At nerd camp with the future leader of the #NerdFighters

I knew John Green when we were both young nerds—at one of the safest places I know for young nerds.

I went to an outdoor music festival on Saturday. It was the Clearwater Festival, which was founded by Pete and Toshi Seeger, and it’s dedicated to cleaning up the Hudson River, but also, in a very Pete and Toshi Seeger sort of way, to making the world a better and more inclusive place in general. I was sitting uncomfortably on a blanket on a hill waiting for one of the acts to come on when one of the people I had come with got my attention. He had noticed a girl fifteen feet away from us, reclined in a nylon camping chair, and reading The Fault in Our Stars, the runaway hit bestseller generation-defining young adult novel that just got turned into a movie that also deserves all of those two-word adjectives. “She’s reading that book by your friend John Green,” he said to me.

Now, it would be an incredible stretch of the definition of the term “friend” to say that I am John Green’s friend as of my writing this. I think we definitely were friends once though, and his emergence into a ubiquitous cultural force has made writing this little essay even more diffcult for me than the average amount of writer’s block that comes with anything I write. How can I write about John Green without it seeming somehow self-aggrandizing? The timing is all off, right? He seems like a nice, approachable guy, but now he’s a bonafide celebrity, so any attempt to write about the fact that I knew him when might seem like I’m the distant cousin who comes knocking when you win the lottery. And I didn’t want to be that guy.

But I did know John for three weeks in the summer of 1991. That would make me 14, and having looked at his Facebook page (1.9 million likes), I figured out that he was a month or two shy of 14. I just watched one of his videos, in which he complained about being old, and said that he hoped that there were some other “old” NerdFighters out there. Maybe it will make him feel better to know that I’ve got a good six months or so on him. We met on the East Campus of Duke University, probably in a dorm called Brown. We were two of maybe a couple hundred teenagers who came to Duke to spend three weeks taking classes led by real college professors and graduate students. College in the summer. By choice. We were nerds, definitely. But the Duke University Talent Identification Program Summer Residential Program (we all called it “TIP” and we were “TIPsters”) was the one place I knew growing up where being a nerd was celebrated. It’s great to see John taking that idea mainstream, 23 summers later. We really are old, John. Sorry.

More than a year before that, I had been selected by a process about which I knew very little at the time to take the PSAT. I must have been in 7th grade at the time, and had scored highly enough on some standardized test or other to be invited to take this other standardized test designed for high school sophomores and juniors. I still remember my score: 1070. 520 verbal, 550 math. It was probably the last time I scored higher on the math section of a standardized test. (In terms of strict percentiles, I actually did better on the verbal, but explaining that would require more math.) My PSAT experience had been sponsored by TIP, which performed research on high-performing students at Duke, and my score was high enough to qualify me to attend the Summer Residential Program. The first summer, I tried to get into an astronomy class because, being 13, I didn’t realize that astronomy was a sub-field of physics. Anyway, I didn’t get in, and I went about my 13-year-old business, doing whatever it was I did in the summers of my early adolescence. But the next year, I picked something a little bit more humanities-oriented, and I got in. It was a course on rhetoric and public speaking. But I hardly remember it. Mostly, I remember shoelaces, bagels, Poindexter Records, Ultimate Frisbee, the Time Warp and of course, the people.

My dad seems to have come with me to Durham to drop me off that first summer. I have a few of the letters I wrote home, and I made some crack about how he had to buy a new pair of shoes, though the context for that is utterly lost to me now. We went to a Durham Bulls game. Then we went to the East Campus for check-in. The Duke East Campus isn’t the Duke you know, probably. Rather than the collegiate gothic of the more famous West Campus, the architects of this side of things had looked to Thomas Jefferson and built a slightly shabbier University of Virginia one state to the south. There was a domed auditorium at one end, a circular green in the middle of campus flanked by the library and the cafeteria building. Stretched along both sides of the quad between those two landmarks were the four dorms where the TIPsters lived: Pegram, Alspaugh, Brown and Bassett. There was a clear hierarchy. Pegramites were the first-years, the kids who came to TIP the first time they were invited. Bassett was for the fourth-years, those seasoned near-adults. Some of them were old enough to drive! We envied them, and aspired to live in Bassett if we made it back for that “senior” year of TIP. We heard they had carpet in their hallways. It sounded super-luxurious to us. I have almost no memory of Alspaugh and admit to having Googled it just now even to remember its name. That may be because it was being renovated the year I first came to TIP. I seem to remember it being closed. Anyway, I was in Brown (and I would be for all three years I attended). Never had the indignity of being a Pegramite. Never had the glory of living in Bassett. Though I wrote and performed a blues song about not getting Bassett. So I guess that’s something.

I’m not going to pretend to have been a total outcast in junior high school. I had some friends. I was in the band, for better or worse. It was one of those places where self-identified nerds could gather and be safe in each other’s company. I cared intensely about music, but not the kind of music that anyone who cared about seeming cool in a north Texas junior high would care about. I wasn’t into C+C Music Factory or Color Me Badd or Mariah Carey or Roxette. I was more influenced by my uncle, who had dubbed the entire Beatles discography onto cassette for me, and who had introduced me to Elvis Costello’s music and Talking Heads. Oh, and Richard Thompson, who, incidentally, played at Clearwater this weekend. These might be a sign of a little bit of proto-hipster inside me, but when you’re 14 in 1991, you’re not supposed to be listening to English folk rock or New Wave or late-60s Dylan. But I was, and I brought my Sony CD boom box with me, the kind where you give one corner of the lid a gentle push and it pops open so you can lift out the disc. It took up almost an entire duffel bag, but I wouldn’t have been able to go three weeks without it. I also brought my electric guitar, which I didn’t play very well.

I soon discovered that my roommate was also a musician, though a very TIPster musician. His name was Alistair (a name I had previously associated only with a kid on You Can’t Do That on Television) and he was from Houston. He claimed to play in a bagpipe-driven rock band there. I don’t know about the rock, but he did play bagpipes. He brought them. They were very loud. I lived in a group of 16 kids, overseen by an RA—my first encounter with that term. His name was (really) Bruce Lee. In my first letter home, I sound as if I’m not eating a lot, which was rare for me. I suspect it was because I hadn’t found anyone I felt comfortable enough to invite over to the union to try the cafeteria. Also, I misspelled Domino’s. So much for that 520 verbal score.

Almost everything that I remember about my rhetoric and public speaking class I got from a letter to my family that I re-read last week. A week ago, if you had asked me if I had ever seen “Inherit the Wind,” I would have told you that I always wanted to, but never got around to it on Netflix. But I apparently would have been lying to you. It seems I watched it in July 1991. Apparently I had to write eight essays over the course of three weeks. That sounds pretty intense to me even now. Also, I was not a terrific writer of academic essays, it seems. One of mine was among a stack of them passed back to the class as an example of how not to write. By the following summer though, when I took a class on satire, I had begun to establish an identity for myself as a writer. Things move quickly when you’re a teenager, I suppose.

John was one of my two best friends that summer. The other was a guy named Joe Berg, from Statesboro, Georgia. He was fun, down to earth. He loved baseball, and got me involved in a computer rotisserie baseball game. I named my team after my high school mascot (go Vikings!) and “drafted” Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio (go Yanks!) as well as Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers (but apparently not Frank Chance). Somehow, the baseball novel Shoeless Joe was involved in our friendship, but I can’t remember if maybe Joe introduced me to it or we had discovered it independently and bonded over it. (It’s the book that “Field of Dreams” was based on, but it was cooler, since it had J.D. Salinger in it instead of James Earl Jones.) And I introduced Joe to Elvis Costello’s Spike. Joe later went on to the United States Military Academy and a career in the Army.

I don’t remember meeting John for the first time. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in the rhetoric class. He must have been in my R.A. group with Bruce Lee. According to my letters, I was friends with John before Joe, since I mention early on that I was friends with Alistair and with John.

“And friends,” I wrote, “I’ve made plenty of those.” This may have been a boast to make my parents or myself feel better, or it may have been that I thought that two friends was a lot of friends. (When I was in high school, one of my sisters would be preparing for a night out and tease me: “Are you going out with your friend tonight?”) “Mostly I hang out with Alistair or, even more often, a guy named John Green from Orlando (home of the 6' rat).”

Ahh, that six foot rat. Probably my strongest memory of John from that time. I think he had moved with his family not that much earlier to Orlando, and he didn’t seem to have been too keen on the place. I remember him describing Mickey as something like a mob boss, controlling the town with his gang of angry (or just Grumpy?) dwarfs. It was a dark sense of humor for a 13-year-old, and I ate it up. I was the kind of guy who loved genuine wit, and I don’t think I had met anyone my age who could be described as sardonic until I met John. Thirteen is precocious for sardonic, I think.

I haven’t read The Fault in Our Stars. I’m sorry, John. I haven’t read too many novels in the last few years anyway, as I’ve worked on writing my dissertation, and TFIOS struck me as just some dopey, mopey (more dwarfs?) teen romance. And I didn’t recognize the author’s name, to be totally honest. Not that I didn’t know that I had known a guy named John Green, but come on… it’s not exactly the most unique name. What were the chances that this John Green was that John Green? I didn’t bother to check. And I wasn’t a mopey teen. At least not when TFIOS came out. And not now that the movie is out. Haven’t seen that either. Sorry, John.

But I’ve read some things about John, now. It was reading a profile of him on the NPR website that I had the realization that John Green was John Green. And then I read the New Yorker profile. He paints himself as a mopey outcast teenager, and I think that might be mostly right. I found two pictures of John in the photo album I kept from TIP. In one, I’m wearing a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt and playing my electric guitar, which doesn’t seem to be plugged in to anything. I’m oblivious to the camera, but John is staring right at the lens, or at least toward it, but with a thousand-yard stare. His now-famous “puff” looks more like a mullet in 1991. His arms are limp at his sides, and his fingers are tied up in a neon green shoelace, which he’s dangling down between his legs. (TIPsters were given shoelaces to tie our IDs on.) His expression is almost bleak, even though there seems to be some sort of party going on. In the other picture I found, he seems even more disengaged. I think I took this one, since I’m not in it. There are at least six other people in my dorm room. Three of them are kids I honestly don’t remember. Alistair Isaac is at the left, dressed oddly formally for a teenager at a summer camp, and reading the liner notes to some CD. Joe Berg is at the center, looking pretty relaxed. John is perched on the edge of the bed, his ID shoelace again dangling between his legs, and the ID itself dragging on the floor. He’s looking nowhere in particular, and he almost looks as if he’s going to be sick. I must have thought we were having fun if I saw fit to document the scene, but 20-some years later, it doesn’t look like a particularly good time. I had my bleak moments too. In one of my letters home, I reported back on a TIP dance: “I feel like a loser. Dances always do that to me. Even in a camp for geeks, I still feel like one.”

But I know there’s another picture of John somewhere. It’s not in my album, and I couldn’t dig it up, but I know it exists, or at least existed. Someone else sent it to me, I think. Maybe one of the few girls with whom we interacted. John and I were sitting on one of the two-level painted wooden fraternity benches in front of the dorms, and the photographer had come up behind us. John and I were turned around toward the camera. I don’t remember so much what I looked like in the photo, but John was swatting at something, as if someone had just tickled him, and he was laughing, his head thrown back. He was definitely having fun. He couldn’t mope around all the time. And neither could I. By the next sentence of the letter in which I told my family I felt like a nerd among the nerds, I had gotten over it, moving on to a discussion of bagels.

I don’t think John ever came back to TIP after that first year. I came back two more times. In 1992, I took that satire class, the only one that really stuck with me. We watched Zelig and Brother From Another Planet and read Pride and Prejudice and Candide. I wrote my first short story, which was a blatant rip-off of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” except told from the point of view of a teenager named Trevor Algonquin. We had a class t-shirt made with favorite quotes from our books and movies. “Mr. Darcy may hug himself.” And my contribution: “O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni.” My last year, I took a college-credit formal logic course.

I made other friends in those subsequent years. Glen. Jason. Gabe. Caroline (a girl!). I watched a group of TIPsters dance the Time Warp on the steps of the library. I stayed up all night to watch the sun rise over either the union or the library, whichever one faced east. I met an RA who had gone to the University of Pennsylvania—the first time I realized that it wasn’t a state school, and the first time I considered going there. I went to more of the TIP dances, and even danced with Caroline, though I was starting to realize that I didn’t have to be nervous about dancing with girls, because I probably wasn’t interested in doing anything more than dancing with them. I wrote that blues song about how the fourth-years couldn’t live in Bassett because of construction work or its having been taken over by the dance camp that shared campus. And I got on stage with some friends to perform it. I had gotten over the fake cool of my electric guitar and embraced my inner nerd. I was on stage, in jean shorts, playing my trombone. At TIP, it felt safe to do that kind of thing. Just like it felt safe for other TIPsters to publicly do the Time Warp. Just like, I hope, it felt safe for John Green to sit on a bench outside a college dorm and talk to me about how much he hated living in Orlando with its giant rat overlord.

A few years later, when I was in college at Penn and had access to the Internet, I tracked John down. I’m not sure how I figured out that he had gone to Kenyon College, but somehow I did, and I found his Kenyon email address. We emailed back and forth for a little while. It might have been a week. Maybe a month. I doubt it was longer than that. But I remember them being long emails, on both sides. And also that he was still darkly funny, but sensitive, in that very writerly way. I remember writing in one of them that we should make sure to keep copies of those emails so that we could publish them when we got famous. But that was in a time when server space was at a premium, and as far as I know, they’re lost to time. I do wish I could have them now, the way that I have those letters I wrote home to my family. And I wish that I had done a better job of keeping in touch then. I think it would be fascinating to have seen him go from being a mopey nerd to being the charismatic leader and biggest fan of that same group of kids half a generation later. I know TIP is still out there, and still doing good work. I hope that the TIPsters who are there this summer feel the same way about the place, even now when the Internet allows them to find each other (and people like John) every day. In 1991, it was a special place. I’m sure it still is.