Geek Tragedy

An unpopular opinion on a couple of fairly popular words

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Bicentennial. If you’re of a certain age you may remember this—a red, white, and blue year studded with fireworks and tall ships. I was very young during the Bicentennial, so in a sense I feel like I began my life with the two-hundredth anniversary of the country’s founding. Now, as we approach the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary I occasionally reflect that I’ve lived through twenty percent of the country’s history. This tells you two things. One, that the country isn’t very old, and two, that I am.

I figured I might write a few words about this odd fact, but invariably all thoughts about the pending sestercentennial (semiquincentennial and bicenquinquagenary are also acceptable terms for this particular anniversary) have proven to be roads leading to January 6th and the intransigence of that party most vigorously dedicated to appropriating all of the symbology of America for use as a sort of political codpiece to cover up their tiny swastikas. God knows what the two-hundred-fiftieth birthday of our country will hold, but it’s an even bet it will be bad.

I’m not really interested in going there this week. I got to play music yesterday in front of other humans for the first time in over a year, so it’s been a cheerful time and there will be plenty of time to soil it later. So instead I’ve dipped once more into the apparently limitless archives (When did I write all these reams of stuff?), coming up with “Geek Tragedy,” in which I write sourly about something else altogether. I hope you enjoy it.

If you put a gun to my head, I’d probably choose “geek” or “nerd” as an appellation over, say, “dingbat” or “twerp,” but it’s a close-run thing. Not that I ever got to choose. About the time I careened through puberty like a horse on roller-skates, I fit the bill pretty well. I wore overly large glasses—this being the 1980s we’re talking about here—with permanently greasy nose pads that required constant adjustment. I had epic, heartstopping acne. Worst of all, I loved computers and played Dungeons and Dragons. Does that make me a geek? Perhaps. But can I embrace my geekhood?

Let me tell you a story. One summer afternoon when I was about fifteen, I was shooting pool in the game room at my local community center. I’d spent most of the day playing D&D in a conference room there with my crew, who were pretty much the skinny, ill-clothed, gangling bunch you’re probably imagining. And when I say we were playing Dungeons & Dragons, well, there are aggravating circumstances. For maximal impact you have to picture us hauling a big, double-handled cooler—we called it a “chest” of course—filled with rulebooks, dice, character sheets, meticulously drawn maps on graph paper, a couple dozen copies of Dragon Magazine, and about two hundred delicately-painted lead miniatures of warriors and magicians, orcs and goblins, all carefully stowed in egg cartons. We humped that thing over hill and dale two or three times a week, a mile and a half in the sticky Nashville heat, sweating and grunting like a team of scrawny mules.

On this particular day, the community center was packed. We had the conference room all to ourselves however, because, after all, what kind of kids want access to a conference room on a summer Saturday afternoon? There were at least a dozen kids playing basketball in the gym, and another eight or ten in the game room, which was a big reverberant concrete and linoleum box featuring the aforementioned pool table, ping pong, air hockey, foosball, and so forth. It was into the game room that we came up for air after three hours spent poring over our books and papers. We reasoned, erroneously, that there would be less testosterone there than the gym.

I played a lot of pool as a kid, enough to be not completely ghastly¹—that in itself ought to be worth at least a few cool points. But again, the glasses, the acne, the D&D. I was pretty awkward around girls, admiring them mostly from a distance and writing them secret poems in Elvish. We’ll call it a wash.

So I exercised my slightly above mediocre cue in the raucous game room. Next to the pool table a couple hoodlums were playing ping pong. The older of the two was Tony, who looked like a piece of beef jerky with a buzz cut. There were a group of kids just like him at my high school—perpetually a year or two older than everyone else in their grade, they just bobbed along at an unchanging distance from graduation while whole generations zipped by them. Grasping for the prepotency that they probably knew in their bones would be stripped from them before they reached their majority, they were uncommonly fond of beating the shit out of younger, smaller kids whenever the opportunity arose.

I knew all of this when I walked into the room. It was instinctive, like the wariness that seizes prey animals when they approach the watering hole. Unlike the skittering gazelle, however, I am prone to colossally stupid acts of stubbornness. I would never survive in the wild. This is not a conscious thing, mind you; I have a demon inside me. This also I knew, when Tony’s ping pong ball bounded across the pool table and hit me square in the forehead. So it was with both surprise and deep resignation that I listened to my own mouth telling Tony, neighborhood cretin and bully, to watch where the fuck he was hitting his ping pong balls.

Was that a geeky thing to do? I like to think it was not.

Of course, neither was it smart. Words were bandied back and forth, his sharp and Anglo-Saxon, mine Latinate and tremulous. Before a minute had expired I found myself inexplicably heading to the parking lot with Tony, ostensibly to settle our dispute with fisticuffs, which I have no doubt would have ended with me getting exsanguinated before the community center doors had swung shut. 

I suppose it was fate that brought my mother rolling up in her Volkswagen Beetle just as I walked out of the building. I don’t recollect how I managed to explain to Tony that her arrival would necessarily preclude the ass-whipping I had intended to lay upon him, but somehow the pugilistic tension dissipated. Problem solved; in the nerdiest manner imaginable. 

Can we just not?

My point in recounting this incident is this: in 1985, I may well have been the epitome of a geek or a nerd, but this was in no way amusing to me at the time. It was in fact a rather unhappy state of affairs. Here are some things that films and television shows might have convinced you were characteristic of geekdom but which never happened to me:

• I never got my comeuppance by way of my superior brain power.

• I never had a girl remove my glasses to reveal the prince hidden beneath them.

• I was never asked to represent a heterogenous group of kids in an essay to our spiteful, overbearing principal during Saturday detention.

Truthfully, I was lucky—as bad as I was, I knew people who had it far worse. Long summers of near-constant swimming made me wiry, if ill-coordinated. I played guitar, which proved a real blue-chip skill as I got older. There were plenty of kids who did not possess these qualities. The ones who had it hardest were the kids who were not-so-secretly gay—this was the early to mid-1980s, remember. Gay was completely outside the range of daily experience and not at all well-accepted. I had a friend in the 8th grade who fell sadly into this category. He introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien, for which I’m eternally grateful. But the thought of him is a discomfiting one — he was all of the things that you didn’t want to be as a kid in 1983 and thereabouts: short, skinny, bookish, and effeminate. And like that joke about escaping bears — you don’t have to outrun the bear, just the other guy—his presence was a weird boon to me because it took some of the heat off.

That’s what it meant to be a geek, or a nerd, back when I was young. There was nothing cute about it. If it wasn’t about raw survival, it often felt like it.

Flash forward a decade or so, and you find the words “geek” and “nerd” the targets of a reclamation effort. Like “queer,” there was a concerted effort to lay claim to these words afresh, and turn them from negative to positive. The film Revenge of the Nerds was probably the first mortar shell to drop, and by the 1990s there were a slew of common narratives—Wargames and Weird Science covering the gamut from the dramatic to the farcical—in which the nerd won the day by dint of overwhelming intelligence. Freaks and Geeks may have been a flop during its original run, but today it’s a cult classic, and it launched the careers of a half dozen significant actors. And geek even found its way into commerce with Best Buy’s Geek Squad.²

Geek and nerd have won a sort of linguistic lottery, becoming terms denoting simply “passion.” You can no longer be a wine connoisseur; you are now a wine geek. You’re not a baseball fan; you’re a baseball nerd. Somewhere I imagine Tony sitting in his double-wide telling his mouthbreathing friends he’s a real UFC geek.

Good thing, right? Well, no, I don’t think so. In spite of the enormous popularity of modern nerd life, there are still aspects of the words I find off-putting. 

Let’s start with the word whose job geek usurped: passion. It’s a markedly different word—the passionate individual is emotionally involved, pouring her industry into a respected field of human endeavor. There’s something noble about a passionate pursuit; something that seems not at all incompatible with words like Nobel or Pulitzer.

To be a nerd, on the other hand, is to worm one’s way into the bowels of an enthusiasm. Geeks are isolated from the outside world. They are tribal, wallowing in the sheer obscurity of their pursuit. The geek loathes the ill-informed attentions of the population at large and seeks primarily for the approval of his sectarian brethren.

Furthermore, the nerd is a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a human being. To be reduced to one’s idle pastimes is to deny the complex interplay of knowledge and relationships that gives a person their depth and intrigue. Am I simply a list of characteristics associated with “computer nerd?” What if I like English history and carpentry, and what if I consider them part and parcel of myself, not simply additional geekdoms to which I subscribe? What if I want to combine all three into a single project? Is there an EngCarpCompCon I can attend?

The truth is, when I was an awkward kid trying to find myself in a community center game room, nobody really called anyone else a geek or a nerd anyway. The words were mostly a media archetype—a punchline in TV sitcoms and B-movies. For me and kids like me the punchline was much more often just a punch in the mouth. Our triumph was in growing into multifaceted, well-adjusted adults, and seeing these ugly, superfluous words dragging along behind like a toilet paper wake is tiresome and depressing.

I don’t mean to be a crotchety ass, I really don’t. But things have changed and it wouldn’t kill us to move on. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. Or to put it another way, I’d be happy to play Dungeons & Dragons this weekend, but this time the cooler will be full of beer.

Beer nerd alert.

Thanks for swinging by this week. I’m sure you’re all busy recovering from the depredations of the holiday so if you’ve read this far I’m grateful. The big surprise I’ve been teasing you about for a month is moving along slowly but surely, and someday I might actually reveal it to you. In the meantime, take care and look for me again in a fortnight.

1. Years ago I played a game of pool with my friend Adam Cole at a bar in Porterdale, Georgia, and ended the game by jumping the cue ball over the nine in order to sink the eight ball into a side pocket. This is without a doubt the single coolest thing I’ve ever done, and though it was about 98% sheer luck, I have no doubt that Adam thinks I am a god of the baize. In the interest of preserving that fiction, I shall never play pool with Adam again. Sorry Adam.

2. I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than putting “Geek Squad” on your resume.