The Rival Poet Who Became My Best Man
We fought over prizes for a decade and then over the toast.
My best man opened his toast with the words, "I have hated this man since 2011, and I have brought receipts."
Then he reached under the head table and lifted a shoebox onto the white cloth, right next to the little dish where the rings had sat that morning, and my wife, who knew exactly what was coming because she is smarter than both of us, started to laugh before he had said another word.
But I should start in 2011, at the back room of The Bellows, a pub that hosted a monthly open mic and smelled permanently of spilled ale and ambition. I read a poem that night that I believed was a masterpiece. It had nine kinds of cleverness in it.
Dev read a poem about his dead father's radio, how it stayed tuned to the cricket for a year because nobody in the house could bear to change the station, and the room went so quiet... you could hear the fridge behind the bar. He won the twenty pound book token. I told my friend Priya, in a voice I believed was private, that it was sentimental, that grief was an easy chord to play.
Dev was standing behind me holding two pints.
"Yours was a very clever coat," he said, handing me one of them, which somehow made it worse, "with no one inside it."
That sentence ruined my year and, eventually, fixed my writing. But first it started a war.
For the next decade we entered everything against each other. Open mics, anthologies, the Northall Prize, every monthly poetry contest either of us could find, and we kept score out loud like it was a league table. If he placed and I didn't, a single text: the number of the placing, nothing else. If I beat him, I would post my acceptance with a caption I am no longer proud of. Readers of the local scene thought we despised each other. We did... in the way you despise the mirror at the gym. Every poem I wrote for ten years was written with his eyebrows in mind, that specific skeptical arch he did in the second row, and I have never had a better editor than the fear of that eyebrow.
Here is what nobody tells you about a good rival: he is the only person guaranteed to read every word you publish. Friends say they will. Mothers try. A rival never misses. That is a strange kind of faithfulness, and we were faithful to each other for years before we were anything else.
The war ended, or changed weather, in 2016, when we both lost the Northall to a seventeen-year-old named Grace Okafor whose winning poem was so good that neither of us could even pretend to be robbed. We ended up at The Bellows out of habit, at the same table out of pettiness, each refusing to leave first, and somewhere around the third pint... Dev said, "Her fourth stanza," and I said, "I know," and he said, "We are two mediocre heavyweights watching the future arrive," and I laughed for the first time in his presence in five years.
We closed the pub. He recited my own worst lines back at me from memory, which meant he had memorized them, which meant something neither of us said out loud. From then on we exchanged drafts. Brutally. Weekly. The scoreboard stayed, but it became a joke we owned together instead of a knife we passed back and forth.
I met Sara because I lost to him.
This is the part of the story she makes me tell correctly. The 2019 festival prize, his year, his poem about his mother's hands in flour. I was standing by the wine table doing my gracious loser face, which Sara, who was coordinating the event, later described as "a man passing a kidney stone politely." Dev appeared, took one look at me, and physically turned me by the shoulders toward her. "Go and talk to that woman who has been laughing at you," he said. "You always write better when you've lost. Maybe you live better too." We were married three years later, which means, and he has this in writing, that the single most consequential thing Dev ever won was my wife.
So of course he was the best man. There was no second candidate. The rivalry had quietly become the longest friendship of my adult life, the friend of the eyebrows, the friend with the receipts.
Which brings us back to the shoebox on the head table, beside the ring dish and the sweating champagne.
"Receipts," he said, and opened it. Inside was every poem I had published since 2011. Printed, dated, annotated in his cramped left-slanting hand. A decade of my work, kept by the man I thought was keeping score against me. He held up a page from 2013, covered in red ink. "Exhibit A. Terrible. Clever coat, no one inside." The room laughed. Sara squeezed my knee under the table.
Then he held up one from late 2014 and went quiet in a way I recognized from the second row of a hundred readings, the quiet he goes before the good stanza.
"In 2014," he told the room, "a certain prize asked me to be an anonymous first reader. And a certain groom entered that prize. I should have recused myself. Instead I wrote him a note."
I knew the note... everyone who loves me knows the note. It is taped above my desk and has been for twelve years, unsigned, in typescript, the sentence that rebuilt me as a writer: "You are good enough to be dangerous, and you keep choosing to be safe." I had quoted it in interviews. I had built whole workshops around it. I once read an essay about why safe poems lose and sent it to Dev saying, this is what my anonymous judge meant, and he replied, simply, "Sounds like a wise man."
He let the silence sit... he is a poet; he knows what a line break is for.
"It was me," he said. "It was always me."
"I have spent ten years being quoted at dinner parties by a man who had no idea he was quoting his enemy. And I am telling him now, in front of witnesses, so that he can never take it down off his wall."
A rival is just a friend who refuses to lie to you about your work.
I did not cry at my own vows. I am told I went through the toast like a dam going through an interesting engineering event. Because here is what he had actually confessed, underneath the joke: the decade I thought I spent being hunted, I had spent being coached. The eyebrow in the second row was not waiting for me to fail. It was waiting for me to be dangerous. Nobody clapped harder at my wins than the man I was trying to beat, he just did it with his hands in his pockets, where I couldn't see.
The scoreboard is retired at eleven all. We declared it a draw in the speeches, formally, like a treaty, and Sara had it printed and framed as her wedding gift to him, final score and all, with a plaque underneath that says CONTEST CONCLUDED. NEW EVENT TO FOLLOW. She was right about that too. Marriage, it turns out, is its own kind of new beginning, and Dev has already announced the next competition: first poem finished for our first anniversary, his about friendship, mine about luck, winner judged by Sara, prize one pint at The Bellows.
At the end of the night I found the shoebox on the head table where he'd left it, beside two empty glasses and the little dish that had held the rings. A decade of my poems, every one of them read, every one of them kept. I put the lid back on very carefully, the way you handle evidence.
Receipts, he calls them. Fine. But I know a love letter when I lose to one.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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