Geeks by Jon Katz Page B

refuge here. A place to feel safe,” Brown recounted, as I wedged myself into a chair with a writing arm. “They weren’t jocks or preps, the dominant social groups. They liked to kick around ideas, argue about movies and books. Sam and Joe were less vehement, though, and better-liked by their peers. Jesse and Eric never seemed to care much about being liked.”
    In fact, Eric Twilegar personified the social attitude of the hard-core geek—distance, anger, alienation. And Jesse Dailey was the school’s official Mormon-baiter, no insignificant role in these parts, challenging the existence of God and the validity of dogma, criticizing the values and tenets of LDS without fear—or much tact or respect, either.
    Perhaps it was inevitable that Jesse, a memorable figure in a trench coat who wore a corduroy porkpie hat over his shoulder-length hair, would come to define himself—and be defined by his peers—as the Other.
    “He was wild,” one of Sam’s friends told me. “He loved to argue, especially about religion, but he’d fight about anything, especially if it would tick off the preps who ran the school or the Mormons. He was the only one of his kind around here, somewhere between a prophet and a hippie preacher.” Some of the Mormon kids, intent on saving Jesse, brought him notes from their bishops and copies of the Book of Mormon to try to win him over. They didn’t have a prayer.
    It was 1996 and Brown had been reading Katherine Dunn’s strange, evocative novel
Geek Love,
talking about it in class, pointing out the enthusiastic alienation of its characters. “The book takes the extreme case,” Brown recalled. “People as far on the fringes as you can get, completely dehumanized by ‘normal’ society. And it humanizes them-which is ironic, because they’re already human.”
    At first, when the four boys began drifting in awkwardly at lunchtime, Brown was afraid to spook them. Deliberately, he barely looked up from the papers he was grading as Sam, Jesse, Eric, and Joe, foregoing the theater of hostilities that was the cafeteria, carried bag lunches into his classroom and spent the period arguing about movies and books and, increasingly, about computers.
    “They always sat in the farthest corner,” Brown said. “Gradually, we talked as I worked and they ate.”
    All four had grown passionate about computing and the Internet. Sam and Joe had become the school’s roaming tech support, a rapidly spreading phenomenon among geeks as hard-pressed and technophobic school districts turned to their onetime social outcasts to help run their computer systems. In fact, geeks repeatedly cite the nearly universal need for people who can cope with computers and software as the primary reason for their elevation to a new techno-elite.
    If Sam and Joe had turned their new interest outwards, Jesse and Eric characteristically went the more solitary route, obsessing over hardware, code, hacking, and games.
    Brown sensed that Jesse, in particular, was in distress, but didn’t know exactly what kind; Jesse never talked about personal stuff. Brown didn’t know that the year before, Jesse had joined a street gang in nearby Nampa, had been shot at late one night by a rival gang member, had gotten into marijuana and amphetamines, and had been busted by the Caldwell police for driving under the influence of liquor and for possession of marijuana (the case was pleabargained).
    Jesse didn’t volunteer much about that time to me, either. It lasted between six months and a year, he said a bit vaguely. The gang had about a dozen members, who hung out, smoked dope, and broke into cars. “A form of rebellion,” he said. “I don’t know what else to call it. It was as if I had to go down, all the way to the bottom, to the guts of things, before I could move on. I saw it as an exploratory time. I wrote a paper about it at the end of my junior year, but I lost it.”
    In March 1995, the
Idaho Statesman
had run an article about the