It wasn’t just ‘you can be anybody’, it was that we had to be somebody.
Introductory Marketing had turned into a zoo. Holding an operatic stance in front of the class, which was a janitor’s closet under the staircase, a recovering addict in his mid-forties gave us the spiel on his company.
“Mother of God!” He shouted covering his ears, in his Top Gun shades. Most the other students were kicking their feet up on the desks, egging on the salesman with crunched up paper balls, trying to illicit greater reactions, while I was transfixed by his display.
“So, there I was, that discount hotel room, $13.99 a night, you know the one next to the freeway, I’d just taken a monster hit of meth,” he demonstrated a violent inhale and the aphyxiating cough afterword.
“That’s when I saw it…” like a mime opening the heavens he then pointed to the box of vouchers, “Coupon books.”
All my life I’d listened to presentations like this, how some down-and-out individual had risen from the ashes and accomplished something great. This was when it clicked for me that I wasn’t just being told, “I can do anything I want”, but that, I had to be something. There were no gas station attendants nor grocery store salesclerks standing in front of the classroom during Career Fair. Ushered in on the back so f business leaders and professional services, the one week career fair was developing the next round of economically viable citizens.
More often than not, someone standing in front of us sounded like a cereal box. They were the professional equivalent of the “Breakfast of Champions.” Since they’d employed an accountant and a lawyer to help them deliver Coupon Books to classrooms everything in their life was now, a la Tony the Tiger, “Greattt!”
But, I’d be lying if I didn’t mention, I loved the story. It wasn’t the restraining order from his family, getting arrested for breaking and entering his own home, or the zeal with which he described hemorrhoid cream. He was a living embodiment of the ‘go big or go home’ mantra. How he left nothing on the table and for someone in his mid-forties, he was much more relatable than most of the adults I was around. Astounded, he somehow skirted the responsibilities of adulthood: family, kids, and, in general, the normal placidity of suburban life. My asphyxiatition was our semi-rural community of Portland, Oregon. I didn’t know how or when, but I was getting out of here.
That much I was certain of.
