The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (10 page)

He told me that he was going to drop out, and then he paused. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m going to start auditing classes.”

“Oh,” I said, intrigued. “What does ‘audit’ mean?”

“It means I can take all the classes I want but not pay for them.”

I was stunned. “You can do that?” Magical worlds of access unfolded before my eyes.

“Yes, although I won’t get any credit.”

“Oh,” I said again, sort of sad this time.

“But I don’t need the credit. I just want the classes.” He said this with a sense of steely-eyed realism. And there it was—evidence of the creator’s synthesizing mind. Earnest and pared, Steve had figured out how to go to college without using his parents’ money.

When I look back on all of this now, I wonder how the adoption lawsuit in Steve’s infancy might have factored into not just this decision, but how it had affected his life early on. At a time when adoption was culturally less reflective and variable than it is today, Steve’s birth mother, Joanne, seemed uniquely remarkable and courageous to have challenged the placement of her child. And maybe incredibly stupid, too. I imagine her having acted boldly, even in the midst of what must have been nearly unbearable grief over the loss of her son, not to mention his father’s departure, the man she must have deeply loved. She was only twenty-three or twenty-four, but her fierceness and sense of authority stand out for me. And so does her lack of reflection and compassion for Steve and his new family’s emotional environment.

What I imagine now is that Joanne could have had a back alley abortion but chose to give birth. And in the nine months the child grew in her, she must have thought through what kind of influence she could have on his life when she wouldn’t be there. Her blessings would include a Catholic upbringing with its Divine Mother to oversee him all his days; adoptive parents whose higher education would ensure that his environment reflected his birth parents’ deep regard for learning; and an adoptive family wealthy enough to afford her child big choices in life. But it all torqued out of shape because the family she’d chosen changed their minds at the last minute and decided they wanted a girl.

The Jobses had not attended college. They weren’t Catholic and they weren’t wealthy. So after the adoption was finalized, Joanne demanded that her plan for her child be honored. I understand that. But then there are the other painful pieces that float in my mind; Joanne’s beauty, her returning to take him away from the Jobses and put him into what she perceived to be a
better
home with
better
people. And the Jobses, first-time parents being told they weren’t good enough, fighting like hell to keep the newborn that they’d named Steven Paul. They probably even wondered if they were doing the right thing by fighting. Why not just give the baby up as the mother wanted? All through it I can hear Paul, blustery and pragmatic, saying, “Damn it, lady, you let go of him, he’s ours now.”

Understandably, the court’s impending decision interfered with Clara’s ability to feel safe enough to love the infant for his first six months. It was seventeen years after the fact when she told me this and the whole thing still haunted her. The Jobses’ home must have tottered with profound uncertainty until they finally won the case. And all of Joanne’s bright dreams for her son narrowed to one single requirement: that the Jobs promise that Steve would to go to college. With that agreed, at least it meant that everything was settled.

In light of it all, Clara’s later guilt over not wanting to mother such a difficult child when Steve was two makes the picture even more poignant. And because Mona, Steve’s sister by his birth mother, later told me that Joanne had never saved any money for
her
college education, it makes me think there was shattering in everyone that had come from both the adoption and lawsuit. It would seem that Steve’s existence set off detonations from the very beginning.

Steve had nerve. It was a thin line that ran up through the middle of him. If you plucked it with a less than a careful comment, he would speak harshly about his parentage: “My parents are the ones who raised me,
not
the person who gave birth to me.
She
gave me away.
She
doesn’t deserve to be called my
mother
.” This refrain seemed to me to acknowledge not just the fact that the Jobses were the ones who did all the work, but Steve’s bitter sense of loss and what I imagine were years of Paul Jobs spitting tacks about it and everything else he felt powerless to control.

Back then Steve was so empathic that I think he overidentified with his father and wanted to shore up his insecurities. And so, at the tender age of seventeen, he took things into his own hands. He made the decision to drop out of his degree program and audit courses instead. It was a funny hybrid of his own desire to learn exactly what he pleased without it breaking his parents’ bank account, and complying with his birth mother’s requirement. I never heard him regret it. Not once. And there were plenty of times he might have, because the next few years were rough.

That his parents allowed for the change is revealing, too. Here was one of the smartest students at a high school known for extremely bright kids, so advanced that he met once a week with a handful of students chosen from a pool of thousands for an elite math class. It seems to me that a child of his intelligence should have been cultivated, but that would not have been the Jobses’ context. Once he had made the decision to stop matriculating at Reed, as young as he was, he had in some way become his own man. He wouldn’t have given his parents any say in the matter and that, ironically, was consistent with the Jobses’ worldview. That would have calmed Paul down and made Steve look good to him.

Steve acted happy about the change and his fledgling confidence grew as he embraced his Grand Experiment. I could feel his slightly overloaded enthusiasm to
fake it until he could make it
. Steve was inventive, for sure, and he was great at finding alternative ways of doing things, like using other people’s unused meal tickets and sleeping on couches and on dorm room floors in his sleeping bag. Steve liked being a vagabond in the tradition of Woody Guthrie. He fully enjoyed the experience of being homeless and free with the wind at his back. Steve was an experimental romantic at heart, and may very well have had his eye on the rugged beauty of that former time. I think this was what he meant when he told my father that he wanted to grow up to be “a bum,” and to me it suggests a Henry V blueprint of the foolish days of the young prince before he ascends to the throne.

Steve went back and forth between the Bay Area and Oregon a lot over the next year. I’d drive him to an on-ramp entrance of a freeway so he could hitchhike. And driving away from those drop-offs sort of broke my heart because with his shoulders up around his ears and his black hair ruffled and flying in the chill wind he looked like a cold and lonely raven, like a bird on a wire. I remember him smiling and waving good-bye, determined to make the best of it. It still gets to me.

*   *   *

Everything that happened for him at that point was a complete surprise to me. Steve audited Shakespeare, poetry, dance, and calligraphy. I was baffled he didn’t take more science and math, because that’s what he was good at and what Reed was known for. It’s remarkable to me that he followed his instinct to develop himself through the arts. He must have told me twenty times that he loved his dance class. “I’m not very good,” he’d say, shaking his head at his willingness to be seen like that, “but I
love
it, I just love it!” He couldn’t stop repeating himself. He loved all his audited classes, but …
dance
? I tried to imagine him in a leotard, but I couldn’t quite see it. Steve had been a competitive swimmer in high school and until he went to India, he had a beautiful swimmer’s body with a muscular upper body and arms. But he could also be awkward and clumsy in all things physical. His massages hurt and he was extremely self-conscious, tripping and falling over his own feet more than anyone can possibly imagine. And yet, he also had a sense of sublime grace in many of his movements. I would try to see into how this all might have worked for him in a dance class. I may have snickered a little, too.

At one of the winter breaks, Steve hitchhiked with a friend from Reed to the Bay Area. They stayed at my house, since my father was out of town on a business trip. The two were excited about their clever plan to hitchhike to Mexico on a private airplane flying out of the little airport in Palo Alto, which then was only known as a college town for Stanford. Rainy Portland could be very dreary, and Reed in those days had one of the highest suicide rates of any college in the United States. Bright, sunny, cheap Mexico must have seemed like the best idea anyone had ever thought of. The guys had put an advertisement in the local paper saying they needed a ride, but they got no response, so they decided just to show up at the airport and shake the pilots down for a ride. Steve’s body moved like a song and a prayer in the hopes of free air passage.

The three of us spent the next day and a half in Cupertino, and then I dropped them off at the Palo Alto airport in my father’s VW bug, fingers crossed that they would be picked up. I knew they had done it when they hadn’t called by nightfall. Steve came back a week later, sunburned and happy, bearing a gift to me of a beautiful rainbow-colored Mexican blanket, which I had for years until someone stole it out of the back of my car. (
You know who you are!
)

On the evening they stayed with me before their trip, while Steve and I sat on the couch and talked, I noticed that his friend was wandering around the living room with a look of dumb loss on his face. Steve was completely ignoring his friend, and I felt that the guy was disconnected from us, in a sort of no-man’s-land that alarmed me. The change in the two boys’ dynamic was subtle, but I found the friend’s expression more profoundly disturbing than might easily be explained.

In a flash of indignation I got off the couch to draw his friend back in, and as I got up, I looked back over at Steve to see a hazy, almost drunken look on his face. It was as if he were in an altered state of his own. I couldn’t understand it: neither of us used marijuana very often and that night we definitely had not. I was miffed at Steve because I felt he was excluding his friend in some weirdly powerful way. I moved away from Steve and found his friend bedding, food, and water and we talked a bit because I had a strong instinct to care for him. I’m not really the mothering type; as an artist I tend to relish my own experience. But I’m sensitive to people in my environment and on this evening, my attention was reordered in a way that told me that something was way off. I had a feeling that Steve, so crippled that he needed to be the center of my focus, had actually blanked his friend right out of the room.

In retrospect, it seems to me that there was a dark vortex next to Steve for as long as I knew him. But that was the first time I recognized it. After that, I always knew, just below the level of words, when that aspect of Steve would show up. Through the years, I’d see that buttoned-up look of shock and loss overcome people when they went from inclusion to invisibility when they were with him. It always left me pale with the feeling that something was terribly wrong. The words “there it is again” would move silently through me when I saw that lost-from-self look in people.

I never thought of Steve as having serious mood swings because they were so mild back then. But after he became the Steve Jobs the world would know, I would hear about the extremes other people witnessed. I still thought it seemed unlike him until much later, when I better understood my own creativity and so could appreciate his. I know now that it would have been impossible for Steve to keep his extremes hidden after Apple had started because it is through the movement between the highs and the lows that creativity and invention flesh out new spaces. Highs and lows are what it takes to break the mold of previous consciousness and allow world-shattering ideas to be birthed. Not only did Steve have a big hole in him from the adoption, he had an enormous id that fed on nearly everything to fill it up. Looking for the love he missed, he made sure all eyes were on him so he could get what he needed. He’d wipe people out in the process.

But that night in Cupertino, prior to his Mexico trip, I wasn’t mature enough to understand that Steve was himself in deep trouble, and that was why he was creating a sense of loss in others. It was over my teenage head and I was just so tired of his haunting social ineptitude that it triggered something self-protective in me and I started to back out of the relationship. I didn’t know that I should talk about it with him, much less
how
to talk about it. In this I am sure I was caught by my own limitations as well as by his. I felt like growling and screaming and shouting because he was using his weaknesses to manipulate people who didn’t know what was happening. I just didn’t have a vocabulary for this and, even if I had, he likely wouldn’t have been willing to hear it.

*   *   *

By the spring of ’73, I didn’t visit Steve at school anymore. Once he had dropped out, there was no place for me to stay and I didn’t want to visit him anyway. So our distance, emotional and otherwise, increased. He was distraught.

One day in early spring, Steve called to tell me he had rented a room in a house near Reed. He asked if I would move up to Portland to live with him as soon as I graduated from high school. “No, I’m sorry, but no,” I told him. He seemed so sad I hated to refuse, but I didn’t have a life up there and I didn’t feel good about him at that point. In truth, I felt that all that was unconscious between us was too great to foster happiness. Eventually I came to understand that he had been seeing other girls at this time. He himself bragged and bragged about it years later. He was in college and surrounded by all kinds of beautiful and interesting young women, it made sense. But the real issue—and the one that I didn’t understand at the time—is that he asked me to move up there to stop him from having these other relationships. It was his attempt
not
to destroy ours.