Geeks (18 page)

FINITO

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Looking back, the year seems a bit of a blur, a lot of the way I see the world was changed, and necessarily so. The way I define myself has changed in some ways, but in one major way, it really hasn’t. I remember we talked last year before Christmas about David Copperfield, about “having passed through scenes of which [my ‘peers’] could have no knowledge” and of “having acquired experiences foreign to my age, appearance and condition.” This I think will never change. . . . I will forever be an outsider of some kind.

Behind me is the only reality I have known, the only one I can know, for want of foresight. Last year, I defined myself as a geek, as an “outsider,” as antisocial, because of the reality that preceded it. Ahead of me is a life quite different, and yet I don’t quite know how different since I haven’t lived it yet. It’s something Ican only imagine. I see now that saying I’m a geek is a form of shorthand for me. Being able to use the word “geek” has helped me a lot to define myself, but not as a mold for me to fit myself into, as a template to help accentuate my differences.

For me, writing this right now, being a geek means being a willing member of a growing community of social discontent, an intelligent community of libertarians, artists, dreamers, and builders. Technology is just the ticket in, the magic is the discontent and imagination, never being satisfied, and being creative about it. Everyone can use a computer, not everyone is a geek.

EPILOGUE

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

It does hurt, but in the end it really doesn’t matter. It’s just someone else’s opinions. . . . It becomes a part of you, it scars inside, and those scars become a part of you, all people have them, in different places, different degrees, not all people dwell on them, or nurse them, some of us just keep going.

I know it sounds melodramatic, like John Wayne getting metaphysical, but it’s the truth. When faced with conflict, any system (including the human system) always has two options, grow and adapt, or die. . . . The more conflict the more growth. It’s a basic concept of evolution and a key in modern geek faith, in
my
faith. It’s basic human instinct to do whatever necessary to grow and adapt and keep on living.

Jesse

   “That which doesn’t kill us, only makes us stronger.”

>    >    >

JESSE DAILEY
had good reason to complain, but he rarely did. He practiced what he preached: To the extent he could manage, he trivialized obstacles, viewing them as building blocks to character and resilience. Technology was the tool that made that possible for him, enabling him and Eric to evade the fate circumstance had chosen for them. Their lives were evidence of the sometimes brutal Darwinian streak in American life.

They had entered high school as classic outcasts, geeks in the traditional sense. But there had been one enormous break—the rise of the Internet in their early adolescence. History, great social and technological change, had swung their way, and they caught a lucky piece of it, grabbed on and rode it out of Idaho toward a different future. Those born a bit earlier or poorer or more technologically inept probably got left behind.

It was Jesse and Eric’s geekness that first attracted my attention, that led
Rolling Stone
to publish a story and my publisher to want a book. It has proved a valuable commodity. It was this geekness that inspired Mr. Brown to form a protective high school club, induced companies in Chicago to hire Jesse and Eric practically off the street, got the University of Chicago to admit Jesse and the University of Illinois to consider Eric.

How much did my interest and action affect the direction of their lives? A fair amount. It was my suggestion that geeks could get work anywhere that started Jesse plotting to leave Idaho, although I didn’t know it at the time. I instigated the timing of the move from Richton Park to Lakeview; my friend’s check helped make it happen. I talked with Jesse, countless times, when he was discouraged and depressed. I prodded him for months to begin thinking seriously about college.

I back-stopped his application process to the university, made phone calls, reminded him about essays and deadlines and various administrative chores. I went out to the school to argue his case. I’d promised the university that I would stay involved with him through his college years, not just through the publication of this book. And I will.

In the interim, trying to broaden his world and feed his hungry mind, to lure him out of his apartment, I sent books and, once in a while, tickets. I sent him a coffeemaker, a desk lamp so he could read in his room, a baseball cap with a Linux symbol. When I visited, I took him and Eric out for meals that included vegetables.

Small gifts, all of them, to an already independent and enterprising person, but I think they heartened Jesse, gave him some sense of security, that there was a safety net below him. When we first met, I could see that he expected me to vanish at any moment. Over time, he came—cautiously—to see that I wouldn’t. His trust in me was touching, my faith in him absolute.

I mention this stuff because I’m obliged to be candid about the support he received, in the interests of honest reporting and a faithful recounting of his journey from Idaho to Chicago. I’m not objective or detached about Jesse or Eric, but I have tried to be straightforward and open about that and about my role in their journey.

They never asked for any of this and resisted almost all of it, except for Jesse’s request for help in applying to college. His passion to move forward with his life overcame even his fearsome pride. And he has repaid me in many ways, beyond opening up his life so that I could write a book.

He helped with my online writing, showing me things like gaming, MP3, and the ICQ and Hotline messaging systems—knowledge that was tremendously useful in my Web and Net columns. His insights helped me grasp what was happening in the Hellmouth, decades after I’d fled myself. He reaffirmed my waning belief in the ability of people to change other people’s lives for the better, cracked my cynical veneer. I was wrong about the University of Chicago; institutions can do good, can sometimes extend themselves. He even reminded me that lost boys can overcome daunting difficulties and change their destinies, even as I’ve struggled to change mine.

All along, I was very conscious of the boundaries of appropriate help, something any parent wrestles with daily. I could give Jesse some support, a little material help. But his internal life is his, beyond my reach or influence, as it should be.

Jesse’s isolation is something he carries within, not merely something that the world has inflicted. I still haven’t understood why someone so personable and articulate has had such a struggle to forge connections with others.

I’ve been largely unsuccessful at guiding him toward a more balanced life, but we both know that this is something he has to do for himself—or not. A social life, he once wrote me, “is not something you turn on and off like a switch, it’s not a process that can be initiated at the behest of the processor. It cannot be treated as a maneuver, or dealt with in terms of tactics, and strategies.” In this and other ways, Jesse is wiser than your standard twenty year old.

“To tell the truth, despite my best efforts, none of my girlfriends (both of ’em, lol [laughing out loud]), could quite figure out how to settle with someone as . . . as . . . well, as Geeky as me,” he wrote me last summer. “One was intelligent, very free, but never stable, she just ended up being quite the young alcoholic and I couldn’t deal with that, I tried and so did she, but I just couldn’t stand her drinking. Oh well . . . I’ve turned the search for The One over to the muses, and I’ll let the worlds decide.” A particularly revealing, even hopeful message: Jesse hadn’t given up on the idea of love, he was simply putting it aside for a while.

WHEN I
told friends about these two kids, and about what had happened with the University of Chicago, the first question they asked was, “What about Eric?” It was much on my mind.

Jesse and I talked constantly about Eric, who was happy for his pal, but also clearly unnerved and depressed at the prospect of losing the one person in the world he completely trusted.

Jesse had been prodding Eric for two years to be more outgoing, communicative, and optimistic; he hadn’t gotten far. Sometimes Eric felt good about work, sometimes grimly pessimistic. His oftexpressed dream of advancing into the higher levels of research science—at NASA, Caltech, or MIT—came up less frequently now, his bleak funk descended more often. If life in an office tower—“I swear, it was just like
Dilbert,
” he told me—had energized Jesse into wanting something more, igniting his perpetual restlessness, it seemed to drain Eric.

For the first time since we’d met, he didn’t always answer my email promptly. But he did stay in touch, sending occasional messages like these:

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

Hello Jon,

Things have slowed down a bit here at work. Probably because everyone is heading off for the four-day weekend. Good news abounds for Jesse, can’t say much is really happening in my life. I’m not sure quite what to think about the future. I definitely know I’m torn. On one hand is a life of science and little money, and the other a life of boring development for quite a bit more $.

Either way I have to get some schooling. I don’t think I’m feeling comfortable about going to school in the spring, but maybe I should anyway. DePaul has kinda popped up again too. I have to say timidly that I’m a little scared. Maybe I am just a wanderer.

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Eric P. Twilegar

Eric, I’m not sure what that means. Nobody can force you to go to school, of course, it’s your choice. Like Jesse, you are sure smart enough to do it if you want to. And I’ll help you in any way that I can. Have things been satisfying at work?

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

. . . not much of anything. I got a lot done on my program Friday and Saturday, most of the framework is done, now I just have to write a good user interface.

I think I’m going to start running after work to cool down a little, and to get rid of the pouch I’m forming.:) The next 6 months is just going to be hell. I might be able to get a contract or something. But I still have to pay the rest of my bonus back. Plus being a contractor is no fun. All day I wish I was at home coding . . . this tech support crap is getting out of hand. I’m stagnating and there is no way out.

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Eric P. Twilegar

Eric, I disagree. There is often a way out, especially at your age, and as you proved last year. But do you have to define your life so narrowly in terms of programming?

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

it’s the only thing I got.

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

I always have tried [to get interested in other things], but have failed miserably with all of them. I don’t know if you can understand, but going out and trying to do what other “normal” people do is so uncomfortable for me that it’s not any fun. I really try to go out to things and enjoy myself, but all they do is make me feel bad about myself.

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Eric P. Twilegar

Eric, you sound pretty down. Can I help?

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

only I can help myself

His messages almost always ended on the same note of despair and resignation.

Jesse had changed enormously since we’d first met in Idaho, and in the months to come would change still more. His generous, outgoing side would emerge; he would even start to look different, less pale and hunched. Eric hadn’t changed much. Profoundly guarded in many ways, Jesse was inherently optimistic: faced with a problem or dilemma, his conclusion was usually that he could find a way to solve or survive it. Eric’s, increasingly, was that he couldn’t.

For all that they shared, Jesse had developed a passionate, profoundly upbeat view of technology as a means to alter fate and circumstance. Eric also loved science, but saw fate and circumstance as inalterable. Their differences took on a poignant note, now that their parting seemed inevitable.

Earlier in the spring, Eric had wanted very badly to go to school and was planning to apply to Illinois for the fall of 2000. He had all the forms and had started filling them out. But then he balked. He hated school, he wrote. He wasn’t sure.

In early July, he e-mailed me he was not going to apply, and would probably stay on in the Lakeview apartment, saving his money for a career change in his mid twenties.

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

. . . one thing you have to remember about me is, I hate school. I love learning, but not in the medium our education system does things. Going to lots of classes, jamming shitloads of info down your throat and testing you on it and then grading you on how well you did it. . . . Perhaps some day school will be less of a capitalist nest.

From:
Eric P. Twilegar

To:
Jon Katz

Hey Jon,

Thought I’d end the silence. Things are going pretty good. . . .

The next few months are definitely going to be weird for me. Jesse is such a huge chunk of my life. It will be nice to have the place to myself, but very lonely. But I see a good side to it. At the moment I have very little motivation. It has always been a flaw of mine. To settle into situations like this. So far I have been lucky enough to have big change whip me out of the holes. It seems like fate has helped me out again. Now I will have to try the dating game out, and will definitely have to meet someone outside of work.

Hopefully life will continue to be interesting at least. If not, oh well.

Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.

I worked to keep in contact, and to remind him that life was no more fixed at twenty than it had been at nineteen.

Meanwhile, Jesse and I were embroiled in the endless details of his getting ready to be a student again. His last contact with a doctor had been at a phys ed check-up in high school, so he needed immunizations. He’d have to figure out where to go during school vacations. “I guess it will be like being a foreign student,” he said.

There were a million financial aid forms to fill out, which involved contacting his parents and digging out tax records. Neither of his parents were in a position to help out financially, and he still didn’t know how much the university might provide. I would be struggling to pay my own kid’s tuition; I couldn’t tackle Jesse’s. Since he—and I—had been so clear about his lack of money, we both hoped the university financial aid office would come through.

When it came to handling bureaucracies, though, Jesse was a master; I knew once he got into the school, he’d figure out ways to stay there.

His big fears came when he pondered the differences between his academic background and the experiences of his new colleagues. “I’m trying to go online to figure out how to do a college paper,” he told me. “I’ve never done anything like that.”