21  Svetlik

I developed a competitive spirit for school early, from second grade when the teacher used a scoreboard to track which kids were doing best, to fourth grade and the contest for who could read most books, to fifth grade when I competed against the smartest girl to see who was best at class assignments. And always, there were the regular chess matches with Jimbo. In each case, I was inspired to try harder as I discovered how I could always win, with enough effort.

It wasn’t until seventh grade, when a new boy moved to town, that I met the first person I felt was truly smarter than me in every way. Our initial rivalry quickly gave way to a deep friendship that ultimately influenced me more than any other.

I first heard rumors about John Svetlik near the beginning of the year when other students, by now accustomed to my role as best in the class, told me about another boy who was also always first in his class. He was so good at math, they claimed, that our teacher Mrs. Reidel exempted him from normal classwork to give him a different textbook and assignments.

He came to Neillsville from a town in New Jersey with an unpronounceable name but which we assumed was the Big City compared to Neillsville. Although he was new to us, his grandfather had been here decades, operating the Ford dealership in town, which his father would now be running. He had a little sister named “Sam”, short for Samantha, and they lived in a new house on the other side of town to us but near the school.

John’s family were good Catholics, which meant that our non-school free time never overlapped. My evenings and weekends were full of my own church activities, but school was another matter. As the class overachievers, we shared the common fate of nerds everywhere of being ostracized at lunchtime and it was natural for us to begin meeting every day at school. Our middle school had begun to divide into the “popular” kids versus the rest of us, and in particular there was a small but dangerous group of athletically-minded bullies who were known to gang up on those of us without enough social skills to avoid their oppression. As one of the new kids, and nerdly to boot, John came under the same scrutiny that we did and we soon were forced together for common defense.

He knew so many more things than I did, so he introduced me to many wonderful new subjects I hadn’t imagined before. Science fiction! He had me reading Asimov and Heinlein, and we shared stories about new scientific discoveries and the whole wonderful world of technology. He knew about electronics, and was good at it, showing me and then teaching me how he made circuit boards, how he modified his home clock radio to brighten the display automatically in the light, and much more.

Our friendship always had a slight edge of fun competition, but through it all I remembered my previous place as the smartest kid in class. It was an important part of my identity, to be the best in class. If I couldn’t be as athletic as others, or as popular, I wanted to be different and better at something and that something was academics. But John was so much better, I learned, just so innately smarter and more capable, that I discovered my only option was to admit defeat and find some other way to differentiate myself.

It didn’t matter. John exposed me to such amazing new worlds of ideas and I was honored – humbled – to be his friend. Along the way I learned that wonderful feeling of discovering something interesting that appealed to him too, things he hadn’t already seen. I devoured new magazines and books, always looking for something I could show to John. If I couldn’t be better than him, I could at least be first.

I also discovered that, despite an intelligence that compared to mine seemed superhuman, he was still capable of mistakes. The effortlessness with which he beat me at academics, I noticed, left him prone to be a bit lazy, and that was where I had my edge. If I applied myself – really focused on a math problem or a feat of memorization – and if along the way he grew bored or distracted by something else, I learned I could win. It was a lesson that became one of my most important lifetime observations: the truth of the turtle and the hare. Focus and determination, I learned, can beat innate ability.

Like me, John was often treated like an outcast, a nerdy boy distinguished by not being particularly athletic or popular with the other students. One day in eighth grade, Billy Roberts used John’s lack of social skills as an opportunity to put him in his place, and without provocation began to make fun of him between classes.

John immediately began swinging, hitting Billy Roberts as hard as he could with his fists shoving him to the floor, beating and kicking him. There was no particular damage, but of course John was called to the Principal’s office.

The Principal called me in too, and as I sat in front of him at his desk I began to cry. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I insisted.

“It’s okay,” said the principal, “You’re not in trouble. We just wanted to talk with you because you’re friends with John and we want to hear more about what happened.”

I didn’t know much, so after a few questions I was let go.

John wasn’t at school the next day, a Friday, expelled for a day of punishment. On Saturday I went to John’s house to see more of what had happened.

John’s Dad met me at the door. “We’re so proud of John, for sticking up for himself. Yesterday we let him do whatever he wanted at home.”

John was beaming too. This one incident took away all possibility that other kids – those who were much meaner than Billy Roberts – might treat him as a pushover. It still didn’t classify John as one of the tough kids – he would always be a nerd – but to anyone considering a little fun at the expense of a weaker kid, there were much easier targets. John was securely out of range of the class bullies.

Ironically, John’s biggest influence came when, sadly, his family moved away from Neillsville the summer before tenth grade. At fifteen, I was just beginning the most rocky years of teenagerdom, and my friendly competition with John was expanding beyond schoolwork and hobbies, to the broader worlds of socialization, of popularity, of girls. As the two indisputable representatives of the Neillsville High School geek elite, I needed him as an ally and as proof that I wasn’t alone in my interests in computers and the future. His leaving suddenly turned me into a loner.

Jimbo was still a friend, of course, but becoming increasingly distracted by girls, and by his friend Tracy, the only child of divorce we knew, a boy whose father lived far away and whose mother was proud of her independence and free-thinking ways, who gave Tracy his own phone and a subscription to Playboy to complement his education. Tracy was a neighbor, and we were friendly too, of course, but he was really a better match for Jimbo. Both boys were sports-watchers, for example, intensely interested in baseball. I couldn’t keep up, and until John left, it didn’t matter.

Now suddenly, with nobody else to share my competitive love of computers and technology, I felt very alone. It was around this time that I began to write, first for myself, and then letters to John, who to my delight wrote back promptly and at length. Thus we began a long, fruitful correspondence whose impact I feel today.

Our first letters were less noteworthy to him than to me. He was adjusting to a new, much bigger city (Mesa, just outside Phoenix) and a new school (a private, Catholic school) and his descriptions of his new, urban world were to me a wonderful window to a vast, unexplored territory that I wanted to see too. With every letter, I learned more about how different it was outside Neillsville, and nearly all of it to me was exciting and worthy of envy. He told me about the computer store near his house, the big shopping centers, the bookstores, and even the university campus. I was both envious at his great urban experiences and emboldened at the thought that someday I too would be able to enjoy that type of life if I chose. He opened a completely new world for me.

Since we were already good friends, we were comfortable discussing more personal thoughts. As it became clear that the distance between us ensured that neither of us was in a position to leak secrets, our letters took on a more intimate tone, spilling thoughts and dreams that might have been more difficult if we were living in the same place.

He told me about high school crushes, beginning with innocent teenage unrequited relationships, situations I could relate to. But over time, as he became more emboldened, both in his actual life and in his willingness to express himself in letters, he divulged more details about experiences that were beyond my social abilities at the time and I learned far more than I would have if he had been living near by.

Some of his stories shocked me, both as a small town boy and as a deeply religious one. John knew of students who used drugs, fooled around sexually, drank alcohol, a teacher who talked openly about a gay lifestyle. These weren’t themes that I encountered in Neillsville other than as theoretical concepts that proved Satan was out there in the “world”, trying to deceive us, threatening chaos and all that would be wrong if we slip from our religion.

Coming from John, though, these stories took on a reality that, though at first disturbing, helped introduce me slowly to a bigger, more diverse world, and prepared me in a way I don’t think could have happened without such a faithful, long-distance correspondent.

Writing helped, too, because I was forced to put into words, to express on paper my thoughts, and having John as a confidant was a reassuring way to know that, in the difficult transition to adulthood that we all make, I had a friend who was truly listening.