The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (12 page)

*   *   *

Little by little, Steve and I separated. But we were never able to fully let go. We never talked about
breaking up
or
going our separate ways
and we didn’t have that conversation where one person says
it’s over.
I guess we just didn’t know enough to be final about it. Later, Steve would make jokes about our breaking up by telling people, “I knew it was over when she bought a sleeping bag that didn’t zip to mine.” It was like him to find the defining, humorous spin. But it wasn’t quite truthful. Not in my experience.

I remember a different turning point in our relationship, a particularly dramatic moment that played out late one afternoon in August of ’73 when Steve was still living on Skyline. My father, my little sister, and I drove Steve home. When we got to the top of the mountain to drop him off, Steve stepped out of the car and held his stomach as if in intense pain. But he looked as if he was stepping out into a desolate no-man’s-land. It would have been comical for its extreme drama, but this was real. He couldn’t even say good-bye. He spun around on his long spindly legs and staggered from one foot to the other as his stiff body stepped toward his cabin, like a cowboy who had just been shot. I watched, trying to comprehend what was happening. I glanced at my father and sister, who also looked baffled. Had I wounded him? Had there been some misunderstanding? Later I wondered if it was about my being with my family that triggered a sense of profound loneliness and isolation in him.

After that afternoon, we moved increasingly apart. He didn’t seek me out as often and our paths didn’t cross. I don’t really know what he was doing at this time, because I was busy in school and working at a café. But seeing him so rarely allowed me to better grasp the changes he was going through. One day he called to see if I wanted to go for a walk. I hadn’t seen him for a while and I didn’t know until then that he had moved back into his parents’ home. I drove over to Los Altos and walked in to find him sitting on the floor in his bedroom playing a guitar and singing. I can see now that he had staged himself for effect, and he did a good job at it. He was holding a beautiful guitar with a wide tapestry strap; he had a harmonica brace around his neck with a harmonica attached. He looked up at me, a misty depth in his eyes, this time fully channeling himself as the rock star.

I was instantly taken in. He curled his vowels. His phrasing was beautiful. Spit flew as his mouth went back and forth between the words and the harmonica, and I could see that he was mastering the coordination between the energetic intensity of his singing and the grace of the song. Basically he was saying,
Look at me!
I stood there blinking, overwhelmed by how good he was and how far he’d come. Up to that time I simply hadn’t believed that he was a musician. Ten different kinds of brokenness in me could have prompted me to make that judgment, or maybe I had been right all along.

Musicians made up a large body of my friends in high school. For those friends, music was a way of life. But it wasn’t a way of life for Steve. He knew he was going to be famous, but it’s likely he couldn’t imagine anything beyond Dylan at that time. That day I was hard pressed not to reconsider all of my assumptions. And I would have, had he kept going with it.

Through the years I have toyed with the idea of an alternate scenario: if, in that moment, I had fallen at his feet in adoration, would it have incited him to become a mystic poet musician instead of a billionaire businessman? His truth and beauty turned me inside out with admiration. But instead of giving over to it, I hung back, uncertain of how to speak and scared to fully acknowledge him and the effect he had on me.

*   *   *

Weeks, if not months, would go by without us having contact, but Steve would always find me. When I worked at the health food café he’d stop by in the off hours. When I worked as a live-in babysitter he would come over in the night and knock at my bedroom window. We’d talk through the screen and sometimes he would stay over. On those nights, after making love, I would fall into a deep sense of peace that would enfold me for days. From this I would walk around trying to fathom how it was that he could make me feel this way. I didn’t understand my own experience.

Steve was the person I measured everyone and everything by. If I had entered into a not-so-great relationship with a boy, just seeing Steve would be enough to get me out of it. If he showed me some new thing—Medjool dates, a spiritual book, or that science supply store that used to be in Palo Alto—I’d go back to them repeatedly. He and his eyes brought sanity to my heart and soul. His take on things lit me up. He once said to me, “Do you not sense how deep our history is?” In this he was referring to past lives. “No,” I said. “And you do?” I looked up into his face, knowing he’d say yes. He nodded seriously, and scanned the horizon. He knew I didn’t get it.

During that floating time Steve traveled to Oregon to go through primal therapy. Between John Lennon’s song “Oh My Love,” and all that Steve had told me about primal therapy, I had intense expectations. I looked for the changes when I saw him about four months later, but I noticed nothing. I urged myself to scan more deeply and to be more perceptive, but still, I found absolutely nothing different. I had assumed at the very least that his voice would deepen and that his massages would improve. But his voice was the same and his massages still hurt. Steve had a way of always pushing into the place where skin runs thinnest over the sharpest bone, and an uncanny ability to press on the exact location of a new bruise. This hadn’t changed.

Compared to everyone I knew, Steve was the Spock character from
Star Trek
in my life. I had thought—imagined—that primal therapy would make him more human. In the end I discovered that Steve hadn’t completed the course. In fact, he’d hardly even started. I sensed something had gone wrong with the therapy or the relationship with the therapist, but when I asked him what had happened, he brushed me aside with “I ran out of money.” This didn’t ring true. Steve always had money when he needed it. But I knew him well by then, and if he didn’t want to tell me something, he simply wasn’t going to.

Later, Steve spoke quietly about a trauma that he had dealt with, regarding a memory of his mother, Clara. He was five at the time, and Clara had taken his sister Patty indoors and left Steve outside, alone on the swings. Clara had excluded Steve from her intimate world with Patty and it must have played utter havoc on the psyche of a little boy who felt he’d been abandoned once already by his birth parents. He’d asked his mom about it when he got back to the Bay Area, and I imagine Clara looking into herself to answer as fully as she could because her response was “Patty was an easier child to take care of.” Boy, was that the understatement of the century. Clara’s words couldn’t have been more simple or profound. And they were followed up with an apology: “I didn’t mean to leave you out,” she had told him. “I didn’t know I was hurting you. I am sorry.” I’m so very sure she was.

Steve’s failure to complete the full primal scream course made a huge impression on me. Here was the magnificent opportunity for transformation and he had just walked away from it. I had fully believed that the miraculous was possible because of how Steve had talked about primal scream therapy. I had so wanted for him to be okay. But when I understood that he had quit, then nothing was sure for me anymore. And for him, I saw a kind of disillusionment set in, maybe even a quiet, slow bitterness at the edge of everything, like ice growing over a pond. It seemed that when the hope of that therapy died, a pragmatism set into Steve’s life and soured the tenor of his sweetness. This sort of thing isn’t ever totally obvious, and because Steve kept his thoughts and his feelings to himself, I can’t point to one big thing that changed, except that he became a little more sarcastic. Steve had exhausted his childhood plan and at that point began to internalize the loss of a dream. He kept himself busy after that—and it wasn’t with a guitar.

*   *   *

On one of Steve’s hitchhikes home from Oregon, he got picked up by a guy I’ll call Thomas. Thomas lived in unincorporated Cupertino, right across from where I was staying at my father’s apartment. (I had by this time quit the babysitting job.) I never did meet the man. Steve had his own reasons for keeping people apart, but I remember Thomas because, with all of Steve’s hitchhiking, he had never told me about anyone he had taken a ride from, until this guy. Apparently they had made a good connection. Steve even told me that Thomas asked to buy Steve’s North Face hiking boots—right off Steve’s feet!

Thomas was a scientist in his forties. This was already impressive to me because I saw Steve as a scientist type and I liked that this man was older. But there was something more going on here. I sensed Steve was trying to tell me about it in an oblique way so I found myself listening more deeply. I was confused by the boot story. “What a weird thing for him to ask to buy your boots,” I said. “Are you going to sell them?” Steve then threw another line out, hinting: “The guy can get his own.” A nonanswer, so I asked, “Then why did he want to buy yours?” Steve gave me a really long look, like I was soooo sloooow. “He wanted contact with me again,” he said, slightly embarrassed.

Steve’s embarrassment was always charming to me. He had an unusual quality that I would later see in Mona when I would compliment her writing. It must have been in the DNA. I think there was so much beauty in their extraordinary minds it made them feel uncomfortably cornered when it was acknowledged. Years later, I asked Mona why she behaved that way when she was complimented. She shook her head and with a rush of embarrassment said, “I just don’t know what to say.”

It was after he met Thomas that Steve started talking about “going through,” and how once you’re through, “there’s no going back.” I am sure in their friendship the two men were talking through the nature of truth and enlightenment. I felt that this friendship bolstered Steve, that it helped him with something very important. He would tell me a little obsessively, “No mistake is possible, there is
no
going back, once you’ve gone through, you’re through. You cannot slip back out.” I believe he was telling himself this as much as he was telling me. Steve was beating a drum, rhythmically repeating, invoking and hinting, but he would never come right out and say, “I’m going to be enlightened. It’s finally happening.” All of this is in the tradition of “The Way,” Steve would say, “It’s like a bush. You can’t ever just say what it is.… You can only point to it!” This was like Alan Watts’s remark about pointing to the truth, something like “You can point to the full moon but you cannot touch it and most people only want to suck your finger.” These were the metaphors of the time.

In the extremely refined and sophisticated traditions of the East, you would never say you are enlightened because the tradition abhors it. There are ways of thinking and using language that can turn you away from a true state of awakening. Exclaiming that you’re enlightened or going to be enlightened would be one of them. I was always excited about Steve being so remarkable, but the masculine systems of philosophy and spirituality irked me. The systemization of special words and behaviors has always seemed to me to be exclusive and, contrary to all expectation, extremely egoistical. It never touched my heart or engaged my imagination, either. Later I would be apprised that the female aspect was enlightened in a different way. This made sense to me, but no one talked about the differences then, they just said it was all the same when it really wasn’t.

It was so like Steve to imply but not actually say anything. I had to read the invisible ink in the air around him to understand what was happening. My take was that Steve was going to go “through,” and he would change and never come back. I had some fear of being left out—justifiable, I think, because there was something in Steve that wanted me to feel this fear. A big part of him wanted to get over me and leave me in the dust. But he also was deeply sincere, and that big conversation he had going on in himself since we’d first met was finally starting to accumulate mass and order. He was finally finding the right connections. And as a true fan watching on the sidelines of his life, I was as relieved and happy for him as I was worried for myself.

Months went by and then Steve called to tell me he’d moved into a small cabin in the mountains near downtown Los Gatos. It must have been early spring of ’74 when he was earning money working at Atari for a trip to India. I didn’t know anything about Atari, just that it was an up-and-coming game company. Later I heard that Steve was put on the night shift because his coworkers were uncomfortable around him. In fact, it’s been widely reported that people didn’t want to be around Steve because he smelled. That didn’t make sense to me; Steve never smelled when I was around him. I had heard that he was moved to the night shift because his coworkers found him so dark and negative. Now that made sense.

Steve invited me to the cabin for dinner. When I got there, I saw that he was living a very simple life on a big property that a divorced couple was sharing for the benefit of their children. The way Steve told me about these people’s circumstances was as if he were winking an eye at me and saying: this is what will happen between us. We’ll have a child and this is how we’ll manage it.

I wondered at such an arrangement.

Steve had the ability to see into the future. I was convinced he could and therefore was hypnotized by his ideas of things to come. I listened too deeply to his take on everything and it never occurred to me not to play into his vision. Or to alter it. Steve planted seeds in my imagination and I just didn’t think to say no or to respond with any conditions. I didn’t know I could be practical or even magical in my own right, so I just gave in. Was that ever a mistake.

Steve invited me to the Los Gatos cabin only twice. And both times I was talkative in contrast to his stone-cold distance. We were polarizing. Part of me was witnessing it all, while part of me wanted to pull us back together and smooth over our differences. But his mind was made up. He wanted to hold me at a distance. Or more likely, he wanted me to feel unsure of where I stood with him. At the cabin, he had acquired a Japanese meditation pillow, and was reading
Be Here Now.
He gave me a copy on one of those nights and signed it, “With love, Steve” in his brown calligraphy. He turned on some South Indian music that was so outrageously different than anything I had ever heard that I wondered at it even being called music.