Geeks (11 page)

“You’re not doing him a favor by encouraging him to do something like this,” she said more gently. “You have to help him be realistic. If you start lower, he has a better shot of getting in, going, and surviving.”

I told him what the guidance counselor had said. The prospect was unrealistic, and he’d have trouble competing if he got in. It made so much more sense to aim lower. “It’s almost impossible,” I said.

I wasn’t making even a dent in his position. He wanted to go for it. He knew it was a long shot, he told me during one of our marathon late-night phone sessions, but he wanted to try. He could use “a bit” of my assistance. It was, for Jesse, a cry for help. If I couldn’t see how he’d get in, neither could I see how I could discourage him from trying.

In fact, I called the admissions office to ask if the school would still look at a kid’s application three months after the deadline had passed. “Are you kidding?” the staffer said. “We’re sending out acceptance letters soon.”

ERIC WAS
interested too, talking about applying to the University of Illinois. I’d made the same kind of exploratory phone calls on his behalf, hoping for a more encouraging response, but didn’t get one. The school’s computing school was one of the hottest in the country, the admissions counselor said, and Eric would be up against kids with outstanding grades and achievements.

Still, he made plans to travel to Urbana-Champaign after work one night for an admissions-office appointment and a look around. He bought a train ticket and made a motel reservation. Then he fell asleep on the train, overshot Urbana-Champaign and had to hire a cab in the middle of the night for $70 to make it back to his motel.

On the campus tour next morning, he fell in love with the computing school, alas. The admissions office was helpful but blunt. Eric should wait until the fall, when he’d officially be an Illinois resident and tuition would be far cheaper. He shouldn’t apply directly to the computing school; he should enroll as a liberal arts undergraduate, and take some of the courses necessary to compete academically with the other computing applicants, then transfer.

“The problem,” the counselor told me afterward, “is that most of the applicants have many more advanced courses in math, physics, and science than Eric does. What would we tell them?”

It was sound advice, but Eric was downcast at the idea that he was unqualified to apply directly to the computing program. “I realize what I’m up against,” he said. “This is going to be rough.” He’d love to work at a research facility one day, and he understood he needed more education to do that. But I worried that the delay would discourage him, that he wouldn’t reapply. I also wondered how life would be for one of the lost boys if the other went off to school; they’d been inseparable for so long.

Eric downloaded the so-called common application from the university’s website. He said he’d probably apply the following year, but he wasn’t sure.

Jesse, on the other hand, decided to begin the process months late and see how tough it became before he made a final decision. He was testing the waters in his cautious way, beginning to apply without having formally decided to apply. He could put the brakes on at any time. He could return to DePaul in the fall and pick up where he’d left off.

He and I made a list of things he had to do if he decided to go on. High school transcripts to be requested and forwarded. Teacher references. Financial aid forms. Essays. Endless paperwork.

The application process was Jesse-style, prolonged, distracted, interrupted by technological projects. He forgot about the application fee. He was initially stymied by the essays, which he tried to fire off as irreverent, impulsive e-mail messages. Administrators in Middleton didn’t return his phone calls. He left critical forms lying on the floor for days.

I couldn’t see how this was going to happen in time for Jesse to join the class of 2003. The admissions office said to go ahead with the paperwork, though; it could always be used the following year.

So Jesse slogged on, still holding off on a final decision, understanding the long odds. A natural writer, he quickly grasped the difference between e-mail chat and the more formal and grammatical prose the school wanted, and labored over his essay. His punctuation began to improve, and he was careful to use his spell-checker, plus various online dictionaries and style guides.

Barely unpacked from Caldwell, his perpetual restlessness was back with a vengeance. He could forsee a life of boredom and routine, not one of ideas and puzzles. And Jesse wasn’t one to accept the cards dealt him.

He e-mailed me the “essay” he finally wrote, a poem modeled on one by Langston Hughes:

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Instructions from the University of Chicago Office of Admissions:

Essay Option 1:

“The instructor said, Go home and write/ a page tonight. And let that page come out of you- Then, it will be true.”

The second line of this poem by Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B,” goes on to ask: “I wonder if it’s that simple?” We ask you here to write a truthful page about yourself, beginning where Hughes begins: “I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem./I went to school there, then Durham, then here/to this college on the hill above Harlem./I am the only colored student in my class.” That is to say, each of us is at a certain stage of life and has a history. Each of us has lived somewhere and gone to school. We each are what we feel and see and hear, as the poem goes on to say. Begin there and see what happens.

I am 20, white, a child of the working class.

I was born amid crazies devoted to Christ.

Of his name, though not of his words, did they preach.

Mother discovered transgressions past,

Sins of the man chosen to lead us.

And aside she was cast.

“Bad Spirits” they said.

“Bad Spirits” she had gathered.

“Bad Spirits” she would spread.

There followed divorce, and life thrown awry.

We left, outrunning the spirits.

Many years later, I landed back in the nest.

Come home to discover the changes of late.

Father with Parkinson’s,

A new marriage completed,

Though hardly a new mother.

Spirits were not lost to her.

They were her solace, her peace.

She drank them the same way, and as quickly

As she drank the life out of my father,

Though still not nearly as quickly as disease.

A happy homecoming it wasn’t.

I left, outrunning the spirits.

To a small apartment on the outskirts of a town

Stuck on the outskirts of the world.

Life here was tough, and for the first time

I began to appreciate my mother’s masterful touch.

I learned about money, how it’s never enough.

I learned about love, how there’s never too much.

I saw for the first time the horizons of life, how they are always too close.

For a 20-year-old, white child of the working class,

Those horizons were far closer than I like to admit.

The spirits had found me.

The change happened quickly,

A matter of moments.

I was sitting and thinking,

When suddenly it hit me:

I was free.

There is nothing to tie me down.

There is no one here to dictate my horizons.

I held in my hand the greatest gift I could have given myself.

The gift of freedom,

the gift of the future.

I had given myself a gift of the future,

And as I turned it around in my hand,

it felt a lot like a steering wheel.

A steering wheel attached to a

Sluggish yellow moving truck,

Plummeting eastward,

With reckless abandon,

Outrunning the spirits.

Jesse’s grades, when the transcript arrived, were mediocre, far below what he seemed capable of. He tended to do well in math, science, and English, but even that record was spotty—he once got an F in a Shakespeare course. Teachers like Mr. Brown had spotted his intellect and tried to fan it, but others were annoyed by his wiseguy rebelliousness. There were few, apart from Mr. Brown, who would remember him fondly or go to bat for him, and he couldn’t show much in the way of extracurricular activities or community service projects that demonstrated his potential.

He was a whiz at the state’s Academic Decathlon where he competed in quiz show–style competitions and wrote essays on deadline. Still, it wasn’t much to show one of the country’s toughest schools.

Jesse’s assets were obvious, but not easily documented, unless the admissions committee wanted to check out one of his pirated music sites and watch him scarf up downloaded CDs.

I was trying to be supportive and protective at the same time. Chicago and its students pride themselves on the university’s intellectual rigor and demanding standards. In recent years, the administration has worked to lighten the load a bit, cultivate a less grim image, but I told Jesse that my daughter had heard the university referred to as “where fun goes to die.”

Jesse laughed. “That’s the place for me,” he said.

My pessimism was heightened by watching my daughter and her friends go through this insanely intense process. She had the support and involvement of parents, teachers, friends, and an involved, knowledgeable college adviser at her high school. She’d been driven from one possible campus to another, visiting friends at schools she was interested in. Her transcripts were full of the advanced placement courses that admissions committees look for.

I tried to explain to Jesse how she had been groomed for college for much of her young life. There was never a question in her mind or ours, in the expectations of her teachers and classmates, that she would go. For years, she had understood what that would take, and had worked hard to get there.

But Jesse had never expected college, nor had anyone around him. He’d had no motive for working hard academically, and he was deeply distracted by personal and familial problems and in fullblown rebellion almost every day of his high school life.

Now he was two years older than his fellow applicants, was months late, had no money, and his family was very far away. Although he had little trouble getting As in classes he liked, he had a C+ average and his ACT test scores were below the mean at the university.

“Jeez, this is pretty unlikely, isn’t it?” Jesse e-mailed me after reading a
Newsweek
-online story about how applications at the University of Chicago had jumped more than 30 percent in the past year. “Even if I did by some fluke get in, I couldn’t pay for it.” I urged him to keep an open mind, while quietly thinking he had a point.

“You don’t have to tell me anything about low expectations,” he said. His boredom grew, even though he was promoted again at work.

I’d supported, even instigated, the college talk, but I’d underestimated just how problematic getting him into college would be.

“The problem isn’t that you’re not smart,” I said. “Everybody can see that. The problem is that you have to
show
them that you’re smart—give them something to put in their folders, to put their hands on. The only way I can think to do that is for you to write something.”

From the first, I’d been struck by Jesse’s writing. Some of it was formal and trumped-up, overdone. Some of it was beautiful, powerful—as he would put it, “fiercely intelligent.” He had that rare quality in any writer—a distinctive voice. I suggested he write a second essay, a letter to the dean of admissions that might anticipate his likely questions and reservations. He agreed to try.

His first drafts were always sketchy and abrupt like e-mail—and he resisted my editing suggestions—but he did listen when I badgered him to take more time, consider more carefully what he wanted to say. This was his attempt to explain himself.

Mon. May 10, 1999
   

Dear Dean O’Neill,

It occurs to me that the people who will be reading this letter are faced with a difficult decision concerning my admission to the University of Chicago. Namely, why would one of the country’s most academically challenging universities accept me, an applicant whose GPA is probably lower than most, when so many better qualified candidates—at least on paper—have been turned away? Since I know that’s what any admissions committee will most likely be asking, I’m writing to offer an answer.

My paper academic records are not a reflection of my intelligence or willingness to work. They are a reflection of my circumstances at the time.

The period during which these records were being forged was one of deep personal turmoil and pain for me, and for those who surrounded me.

My father had been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease several years before. My mother was living far away in Montana. The disease had advanced very quickly, and had taken him to the point where he was nearly incapable of leading a normal life. He volunteered to be one of six people in the country to go under the knife for experimental brain surgery that would possibly provide him with a few more years of functionality. He has, unfortunately, steadily degraded over the last several years despite this augmentation of his brain functions.

There was a bitter divorce during the fall of my junior year. One more bit of wind added to the torrent.

At the same time, I was in the middle of a full-blown rebellion against almost all of the things I found around me in the world. I was trying to discover myself—and survive perhaps—by exploring the world in dangerous ways. All of it, not just the good part.

I started experimenting with drugs, and became involved with a gang in a nearby town. My attitude about the level of performance in school was altered for the worse, and dramatically so. I was challenging everything I knew and thought and was told. This may have been made easier for me because I was something of a social outcast, taking on the overwhelmingly Mormon and sometimes oppressive and conformist atmosphere of my school and town. I got in a lot of fights about religion and authority.