Geeks (6 page)

His mother, now a clinical social worker living and practicing in Choteau, Montana, was enormously grateful. “The Geek Club saved Jesse in some ways,” she believed. “The teacher saved him . . . Mr. Brown. I knew about the gang and the drugs, but I couldn’t help him. He was always too smart for everybody, always rejected by the jocks, almost always on his own. But I could never convince him how smart he was. All of a sudden, he got into the Geek Club, and they had a community. They belonged.”

In one sense, Angela Dailey was wrong. Jesse did hear her. “I remember my mom telling me how smart I was, and I guess I knew I was smart. I had a lot of other problems, but I never thought I was dumb. That got through to me.”

For the first time, however, he had a name for himself, one he thought fit. He dropped out of the gang, stayed out. Geekhood gave him a way to define himself, a way to be apart and feel okay about it, a way to value his brains and talents and, for good measure, a way to wreak a little vengeance.

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

There is sometimes a lot of pain in being a geek. When I first started using the name, it started to fit and at the same time empower. Calling myself a geek was saying to all the people who sometimes made me feel tortured, or isolated, or defeated, “I don’t care if you think I’m a two-headed freak. I think I’m better than you and smarter than you, and that’s all that matters . . .”

Once he realized, more than a year later, that
geek
was even more than empowering slang, that it meant something concrete, including the emerging reality that geeks could go pretty much anywhere they wanted and find a zero-unemployment rate, he knew that he had to leave.

4

LEAVE FAST

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

I get about half my music from unprotected sites, and half from private sites with very restricted access. It’s not getting “in” to the sites that is the problem. Children can do that. It’s finding and getting to the physical place in which these servers reside, something impossible in the scheme of things, they can exist scattered all over the country and you would never know it. . . . For the consumer, it is a godsend, as he is no longer required to pay outrageous prices for music that may end up being bad.

In short, fuck the labels. Long live the music.

>    >    >

THEY
’
D GIVEN
notice at work, told their landlord they were history, reserved a Ryder truck. To save rent, they’d spend their last couple of days living in an abandoned shack on Jesse’s father’s property. There was some packing to do, a farewell party a few friends were throwing tonight, some games of Doom and Quake, a handful of good-byes to say—not an elaborate leave-taking.

Richard Dailey, Jesse’s father, had a small ranch house outside Middleton. He’d taken a leave from his job as a town fire inspector after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The only outward signs of his disease, though, were the tremors in his hands and an occasional grappling for the right word. He was lean, a warm smile etched on his face, frail and shy.

The two were comfortable together, when Jesse stopped by to visit and to introduce this strange writer guy, but said very little. Jesse’s stepmom was working in the kitchen; Eric hung silently in the background.

Richard Dailey passed around a scrapbook he kept, mementos from his own life and some childhood snapshots of Jesse and his sisters, from the days when the family was intact. The young Jesse—seen largely in photos of camping and riding trips up north—looked remarkably like the older one, grave and intent. Richard had also saved a magazine story about how he got caught in a vicious blizzard years ago and survived—saving his companions, too—by killing his horse and climbing inside its steaming carcass for warmth.

It’s clear that there’s a cowboy streak in the Dailey line. “Riding is something my dad and I did a lot of together,” Richard says. He’s most at ease talking about the past, the trips, hikes, and rides. But those were a couple of divorces and a serious illness ago, and the son looking over his shoulder at the mounted snapshots now had little in common with the boy in the pictures.

How did Richard feel about Jesse’s looming departure for Chicago? “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Good.” He paused for a bit. A part of him seemed to be struggling with the whole idea. “The only thing is, I hear it’s cold up there. Jesse doesn’t like cold weather. He might not last the first winter. If anything sends him home, it will be the cold.”

Richard had given Jesse a few hundred dollars—not a small contribution under the circumstances—for the trip. Otherwise, Jesse said, the two of them never discussed it much. Once Jesse decided to go, there wasn’t much to say. The same was true of his mother, with whom he spoke frequently and somewhat more openly. “I told my parents I was unhappy with my life and was forging ahead. We never talked about it much after that.”

Now, as father and son sat down at the kitchen table with a map, if either felt conscious of a family about to split apart for good, there was no reference to it. Richard was trying to be helpful the best way he could, with advice about the journey itself. Both knew there wouldn’t be much help available, from any source, once Jesse got to far-off Chicago.

The senior Dailey had talked with a friend who’d recently driven east and warned about some construction along the way. He suggested a couple of route changes; Jesse marked them conscientiously on his map.

BACK AT
the Cave, they had stuff to do in the days before they decamped, but not as much as one might think. There were a few last IDs to crank out, to earn an extra bit of road money. Eric, suddenly remembering that he had to drain his water bed, borrowed a length of rubber hose from a neighbor, stuck one end in the water bed nozzle and sucked out a mouthful of water, then spit it into the bathtub. “Jeez, water-bed water,” he gasped. “Guess there’s a lot of chemicals in there.” The water trickled out slowly into the tub. If the huge bed wasn’t emptied within forty-eight hours, it would be left behind.

Jesse biked down to Emco for some boxes, but didn’t really need many. Clothes would get stuffed into duffels and plastic garbage bags. There were the bikes, some books. The only thing they would actually pack carefully into boxes, at the last possible moment, were their two computers, along with monitors, hard drives, scanners, subwoofers, and printers. They would spend more time packing them than they would everything else they owned, combined.

Jesse had taken charge, with Eric happy to abide by his decisions. He didn’t really care where they lived, as long as they found decent jobs, had good Net access, and met some computer types to hang out with. Programming was Eric’s life. “It’s the only thing I’m good at,” he said, somewhat bleakly. He’d like to have a social life, especially a girlfriend, but that wasn’t in the cards in Caldwell. Maybe in Chicago.

So it was Jesse who’d gone on the Web and, between bouts of Quake II, torn through various search engines and relevant Chicago websites. He made some phone calls, sent some faxes, memorized some online maps of neighborhoods and subways—but mostly he browsed on the Net.

He trawled for jobs on the
Chicago Tribune
site, on computer mailing lists and on geek employment agency websites. He checked out apartment rentals through www.relconapartments.com and grabbed an affordable-sounding, two-bedroom w/balcony on the train route in suburban Richton Park, sight unseen.

To plan their route, he bought a Rand McNally TripMaker CD, copied it, and then returned it to the store. Geeks do not, as a rule, pay for things digital, except for products adjudged so outstanding that their creators are deemed deserving of payment; they trade, borrow, copy (“burn”), or hack them instead.

Insofar as they are political at all, many geeks and hackers (a term frequently misapplied, used for computer vandals and thieves, but more accurately referring to computer problem-solvers and tinkerers) share this principle: Keeping the Net free from corporate and government control is a sacred task. Getting stuff for free on the Net is a matter of pride, therefore, a demonstration of determination, computing skills, and righteous geek thinking.

Property, Jesse informed me, came in two varieties, material and intellectual. You paid for the former, but almost never for the latter. Geeks were, in fact, redefining conventional notions of commerce and ownership.

Jesse had a music playlist hundreds of songs long, for instance, but couldn’t remember the last CD he’d actually purchased. He read news online, but rarely bought a newspaper or a magazine. Journalists, educators, and pundits frequently fuss that kids like Jesse don’t read or aren’t well informed; in fact, they read enormous amounts of material online, and are astonishingly well informed about subjects they’re interested in.

Geeks were the first to grasp just how much information was available on the Web, since they wrote the programs that put much of it there—movie times and reviews, bus and train schedules, news and opinions, catalogues, appliance instructions, plus, of course, software and its upgrades.

And of course, music, the liberation of which is considered a seminal geek accomplishment.

Virtually everything in a newspaper—and in many magazines—is now available online. In fact, some things, like the latest weather and breaking news, appear online hours before they hit print.

Yet while Jesse had gone through literally thousands of downloaded software applications, he’d never paid for any of them. He didn’t even quite get the concept. The single cultural exception was books. Perhaps as a legacy of his childhood, Jesse remained an obsessive reader. He liked digging through the bins of used bookstores to buy sci-fi and classic literature; he liked books, holding them and turning their pages.

“But you pay for material things,” he explained. “I’d never pay for any software or music, but I’d never steal a TV from a store.” He didn’t consider acquiring free music online to be pirating or theft, though. Intellectual property belonged to everybody.

In fact, Jesse and many geeks consider themselves liberators of ideas and culture, using the Net to literally pry them from what they see as greedy corporations and powerful, censorious institutions. As mass media has grown corporatized—with journalism, publishing, moviemaking, and the music business getting sold and merged into fewer and larger monoliths—geeks feel ever more entitled to take whatever intellectual property they want. The individual creators of this property—writers, musicians, artists-can and will find alternative means of generating income, they’re convinced.

It’s an enormous idea for a capitalistic country with longstanding ideas about property and payment, and it’s putting the ascendant geek culture in increasingly direct conflict with such institutions as the legal and medical professions, both of which have vowed they will fight the notion of free, “open source” information on the Net.

So far, though, the geeks seem to be winning. They’re bringing the music industry to its knees, for instance. In the past few years, stereos have begun disappearing from college dorms as students attach speakers to their computers and play their MP3s. Like Jesse, they use computers to distribute a growing variety of information on subjects and in places to which access has long been tightly controlled: legal and medical data, academic libraries, stock trading, films.

Jesse intuitively grasped the political implications. “No way intellectual property will be controlled,” he said. “It’s just never going to happen again.”

Yet somehow, despite virtually living on the Net, the discovery that he physically could live in almost any city in the country had come as a shock, an awakening akin to joining the Geek Club. He hadn’t seen what he’d been doing for years—building computers, writing code, playing games, installing complicated software and operating systems—as something marketable or valuable, something that offered status or options in the larger society. “I just didn’t realize it until I got online. It just didn’t occur to me,” he said.

But once it did occur to him, it seemed to embolden him, even past the point of caution.

Jesse had been planning this campaign like Patton plowing through Europe. He knew nothing about cities or urban life, but he was convinced that he didn’t really have time to find out and still meet his flight-from-Idaho schedule. He was tense, possessed, fearful that if he slowed or paused he might lose the courage or the momentum he needed to get out.

Jesse and Eric hadn’t given a second thought to leaving since that “metaphysical moment”—as Eric put it—when they stood contemplating the smoldering wreck of his Olds. Jesse had computed how many paychecks they would get—two for him and four for Eric—if they waited a month before leaving. Pending a few breaks and no serious setbacks, that might be just enough. The only questions were where to go and how to get there.

His plow-ahead-and-cope philosophy came in handy here. When Jesse wants to go to a movie, he employs the Grand Unified Jesse Dailey Theory of Moviegoing: Simply head out the door on whatever means of transportation is available, come across the nearest theater, find a movie to see. He rarely showed up when a particular movie was about to begin, so he’d seen beginnings, finales, and middles of dozens of movies, but hardly any in their entirety. The
Star Wars
series was among the few exceptions. Something about this reflected his relentless need to beat all systems, whatever they were. Checking schedules was for suits and old farts.

He’d chosen Chicago in this way. It was a big city, and probably somewhere within it were jobs, apartments, and plenty of computer stuff. A headhunter he’d contacted via e-mail was practically guaranteeing them work.

As true geeks, it was almost a point of pride to avoid one of the trendy enclaves most American kids would kill to get to. “We thought about Seattle or San Francisco, or Boston,” Eric said, “but no way do we want to go to yuppie cities.” In one way or another, Jesse and Eric had been battling those hipsters their whole lives; they were not about to move across the country just to get rejected again by people who might call themselves geeks but wore hundred-dollar shoes.

Chicago, they had heard (where? online, naturally) was a working-class town, with a reputation for unpretentiousness, not privilege. Neither of them had ever set foot in Chicago or met anyone else who had. But that was par for the course, Jesse pointed out. “You get used to it. You don’t have parents writing checks, networks of people from college. You live off the Net and the Web. You really live there. You use the technology; you make it work for you.”

After all this research, he had worked up a slightly unnerving spreadsheet and kept a copy tucked into his wallet. It had two columns. Under “What We Need” was $680 a month for rent, $130 for phone, $100 for utilities, $130 for transportation. If they ate only once or twice a day at $3.33 per meal, that totaled $1,640 a month, Jesse estimated.

Under “What We Have,” he’d listed the $149.72 deposit that would be returned by Ryder, plus cash reserves: Jesse, $1,072, and Eric, $481. In addition, the two were counting on another $481 in paychecks. They’d borrowed a little from relatives to pay the apartment deposit and to buy some clothes that seemed appropriate for a city (though, except for Eric’s brief stay with a brother in Seattle the previous summer, Boise was the only city they’d ever been to).