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94 / Part II Patterns of indulgence and abuse leading to violent confrontations with parents, stepparents, teachers, and authority figures are routinely approximated in the pecking-order world of their peers. Such uncontrollable rages interspersed with more calculated strategies to defile their elders and impress each other mark the struggle of these embattled youth. As if to mock the genteel conventions through which the older generation sustains and obscures its wealth and power, the boys cultivate a conspicuously exaggerated vulgarity combined with an unabashed affirmation of Robber Baron business values. Traveling between a succession of gilded cages from which they are expunged for their irreverence, they wander in search of a place in the world that cannot accept them and yet will not let go. Their incorrigibility only aggravates their elders’ inability to relinquish the expectation that their sons will somehow be rehabilitated. When the attempts to lure them back seem to fail and hope for a resolution of what has become a deeply embedded generational dynamic begins to fade, Mountainview looms as the last-ditch option. In a school designed especially for them, and through close encounters with Rod, Buck, a carefully chosen staff, and each other, these boys will once more experience, in concentrated proximity, all the pressures, ambiguities, and opportunities inextricably connected with the upper-class world from which they have fled. In their reconsideration of a face-saving return to the fold, Rod, with his delicately honed skill at traversing the Brahmin world he epitomizes and the youthful world they cling to, represents a plausible guide out of the morass into which they have fallen. The Clubbable Induction While listed in a national guide to prep schools, Mountainview does not recruit students in the usual manner. As an institution of the last resort, it has difficulty presenting an image alluring to a general audience. Besides, the icons of prestige in Western civilization have been rendered all but meaningless to the school’s potential students. To sustain enrollment, this alternative prep school relies heavily on word of mouth and personal contact. In the process of exhausting their other options, wayward boys and their families learn of Mountainview in the offices of headmasters, educational consultants, and therapists, in the living rooms of societal cohorts, and through those wider alumni, faculty, and trustee networks with which Rod is intimately familiar. A direct inquiry is usually followed by a hastily arranged visit for which the potential inductee arrives with parents or guardians and, in case he decides to stay, elaborate ski equipment, a state-of-the-art stereo and computer system, a mountain bike, a skateboard, tennis and golf equipment, a fashionable alpine wardrobe, and at least one sport coat. After being dismissed from Gould Academy, one boy was immediately driven to Mountainview by his father, Mountainview School / 95 who made the initial call to the school from a car phone en route. After a series of calls, another hopeful father flew his son to Mountainview; the two returned to Louisiana the next day when the enticement failed. When Mountainview visitors arrive, two “reliable” upperclassmen give them a brief tour of the campus. The parents are ushered into Rod’s study to be interviewed by the staff regarding the applicant’s academic, social, and medical problems and his family history while the boy is given an opportunity to learn about the school in a private session with students at Rod’s house. The interviews often reveal professional and psychological files; one family’s submission of their son’s file included darkly violent poetry. An educational consultant who accompanied another recruit assured the staff, with a knowing nod to Rod, that while it was important that they be made aware of the boy’s alleged homosexual activities, they should not be overly concerned, as such “indiscretions” were common at boarding schools. Moving the interview forward, Rod nonchalantly accepted the revelation while Buck, though slightly taken back, also let the matter ride. One mother explained that her son’s unusual name, which meant “sunshine,” was chosen because her son “was a ray of hope” at birth. On hearing this explanation, the son claimed that the unorthodox nickname was instead a personally derived variation on the initials of his formal name. Fresh from his session with peers, the applicant arrives in Rod’s study for a private interview with the staff. Attempting to assure the boy that they merely want to get to know him on his own terms, the staff members describe life...

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