Geeks (7 page)

Their safety net, money left over for emergencies and unforeseen expenses, came to $10.72.

THE PARTY
was at Joe Allen’s house, a split-level miles from their apartment but still in Caldwell. A friend had given Jesse and Eric a lift. The directions I had simply said to head down the Interstate, take a particular exit, find a certain road, and turn left. But I was driving for half an hour before I came upon any turn that could conceivably be called a road. I saw no houses or street lights, either, just a potato-processing plant that was bigger than many towns—the giant Simplot complex—and seemed to extend for miles.

Down a long, dark stretch of asphalt, I eventually came upon Joe’s place, across the street from a barn and a pasture. The driveway was filling with Jeeps, a couple of pickups, and some small sedans.

Inside, Jesse was playing chess in one room with Sam’s younger brother; I found Eric off by himself, drinking a beer in the playroom. Two sets of jocks were arm wrestling at the kitchen table. A
GOOD LUCK, JESSE AND ERIC
sign had been taped to the refrigerator door.

The party felt muted, unfocused, scattered all over the house. Everybody was drinking. People came up sporadically to wish Jesse luck or say good-bye, but plainly found the trek a little bizarre, a typically Jesse thing to do. Considering the dimensions of the project, the departure caused rather little discussion unless I raised the topic. People almost seemed to be avoiding the subject.

Sam, who turned out to be decidedly non-geeky—he was blond, clean-cut and cheerful—thought that Jesse and Eric would do fine. But he wasn’t drawn to move so far away from family and friends himself, he conceded. There might be prettier or more sophisticated places to live than Caldwell and Middleton, but few that felt more comfortable or were better places to raise a family.

“I think they’re nuts, I guess,” offered a clearly buzzed friend. “Idaho is safe, friendly. They might not be the most popular kids in the town, but they do have friends here. They’ve never been to a place like Chicago. Maybe they’ll get eaten alive. It’s scary. I hear it’s crowded and ugly and dangerous.”

Jesse laughed later when he heard that. “It isn’t as scary as staying here,” he said.

THE NEXT
morning, a Sunday, was the last day in their apartment. Eric had biked off to Office Max to earn a few extra dollars. Jesse, sitting shirtless in front of his computer, had clearly just gotten up.

The Cave, which had never been especially homey, now looked like a typhoon had hit. Some of the computer peripherals were already in boxes, but clothes and household stuff and books were scattered through every room.

Jesse looked deflated, resigned, as if the wind had suddenly been knocked out of him after days of intense focus on the trip.

Last night’s party had clearly been a bust. “It was a bit sad,” he conceded, strong language from him. “Half the people, I didn’t know.” For Jesse—careful to avoid language that suggested emotion, never angry but “irritated,” never hurt but “disappointed”—this came close to an expression of grief.

He had kissed one girl, somebody he’d been interested in for a long time; kissed her twice, in fact. But she’d told him she didn’t want that kind of relationship. “My last stab at acceptance in Caldwell,” he muttered.

I had been, to date, meticulously journalistic in my dealings with Jesse. I’d advised him repeatedly of his journalistic “rights,” that anything he said could appear in print unless he specified otherwise. That he shouldn’t do or say anything in my presence that he didn’t want to see in a magazine or book. That while I would certainly be friendly, that didn’t necessarily mean I was his friend.

I scrupulously avoided giving advice, even when he was recklessly indiscreet about the booming fake ID business going on in the apartment; even when I saw him fax off a signed rental agreement for an unseen apartment in a town I’d never heard of, one that didn’t appear on the Chicago map or even have a Chicago area code.

In fact, much as I admired his planning and pluck, his trip seemed frighteningly ill-conceived. He had no cash reserves, and no people he could turn to who did. No car, in a climate where bikes might prove of limited utility.

They were headed for a melting pot, yet neither had spent much time around minorities, other than a few Mexican families who lived in Caldwell. The gang Jesse had joined once, while rough, was probably very different from the Chicago gangs I’d often read about.

Most importantly, there was no margin of error. If a single thing went wrong—the rental truck broke down, the apartment wasn’t available, a job didn’t materialize swiftly—Jesse and Eric didn’t even have enough money to get back to Idaho.

Jesse didn’t want to think about that. “This has got to work,” he said. “This is where ‘clarity of intent’ applies. I really have no choice but to believe it will work. The second I stop believing that, I won’t be able to do it.”

By his own timetable, he had three weeks to travel to Chicago, get settled in a new apartment, land work, and cash a paycheck before he ran out of even enough money to take the subway. He shrugged. “Worst-case scenario? The money runs out and we live on the streets of Chicago. Or we call our parents and borrow $125 for the Greyhound. Given the two choices, I’d probably opt for the streets.”

Were this my kid, I’d have been beside myself. But nobody in Jesse’s family was sounding any alarms, and my role was to keep my mouth shut and take notes, to observe but not to interfere. The closest I’d came to violating that tenet had been a very subtle hint—which Jesse had ignored anyway—that getting an apartment in Chicago via the Net might prove risky. Otherwise, I couldn’t say or do anything that would affect the outcome of the story.

Besides, Jesse had absolute confidence in his computing skills, in his technology. The Net was a faith to him, an ideology. It had gotten him through the poverty and loneliness of a nomadic life in Montana, the pain of adolescence, the rejection and anger of high school. Once he’d grasped that there were jobs, he reasoned that he could compete with anybody when it came to getting one.

So he was setting off in a rented Ryder with a fake ID of his own, no credit cards, and ten bucks to fall back on if anything went wrong.

What made my detachment particularly difficult was how much I’d liked Jesse from our first online encounter. I appreciated his wily maneuvering on the Net, his bizarre sense of humor, his oddly defiant view of his world, his striking intelligence and lust for ideas.

Despite the obvious differences between us, there were also some connections. He was a lost boy. I’d been one myself, and we know one another when we meet. Lost boys have a strange kind of brotherhood.

We shared other traits as well, alas: He was rebellious and resentful of authority, quick to rage at arbitrary power. I had been too, for most of my life. While I wasn’t a computer geek, I too, loved the Net and the Web, and also could talk about both forever. We shared an oddly similar point of view about the world.

We’d already spent hours yakking into the night about computers, politics, education. Jesse’s normally cautious veneer would peel away in a second at the appearance of an interesting idea or argument. His sometimes heavy-lidded, almost reptilian expression vanished; his eyes lit up, his arms would windmill, and his voice rise. We enjoyed sparring with each other.

And there was something else. My wife and I had lost our first two children; we’d decided to abort after prenatal diagnoses of a rare but invariably fatal genetic disease. On our third try, we were luckier and had a daughter whom we adored.

In all the years since losing the boy we would have named Ben, I’d never met a kid and felt that he was something like the boy I imagined my son might have been.

I didn’t want to be Jesse’s father—he had one and wasn’t looking for another, and I was somebody else’s. But I had a striking sense that if I’d had a son, he would, at the core, be a lot like this brainy, combative oddball sitting in a musty apartment in a small Idaho town.

That morning, I talked to him about isolation and rejection, about how universal they were to people like him and like me, but how temporal they often were. High school wasn’t life, I reminded him, just a small part of it.

I told him he was doing a brave thing; that he had many asset—sintelligence and wit, good looks, personality—and that, as a computer geek, he was in the storied right place at the right time. This was the gold rush for geeks, a special time in history, the Internet moment, and he was primed to take advantage of that, to stake his claim. A couple of decades ago, his choices might have been the military or the Simplot plant or, if he were lucky, a trade or vocational school. He couldn’t possibly have considered the kind of move he was about to undertake.

I saw him brighten as he leaned over the computer to fiddle with his music playlist. He looked at me closely, a rare thing. It was almost impossible for him to focus on anything else for too long when the computer was on, which it always was. Normally, you had to drag him out of the apartment to talk.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “I think, for the first time in my life, that things really can be different. They have to be different.”

We talked for half an hour about changing outcomes, about whether directions in life can be altered or reversed. “Maybe somewhat,” he said dubiously. “Not radically. You can’t change who you are.

“I know this won’t be easy,” he added, as if he’d been reading my mind. “I know there are risks. But think about the risks if I stay here.”

In Chicago, I told him, geeks were probably one of the least odd subcultures around. Nobody would care if he were a Mormon or a Jesuit or an Orthodox Jew, let alone a computer geek. Chicago had plenty of each, plus a lot more; there was some of everything there. He could start all over. He could build any kind of social life he wanted.

“Now that,” he said, shaking his head, “that would be a radical change.”

We said good-bye, agreeing that I would fly out to Chicago a couple of weeks after he and Eric had landed. I threatened all sorts of mayhem if he didn’t write down details of the trip and e-mail them to me.

Then Jesse went to answer the phone—he was clearly cranking out a many last-minute IDs as possible to help finance the move—and I pulled $140 in twenties from my wallet and, in violation of every journalistic guideline, left the bills on his keyboard. Then I drove to the airport in my rental car and flew home. I knew I’d never set foot in Caldwell again, but I couldn’t quite fathom whether Jesse ever would or not.

5

THE TRIP

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Hey Jon . . . I told you I’d tell you the story of Laramie, WY, and why I think it was all too fitting. Eleven o’clock Saturday night we are stuck (naturally) on the freeway for about an hour, so I forced myself to get out and walk around to stretch my legs and to try and start up a conversation with the two girls I had seen in the car in front of us. Now, this is not something that I would ever ever consider doing in the real world, but the whole trip already had a surrealistic pallor . . . as traffic began to clear they invited me to bring Eric and go back to their apartment and party with them and also to crash there since we couldn’t find a hotel. We opted to bag the idea of driving all night and to accept their invitation.

When we arrived we were confronted with the age-old conflict of geek v. mainstream. We entered into what was a U of Wyoming college party on the local Saturday night, something that people our age do quite frequently, but that we do not. Immediately, I could tell that Eric was very uncomfortable and feeling very awkward, and I was not comfortable, but not awkward either. I opted to put us both on the road almost immediately after we got there, to save both of us the pointless aggravation and strain to try and fit into a foreign mainstream group. I had realized that we had come to the point of no return, the point where it was harder to try and fit in, than it was to strike out alone. . . .

>    >    >

BEFORE LEAVING
Idaho, they’d asked the search engines HotBot and AltaVista if there would be any construction delays on the route they’d planned. AltaVista led them to an updated map server that warned of major trouble near Salt Lake City.

So they changed their plans, driving straight through for two days and two nights, east on I-84 to Pocatello, southeast on Highway 30 over the Rockies and into Wyoming, then onto I-80 somewhere near Rock Springs and straight east into Chicago. The trip was a blur, and tougher than they had expected; the truck’s cab was smaller than they’d planned, so it was harder to rest. And there was no time or money for sightseeing.

They found a cheap motel just outside Chicago and then, as soon as it was light, drove their huge Ryder to Richton Park. It was a nightmare.

“We could hardly believe it,” Jesse later told me, recalling that first morning when they gazed up at a squat, ugly, four-story apartment complex facing a suburban highway. Miles of little split levels and stretches of mall-lined highways surrounded the place. The only destinations remotely within walking distance, aside from the train stop across the street with its vast commuter parking lot, were a Dunkin’ Donuts, a pizza parlor, and a supermarket called the Eagle Country Market.

“We were stunned,” Eric said. “It looked like Idaho. We wanted to go back. It was a good thing we didn’t have the money.”

If the Web was devastatingly efficient at displaying maps on a screen, it needed some fine-tuning when it came to capturing the scale and feel of a place. This wasn’t the bustling metropolis they’d envisioned. The apartment Jesse had put a deposit on wasn’t available; they had to take a smaller one. Worse, there was, it turned out, no cable modem access in Richton Park.

In Idaho, the two rarely saw an African American. Here, they were among the few whites in the neighborhood. It didn’t bother them; what did was noticing that they were also the only kids for, it seemed, miles around.

Sherry, the job broker Jesse had been e-mailing, had an office well north and west; it took them two hours to get there, first by train, then by bus and foot—including an unplanned detour when they got off the train at the wrong stop and wandered briefly into a rough quadrant of Chicago’s South Side. Then, it seemed, the job prospect Sherry had lined up for Jesse was with a small computer consulting company in a suburb even farther away, and the job she thought she might have for Eric hadn’t materialized at all.

“It was pretty sobering,” Jesse reported. “Here, we had come all this way and we really didn’t understand anything about where we were going. Everything was strange. The people were cold and unfriendly, the food was expensive, the apartment was way out in nowhere, and we had no way of getting near the job that I had thought I’d lined up, assuming there was a job.”

Nor was the longed-for community anywhere in sight. “We were the youngest people around. We didn’t have cars. We didn’t have families. We didn’t have a single friend. We were nineteen. Nobody who lived in the apartment was anywhere near our age. We were in a kind of a panic.”

Perhaps the strangest thing about the new apartment, I thought when I arrived a week later, was how much like the old one it looked—bare, dim, lit by the glow of computer screens. It was almost unthinkable, but Jesse and Eric, at great expense, risk, and trouble, had re-created the look and feel of the Cave.

Shell-shocked as they were, there was hope: Sherry had lined up another job interview for Jesse. To be sure of arriving in the Loop on time, he set his alarm for 6
A
.
M
.

He showered, groped around in the dark for his brown pants, a beige shirt, and his new Old Navy baseball cap. Eric was still asleep in the other bedroom. A little sunlight was just beginning to stream in around the blanket they’d hung in front of the sliding-glass patio door.

He tucked Eric’s brown dress shoes into his backpack (Eric was twitchy about their getting scuffed, so Jesse wasn’t supposed to put them on until just before the interview), along with the tie he was agonizing about whether or not to wear.

He was tense, rushed, distracted, praying this job would pan out. According to his worn, continuously revised spreadsheet, he and Eric had two weeks left to find work and get their first paychecks before this new life in Chicago crashed like some cheap computer. Plan A was to get a paycheck by early October, then pay the second month’s rent and utilities and buy food.

There was no Plan B.

At least he could take the train from Richton Park downtown. It was a long ride, but easier than the bus-train combo Sherry’s other prospect would have entailed. The National Futures Association, which monitors the country’s booming commodities industry and uses a lot of computer auditing to do it, was looking for a tech in its Information Systems department, a job that paid a stunning $32,000. Jesse ran the zip codes through AltaVista—his and the office location’s—and figured he had a fifty- to sixty-minute train ride into town, plus a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk.

“I hope this works out,” he was murmuring, flitting around, getting ready. “If we eat crackers, I can stretch things another week or two. But we can’t go much longer. And I’d sure hate to have to go back to Idaho, which I’d have to borrow money even to do, and try to get my old job back at Emco. I didn’t come all this way for that.”

He was worried about Eric, who he feared would become frustrated and depressed if he didn’t get work soon. He was worried about what would happen to both of them if Eric didn’t get work soon. Both would rather cut off limbs than ask their strapped families for more money.

Jesse was both excited and visibly rattled by Chicago. Figuring out the transit system and its schedules was the kind of problem-solving exercise he relished. But there were lots more difficult things to adjust to.

Chicago was overwhelming. There were no skyscrapers in Cald-well, thousands here. The entire state of Idaho had one area code; the Chicago metro area alone had three. Everything cost more, including toll calls, phone installation, pizza slices, and meals at Arby’s.

People seemed busy, less patient. The counter workers in restaurants weren’t friendly local folk happy to chat, but hostile teenagers who wished they had better jobs or weary older people waiting for their shifts to end. If he or Eric hesitated at Dunkin’ Donuts, the clerk simply turned to the next person in line. This kind of hostility bewildered them; they saw it not as an inevitable part of urban life, but as something personal and hurtful.

Eric said he missed the sun. He never seemed to see the sun in Chicago. Either it wasn’t out, or it was obscured by buildings.

I’d brought Jesse some coffee and a doughnut, which he accepted without comment. He rarely ate breakfast, but I figured he might need some extra nourishment. Walking across the train station’s vast parking lot, he seemed oblivious to the stream of grim, paunchy commuters on their way into the city. When I saw the map I realized with a jolt that Richton Park was the next-to-last stop on the Chicago Metra. Jesse was as close to Gary, Indiana, as he was to Chicago.

Learning that we were early, we walked the two blocks to Dunkin’ Donuts and Jesse ordered black coffee and another glazed doughnut, took one bite, then threw the rest away. “My stomach is a little tight,” he said. He looked terrified.

When I’d first met Jesse, I jotted the words “internal, anxious” in a notebook and underlined them three times, my signal that they were important. I thought that Jesse was one of the most guarded people I’d ever met. He weighed every word, especially those that had to do with the way he felt about things.

He seemed to experience a near-catatonia when confronted by circumstances that yanked him out of his familiar geek existence and into alien environments. I’d occasionally seen him turn so ghostly pale I thought he’d faint.

I wrote “brave” in one of those first notebooks too, because I realized that this wasn’t a person for whom change came easily, even though he was about to undertake a world of it.

He took the coffee for the train, on the walk back ruminating about the nature of work in downtown Chicago. “I guess you work in those towers, in one of those cubicles. Cubicleville.” He didn’t like the idea. Emco Computer may not have been IBM, but you could relax there, move around, get online and game when things weren’t busy, walk out to get a soda, work irregular hours as long as you got the job done. He enjoyed riding there on his bike. He could see he wouldn’t enjoy the packed, rattling train. Most of his notions about corporate and office work came from reading
Dilbert.
From the few job inquiries he’d made, he already sensed that jobs in those towers would be different, much more structured, formal, and confining. He doubted you could game during work hours, or scarf new software from the Web, “burn” a friend’s CD, or go on ICQ chat lines and trade funny commercials with friends you’d never met.

“The density,” he kept saying. “The density.”

Working in a giant tower with hundreds of people was almost beyond his imagination. Making all that small talk with strangers. And what did he really know about this particular office? Was it a geek-friendly place? Could you wear sneakers? Were you surrounded by suits, like these people streaming toward the train?

Richton Park was nearly as grim as Caldwell, if a bit more middle-class and a lot more congested. It had almost the same dispiritingly drab quality and the same bottom line: an inhospitable place for a bright young kid with no friends to be living.

Spotting the computerized Metra card system, Jesse broke into a complex riff about magnetic codes—how they work, how hard they are to duplicate—which led to a long discourse on bar codes, which are, he said, easy to duplicate. In fact, he’d spent many happy hours on bar code websites where geeks gathered to compare, discuss, and trade codes and information. Some kids even printed out cheap bar codes and pasted them over the codes on more expensive products. It sometimes worked at superstores and giant chains where bored teenaged employees barely paid attention. “But magnetic codes,” he sighed, “those are impossible.” He didn’t answer when I asked whether he considered train tickets material or intellectual property.

By 7:15, we were on the Metra, a huge double-decker commuter train headed downtown. It was a long, mostly grim trip past ugly suburbs, decaying industrial plants, slums, and vast rail and truckyards. The cars filled up with commuters silently sipping coffee or staring dully out the window. As we ran through a mini-rehearsal, I peppered Jesse with a few likely questions: What did he want to do in five years? How long had he been working with computers? How did he get along with peers?

We had a small wrangle about whether or not he needed to disclose his misdemeanor arrest record for driving under the influence. Absolutely, I said. It’s none of their business, he countered. But if you don’t, I argued, they might run some check on you and come up with it themselves. Then they can fire you. He’d sue, he huffed. One thing he’d learned in Idaho was to be suspicious of all this record-keeping; it was an invasion of privacy. Jesse was nearly indefinable politically, but libertarian probably came closest. There was almost no part of government he liked or trusted. “But you’re building the world that makes it possible to get all this information,” I couldn’t resist needling. He conceded this was a valid point.

Two stops later, he decided he would tell them about the arrest. He also decided to call up Ryder and complain about the rental truck. “You can usually get them to give you a refund if you make enough noise.” It wouldn’t be a lot of money, maybe $60 or $75. Still, that would mean two weeks’ food. The transmission was off, he said. The steering wheel rattled.

He remained undecided about the tie, his usually iron-clad geek philosophy failing him. This had nothing to do with fashion or style; it was a political issue that went to the heart of his identity, something he’d never compromised about. “If it’s not a geek-friendly place, I don’t want to be there,” he explained. “I’ll call Sherry and ask her to find something else. That’s not why I moved all the way from Idaho, to be a suit working for suits. I couldn’t survive it.”