Geeks (4 page)

I WAS
coming to recognize the unmistakably heartland brew of diesel fumes mixed with manure and restaurant exhaust. A stiff wind blew dust through the air. Grinding engine noises from passing trucks only partly drowned out the mournful bellowing of some doomed cattle just a few yards down the road. As the broiling sun set, a different kind of American landscape lit up: The halogen floodlights from the truck stop could be seen for miles.

In the dusk, two Diamondback Sorrento mountain bikes flashed down past the Caldwell exit ramp from Highway 20–26, past a dingy cowboy bar, a pizza place, a gun store.

Past, too, a towering marquee-like sign built by local politician Ralph Smeed to greet visitors to Caldwell. Tonight, its black letters somewhat cryptically read:
COLLEGE PROFESSORS ARE SMARTER THAN THE CAPITALISTS—PROFESSORS DON’T GIVE MONEY TO PEOPLE WHO HATE THEIR GUTS
. The two guys on bikes paid little attention.

They pedaled along the edge of the lot, past parked cars and then back into the shadows, stopping suddenly next to a battered red pickup. One of them handed the driver something that looked like a laminated ID card, and the driver handed over something that looked like folded bills, then waved and drove off.

It was my second look at Jesse, still in his Emco Computer shirt, but my first at Eric, who appeared much more the Idaho farm kid than the classic geek. He was muscular, stocky, and short, with a black beard and blazing eyes. In contrast to Jesse’s articulate ruminations about the Net and the World Wide Web, Eric was very nearly mute. He spoke only when spoken to and said as little as possible in response, except—he and Jesse were alike in this—when the subject was programming, computers, or any possible social or technical Net application.

Even though they’d come five or six miles, Jesse and Eric were barely sweating. They biked more than a hundred miles each week to see friends, visit their families, or pick up fast-food dinners at the Taco Bell down the road. They rode to and from work each day, Eric to the Office Max ten miles away in Nampa, Jesse to Emco’s storefront.

They were on bikes because a few weeks earlier, Eric’s ’82 Olds sedan, their only other means of transport, caught fire on the highway to Nampa for the fourth or fifth time. The grease under the hood built up and ignited, and this time they were too far from fire extinguishers to put out the flames. They didn’t even bother to call the fire department.

Afterward, they thoughtfully pushed the old clunker into a nearby junkyard with a note, but the owner declined the gift—the Olds had 185,000 miles on it—so they had to pay another guy to come tow it. The end of the Olds not only meant lost mobility, but the end of Eric’s brief stint at Boise State University as well. He was trying to attend school and work full-time, but without any wheels, that was no longer possible.

They’d rather bike anyway, Jesse and Eric insisted. Biking was simple, inexpensive, paperwork-free, and different, something that set them apart, not that they needed anything more.

Besides, the car fire had inaugurated one of the most important discussions of both their lives, a talk that went on for hours, interspersed between ferocious Quake II battles on their linked computers.

“We saw the loss of the car as an opportunity,” Eric recalled later. “We thought, hey, we have no car, dead-end jobs, no money—all we’ve really got are these technical skills. Because we knew computers, we figured we had a shot at getting out. There wasn’t anything to hold us, especially without the car.”

It turned out I’d played an unwitting role in this decision. During one of my preliminary telephone conversations with Jesse to set up this visit, he’d lamented the poor quality of life in Caldwell, and I’d asked him why he didn’t move.

He seemed amazed at the question. “What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s almost no unemployment among geeks,” I told him casually. “Geeks can get jobs almost anyplace. People everywhere need people who can maintain, repair, and understand computer systems. It’s a universal need, don’t you think?”

I thought Jesse was skeptical of the idea—he hadn’t said two words in response—but he immediately did what I later learned was his almost stock response to any notion, question, or suggestion. He went online, cranked up a search engine, started browsing. He hopscotched electronically around the country, hour after hour for days, browsing through the help-wanted ads on newspaper websites in dozens of American cities.

Jeez, he told Eric. Katz is right. We can go anywhere we want. Let’s get the hell out of here.

2

THE CAVE

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

When I was looking on the Tribune, there were 433 jobs under Computer/Info Systems, under every other category I looked in there was an average of 15–20. . . . A total of about 40% computers. The problem now isn’t finding a place in which those jobs are in demand, because like you say . . . they are everywhere. The problem is finding a place that wants to hire someone like me. In a Human Resources kinda way I’m defined as 19 w/ one year of experience. . . . In reality, I am an ageless geek, with years of personal experience, a fiercely aggressive intelligence coupled with geek wit, and the education of the best online material in the world. Aarrgghh!! too much stress being a geek on the move.:)

>   >   >

JESSE AND
Eric lived in a cave—an airless two-bedroom apartment in a dank stucco-and-brick complex on the outskirts of Caldwell. Two doors down, chickens paraded around the street.

The apartment itself was dominated by two computers that sat across from the front door like twin shrines. Everything else—the piles of dirty laundry, the opened Doritos bags, the empty cans of generic soda pop, two ratty old chairs, and a moldering beanbag chair—was dispensable, an afterthought, props.

Jesse’s computer was a Pentium II 300, Asus P2B (Intel BX chipset) motherboard; a Matrix Millenium II AGP; 160 MB SDRAM with a 15.5 GB total hard-drive space; a 4X CD-recorder; 24X CD-ROM; a 17-inch Micron monitor. Plus a scanner and printer. A well-thumbed paperback—Katherine Dunn’s novel
Geek
Love—
served as his mousepad.

Eric’s computer: an AMD K-6 233 with a generic motherboard; an S3 video card, a 15-inch monitor; a 2.5 GB hard drive with 36 MB SDRAM. Jesse wangled the parts for both from work.

They stashed their bikes and then Jesse blasted in through the door, which was always left open since he can never hang on to keys, and went right to his PC, which was always on. He yelled a question to Eric about the new operating system. “We change them like cartons of milk,” he explained. At the moment, he had NT 5, NT 4, Work Station, Windows 98, and he and Eric had begun fooling around with Linux, the complex, open-source software system rapidly spreading across the world.

Before settling in at his own rig, Eric grabbed a swig of milk from a carton in the refrigerator, taking a good whiff first. Meals usually consisted of a daily fast-food stop at lunchtime; everything else was more or less on the fly. There didn’t seem to be any edible food in the refrigerator, apart from a slightly discolored hunk of cheddar cheese.

Jesse opened his MP3 playlist (MP3 is a wildly popular format for storing music on computer hard drives; on the Net, songs get traded like baseball cards) and pulled down five or six tracks—Alanis Morissette, John Lee Hooker, Eric Clapton, Ani DiFranco. He turned on his Web browser, checked his e-mail, opened ICQ chat (an also–rapidly growing global messaging and chat system) looking for messages from Sam Hunter, fellow Geek Club alumnus, or his mother or sisters.

He and Eric networked their computers for a few quick rounds of Quake II. Racing down hallways and passages on the screen, picking up ammo and medical supplies, acquiring ever bigger guns and blasters, the two kept up their techno-patter about the graphics, speed, and performance of their computers. “My hard drive is grungy,” Eric complained. Jesse gunned Eric down three times in a row, then yelped, “Shit, I’m dead.” A laser burst of bullets splattered blood all over the dungeonlike floor.

Meanwhile, the two of them continued to chat with me over their shoulders, pausing every now and then to kill or be killed. All the while, Jesse listened to music, and answered ICQ messages. Somebody called and asked about ordering an ID card, the cottage industry that at fifty bucks a pop will help underwrite their contemplated move to Chicago. Somebody e-mailed a few additional MP3s; somebody else sent software and upgrades for Quake and Doom. I was dizzied and distracted by all the activity; they were completely in their element.

The game was still under way when Eric moved over to the scanner and printer and printed out something semi-official-looking.

“Too dark,” was Jesse’s assessment, without seeming to look away from the screen. So Eric went back to his computer and called up a graphic program. Jesse took another phone call, still playing Quake, as Joni Mitchell gave way to Jane’s Addiction, then the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

At any given point, he was doing six things almost simultaneously, sipping soda, glancing at the phone’s caller ID, watching the scanner and the printer, blasting away at menacing soldiers, opening mail from an apartment manager in Chicago, fielding a message from his sister in Boise.

He wasn’t just a kid at a computer, but something more, something new, an impresario and an Information Age CEO, transfixed and concentrated, almost part of the machinery, conducting the digital ensemble that controlled his life. Anyone could have come into the apartment and carted away everything in it, except for the computer, and Jesse wouldn’t have noticed or perhaps cared that much. He was playing, working, networking, visiting, strategizing—all without skipping a function, getting confused, or stopping to think.

It was evidently second nature by now, which explained why he looked as if he hadn’t been out in the sun for years. It was more or less true: A couple of weeks earlier, he’d gone hiking along the Idaho River on a bright day and landed in the hospital emergency room with his arms and legs severely sunburned.

He carried himself like someone who expected to get screwed, who would have to fend for himself when that happened, and who was almost never surprised when it did. Trouble, Jesse often declared, was the building block of character. Without the former, you didn’t get the latter.

Of the two, Jesse was more social, more outward-looking. He sometimes read novels or, when he had no other means of communication, yakked on the phone (though almost always while online); he was on the lookout for a few good friends, though not highly sanguine about finding any. Eric rarely socialized, e-mailed, or chatted, at least about non-techie topics. Jesse claimed that if his computer were ever stolen or unplugged, he would read obsessively; Eric didn’t know what he would do, and hoped never to find out.

Both had had difficult adolescent lives, in complex families under unstable circumstances. Eric, who hadn’t seen or spoken with his father in years, had emerged darker, angrier than his friend, a part of him beyond the reach of teachers, peers, and well-intended adults. Jesse, hooked on arguments and ideas—he often describes himself as a fighter—could usually be drawn out of his shell.

Although they were forever getting into raging late-night debates about the nature of cable modem access, the longevity of Microsoft, or what constituted pass interference, and despite enormous philosophical and social differences, the two saw the world in essentially the same way.

That was, they were outsiders. They’d spent virtually all their nineteen years on the periphery of various things—families, teams, churches, school cliques—and had developed a profound suspicion of hierarchies, authorities, institutions, bureaucracies, and anything connected with them. Those things represented the other world, the road not taken, the domain of suits and yuppies. This shared philosophy, plus their mutual poverty, prompted them to rent the Cave together a year earlier. They might as well be broke and isolated together.

At times hurt and anger radiated from them like heat rising from Idaho blacktop in the sun. You could practically see the scars left by years of rejection and apartness. “I never went to one single high school party until graduation,” Jesse told me once. “And if I’d been invited, I would’ve said yes, then not showed up. . . . I had that mutual inclination toward nerdiness.” If Eric sometimes seemed to see this as his fate, a part of Jesse never quite accepted it.

Living with his divorced mom and two sisters in one Montana town or another, sometimes in dire poverty, Jesse always felt like an outcast. He grew up very much apart from the jocks who dominated the schools, the towns, his world. Sometimes his reading was to blame, sometimes his ponytail, sometimes his aversion to sports.

“He wasn’t popular. He didn’t have a lot of friends,” his mother, Angela Dailey, recognized. “He was out cruising the cosmos with Stephen Hawking while the other kids were playing.”

Despite the name of the club that so shaped them, there was nothing nerdy about Jesse or Eric. Both were tough, smart, resilient, and independent. In fact, before the Geek Club, Jesse had some ugly bouts with gangs and drugs, and several run-ins with local cops.

From the time he entered middle school, though, Jesse had also always had a computer—first a hand-me-down from someone he could no longer recall, then one left behind by his mother’s departing boyfriend—and through them, his own portable and growing cyber-community. Perhaps he didn’t really need the world of high school games and dances and crowds. He was too busy taking part in the creation of his own.

White, working-class kids are as invisible in media and politics as the poorest toddlers in the worst slums. They’re nobody’s children, really, nobody’s constituency. Politicians don’t worry about them and interest groups don’t lobby for them. Thrown mostly on their own by divorce (four already among Jesse and Eric’s families, with more possible) and by financial precariousness, Jesse and Eric knew the score: When you’re out of high school, you’re on your own. If you want more education, you work to pay for it. You find your own career track, or don’t.

“For most of my friends, life is liquor, drugs, and bad jobs with no hope of escape,” Jesse had told me. “That’s what I grew up seeing. It’s just life here, for some kinds of people.” When he ticked off the names of friends he grew up with, it was a litany of trouble: one was an alcoholic and divorced at twenty, with a child and no job. Another, unemployed, was perpetually blasted on drugs. One lived from party to weekend party; he was in a beery stupor much of the time in between. They all worked at bottom-rung jobs in “big-box” superstores and fast-food franchises for $7 an hour.

For Jesse and Eric, therefore, getting out of Idaho was less a lifestyle choice than a matter of survival. There was no net beneath these kids, only the Net. It had guided much of their lives—how they thought, what they did, what kind of a future they could have. It was the only thing they trusted absolutely and relied on continuously. So far, it was one of the few things that had never really failed them. “The Net isn’t work and it isn’t play,” Jesse explained. “It’s work
and
play.”

Not surprisingly, both harbored smoldering class resentment at people whose parents bought them computers and $100 pairs of Timberlands and unquestioningly paid for their college expenses. Unhappiness and suffering builds character, Jesse told himself—and me—again and again, repeating one of his Nietzschean mantras. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

They’d learned to expect little from bosses and other authority figures, with the single and crucial exception of a teacher named Mike Brown, whom they both credited with having changed their lives.