Geeks (10 page)

Jesse valued friends and he was a good one, not only to Eric, but to his pals back in Idaho, whose relationships and work lives were faltering one by one. Some were descending into depression, drugs, alcohol. Though he was now far away, Jesse e-mailed them constantly, even telephoned—a major step for him.

He continuously exhorted them to get out of Idaho, to not give up. Sometimes, I was interested to hear, he was telling them things I had told him months earlier: You can change the outcome; there are prospects and opportunities.

On one visit to Chicago, I met one of Jesse’s oldest Idaho friends. Jesse had urged him to come visit, even sent him some money for the trip in the hopes that it might spark a similar impulse to get out of Middleton. Jesse’s age, the friend was unemployed, had just fathered a kid and gotten divorced. He sat mutely for hours staring at the tube, playing video games; he seemed stoned or depressed almost beyond words. “I’m fucked up,” he told me, each word coming slowly. “I’m an alcoholic, I guess.”

I barely knew this kid, but I had no doubt he wasn’t leaving Idaho anytime soon. Jesse couldn’t believe how many of his friends were ending up like this. He could name the two or three who weren’t.

But, he acknowledged, most of them weren’t geeks. They didn’t have the same odds. “They aren’t part of any rising movement,” he said. “They are headed for dead-end jobs in dead-end places. They can’t even get into the army anymore.” The modern army, smaller and increasingly high-tech, was getting quite choosy about its recruits.

I persisted, as always. What about a balanced life, one with room in it for more than work and the Net? He knew perfectly well what I was talking about, but didn’t know what to think—or do—about it. I pushed, but didn’t want to push too hard.

Jesse already carried a lot of burdens. He was the organizer of the pair, the bill-payer, the voice. He felt deeply responsible for Eric, who could be cheerfully upbeat but could also grow morose and withdrawn and sometimes would sink into deep funks, not talking for days. Jesse made it possible for him to function this way. Then he would come out of it, and the two would go out to dinner, then plunge into writing some program or into a long battle over which operating system was superior.

Despite that role, Jesse was more fragile than he let on, or would ever admit. Many things took more energy than he liked to acknowledge. It was obvious that he wanted a fuller life for himself, a girlfriend, more interesting work, a handful of loyal buddies to hang out with, cultural stimulation beyond snippets of movies.

But until he got that, the Net was his life and he wasn’t about to let go of it. He had dug a hole for himself: He loved the Net and found it safe, so he spent almost all his free time there. Because he spent all of his free time there, he couldn’t quite manage to broaden his life.

He wanted to, he said. He was already growing restless. “Part of my personality doesn’t want to sit still. I can’t stand to be in the same place for very long,” he told me. “I’m totally sick of my job. I cannot stay in this place. I do expect more in the way of a social life. I do want it. I do care about it. It’s bad . . . it’s not nice to feel restless, to feel discontented. . . . I’d like to be content.”

We both laughed. A part of Jesse knew he might never be content. “Maybe more content,” he said.

“Getting here, getting to this place—this was all that I can do for now. I’m seeking technology as I always have, as more of a refuge, a place to hide. Technology for me—the Net and the Web—is a safe place to go, a safe thing to do.”

But maybe, I suggested, technology was also keeping him from a broader life, preventing his getting out and doing the sometimes hard work that goes into building friendships and relationships. Maybe the Net provided too much cover.

Maybe, he allowed.

“It’s a big fuzzy question,” he said, struggling uncharacteristically to put the words together. “A social life is something I mean to have, have to have. I know it. I guess I can’t do it until I’m ready, and it’s taken everything I have just to get here. I guess I’ll do it when I can.”

JESSE COULD
muster tremendous energy and enterprise once he got rolling, but he often needed a push. Our relationship had taken on this pattern: I gently prodded him to do something; he would mull it for days or weeks. Then, if he agreed—he often didn’t—he’d take off like a rocket. Without knowing it or meaning to, I had jump-started his search for a life outside Idaho by telling him he could probably find a job anywhere.

So I started doing the same thing with some of the city’s cultural offerings. Knowing the two still had little money to spare, I called a local ticket agency, ordered a couple of tickets to a local jazz club and to the Chicago Film Festival, and had them delivered to his office downtown. The trick, I realized, was not to talk about it. Jesse and Eric both had fierce pride about taking gifts or money; the way to help them was not to ask if you could.

Jesse never mentioned either event but, weeks or even months later, he or Eric would refer to the concert as an “awesome” experience or recall some “neat” film.

Eric was scrupulous about thanking me. He remained guarded and wary, especially about work and bosses, and he was never comfortable talking on the phone, but he was gracious, appreciative and, at times, surprisingly warm. “You’re an angel,” he e-mailed me one day abruptly. “Thanks for helping to get us out of Idaho.”

Jesse almost never formally said thanks, but his gratitude was clear. And he often reciprocated. I’d begun writing for a new website, Slashdot.org, an intensely geeky techno/pop-culture site devoted to the open source Linux operating system and to the open source and free software movements. (This is a global geek political movement committed to building good software and distributing it for free, so that a handful of corporations won’t dominate the Web the way they do the rest of the world.)

Mesmerized by the politics of open source, I’d started writing for the site for free. But my arrival was controversial, a bruising initiation. Most of the geeks who hung out on Slashdot had never come nose-to-nose with a professional writer on the Web before, let alone one with few technical or computing skills. I was “flamed”—roasted by fierce criticism—within an inch of my life for months.

Jesse read every column I wrote, sending critiques, offering ideas. There was hardly a day that he didn’t tip me off to some new website or evolving phenomenon like the rise of the MP3 online music movement. Without ever saying so, he was propping me up.

The idea of moving into the city had also been jump-started. Jesse and Eric both got promotions at work, and Jesse e-mailed me a new spreadsheet showing he’d need about $3,000—deposits for a new place, penalties to get out of the old, another truck, etc. He’d established a fund. It might take a year, he thought, but this time, he’d find a neighborhood with a better commute and—far more important—cable modem access.

And one more jump-start: In late winter, I sent Jesse the e-mail address of Jane Mahoney, a junior at the University of Chicago whom I knew from my town in New Jersey. She’d said she would be happy to show him around the school.

To my surprise, Jesse instantly accepted the invitation and went to visit her. Jane gave him an afternoon-long tour of the campus, the dorms and classrooms, the computing lab.

I’d e-mailed Jane a message of caution: Jesse might be shy or guarded around her or other college kids. She wrote back that I was nuts. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “He didn’t stop talking from the second he showed up. He was great. He loved it here. I could easily see him going to the University of Chicago.”

True enough, Jesse gushed about the school for days. He loved meeting Jane, loved seeing the computer lab, loved the feeling of the campus and the people he’d met.

So much for his often-invoked wariness of middle-class yups, which seemed to have evaporated despite the certain presence of Chicago students in hundred-buck shoes. And what had become of all that social awkwardness? Not only did Jesse not see the school as an alien environment, he seemed to feel he’d come home.

I knew from my own daughter’s college visits that kids either connected with a campus when they saw it, or didn’t. It was sometimes impossible for parents to see what attracted them, but such gut responses were not to be ignored. I e-mailed Jesse a one-line query: “How’d you like it?”

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Oh, it was so cool. It was awesome. . . . I felt just completely at home there. I loved everything about it. I can’t imagine how you even go to a place like that. I understand this is not in the cards for me. No way I could afford it or get in. I feel like I have the brains but not the grades or resources to even try.

8

ESCAPE FROM RICHTON PARK

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

I was thinking today, as I have for several years now, about geekdom and this rise that you are writing about, and I realized a few of the fundamentals that lay the groundwork for such a movement.

The first is basic human greed and its close cousin, envy. When you live in Seattle or San Fran or Berkeley, someone sees a Jag driving down the street (read: luxury and wealth) . . . people automatically associate technology (and geekdom, just not consciously) with that type of money in those places. This flow of envy and thus, of power, is, for the first time in the history of geeks, flowing in the other direction . . . breaking what has been the status quo for many years. . . . The whole focus of the geek movement (please help me find a better word than movement) is to reverse this flow of power to the point of maximum benefit, and this hasn’t happened yet. . . .

You asked me some messages ago why I thought of Idaho as hell. . . . I think that may have been a little strongly worded, perhaps I was fighting with a bout of geek dejection at the moment . . . but I think being able to see the rest of the world making these changes, changing toward much more geek-friendly environments and me not being able to participate or experience the benefits of my class was really upsetting, and possible cause for dubious slander. . . .

I have to apologize for the long e-mails. . . . I’ve been reading your mail in the mornings then stewing over questions and answers all day then finally getting home (it’s 3:45 a.m. here now) to answer them, and by then I have lots to say.:)

>    >    >

IN FEBRUARY,
a friend at work told Jesse about a two-bedroom apartment in Lakeview, a funky, artsy enclave north of downtown. This time, he actually went to take a look at the place, checked out the neighborhood, liked what he saw. Though their rent from Caldwell to Richton Park to Lakeview had increased—from $500 to $670 to a proposed $1,050, reflecting their socioeconomic elevation—he and Eric could afford it.

But there wasn’t enough in his fund, yet, for moving expenses. A friend of mine, hearing regular bulletins of the Saga of Jesse and Eric, offered to send a check for $1,000. “I don’t know about taking money,” Jesse said, reluctantly.

Two things he’d brought with him from Idaho were fierce pride and a strong sense of independence. Anything resembling charity was anathema. But when you approached indirectly and occasionally, it was sometimes possible to help.

“It isn’t from me,” I said. “It’s from a wealthy person who wants to help.” For some reason, this was different. I emphasized that this anonymous donor had volunteered what was, to her, a small sum and that she wouldn’t miss it. I mailed the check along with her note, explaining that someone had stepped in to help her at a crucial point when she was young, and that she wanted to repay the favor this way; he never said a thing about it. It made the move doable months earlier than would have otherwise been possible.

Jesse negotiated with the Cave 2.0 management to get out of his lease—leaving behind the deposit and a month’s rent—rented a Ryder truck, called the phone company to get the all-important cable modem process rolling. Then he and Eric hauled everything they owned to Lakeview.

It was harder this time—their furnishings and wardrobes hadn’t expanded, but their hardware had. There was a new computer to transport, webcams and zip drives, an additional monitor. They began packing on Saturday morning, loaded the truck in the middle of the night, and made three trips back and forth from Richton Park. Jesse called it one of the most exhausting nights of his life—they didn’t sleep at all—but it meant paying for only one day’s truck rental.

It was their second move in just a few months, and this time, Jesse and Eric were actually moving to the Chicago they’d thought they were heading for six months earlier. However much time they spent online, they’d inevitably be exposed to city life.

“Everything was instantly different,” Jesse said afterward, thrilled. “The traffic, the people, the food, the buildings.” Amazed by the scores of inexpensive ethnic restaurants, they left Taco Bell behind for good.

Lakeview was racially and culturally mixed, which Jesse particularly loved. “I think every day,” he said, “that there are more different kinds of people on my block than I saw my whole life in Idaho. It’s very cool.” There were young people all around, although not as young as they were.

There were movie theaters within an easy cab ride, even walking distance. A bustling gay neighborhood crammed with clubs, restaurants, and shops lay a few blocks to the west, although neither Jesse nor Eric ventured there often. A Barnes & Noble bookstore was just down the street, along with a Starbucks and other cafés and diners. They could bike along the nearby lakefront (although the bikes were soon stolen from their second-story back porch).

There might even be time to enjoy it all, now that they had ten-minute commutes by bus as opposed to ninety-minute treks by train and on foot.

More significantly, their online life had been dramatically improved by cable modem access and their new equipment.

Yet, much as they professed to enjoy the stimulation and convenience of an urban neighborhood, they took relatively little advantage of it. To Jesse, the constant in his life was his geekhood; that was the root, the constant, the identity he toted with him no matter where he went.

Week by week, he worked on his computing—his lengthening MP3 playlist, expanded hard-drive power and memory, the cable modem and webcams. It took him all night to download the movie
Phantom Menace,
which he’d already seen in a theater. Why spend all that time downloading a movie playing all over Chicago? “It’s the geek thing to do. I got all the episodes of Matt Groening’s
Futurama,
too, and I’m working on
The Simpsons.
” Like most geeks, Jesse had turned his computer into a cultural entity. He collected and listened to music with it, used search engines to do everything from ordering an evening meal to resolving a technical dispute. Increasingly, geeks were amassing video. Large, high-resolution monitors and quality speakers were turning their computers into sophisticated cultural centers in much the same way TV sets had morphed into family entertainment units.

They still didn’t know anybody in the new building, though. “Life in Lakeview hasn’t changed us by any means,” Jesse said with some pride. “We still live the way we have.”

It was true, I saw on a visit in March, as I was heading back east after a book tour. This apartment was dingy in an urban, not suburban way. A few blocks from Lake Michigan, the three-story red brick building was grimy, the halls airless. The Cave 3.0 was older than the others, with wood floors and higher ceilings, so the place had an echo.

It looked abandoned, even though they’d just moved in. The computers occupied the usual place of honor in the center of the living room, with an array of tangled cables, boxes for hard drives and webcams spread across the floor. The Katz Diet Coke had moved to the new refrigerator.

The only visible change was the new equipment. It had taken the two of them months to cobble together parts gleaned from the Web, from rummage bins at computer and electronics stores, and from the carcasses of discarded rigs at work—but they had finally assembled a new computer to replace the one that had died in Richton Park during a thunderstorm when they’d gone out and left the windows open.

Now, said Jesse, they really felt as if they’d left Idaho behind. And somehow, in the process, he had recovered enough energy to begin talking more seriously about a subject that had been hovering for months, sometimes unmentioned but rarely far from my mind or, as it turned out, from Jesse’s.

His visit with Jane Mahoney had triggered ideas about college. The more he browsed the University of Chicago catalogue online, the more classes he saw that he’d like to take, and the more boring his routinized office job seemed by comparison.

Jesse rarely gave much thought to his future, but when he did, he could move quickly. Once he’d grasped the notion that he could get a job anywhere, he bolted from Idaho in a matter of weeks. Once he got to Chicago, he grasped another elemental lesson: All geek jobs aren’t alike.

There are countless geek employment prospects at help desks, in maintenance and tech support. But the creative challenge is much higher up the food chain—in computing labs, medical research, artificial intelligence, advanced programming for institutions like NASA, and Web design and development—all requiring higher education.

Without a degree, Jesse would likely remain in a cubicle in an office tower, fixing and maintaining the computers of people who didn’t like them but needed them. If he were lucky, he might get to do some programming, set up some systems. Jesse didn’t have to imagine this fate: such people were all around him, ticked-off employees in their late thirties and forties, lots of them pleasant and adequately compensated, but few of them happy or stimulated. Was this what he’d come halfway across the country for?

He saw right away that he and Eric needed college degrees to avoid dead-end jobs in taller buildings. They now knew they could make decent livings and be comfortable; it wasn’t enough.

We had been kicking the idea of college around, Jesse and Eric and I, ever since they’d settled into their jobs. Eric, by now a fulltime employee at Andersen, thought he might like a computing school; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had a topflight one.

Jesse, agreeing with me that he ought to start slow, had signed up in January for a programming course at DePaul University’s downtown campus. In the back of my mind, I was thinking about DePaul as a possibility for him. Run by the Jesuits, it had a reputation for helping immigrant and working-class kids through the hurdles of college. Jesse would probably meet some kids like himself there.

So he’d registered, maneuvering his employer into paying most of the tuition, and went one evening a week. It was a simple class, teaching programming that Jesse had mastered years earlier. He made no friends; in fact, he barely mentioned the school once he’d enrolled. Although he eventually got an A in the course, I could tell he’d been uninspired and unimpressed. Maybe higher education wasn’t such a great idea, I thought. Maybe this was my middle-class expectation, not his.

But now he started asking me about college. What was it like? How much did it cost? How many classes did you have to take? Was there any financial aid? Did a school like the University of Chicago ever make exceptions? Offer special programs? When he talked about Chicago, it was in a completely different way than he discussed DePaul. DePaul was like medicine you’re supposed to take. The University of Chicago had fired his imagination.

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Jesse Dailey

Jess, do I get the sense you’re thinking about the University of Chicago?

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

You might say I’m at the fantasy stage. That’s all. You think there’s any way?

Was there any way? I told Jesse the big decision wasn’t whether to apply to the University of Chicago, but whether or not to go to college. He should look at this as the beginning of a process. “You can definitely go to college,” I assured him. “I have no doubt you’re smart enough, and that we can find a good one to take you. Going after this particular one, though, is the toughest possible road. You should know that.” It was probably a mistake, a red flag that would make Jesse more determined to try to butt his way into one of the more competitive schools in America.

In a funny way, Jesse’s ignorance of the college process helped. Had he been able to see my daughter and her friends dealing with the same process, he might have avoided it altogether. But his myopia emboldened him. He didn’t know how many upper-middle-class kids spent hundreds of dollars on SAT courses to try to boost their scores. He had never heard of the advisers-for-hire who managed kids’ applications, edited their essays, helped them package themselves. He only knew that he was smart enough.

For all the bumps in all the roads, Jesse had an almost infectious self-confidence. He argued that he could match science, math, and computing skills with anybody. On some level, I think, he’d decided that if he couldn’t go to a school like Chicago, then perhaps he ought not go at all.

My wife and friends were skeptical. The University of Chicago was tough to get into if you had top grades and tough to stay in, famous for its grueling workload. Even if he were accepted, Jesse might go into culture shock; Middleton High hadn’t prepared him for this.

I dropped in to visit a college adviser I knew and told her about Jesse’s background and qualifications. “DePaul would be perfect. This is what the Jesuits are known for. Or, if he didn’t like it there, go for the University of Illinois,” she counseled. “Northwestern would be a long shot, but a shot. Don’t let him apply to Chicago. He’ll get rejected and discouraged. Believe me, he hasn’t got a chance.”

She pulled a folder out of her file drawer and read me the transcript of a previous class officer and honor student: 1480 SATs, soccer team captain, enthusiastic letters from adoring teachers, awards for community service. “She got rejected there,” the adviser said. It was like having a bucketful of ice water tossed in my face—unpleasant, but attention-getting.