Geeks (5 page)

3

THE GEEK CLUB

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

In my junior year of high school, me and three of my close friends began to hold the meetings of what would soon become the infamous Geek Club. Perhaps “meetings” is too formal a word for this. It merely consisted of four of us, in the English teacher’s (the local liberal) classroom, eating lunch every day and reveling in our self-imposed and self-indulgent segregation. By the end of my senior year, it had become a veritable institution. We had become quite well recognized by the school populus, it became a kind of running joke among all the people in our class, and for one of the first times, it wasn’t a joke to which we were the butt, we were the ones delivering the punch line.

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THIS WAS
part of the first e-mail Jesse sent me, the one that sent me off to Caldwell to meet the author. He later described it as “a nuclear bit of e-mail,” given the chain of events it subsequently triggered.

It was engagingly well-written, with a sense of irony and a nearly wicked wit, and it was strikingly self-aware for a nineteen year old.

Perhaps inadvertently, his message also reflected the transformation of geeks all over the world: They were suddenly the ones delivering the punch line. I saw that sense of ascent and transcendence expressed scores of times daily on the Net and the Web: that geekdom wasn’t primarily about technology, it was about
using
technology to effect change—personally and often, albeit unconsciously, politically.

Jesse and Eric have a community and even a religion: The Net will provide. It will help them learn and grow, build new lives, find new friends (maybe even women).

My first day in Idaho, it struck me how strangely traditional and American their story was, and how simultaneously unprecedented: two unattached, semidestitute kids were planning to head cross-country, to leave their dreary lives behind and make their fortunes in a strange, huge, vastly more complex place than either had ever seen.

But instead of hopping a freight, it was the Internet they’d ride out of town to Chicago, and it was the Middleton High Geek Club that started the trip. Jesse and Eric were exactly 50 percent of its membership, along with Sam Hunter, just starting his first year at Albertson College of Idaho, down the road in Caldwell, and Joe Angell, a freshman at the University of Colorado. The only place in Idaho Jesse was insistent on showing me was their clubhouse—Mike Brown’s classroom.

Middleton actually made Caldwell look urban; it was barely a town at all. We drove past farms, fading old houses, gas stations, a couple of sandwich shops. Middleton High seemed frozen somewhere in the fifties, a sprawling, one-story tile, glass, and brick complex, many of whose students were headed inexorably toward lifetimes of low-paying jobs in small, conservative Idaho towns.

“The best you can do around here is to get to Boise State,” said Eric, who had attempted that very thing, “then maybe get a computer job there. That’s what getting out of Middleton usually means.” Not that anybody here had ever pushed them to get out, told them they were smart enough to, or offered much help. There was only Mr. Brown, the genial, stocky, sandy-haired English teacher from New York—official school liberal, magnet for and friend of outcasts.

From the moment Jesse and Eric approached the school, and even more so as they crossed the parking lot, walked through the door and down the hallways, they turned wary and alert. They glowered at the LDS Church that sits right next to Middleton High. Non-Mormon as well as Mormon kids are given time in their school schedules—the kids call it going to “seminary”—to visit nearby Mormon churches daily.

A handful of kids said hello in the halls; Jesse and Eric nodded, but didn’t stop for conversation. It wasn’t exactly a joyous homecoming.

The three of us showed up in Mr. Brown’s room at about noon, just when the Geek Club used to convene, Jesse and Eric drifting to their usual seats in the far corner of the classroom.

“We’re getting out of Idaho,” Jesse told him, after they’d introduced me. “We’re going to Chicago.”

“Wow,” said Brown, a bit surprised. “Great news.”

Mike Brown was a warm, easygoing guy, not only the founder of the Geek Club, but one of the school’s football coaches. He was also, it was clear, one of those teachers who genuinely enjoys kids. He had the gift of tapping into the rebellious streak of a kid like Jesse while simultaneously curbing and channeling it.

Everyone in the Geek Club used the same phrases—“a truly great teacher,” Sam Hunter said—to describe Mr. Brown. He was the person-sometimes the only person—who made them think and listened to their ideas. He was funny, accessible, self-deprecating, and informal—unusual qualities at Middleton High, where geeks were not beloved, and where Jesse still bitterly recalls a teacher who punished students for goofing off by making them compose papers on a classroom typewriter—a typewriter!—instead of a computer.

Most teachers avoided controversial subjects, but Mr. Brown’s classroom reverberated with them. “Horrendous debates over everything from evolution to abortion,” Joe Angell said. “Sometimes it split along Mormon and non-Mormon lines. We talked about politics. He encouraged me to read
Catch-22,
and it’s my favorite single book.”

Among his students, Jesse and Eric and Sam and Joe stood out; they were all idea-starved. “I could see they needed a place to talk, a refuge here. A place to feel safe,” Brown recounted, as I wedged myself into a chair with a writing arm. “They weren’t jocks or preps, the dominant social groups. They liked to kick around ideas, argue about movies and books. Sam and Joe were less vehement, though, and better-liked by their peers. Jesse and Eric never seemed to care much about being liked.”

In fact, Eric Twilegar personified the social attitude of the hard-core geek—distance, anger, alienation. And Jesse Dailey was the school’s official Mormon-baiter, no insignificant role in these parts, challenging the existence of God and the validity of dogma, criticizing the values and tenets of LDS without fear—or much tact or respect, either.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Jesse, a memorable figure in a trench coat who wore a corduroy porkpie hat over his shoulder-length hair, would come to define himself—and be defined by his peers—as the Other.

“He was wild,” one of Sam’s friends told me. “He loved to argue, especially about religion, but he’d fight about anything, especially if it would tick off the preps who ran the school or the Mormons. He was the only one of his kind around here, somewhere between a prophet and a hippie preacher.” Some of the Mormon kids, intent on saving Jesse, brought him notes from their bishops and copies of the Book of Mormon to try to win him over. They didn’t have a prayer.

It was 1996 and Brown had been reading Katherine Dunn’s strange, evocative novel
Geek Love,
talking about it in class, pointing out the enthusiastic alienation of its characters. “The book takes the extreme case,” Brown recalled. “People as far on the fringes as you can get, completely dehumanized by ‘normal’ society. And it humanizes them-which is ironic, because they’re already human.”

At first, when the four boys began drifting in awkwardly at lunchtime, Brown was afraid to spook them. Deliberately, he barely looked up from the papers he was grading as Sam, Jesse, Eric, and Joe, foregoing the theater of hostilities that was the cafeteria, carried bag lunches into his classroom and spent the period arguing about movies and books and, increasingly, about computers.

“They always sat in the farthest corner,” Brown said. “Gradually, we talked as I worked and they ate.”

All four had grown passionate about computing and the Internet. Sam and Joe had become the school’s roaming tech support, a rapidly spreading phenomenon among geeks as hard-pressed and technophobic school districts turned to their onetime social outcasts to help run their computer systems. In fact, geeks repeatedly cite the nearly universal need for people who can cope with computers and software as the primary reason for their elevation to a new techno-elite.

If Sam and Joe had turned their new interest outwards, Jesse and Eric characteristically went the more solitary route, obsessing over hardware, code, hacking, and games.

Brown sensed that Jesse, in particular, was in distress, but didn’t know exactly what kind; Jesse never talked about personal stuff. Brown didn’t know that the year before, Jesse had joined a street gang in nearby Nampa, had been shot at late one night by a rival gang member, had gotten into marijuana and amphetamines, and had been busted by the Caldwell police for driving under the influence of liquor and for possession of marijuana (the case was pleabargained).

Jesse didn’t volunteer much about that time to me, either. It lasted between six months and a year, he said a bit vaguely. The gang had about a dozen members, who hung out, smoked dope, and broke into cars. “A form of rebellion,” he said. “I don’t know what else to call it. It was as if I had to go down, all the way to the bottom, to the guts of things, before I could move on. I saw it as an exploratory time. I wrote a paper about it at the end of my junior year, but I lost it.”

In March 1995, the
Idaho Statesman
had run an article about the so-called phenomenon of Internet addiction. Jesse, then sixteen and described as a “supersmart teen,” figured prominently in the story, saying he spent thirty-five to forty hours per week online. “It’s like a revolution,” he told the
Statesman.
“Being online sets you apart somehow; you can just log on and leave the world.”

This is perhaps the most orienting part of the geek experience for many kids like Jesse: They see the Net as a separate world,
their
world.

“If you knew him, you knew the only thing he really cared about by the end of high school was the Internet,” an old friend agreed. “Slowly, he had left the high school world behind, stopped caring about it. One-on-one, he is charming, considerate, loyal. But when you put him in the high school setting, it would just sometimes enrage and inflame him. He would take on anybody and everybody, especially when it was hopeless.”

Mostly, Brown tried to channel Jesse’s evident anger and frustration into constructive discussion.

Some kind of turning point arose the day a couple of kids wandered into the room, took in the scene and asked Jesse and the others if they were brown-nosing, scoring points. Brown stepped in. “I said, wait a minute, you don’t belong in here, have you paid your dues? And the kid says ‘What is this?’

“I answered that this was the Geek Club. If you want to hang in here, fine, but you’ve got to bite a chicken’s head off first, are you willing to do that? Live up to your convictions.”

Jesse got the idea on the spot and pounced, announcing that this was a private club; the intruders couldn’t come in because they were too well-dressed. “It was amazing,” Jesse says. “All of a sudden, we were a club and we could keep other people out.”

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Their names were Don and Kristin, they were two people whom I considered quite popular all through my younger years at school. . . . They jokingly said they’d like to join. I laughed and looked at Don’s shoes, and said “No, you can’t be in here with shoes that cost that much.” He asked why, and I told him it was because they were too trendy. It was a very short conversation, however, because I cut him off by asking him to recite pi to the sixth digit, claiming it was an entrance requirement, regardless of the shoes. Of course he couldn’t do it and had to leave. But who could, except a geek?

For years, we had watched them go to parties, and always have a dance partner at the school dances, and always stand in the hall with four or five other people who liked, or at least pretended, to like, them. And now that we had finally found our place to rest, our place to gather and be surrounded by ideas and people that we liked, and who liked us. . . . They wanted in . . . I think we all unspokenly agreed when they came in that in order to maintain our solidarity we had to stand up against the kinds of ideals that had plagued us for years.

I talked with Kristin about it a year or two later and she was honestly hurt by it. She honestly felt excluded and left out, unwanted and denied. I tried to make it clear to her that the feeling she had for that moment, we had been having for years because of the way in which her social group operated. I don’t think she quite understood it though. She just couldn’t quite get a hold of the pain that comes from having that happen nearly every day for years. I gave up very quickly trying to make people understand what it meant to be the outsider. I just quit caring. The concepts of inside and outside became trivial once I wanted them to be.

Afterward, Brown could see a change in all of them, but especially Jesse and Eric. “Suddenly, they had some power. It was fun. Some preps would walk in, and they would give it to them, tell them they weren’t invited unless they were willing to become geeks. They had a way to fight back.”

Jesse was conscious of a change in himself, as well. He had allies; it made him less angry.