Again, Roy seemed stunned. He sighed deeply, and it was one of the most feeble, hopeless sighs Thomas had ever heard.
“Like I said, I’ve got problems,” Roy finally replied. “I went off to college, but I couldn’t hack it. Didn’t understand the work, couldn’t make any friends. Everyone seemed smarter than me. And cooler. So I dropped out.”
“Well, college isn’t for everyone. No shame in dropping out.”
“Tell that to my parents.”
“Don’t worry about them. Shit, my parents still want me to go off to college. You’ve got to live your life your way.”
“But have you ever thought about going to college? I mean, haven’t you felt that pull?”
No, Thomas had never gone to college like Roy, but he’d had a similar experience, and the memory of it surged into his consciousness, like sewage flowing out of a busted line.
Back when Thomas was in tenth grade, someone had nominated him for the International Leaders of Tomorrow Conference (ILTC). Thomas never knew who it was, as his parents (mainly his father) had instantly pounced on the opportunity, signed him up without consulting him, and then bombarded him with a hurricane of details about the program. It was some time before Thomas could retreat to his room and look over the ILTC materials by himself.
The ILTC, according to its brochure, was “an exciting experience that will show today’s promising youths how to become tomorrow’s acclaimed leaders.” Thomas was intrigued to learn that he was “promising,” as his GPA told a different story. He also didn’t consider himself a leader; most “leaders” at his high school thought that tersely-delivered commands disguised as innocent suggestions and appropriation of other’s ideas were the cornerstones of leadership.
As he continued thumbing through the brochure, he was edified to learn that the ILTC had “brought together students from 75 countries since our inception in 1980” and that “ILTC participants travel to learning-intensive locales to collaborate on horizon-expanding projects and to hear speeches and lectures from top academics, business leaders, and activists.” It all sounded very sunny and innocent. The Thomas of age forty knew that the whole thing was a money trap, just another vacation-cum-resume-stuffer that middle-class parents foisted onto their children, but the Thomas of age sixteen thought the whole thing sounded mighty swell.
Though he’d called his father a “tyrant” for signing him up, he’d settled down and come to understand the value of the ILTC. The worst part was that it took place during summer vacation, that hectic time of endless beach days and nighttime (mis)adventures with tourist girls. He’d also have to miss work, but he was sure Vernon would give him time off. It was only two weeks, after all…
So, a few months later, he happily flew from Raleigh to Washington, D.C., where the ILTC Opening Ceremony was held. A grinning female staffer met him at the airport; she was even holding a printed sign with his name on it. He was, she explained, the only one she was picking up at the moment; his flight had been later than those of the other Young Leaders. As the staffer pumped his hand energetically, Thomas wondered if her smile was going to split her face asunder. He was also impressed by the tightness of her skirt and her skyscraper-high heels. As she led him out of the airport at a brisk pace, babbling about something or other, Thomas watched the twin mounds of her ass bounce beneath the black fabric.
But the staffer soon dumped him in a dorm room at George Washington University and disappeared. It being summer, the campus was deserted, and the ILTC had acquired an entire dorm hall to house its prodigies. As Thomas unpacked, he tried to chat with his roommate, a tall and flat-faced Lithuanian, but as the Lithuanian’s English was poor, he ended up lying on his bed in an awkward silence and counting the ceiling tiles.
The ILTC’s Opening Ceremony was spectacular, if one liked endless speeches. It took place in a small lecture hall with strange acoustics, so that every syllable a speaker uttered seemed to have been bellowed by a god. Thomas sat stiffly as a CEO, a senator, the ILTC’s President, and numerous other luminaries talked about the immeasurable value of the ILTC’s program, and how they wished every participant would do their best.
Finally it ended, and the Young Leaders, after moving to empty classrooms, were placed in small groups to do various exercises, such as determining what Chile should do with its copper resources, although Thomas suspected Chile already had that covered. He breathed easier; now he would get to meet people. He’d never been in such a cosmopolitan atmosphere, and he wanted to learn everything about everyone.
That heady feeling was soon dashed. These leaders, no matter if they were from Madagascar, Germany, or North Dakota, were exactly like the leaders in his high school. They didn’t discuss; they pronounced or commanded. They didn’t ask questions; they battered each other with pointed interrogatives. If another person made a good point, they would say “That’s a good point” grudgingly, then repeat the point using longer and snazzier words so it appeared that it had originated with them all along. Thomas’s gaze bounced from speaker to speaker as everyone talked over each other; he felt like a ping-pong ball during a particularly heated match. Once he tried to say something, but a Frenchman sniffed “Well put” and threw a rarified Continental gloss on his words. He even used a quote from Voltaire for garnish. Thomas clamped his jaw shut, crossed his arms, and sat brooding.
Just a few minutes ago, he’d yearned to escape from the endless speeches. Now he yearned to escape from these young titans, with their bottomless self-assurance and indisputable declarations. He wished he was back home, lying on the beach with his friends and watching the young bikini-clad girls saunter by, or at Oxendine’s Grocery joking with Vernon and the rest of the guys.
The days passed by so slowly that Thomas wondered if God (or a god) had fiddled with the flow of time. He listened to a speech by a supposedly-heroic Canadian activist, but the only thing he seemed to have done was spent some time in a Burmese prison. He listened to another speech by a different senator, one who talked about “the value of bipartisanship, of dealing with my fellow congresspeople across the aisle.” He listened to yet another speech from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who informed his audience that the key to storytelling was creating compelling characters.
The only decent experience was the walk along the National Mall. The Washington Monument’s plain majesty reminded him of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, and the Lincoln Memorial moved him in a way few things had. There was Honest Abe, the hero of his textbooks, looking out from his shrine for all eternity. Hot tears formed, and he wiped them away quickly, lest one of his apparently unaffected peers see them. What would Lincoln think of these callous young strivers marching around his temple? Surely he would be angry and baffled at their arrogance. Thomas wished the exquisitely-carved statue would come alive and humble these fools with a few calmly-delivered yet mountain-shattering words, and then stomp them with his giant shoes.
Then it was off to New York, and another dorm room at some university. Thomas was beyond caring which one.
He knew New York was big, but he didn’t know it was big. On a normal day in Morehead City, there might be a total of ten people on the downtown sidewalks; here, there were ten people within fifteen feet of him. Buildings towered over him, terrifying in their concrete and brick indifference. Newspapers flew down alley and street, like ghosts that decided they’d come out in daytime just to be cheeky. Dirt was everywhere. Drivers honked their horns. Finally their Big Apple Exploration Group entered a pizza joint for lunch, and Thomas felt relieved to be away from the bustle and whirl, until the mustachioed, portly man at the counter demanded he make up his mind what he wanted cuz he was holding up the line. Thomas stammered that one cheese slice and a small drink would do it, then he sped to a corner booth and ate by himself, like a disciplined child sitting in time-out.