The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (11 page)

I think Steve called with the invitation because he had a beautiful dream for the two of us as a couple. He wanted me to come up Portland and start painting seriously, while he wrote poetry and learned to play the guitar. But this was sort of in the talk bubble above his head where he shelved his imaginary copy of the
Handbook of Becoming Bob Dylan
. It was a great plan but it was far more formulated in his mind than any plan I’d had for myself. I couldn’t have made myself into a painter at that time because I didn’t know how to focus or work hard. I needed training and experience and more feedback from good teachers. And because I didn’t see him as a musician, I didn’t have the foundational belief needed to support an idea of marrying our fortunes in such a way.

I was disenchanted.

Steve had come to seem like a floppy marionette that had lost the taut lines connecting to his excellence. I would never lose sight of his beauty or the knowledge that he was extraordinary. I would always believe in him. But he was so spun around and tangled up that I knew of nothing I could have done to help right then. That was when he began his descent into what I think of as one of the darkest periods of honest confusion that I ever saw in Steve. It was embodied in Dylan’s paradoxical lines about there being no success like failure and failure being no success at all. I personally never knew how to be so honest while in as much difficulty, as he knew how to be, and so these were some of the times I felt my deepest, most profound awe of him. This was the beginning of when I came to trust failure in Steven Paul Jobs, far more than success.

*   *   *

One day around March of 1973, Steve’s mother sort of angled in obliquely to ask if I wanted to live at their house, in Steve’s room, until I completed high school. I think she asked in a careful way so as not to shock me. But I was shocked and wondered where the question came from. Why was she offering me a place to live? My mind searched—did she know my mother was mentally ill? It’s likely that the whole school knew, but I had no way of talking about it publicly.

Not meaning to be ungrateful to Clara, I mumbled a response, something like “No thank you, no, but thank you.”
NO!
I thought to myself as I scanned the implications. The truth was that I had just met Jim, a guy in my art class, and we were spending a lot of time with each other. I could never stay at Steve’s parents’ house while my affections were blooming with this new boy. It would have been dishonest. But there was more to it. Clara’s offer frightened me; I felt like I was an outcast in my own family and I had no idea how to fit into another’s. Also it would have felt like a prison. At a time when kids didn’t trust the older generation, her offer seemed like a generous bolt from the blue. But I didn’t have a close relationship with her and I didn’t want her generosity. None of it made sense and it only occurred to me much later that Steve had more than probably asked her to offer this as a way of keeping me in his life. I’m sure she never would have considered it without his first requesting it anyway. It was always very like Steve to ask people to mediate for him.

Spring moved toward summer. I lived at my father’s apartment in Cupertino and was free to be and do as I liked when my dad was away on business trips. I would stay out until all hours with Jim and we would walk all over Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and Cupertino, down the long dark streets and through the blooming cherry and apricot orchards, sometimes until dawn, getting to know each other. This was the bohemian lifestyle that I have always had a great appetite and natural inclination for, and I still kept up my grades. Under those deep blue starry nights we talked quietly and laughed a lot as we walked down quiet streets, sometimes running over the nights and over the tops of cars in our bare feet, climbing over fences and out of windows and up onto rooftops, treetops, hilltops, listening to lonely dogs bark to each other across great distances. The nighttime had a way of redrawing the daytime territories, and in this I found my way out of structure and back into full-blown wonder.

Jim’s sensibilities were warm, human, and earthy. Our relationship wasn’t sexual; we were more like happy soulful playmates falling in love, yet not too seriously. Like me, he liked to live inside alternative worlds. He was crazy in love with the Tolkien Trilogy and was in the middle of illustrating the whole thing, beautifully, when we met. Once, when he was lying on his back on my couch and I was sitting on the floor close up next to him with our hands and arms playfully entwining between deep kisses, I felt his breath on my face as he quietly said, “I love you.” I could hardly bear the words before my entire being dropped down to what felt like hundreds of thousands of miles below all surfaces. The expression of his love was profound and I confess that later I compared it to Steve’s expressions of love, which at that point seemed more about insecurity than anything else. Still I was drawn powerfully to Steve and a love that seemed both broken and big. It
was
big. In this present age where the tendency is to pathologize everything, it’s easy to think that Steve and I were attracted to each other because we were both, in essence, motherless kids. But that’s not how it was. In fact, it was motherlessness that got in the way of a love that was real. I loved Steve. He was time and timelessness to me and I measured everything by him. I would have thrown my lot in with Steve over anyone if I’d known how. But I didn’t know how.

EIGHT

WALKABOUT

Steve moved back to the Bay Area late in the summer of 1973. He was living with a roommate in a house off Skyline Boulevard, a two-lane highway that tears a perfect hilly line between the mountains and the sky. Steve had scored a great place, with a big redwood deck surrounded by old-growth trees. I would visit him at this cabin by hitchhiking up the mountain on 84, taking rides only from pickup trucks so I could sit in the open air and catch the glorious views as the driver ascended the mountain road.

Our relationship was complicated. I couldn’t break the connection and I couldn’t commit. Steve couldn’t either. One night, when he had the cabin to himself, he invited me to spend the night. We slept outside on the deck, on a heated waterbed, which was a kind of perfection in those days, maybe even now, too. Softly entwined outside under huge old evergreens in the deep quiet of night, yet with the protection of the cabin and the comfort of a warm bed … it just doesn’t get any better. If only we had understood.

In the morning, the air filled with happy birdsong and when we got up, Steve played Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken” as we made breakfast and puttered about. Just then a friend of Steve’s roommate dropped by. “My God,” he exclaimed. “There is so much love in this house!” That may sound like a very seventies thing to say, but the truth is I had never heard anyone say anything even remotely like it. The remark startled me. How could someone else know such a thing when I couldn’t see it myself? But when I looked around I realized that the stranger was right: the house was bright and radiant with our love. I was amazed by the power and simplicity of the love between us. Steve had known it all along. I was the one who hadn’t realized what we had.

There would be other occasions, other times and places when people would see the love between Steve and me. They’d remark on it, very clearly, and I would be perplexed that others saw what I didn’t see. Teens often live in a haphazard state of hit and miss, and they need the insights and the framing that an adult’s experience can provide. It took me a while to realize all this, but in the years since there’s never been a time when I wasn’t mentoring at least one young person. Having come to realize how much I didn’t understand when I needed to understand love, I now feel compelled to shorten the years of ridiculous, unnecessary trouble in others.

*   *   *

Steve may have had a long lovely summer at the cabin, but it wasn’t carefree for the simple reason that Steve himself wasn’t carefree. “I’m already nineteen and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he said, fretting about his life’s big picture. I was kind of shocked by the statement. Impressed, too. I wondered if men had to be more serious about their futures, because, by comparison, I was just enjoying life and not at all stressed because I didn’t know what I was going to do. “But why on earth do you think you could know so much at nineteen?” I asked. At this he became a pantomime of despair. Unable or unwilling to just tell me what the problem was, he threw his arms up into the air in abject frustration. He simply would not use words. And in the silence I wondered what pressures Steve was under. Now I understand that he was both confused and alarmed that his future hadn’t yet started. I think he was worried that he might miss it. After all, he thought he was going to die at forty-two, so it stands to reason that he had no time to waste.

After Steve had dropped out of college, and before he went to India, he entered into one long aboriginal-like walkabout. He was an American boy searching for a way to access the huge potential within him. He was, in turns, full of hope and despair, advance and surrender, cheerfulness and devastation. He tried everything. Following his intuition and his common sense, Steve hitchhiked back and forth between Oregon and the Bay Area. He worked. He gathered new ideas. He met new people and stayed with old friends. Sometimes he’d rent a room. He’d find me, too, when he felt the need. His was a case of moving from the sublime to the ridiculous and then back again until one day all the infinitesimally small steps started to piece together. Later in my twenties, when I was floundering, Steve got mad at me. “Look,” he said. “If you’re having problems, work it through. Chase after everything until you’ve understood it!” Oh, had he ever earned the right to give that advice.

There were many times in the course of his sojourn when Steve would call out of the blue to tell me he was in town and that he had something to show me. It started with the harmonicas, which he kept in his pockets and backpack. I think he was learning to play them between rides when he was hitchhiking. Then he tried to get me to look into candles, as if they were flickering messages from a higher plane. And then he showed me how to use the
I Ching,
first with coins and then with yarrow sticks, offering his interpretations of the hexagonal combinations that we threw. Steve explained a kind of thinking that was new to me, one that was based on ancient wisdom and the workings of chance. This knowledge had been available to me intuitively, but it took me time to understand that the potential of a moment was readable in the toss of some coins. The
I Ching
actually changed my understanding of time. I used it for years after that.

It was around this period that Steve introduced me to Georgia, a forty-something-year-old woman who lived in San Francisco. Generous and lively, she reminded me of Maude from the movie
Harold and Maude
. Steve was working with her on a color-based therapy system she had developed for clearing past emotional trauma. He was midway through his process when he asked me to work with her, too. I soon found out that she had been a former colleague and girlfriend of Werner Erhard of EST fame. EST was a personal growth regime of weekend seminars that started in the seventies with an overly aggressive template for getting people to take responsibility for their lives. It has since changed a bit, and after renaming itself several times, it’s now called The Forum. How Steve first came across Georgia I don’t know.

We started with seven pieces of colored paper, red, blue, yellow, brown, purple, green, orange, and one big white sheet, twice the size of the others, which was to be a summary sheet. Then we cut images from magazines and put them on the colored paper of our choice. Mostly Steve and I cut images from back issues of
National Geographic
that we bought used at a resale store in Palo Alto. In the beginning we had no idea what the colors, the sizes, and the images meant. We’d just gather the pictures we were attracted to and glue them to what seemed to us the appropriate color. When that was done, Georgia would interview us, taking notes on our thoughts and explanations for our choices and what they meant to us. Then the boom would fall and she would decode what we had done so that we could see our issues and work to move beyond them.

I remember most of my images and two of Steve’s. The best of his was a delicately granulated, color-treated photo of a stone relief depicting an Egyptian god of Intuition. He had placed the image on a piece of orange paper where it just floated with ethereal light. It was breathtaking, and we were, all three, in awe because it was clear that if ever there were a god seeing over Steve, it would be the Egyptian God of Intuition. Steve used one image per colored sheet, evidencing his minimalist aesthetic. We both knew it was superior and he gloated over it. I loved his awareness of his own design excellence, but was a little perplexed by his sense of competition.

My time with Georgia brought new awareness to my thinking. She told me, “I sense you have a huge capacity for love.” This comment was like a stunning rebirth after the terrible ways my mother had spoken to me. Georgia valued me and she helped me value myself. But in the end, she became ill and I never completed her program. Later, after I got pregnant with Lisa, I called Georgia in tears and it was then that she told me that Steve had sat with her for hours and hours in grief because I didn’t love him enough.

Georgia had some unspecified illness when I knew her, and it was getting worse. One day she told us that Werner Erhard had been stealing her creative energy and that this had been making her ill. I had no idea how to evaluate such a statement. It was so matter-of-fact, yet so outside the borders of accepted reality. But the notion that such a thing might be possible stayed with me. It was terrible, of course, but also exciting because I was ever looking at the way things might be working behind the scenes. All told, Georgia provided me with a much better self-image and offered me my first experience using a color system as a tool for transformation. I would go on to use many others through the years.