front lines and resolutely focused inward. There I discover I have a time-worn capacity to bounce back. Whether it's being graded unfairly by a Bryn Mawr English prof senior year and taking it in stride, recovering virtually unscathed from a head-first collision that by all accounts could have killed me, or untying the heart strings cauterized by a lover's desertion, I have this crazy sense that I belong in this world right side up. Did Haverford give me that? I certainly got a handle on the academics. Some of that credit goes to English Professor Steve Finley, my senior committee chair, a gifted teacher and communicator. But ultimately I'll never know the answer to that one either. If it did, it was through the same process by which a rock is molded. You don't turn around and thank the fire, shaking off sparks; in its mindless, impersonal, relentless way, it only tried to force a meltdown. Maybe that's why by the time I ran headfirst into that SUV, my head was hard enough to leave more damage than it received (onlookers say the dent looked like a boulder made it). Maybe cars are just cheaply made.
Anywhere but New York City, I still seem to carry more diversity with me than I encounter. Maybe that's my M.O. On the verge of 40 and on the edge of the new millenhumhum, I work to increase the responsible use of alcohol and to reduce the digital divide. I write plays and never seem to run out of ideas. My car is back. I have a few sore bones and muscles. And I am generally happy. I get out of bed and look forward. I have the hope that my private battles will somehow resonate on a larger plane. I no longer dream a world, I live in one. After all, no one knows they've given birth to an Albert Einstein or a Miles Davis, or even whether you are one. You just know you've got a baby to love and take care of, you've got a story to tell, you've got an idea about the world, or you've got a song to play, and you do the best you can.
