Traffic picks up on the east wing. I suppress my pedestrian
road rage equivalent behind two hunchbacked and shuffling guests. Room 185 has
been converted into a makeshift dining room. A wall dividing 185 from either
187 or 188 has a passageway cut out of it, opening onto an area where the
chef/waitress/janitor is stationed. The kitchen appliances consist of a
microwave, toaster, and two industrial-sized coffee urns. A spread of Danish
glisten in fatty dullness on a counter. Waxy apples lie in wait. Trashcans
already overflow. A TV mounted in the corner is showing a local newscast. The
set is outdated and the screen skews colors to blue. Half of the patrons are
more decrepit than I am, which is simultaneously relieving and unnerving. People
are speaking more loudly than they realize. Over the ambient din, the employee
announces “Sausage!” A wave of nausea passes over me at the thought.
A plain packet of instant oatmeal with a grinning Quaker
greets me as I riffle through a bin labeled ‘Hot Ceareal.’ Perfect. A steaming
pot of clearish water rests on a burner. I swirl some of it into my bowl. A
drop splatters and singes the fleshy part of my hand. I wipe it on my pants leg.
The pain subsides. I snag a cup of coffee and a napkin/spoon combo pack. The
coffee smells like nothing but extreme heat. I walk with caution.
A two-top is open in the corner and I make a gingerly
beeline for it. I settle down and unwrap what turns out to be a spork.
The conference goers in the room are easy to spot by their
nametags. Nametags make me sad. The handwriting is rarely precise and often calls
the wearer’s competence into question. Letters are bunched, slanted, or
squiggled. There’s no quicker way to make an adult seem like a child than asking him to write his name on a sticker and apply it to his chest.
The coffee is in fact molten. After many a cooling breath, I
discover it may well have been filtered through a comforter. It tastes
synthetic, but it’ll due. Desperate times.
“Taken?”
A heavy-set man in his mid-to-late twenties is already
pulling out the vacant seat across from me. With the body control of a server,
he palms his stacked-high plate. He’s wearing a black T-shirt under a black
untucked Oxford.
“It’s all yours.” I rub my reddening hand.
His name is written in indecipherably light pencil. The tag
may be blank. He heeded the sausage announcement. He’s ringless. We eat in
relative silence for a while except for the chalky noise of his cutting on
styrofoam. I am more alert after my second cup of coffee. I notice the brown
liquid on his plate isn’t sausage related. It’s syrup. I prod my oatmeal with my
spork.
He begins. “So uh, what brings you here?”
“A gig. You?”
He cocks his head and furrows his brow like a dog to a new
sound. “Gig? Like stand up?”
“No not quite. I’m giving a speech.”
“Why’d you call it a gig?”
“It’s just what we call them in the business.”
“Oh.” The disappointment is palpable.
“It’s a lot like stand-up, actually.”
He hums through his forkful of meat. He asks, “You talking
today?” between chews.
“Yeah at 11. Will you be there?”
“I sorta have to be.” He discovered the actual plastic
spoons and uses his on a bowl of Fruity Floats.
“Yeah.” I pause. “But at least you have the day off.”
He frowns momentarily, squishing the lump in his cheek. “Sure.
I’m not complaining or anything. I mean I’ll take any chance I can get to get
away from the office.”
“You look a little wet behind the ears to be burnt out.”
I’ve caught him with his mouth full, so he angles his head
back and speaks around his food. “You ever work a 9 to 5 job? It doesn’t take
long. Two, three months tops.”
Watching him does nothing for my appetite. “Decades ago,
yes. I was a guidance counselor in another life.”
Conversation trails off. He slurps the sweet dregs of
cereal. He consumes the entire contents of his cup in two gulps. Is he in a
hurry? He’s drawn to the commotion surrounding the microwave. He leaves to get
something more to eat or drink. I take my first tentative bite. The oatmeal
tastes like a moist paper towel. I bury the spork in the mound and leave it
there.
The ladies one table over discuss the pros and cons of wool
clothing, taking turns to make a statement and reply with enthusiastic
affirmation. A peel of laughter erupts from a man with a horseshoe of
salt-and-pepper hair. The employee appears despondent. The buzzers of coffee
pots and microwaves erupt more often than a single person can manage.
The wallpaper features small bouquets of cornflowers repeating
on diagonal axes atop a taupe background. A chair rail of dark wood skirts the
room and a border of vintage mechanized farm implements trims the top of the walls.
Most of this country is country.
He approaches our table with a cup in each hand a slice of
toast in his teeth. Maybe it’s the challenge of free food that drives him. He
places his toast in the puddle of greasy syrup on his plate and sits. “So do
you say the same stuff everywhere you go or what?”
“Not exactly. The professionals have five to seven canned
acts. I don’t have any fixed speeches. It varies.” His eyes are on me but are
not focused. He blinks. Perhaps he wants more. “My material—what I say—is mostly
in a notebook I keep with me. I basically write my thoughts down in script
form, complete with stage directions. It calms my nerves to have it memorized." He's wiping his fingers on a napkin. "I mix all the little snippets together based on what the situation calls for
from talking with whoever books me and anybody I talk to from the company
beforehand.”
He retrieves a packet of Squeeze-able! grape jelly from his
hip pocket and squirts it onto his bread. The deep violet jelly coils haphazardly. He eats
it in a fashion reminiscent of corn on the cob: side-to-side. “Is that good?” I
ask, not really interested in the answer.
“Eh.”
He leans back in his chair and nurses his apple juice. “What do you say? Like in a nutshell?”
“That’ll ruin the surprise. If I tell you now, you’ll just tune out later.”
“Well, what’s the gist then at least?”
“I don’t have a schtick, really. I think of myself as a
realist. No gimmicks.”
“But others have gimmicks?”
“Sure. Most of us have
marketing or advertising backgrounds. You’ve got your
if-I-can-do-it-you-can-do-it guys, your life-is-too-short guys, your
all-you-need-is love guys. You know.”
Two boys yell at each other and come to blows over the last
cheese Danish. The mom yells louder than them both. The loser gets a final kidney
shot in.
I try to alter the course of where we’re headed. “You’ve
been here since yesterday, right?”
“Yeah we had to get here by like noon yesterday.”
“What else have you been doing?”
“Games and stuff. Dinner. The vice president gave a little talk,
commencement type thing.”
“What do you think of the VP? You can tell a lot about a company from the people up top.”
His eyes wander again. When they return to me, it’s as
though the last five minutes never happened. Burnt toast or bagel diffuses
through the air. “How’s a guy become a motivational speaker?”
I cannot determine the level of genuine interest behind his
queries. I want to believe he’s only curious. “D’you have a minute?”
He consults his cell phone. “I’ve got a couple hundred.”
“Mm.” I pause and drink from my cup to gather my thoughts. “I
haven’t told this story in a while.” Memories tumble out of their pen like
bouncy balls. The pictures are foggy and dim from disuse. “Uh... I wasn’t very happy
where I was at—the school. The kids rarely listened to anybody over the age of
20. At 27, I was out of the question. The pay was pretty terrible too and my
wife and I had a newborn. So, I looked around to see what else I was qualified
for. Turns out anyone can be a speaker.” The TV’s volume increases to a
distractingly loud level. I lean in to compensate. “The pay was better and had
real prospects of improving even more. I could travel and I could help more
people or so I thought. Adults are supposed to be able to listen, right?” I sip. “My
wife—Debbie, her name’s Debbie—was supportive, at least to me, so I contacted
an agency. There were a few of them popping up in Kansas City, which was nearby
where we were living at the time—it’s centrally located—and the nation as a
whole was much more open to psychotherapy and touchy-feely stuff, so yeah, I
more or less signed up. They sent me a few canned lessons and told me whenever
I was ready I could do my own. It was extremely liberal, the agency—very hands
off so long as you didn’t get negative reviews. It’s a lot like sales—all about
your numbers. So yeah I was on a plane in a couple weeks.” I recall that first
flight, Debbie’s haggard face, Will screaming in her arms. The plane was
peaceful, a deserted redeye to Omaha. “It was unfair to Debbie of course, but
she never protested.”
“Do you like it?” He stacks one of the empty cups into the
other and begins work on the third.
“Parts of it, yes. I’ve been at it for a long time and have
as long of a leash as you can get. I can turn down a gig if I want. Our savings
are healthy enough. I’ve missed out on a lot back home, of course, but I’ve
seen a lot, too. I get to meet all sorts of people—like yourself—and I like
that. Keeps me young. I get a fair amount of positive feedback and most nights when I’m
unwinding I feel I’ve given three or four people something to chew on,
something that might stick with them and help them get by. That’s a unique
opportunity as far as jobs go.” I sip again more to break up the monologue than
anything. “But I’m on the road a majority of my time and I don’t really know
anybody to be frank. It’s a lonely profession. I’m kind of like an itinerant
preacher.” I clear my throat. “It is what it is.”
His posture suggests he’s bored. He’s reclining as much as
possible. “I don’t know you but you don’t look too happy to me.”
I’m stunned by the abruptness of his observation. Either he
is preternaturally observant or I look even worse than I feel this morning. I
consider taking offense but think better of it. “I’m not too happy.”
“How can you make people happier if you aren’t yourself?”
“My job’s not to make people happy, it’s to motivate them.”
“I would’ve thought happy people were motivated.”
“Not usually, no. Happiness is static, stationary. You wallow
in it. Soak it up. Motivation is active though. It’s forward movement and most
everything else is backwards. Most of my crowds are slipping when they take
their seats if you know what I mean. My job is to give them a push.”
“Hm.”
“Happy or not, I can do that.”
We both drink ponderously. “Eggs!” rings out and chair legs
squeal against the asbestos tile. The place is a lot less full. An unknown
saint turned the TV back down. My oatmeal is clammy. I push the bowl away. I
have some saltines in my bag.
“What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Your job. I mean, the life.”
“It depends on the week. We’re scheduled on one week and off
the next. In on weeks, you make a swing through a section of the country,
landing someplace bright and early Monday, renting a car, driving stop to stop through the hinterland, and you end up Friday morning about 600 or 800 miles
away from where you started.” I rub my temples. “Then you’re supposed to go
home.”
“You only work like half the year?”
“If you’re doing a terrible job, yes. If you want to pay
your mortgage or alimony…” I laugh; he doesn’t. “Well, you’re on the road more
than that anyway. All the money is in the extras. Make a good impression, hand
out some cards, and you can schedule talks on your off weeks. The agencies let
you keep a higher percentage of the fees.”
“I couldn’t do it. I don’t like travelling. You waste so
much time waiting in lines or with flight delays or security or whatever.” He
pauses, visibly reflecting. “God, you must’ve spent like 10 years in airports.”
“That’s probably true. Travel isn’t so romantic when it’s
the rule not the exception.”
“Why are you still doing it?”
There’s a confrontational tone behind his words I used to
hear a long time ago. “You’re full of questions, aren’t you?”
“You’re the closest I’ve come to meeting a rock star.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He grins. It is impossible to read him. “I’m still doing it
because I’m comfortable doing it. When you get to be my age, comfort counts for
a whole lot.”
“Oh.” He consolidates his trash, stuffing his utensils and
napkin into the fourth and final cup of his column.
“What about you? What
brings you here? You look younger than everybody else.”
He crosses his arms and stares at what he’s made. “I am. I
started in June.”
“What do you do?”
“My title’s computer support specialist. The IT department’s
just me and this other guy. I basically reset people’s passwords and unjam
printers all day.”
“Do you like it?”
“What do you think?” He’s tearing off thumb-sized edges of
his plate to give it a buzz-saw quality. “It’s not exactly what I got a degree
for.”
“Be patient. You’ve got a lot of career to go.”
“I know. That’s what scares me.”
“At least you have a job. That’s not a given anymore you
know.”
“Yeah.”
I feel impotent. He does not want to be encouraged. His eyes
are on me and I avert mine. The employee is frantically wiping down her area. A
Leaning Tower of Pisa fashioned out of refuse will tip at any moment. A little
boy asks his dad to add his plate to the top of the pile. The dad obliges.
We return to silence. The novelty has worn off. I am uneasy
in at least two ways. My abdomen is audible now that the ambient noise has
diminished. I cannot bare this any longer. “Well, I best be going. I need to
figure out where I’m supposed to be and all that.” I pull my bowl and cup
toward me. “It was good talking with you.”
He seems caught off guard. “Oh all right. See you later
then.”
“I’ll be looking for you in the front row,” I say full of
mirth. He glances at me but does not otherwise respond.
I stand and walk to the far corner with the less swollen
trashcan. I flip my oatmeal onto the top of the trash. I push down and the
contents crumple and spring back slowly. I thank the employee as I pass. She nods and
says, “Mmhm,” while unplugging the urns. Checking the corner table, I see the
young man watching the news. Exiting, I sidestep a grizzly man with biker garb
who smells like the area around a gas pump. My elbow grazes his leather vest
and I am more frightened than I should be. The grizzly does nothing.
I check my watch as I walk down the hall. Roughly two hours
to go.
