Geeks by Jon Katz Read Free Book Online Page B

on the lookout for a few good friends, though not highly sanguine about finding any. Eric rarely socialized, e-mailed, or chatted, at least about non-techie topics. Jesse claimed that if his computer were ever stolen or unplugged, he would read obsessively; Eric didn’t know what he would do, and hoped never to find out.
    Both had had difficult adolescent lives, in complex families under unstable circumstances. Eric, who hadn’t seen or spoken with his father in years, had emerged darker, angrier than his friend, a part of him beyond the reach of teachers, peers, and well-intended adults. Jesse, hooked on arguments and ideas—he often describes himself as a fighter—could usually be drawn out of his shell.
    Although they were forever getting into raging late-night debates about the nature of cable modem access, the longevity of Microsoft, or what constituted pass interference, and despite enormous philosophical and social differences, the two saw the world in essentially the same way.
    That was, they were outsiders. They’d spent virtually all their nineteen years on the periphery of various things—families, teams, churches, school cliques—and had developed a profound suspicion of hierarchies, authorities, institutions, bureaucracies, and anything connected with them. Those things represented the other world, the road not taken, the domain of suits and yuppies. This shared philosophy, plus their mutual poverty, prompted them to rent the Cave together a year earlier. They might as well be broke and isolated together.
    At times hurt and anger radiated from them like heat rising from Idaho blacktop in the sun. You could practically see the scars left by years of rejection and apartness. “I never went to one single high school party until graduation,” Jesse told me once. “And if I’d been invited, I would’ve said yes, then not showed up. . . . I had that mutual inclination toward nerdiness.” If Eric sometimes seemed to see this as his fate, a part of Jesse never quite accepted it.
    Living with his divorced mom and two sisters in one Montana town or another, sometimes in dire poverty, Jesse always felt like an outcast. He grew up very much apart from the jocks who dominated the schools, the towns, his world. Sometimes his reading was to blame, sometimes his ponytail, sometimes his aversion to sports.
    “He wasn’t popular. He didn’t have a lot of friends,” his mother, Angela Dailey, recognized. “He was out cruising the cosmos with Stephen Hawking while the other kids were playing.”
    Despite the name of the club that so shaped them, there was nothing nerdy about Jesse or Eric. Both were tough, smart, resilient, and independent. In fact, before the Geek Club, Jesse had some ugly bouts with gangs and drugs, and several run-ins with local cops.
    From the time he entered middle school, though, Jesse had also always had a computer—first a hand-me-down from someone he could no longer recall, then one left behind by his mother’s departing boyfriend—and through them, his own portable and growing cyber-community. Perhaps he didn’t really need the world of high school games and dances and crowds. He was too busy taking part in the creation of his own.
    White, working-class kids are as invisible in media and politics as the poorest toddlers in the worst slums. They’re nobody’s children, really, nobody’s constituency. Politicians don’t worry about them and interest groups don’t lobby for them. Thrown mostly on their own by divorce (four already among Jesse and Eric’s families, with more possible) and by financial precariousness, Jesse and Eric knew the score: When you’re out of high school, you’re on your own. If you want more education, you work to pay for it. You find your own career track, or don’t.
    “For most of my friends, life is liquor, drugs, and bad jobs with no hope of escape,” Jesse had told me. “That’s what I grew up seeing. It’s just life here, for some kinds of