Speech Impediment: II of III

Walking down the corridor, I get the feeling I could be anywhere—at least anywhere American. This is one of a million such stretches. The wall art is dated and vaguely Southwestern. Turquoise, sage, and terra cotta. It’s hard to imagine the prints ever looking good, even when new. The signatures are anonymous scribbles forged by a printer.

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 The set is outdated and the screen skews colors to blue.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.