A HISTORY OF GEEK CIVILIZATION

Jessica Zafra.
from her book Womenagrie.
I am a geek. More exactly, I reek of geek. I wear thick glasses and use words of many syllables. I always have a book
on me, partly for ballast, partly out of a deathly fear that I will be marooned in a sea of traffic with nothing to read.
What is a geek? Why do I repeat the term with such pride? As my dictionary does not contain the word, I have prepared
a short history of my life as geek, and the hope that it will serve as a definition.
I learned to read at an early age--a sure symptom of geekness. My early tastes in literature leaned towards "Little Red
Riding Hood," which I read aloud, in different voices ("Gwandma, what big eaws you have!"); and "The Little Mermaid,"
which, now that I think about it, is pretty gruesome for a bedtime story. The mermaid let the sea-witch cut off her tongue
so she would look like an ordinary person and get near that stupid prince who was in love with some goody-two-shoes
princess.
Much of my childhood was spent reading D.C. Comics, which served as substitute playmates. Then as now, I loathed
physical exercise (and was--am--a klutz), and being lousy at habulan and patintero, I preferred to keep to myself. There
was a game I was particularly lousy at, called "Open the Basket." Your playmates paired off and made "baskets" by
holding each other's hands, and you, as the "chicken," had to run out of the "basket" and find another one. I was
perpetually the homeless chicken.
In grade school my lunch hours were spent prowling the library. This did not make me terribly popular, or increase my
circle of friends. Around that time I was already recognized as the resident geek. I got sent to the Spelling Bee and to all
the categories of the Quiz Bee; I was so sure I would wipe the floor with the competition that I got trounced every time.
One good thing that came of being the official school geek was that the principal gave me a copy of Edith Hamilton's
Mythology. For some time it was my favorite book; I could rattle off the names of all the Greek divinities plus the major
royal houses. I still have the book.
At St. Theresa's it was hip to read the Nancy Drew mysteries by Carolyn Keene. I still get a kick out of seeing Nancy
Drew, forever 18, "titian-haired," and driving her convertible, on bookstore shelves (At seven times the price I bought my
copies for. By the way, did Nancy ever marry Ned Nickerson? Did Bess ever lose weight? Did anyone ever graduate
from college?). For more serious literary enjoyment I kept my mom's ratty copy of Cyrano de Bergerac under my
mattress. To this day I can not pass a book sale without buying a copy of Cyrano--it pains me to see it unread.
If we are indeed molded by the books we read as kids, then I was molded by books in English. OK, let me have it,call
me a little brown American, accuse me of colonial mentality. But first, name one Pilipino children's book that was widely
available in the '70s. Sure, there were komiks, but my father wouldn't let them in the house. Occasionally in other
people's houses I got my hands on Hiwaga, which had that gross series Zuma the snake man, and another one in
which a man could turn into a giant rooster with superpowers, but my exposure to komiks was limited.
In sixth grade while my classmates were discovering that there was another gender, called boys, I was reading the John
Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Mars books got me started on science fiction. Teleportation and
parallel universes were simple compared to puberty. What was acne, anyway, in the scheme of the universe? Mr.
Spock never mentioned pimples in the James Blish Star Trek books , therefore it was irrational to worry about the vile
eruptions on my face. The trouble with me was, I believed what my teachers taught me. I trusted in their version of the
world, in which, as one teacher so quaintly put it, "Beauty is useless, character is the best."
Boy, was I wrong.
I learned in freshman year at a coeducational high school that the universe is not kind to fat, pimply kids. That it was a
school exclusively for geeks didn't make a difference: all thirteen-year-old boys reserve a special kind of cruelty for
twelve-year-old girls with braids, glasses, zits and weight problems. They oink. Which is funny, if you think about it, but
not if you're the twelve-year-old girl. In retaliation I wrote stories in which my tormentors (especially a particularly
obnoxious vermin named Stevie, whose name I still cannot pronounce without reaching for a rusty cleaver) appeared as
genetic mutations.
One would think that a geek would find happiness in a school designed for geeks. Unfortunately, these geeks were of
the scientific sort. I was into literature. For the first time, and you cannot know what a blow it was to me, I did not get
good grades.Who am I kidding? I barely passed Chemistry, Physics, and Math. English I was great at, but the
Humanities were secondary concerns.
Second year high remains one of the pits in my history. It is only appropriate that it was the year I went through Harold
Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, and Robert Ludlum. In their novels all the men are rich and all the women are
beautiful. No one can appreciate beauty as much as those who don't have it. Critics sharpen their axes when Krantz, et.
al. have new books out. They have reason to. Krantz, et. al. are awful.Their one redeeming quality is that they allow the
reader to escape dreary reality and clink champagne glasses on yachts on the Riviera.Nonetheless, those moronic
books kept me sane.They also steered me towards serious Lit.Once you've read too many trashy best-sellers, you
begin to look around for something with substance, something that attempts to define the universe.
In junior year my literary geekhood was rewarded with the editorship of the school paper. I began to read some truly
good books. Kurt Vonnegut. John Steinbeck. I discovered Woody Allen movies, and his books, Without Feathers and
Getting Even. And in senior year I was rewarded for my fortitude. In senior year I discovered that I was not alone.
In every school there are people who read good books that were not necessarily assigned by their teachers, who talk
about these books during lunch, and scribble poetry and short stories in their Math notebooks. I did not find these
people until senior year in high school, when they took the editorial exams. We literary geeks got together and ran the
school paper.
From then on I could be as geeky as I wanted, I could wallow in geekness. I could say anything and know that I was
understood, I could talk about books that knocked me flat and know I wasn't boring them into a coma. That year I read
The Great Gatsby; the result was that I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wanted to ride hilariously drunk on top of a
vegetable cart through the streets of Paris at midnight. I wanted to jump fully-clothed into the fountain at the Ritz. I
wanted to prowl New York speakeasies and never get enough sleep. On F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday I actually ordered
a birthday cake.
To the detriment of my already embarrassing academic standing (except, of course, in English), I read everything I
could get my hands on. I read on the bus, at home, in laboratory class. I literally forgot to eat, and lost--ask any member
of the class of '82--fifty pounds. My friends explained my condition to the curious by saying I was on a hunger-strike to
demand the release of jailed IRA soldier Bobby Sands. Anyway, I lost a lot of fat. Bobby Sands died as a result of his
hunger strike in a British prison.)
In place of Calculus I read The World According to Garp, which was borrowed so often that John Irving's words began
to creep into our speech ("Arp," "W.C.," "Ellen Jamesian"). I forsook the Physics textbook for Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
the Chemistry manual for The Catcher in the Rye. The latter had attracted a lot of attention the previous year: John
Lennon had been shot, and his assassin was arrested carrying a copy of Catcher. I like Catcher, but I did not fully
appreciate it until I read it again in college. Rereading Salinger, I felt like Archimedes shouting "Eureka!" and dashing
out of his bathtub stark naked into the streets of Athens (Is that story true?). I wound up writing my undergraduate thesis
on J.D. Salinger.
Our preoccupation with literature wasn't exactly great for the school paper we had been assigned to produce. It was
always terribly late, and the articles apear to have been thrown together with no regard for cohesion. Except for one
page of news and one page of sports, the paper was a motley assortment of rambling book reviews, science fiction
ravings, and whatever the editors were into lately. But we had a good time. We were geeks together. We belonged. I
learned that not being popular is not bad, and that the people who make fun of those who read are doomed to be
illiterate.
In college I majored in Comparative Literature, and to be a geek in the C.L. course was the norm.
Yes, it's true that you can't learn everything from books. But you do learn something about everything.
Trust me, I'm geek.
August 23 and September 6, 1989.