Geeks (8 page)

In Idaho, Jesse hadn’t even owned a tie. But the night before he left, his mother, visiting from Montana to say good-bye, took him to JCPenney and bought him a Grateful Dead tie and some brown work shoes. Just in case. But Jesse realized last night that he didn’t know how to knot a tie; moreover, he’d forgotten to pack the shoes, which was why Eric’s borrowed pair were in his backpack. He’d used AltaVista to find a fashion site with necktie instructions, but he wasn’t sure he’d gotten it right. I said I could show him.

Rummaging through his backpack, he discovered that he’d left behind the slip of paper containing the name of his interviewer and the company’s exact address. He then proceeded to spill coffee over his pants leg. A woman across the aisle handed him a cup of water, which he poured over the stain. “Jeez, that’s impressive,” he muttered. “Showing up with a coffee stain on your leg.” Maybe, since he was wearing brownish pants, it wouldn’t show.

“I’ve never had a real job interview,” he announced. Ernie, who’d hired him at Emco, hadn’t asked him much beyond when he could start. Certainly he hadn’t needed to dress up. He decided that the tie might present a safety issue. If pressed, “I can tell them that ties get caught in computer workings and can damage the computer or catch fire.” It was, he insisted, remotely possible.

Desperate as he was for a job, he was determined not to sell out, not to “start on that road,” as he put it. It was an interesting point of view for somebody a year out of high school who’d only had one job (except for summers at a skeet-shooting range outside Caldwell, where he dodged the wayward blasts of drunken, late-night shooters). It would be smart to put the tie on, he knew, and appear sober and respectable. Yet having appeared in a tie, would it become expected ever after?

He was clinging to his optimism despite neckwear inexperience and coffee stains. “I’ve done everything with computers,” he reminded himself. “I’ve solved almost every conceivable kind of problem. I’ve built them, taken them apart, fixed them, installed software, written programs, installed and fixed modems, fixed hard drives, put in memory chips. I can’t imagine there’s too much they would need to know that I can’t answer.”

The train pulled into Hyde Park, which I remembered was the home of the University of Chicago and also where Clarence Darrow, the famous criminal attorney whose life had obsessed me when I was a kid, lived with his wife, Ruby. Looking out the train windows, we could see the university’s Gothic spires. Five or six students got on, several reading books even as they walked down the aisles. One wore a stud in her lip, another was a self-styled Paris intellectual—beret, scarf tossed around the neck, volume of poetry.

Jesse took them in silently. He’d love to see what a real college campus looked like, he said; I mentioned to him that a kid from my town in New Jersey was in her third year there, loving it. She was awfully nice. Would he like to call her and maybe get a tour?

“God, I’d love that.”

Don’t you ever want to go to college? I asked, not for the first time.

“Sure,” he said, “but it’s not in the cards. No money, no time. I don’t have the grades either.” He looked so mournful that I regretted having brought it up.

“I knew a kid in Idaho,” he recalled as we resumed the journey toward the Loop. “His parents sent him to college, paid for the whole thing, tuition, room, and board.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that!” The idea seemed so astonishing to him that he pondered it silently for a minute or two.

Trying to keep his job-interview terror at bay, I asked about jobs he’d like. “My dream job? Working for the
National Enquirer,
doing computer graphics, you know, putting somebody else’s body with Hillary Clinton’s head.” He added, more wistfully, that what he’d really like was to be a chemist or biologist.

After an hour’s ride, the train pulled into Chicago. AltaVista had prepared Jesse well for this part of the trip; he sprinted up the stairs and through the station tunnels, emerged onto the street, turned left toward State Street, then north to Madison. He’d remembered the address, it turned out. But when he tried to call Sherry to get his interviewer’s name, there was no answer. It was too early.

He called Eric, hoping he could locate the slip, but Eric didn’t pick up; probably he was still asleep. Growing frantic, he plunked quarters into a phone booth in the lobby, called Eric again, then Sherry. He drifted across the street to another Dunkin’ Donuts, but his stomach was still too queasy even for a glazed doughnut.

Sitting in a booth, we went over the interview questions one more time. “This isn’t the only job,” I assured him. “It’s the first job interview. If nothing else, it will be good practice.” But I could almost hear him mentally running through his spreadsheet. When we got up a few minutes later, I saw the sweat stains under his arms.

A traffic cop’s whistle was shrieking at the intersection as we crossed back to the building. Cabs honked and the sidewalks were thronged with more people than pass through Caldwell in a year. “I don’t see any kids my age,” Jesse said, forlornly. Wherever he went, there were no kids his age.

He remembered that he had to change shoes and retreated to a corner of the lobby, out of sight of receptionists and guards, to sit on the floor and pull on Eric’s brown Oxfords. I kept pumping quarters into the pay phone trying to reach Sherry. As a few office workers stared, Jesse stuffed his Airwalks into the backpack.

He would put his tie on after all, he decided. “I figure it’s respectful to wear a tie during an interview, even if you decide later that you don’t want to.” Then he changed his mind.

He tried calling Eric and the broker again. Still no luck.

Fifteen minutes to go. He decided to take the elevator up and ask the receptionist for the name of the person who’d be interviewing him. He put on the tie, but needed help knotting it properly. And he promised to check out the office carefully to make sure there were geeks working without ties and jackets.

Two hours later, drained and distracted, looking almost about to pass out, Jesse descended. It took several minutes before he could talk easily.

It went well, he thought. The head of the Information Services unit had asked him to replace a hard drive. The other two interviewers had asked a bunch of questions about how he’d handle various repairs of the company’s numberless desktops. None of the questions threw him. He did, in fact, see a number of tie-less employees, and was reassured by one of his interviewers that nobody in his department would make an issue of neckwear.

There were still a couple of other people to interview, they told Jesse, but he was a leading candidate. “I had a good feeling about it,” he said. Nevertheless, he still looked exhausted, even paler than normal. I bought him lunch, then he headed home, went back online, and began playing Quake II with Eric to wind down.

The day had completely emptied him as if, between my questions and the job interview, he had used up his entire reservoir of chatter, energy, and social grace. He lost himself online, in his character, in the search for weapons, in the running techno-patter with Eric about speed, graphics, power. He didn’t speak again for three hours.

Two days later, Sherry called to tell Jesse he had the job. His starting salary as a support tech was far higher than his father’s as a fire inspector in Idaho.

Three tense weeks after that, Eric took a temp job, as a network programmer with Andersen Consulting that paid $35,000 a year. After three months, he was told, the prospects of a permanent spot were very good.

Within a month, Jesse and Eric found a local Internet service provider and bought themselves a celebratory Nintendo 64.

There were some glitches. Jesse had assumed that phone rates worked the way they did in Idaho, that there was no charge for going online. The first $1,100 phone bill taught him the hard way that he was mistaken: The dial-in number was a toll call, unless you subscribed to a $100 plan that capped the costs. Eric nearly collapsed, and Jesse mustered all his well-honed phone skills with the telephone company, talking his way past the first rank to a supervisor, then claiming he was misled. The supervisor agreed to let him sign up for the special plan retroactively. Since they could never have paid the bill—and worse, couldn’t have gone online—both were immensely relieved.

The incident revealed a pair of explorers still finding their way on the strange urban frontier. Jesse steeled himself and attended a coworker’s Halloween party in a hip neighborhood, bolted when he felt utterly out of place, then spent the night websurfing at his office because the last train to Richton Park had already left. Then Eric’s hard drive got wrecked during a thunderstorm, when rain poured in on it through an open window. Both were staggered by their long commutes.

But something essential, even profound, had changed. They’d gotten out of Caldwell. They’d made it to Chicago. They were employed.

And of course, something essential hadn’t changed. Their non-working lives completely revolved around the Net, trading MP3s, finding software, getting their hands on new games, trying out new operating systems. Weekends consisted of sleep, Web surfing, shopping for random groceries and fast food, perhaps catching a part of a movie. Neither had made new friends or met a girl. They were still together in their aloneness.

6

THANKS GIVING

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Okay, so I’m sitting on the train and I fire up my portable intending to spend a nice intensely focused time installing and playing with Visual J++6 on my slow beast of a laptop. Across from me sit these two kids who are about ten or so . . . maybe 11 or 12 but not very old. So one of them pulls out his pocket Gameboy and starts to play while the other watches and both continue to argue about what character is better. . . .

Eventually the argument reaches a fervent pitch and the friend pulls out his pocket Gameboy and his 3 port networking cable. They proceed to hook up right there and fight it out to settle once and for all who is better . . . when one of them wins the other one says, “Okay, who do you want?” and the loser is forced to download one of his characters over to the winner’s machine. They were fighting for pink slips on role playing characters.

This is the kind of stuff I would have killed to do when I was ten years old. . . . These kids have computers at home they were talking about also, and in 5 years they are gonna be doing things that haven’t even been introduced to us yet, and then in 10 they’ll be doing it in a way better than we ever will be. These guys were geeks in training and as soon as they realize it they are gonna kick the pants off of me.

>    >    >

THE PLAN
for the first Thanksgiving either Jesse or Eric had ever spent away from their families was to order a pizza, then turn to the important stuff: Quake and Half-Life, an advanced new computer game they’d borrowed and copied—“burned”—with very cool blood-soaked graphics. In fact, Jesse announced, he thought it was time I had my first computer game “kill.” I overheard him whispering to Eric, asking if he’d disabled the kill functions of the other players.

I’d watched Jesse and Eric play for hours; I knew I wouldn’t last three seconds before some strange creature popped up out of a hallway and blasted me to bits. Jesse practically melded into the computer casing when he played, his entire neural system wired into his character. He was completely focused and alert, firing a stream of laser bursts, anticipating enemies, collecting armor and medicine. I was too old to summon those kind of reflexes.

Sure enough, when I took the controls, a dozen commandos jumped out and blasted away. Miraculously, nobody hit me. I fired back and one grunted and dropped to the ground.

“Hey, congratulations,” Jesse beamed. A new kind of ritual initiation; I found myself curiously proud despite the fix being in. Then Jesse and Eric took over.

They wondered if their parents would call. (They didn’t.) They wondered which takeout place would deliver a plain cheese pizza on Thanksgiving Day. AltaVista provided the answer: Aurelio’s.

But then, for no discernible reason, Jesse decided that pizza lacked panache. They should cook their first dinner in Illinois, a proper one, to mark the occasion. So they headed out to walk the three blocks to the Eagle Country Market.

The place was quiet, nearly deserted but for some last-minute shoppers—almost all middle-aged women—scrambling for an odd or end to complete Thanksgiving dinner. Except for the cashiers, Jesse and Eric were the youngest people in the market by twenty years.

Soon they were huddled at the end of the first aisle, in the unaccustomed position of pushing a shopping cart. Did they want frozen turkey? Corn? Gravy? They grabbed a six-pack of lite beer, then got bogged down in the instant potato section.

“Look, these are Idaho spuds,” Jesse called out, picking up a package. He and Eric always looked to see if potatoes were from Idaho, one of the few manifestations of loyalty to their home state.

“Those are awful,” warned a woman passing with a cart. They regrouped, comparing five or six varieties to study the microwave time: anything that required longer than four or five minutes was unfeasible, given that every course had to wait its turn in their small countertop oven.

They finally settled on a mix with herbs, two packages of frozen Oncor turkey, also microwaveable; a can of gravy; a package of frozen corn; some stuffing mix that could be boiled with water if they could locate a pot; a $3.99 frozen pecan pie and some ReddiWip. The bill came to $37.35.

Back at the Cave 2.0, they cooked Thanksgiving dinner in their own particular way, passing back and forth between the kitchen and their computers, wordlessly sticking turkey slices in the microwave while glancing at the football game on TV, playing Half-Life, or asking something of AltaVista. Eric killed a few aliens while Jesse prepared the stuffing.

Eric picked up a book he’d ordered online,
How to Succeed with
Women,
by Ron Louis and David Copeland, and read aloud from a chapter called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Seducers,” which prompted an argument about whether it was okay to grovel for sex. (Jesse and Eric never thought it was okay to grovel for anything.)

Not that the issue had arisen yet. Their social adventures had been mixed, but familiar. Eric wouldn’t be invited to his company’s holiday party because he wasn’t a full-time employee yet. Jesse went to the Chicago Film Festival where he met a friendly and attractive Finn, but she barely spoke English. Both were invited to a rollerdome on the South Side where, to their mutual horror, they found themselves at Gospel Roller-skating Night, complete with pauses for prayer.

The reality was that though people had been kind enough to include them in events, they remained very much apart. Eric missed having even the few friends they had in Idaho, who’d come over to play games and browse the Web.

“The really hard thing, but something I guess I’m used to,” Jesse reflected, “is that we’re still out of sync. I’m the youngest person in my office. People my age are in college, mostly, or in different kinds of jobs. I’m too young to drink, so I can’t go out with everybody to bars after work, which is what they do.” It’s different, he said, and yet the same.

Still, by the end of the year, Eric would be making nearly $40,000 and Jesse about the same—several times their income in Idaho just a few months earlier. And both were working for big companies with lots of benefits and possibilities. They could even afford Coca-Cola instead of their customary generic pop, and brand-name Kraft macaroni and cheese; this was a source of distinct pride.

Their biggest regret?

“Moving to a town with no cable modem access,” Jesse reported sadly. “So we are slow on the Web.” According to AltaVista, source of all knowledge, though surrounding suburbs were wired, no service was even planned for Richton Park. They were talking about a move as soon as there was enough money.

Meanwhile, downloading software and MP3s was sometimes agonizingly slow; even worse, they’d gotten their butts kicked when they went online to play Quake or Half-Life against geeks who did have cable modems. “No way you can move fast enough to keep from getting killed against somebody with cable access,” Eric lamented.

As in Idaho, they’d worked themselves into a kind of routine, bounded by age, social realities, money, and the Net. Fearless online, cautious socially. Fast-food meals, though Jesse had discovered Thai takeout downtown. Almost no new furniture, two bedrooms turned into the familiar shambles of clothes and books, not the slightest domestic touch in the apartment. A phone with Caller ID, best friend of the occasionally delinquent bill payer. Long days of work and commuting, evenings online.

Apart from movies, weekends were constructed around some new Net or Web project—trying out a just-purchased game, downloading new software, collecting and listening to music, installing a new operating system. There was no end to this incessant exploring, finding new sites, going on ICQ and Hotline Connect to trade or play chess. The Net filled in all the blanks in their lives.

There was a problem with the turkey—not enough time to nuke both packages—but one would serve. It was dinnertime. The table, usually reserved for CDs and programming manuals, was cleared and was as close as it would ever get to groaning, with a plate of turkey slabs, a bowl filled with instant herbal mashed potatoes, some microwaved corn, and boiled stuffing. And real Coke.

“Not too shabby,” Jesse said, surveying it all. “Our first meal.” Eric took out the paper plates they used on the rare occasions they didn’t get fast food, but Jesse suddenly balked. “Heck, this is Thanksgiving,” he said. “Let’s use real plates.”

“Do we have three plates?” Eric wondered. Rummaging around in some lower shelves, they dug out several, filled them with food, then sat on the floor between the computer and the TV. In their own way, both were formal, gracious. Eric wondered if they should say something. “Thanks,” Jesse intoned. “Thanks for getting us out of Idaho.” Eric nodded and they dug in.

Through the door of Jesse’s bedroom, hanging on a closet door knob, was the corduroy porkpie he used to wear to Middleton High. He hadn’t worn it much since, but it was one of the few things he’d kept and brought to Chicago.

Afterward, Jesse leaned back in their only armchair, stuffed and satisfied, in a rare moment away from the TV or computer screen. Always wary of tempting fate, or sounding “prideful,” Jesse refused to gloat about having pulled off this move. But they had, in fact, come halfway across America on their own wits and meager resources. They’d started up the ladder of upwardly mobility. They’d joined the geek technocracy.

And they insisted they weren’t going back. Jesse was right: It
was
easier to strike out alone than to try to fit in. They were on their own, still searching in this new place for compatriots and allies.

Jesse raised his glass of Coke in a toast. “Here’s to the community of social discontents,” he said.

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

So, with much regret I’m backing out of the company Christmas party. I just don’t have any kind of right attire to go. It’s business attire, like jacket required. This is something I really wanna go to . . . for networking reasons and just for personal exposure to fellow human beings who would be mostly friendly. I may not fit tightly or very well with them yet, but it could be fun, and the whole damn company is going to be there. I feel like I’d really be missing out.

I may stop by the super cheap suit store on the way out of here, and see if maybe I can pick something up for not too much money that I could at least wear once.