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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's Friday, which is when we hear from StoryCorps. Maybe somebody listening will be playing D&D this weekend. For more than 30 years, nothing kept Tom Candela and his friends from gathering each week to play Dungeons & Dragons until politics broke up their game in 2020. Candela was the only one who voted for Donald Trump. Candela and fellow player Michael Youssouf talked about it with StoryCorps.
TOM CANDELA: We started around 1986. We would rent a hotel in the Catskills and play D&D for the entire weekend.
MICHAEL YOUSSOUF: Eating every junk food known to mankind.
CANDELA: Yeah.
YOUSSOUF: And I remember, my wife is eight months pregnant, and the phone rings.
CANDELA: We're all sitting there knowing what this could be, and he's, like, are you sure?
YOUSSOUF: I don't really want to give up the game right now. We're in the middle of something.
CANDELA: Yeah, we're in the middle of the battle. And we're, like, are you kidding me? Get off the phone.
YOUSSOUF: (Laughter).
CANDELA: I'm driving you home.
YOUSSOUF: But these are the things that actually make us closer as a group.
CANDELA: Absolutely.
YOUSSOUF: You have a fight with the wife or whatever. So we became our own little group therapy with each other, too.
CANDELA: That's right. The dungeon master, Steve, and I were always close friends. He was the best man at my first wedding. I would use combinations of his name as my passwords.
YOUSSOUF: Yeah (laughter). Can you tell me, then, what I call the divorce or the schism that happened during our last time we played?
CANDELA: Well, you're talking about - we were playing one time on Zoom during the COVID years. And Steve and I - he never called me Tom and I never called him Steve. We had a nickname...
YOUSSOUF: (Laughter) Yeah, that we can't say...
CANDELA: He'd say...
YOUSSOUF: ...On radio.
CANDELA: That we won't say on the radio. And he said to me, Tom, it's your turn. Who the hell is Tom?
YOUSSOUF: Yeah.
CANDELA: When he used my name like that, something was wrong. I immediately called him up. He didn't pick up. And then he sent me an email. The first line was, obviously, this is about Trump. The gist of it was how my support for Trump was unacceptable to him, and basically, I can't be friends with you right now. At that point, partly out of anger - I'll admit it - I decided to remove myself from the group.
YOUSSOUF: When that happened, it caught me totally off guard. Let me tell you how I deal with this thing because I look at our country, I look at me and you, and I would only focus on the differences. But then - and I go, wait a minute. Of the 10,000 things that make up a human being, we have 20 things that we strongly disagree with. The other 9,980 things that we both agree on.
CANDELA: Yeah. If you live in certainty all the time - and I'm not talking about just politics now. I mean, certainty about anything.
YOUSSOUF: Yeah, sure. Yankees versus...
CANDELA: Yeah.
YOUSSOUF: ...Mets.
CANDELA: Right...
YOUSSOUF: (Laughter).
CANDELA: ...Yankees versus Mets. Whatever it might be, you're cutting yourself off from the possibilities.
YOUSSOUF: Yeah. Thomas, I love you, and I want to get you back in the game 'cause the group could use you. (Laughter) Another character to get hit by arrows.
CANDELA: (Laughter).
YOUSSOUF: So, you know, I'm glad we had this opportunity.
CANDELA: Yeah, thank you, buddy.
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INSKEEP: Tom Candela and Michael Youssouf spoke as part of StoryCorps' One Small Step program, bringing people together to talk about their differences. Find out more at takeonesmallstep.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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