The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (13 page)

On my second visit to the cabin, Steve once again asked me to look into a candle for some mystical insight, but this time he wasn’t sweet about it. I felt like I was being tested in a mean way because he bore down on me, repeating, “What do you see? What do you see?” Sadly, I could see no higher level of reality. What I saw instead was that he rather enjoyed that I wasn’t
getting it
. I hated his big fat Houdini act.

Until this time Steve had wanted to include me in every adventure but no more. The load of our unconscious on the truth of our love was overwhelming and infuriating to both of us. Steve blamed me, and that indicated a lack of spiritual development on his part. So my feelings about staring into the flame were probably right. It was a cheesy parlor trick: all light and no love, patience, or compassion. Steve’s heart had become negative toward me and he used the spiritual techniques as power tools for one-upmanship.

*   *   *

Steve had grown up in remarkable nonconformity to the rest of the world, because he was so ahead intellectually and intuitively, but so behind emotionally. As he pursued his destiny with an uncompromising commitment, there wasn’t a single misstep he could take that wouldn’t eventually come around to serving the greater goal of his emergence. It was going to happen. Ultimately, I’m pretty sure it came down to one remarkable friend, Robert Friedland, to finally usher Steve into his own remarkable life.

I never knew Robert well. He was Steve’s friend. They had met at Reed. Nevertheless, I have shared some of the more profound times of my life in Robert’s company as a result of his assistance to me. Robert is an extremely bright, ambitious guy, and I would say that in the seventies he was a seeker in the tradition of someone like Ram Dass. He had started out exploring the intellectual traditions of consciousness, then moved to LSD, and from there became a student of Neem Karoli Baba and the mysticism found in the East.

At around nineteen years of age, Robert had gone to prison because he was caught in some kind of drug operation. He went on to spend time in a low-security facility, where he was constantly in trouble with the guards for teaching yoga to the inmates. I know all of this and more because Robert, who was named Sita Ram when I met him, is a master storyteller of his own antics.

When I met Robert he was a smooth youth in his mid-twenties, of average height and build, with long blond hair. Robert was handsome, with a cultivated calmness and a humorist’s killer instinct. His large, crystalline eyes would open and close with slow, deliberate blinks and when he told stories, he’d speak in light syllables that created the impression that here was a guy who loved hearing himself talk, and was worth listening to as well. He held his head level with self-awareness, and for all intents and purposes, he looked to me like a Caucasian Krishna.

Robert sat down with me on his farm one day and told me the story of his prison stay. Apparently a deal had been brokered for his release if he would go to college, get straight As, and fulfill extracurricular demands to keep him focused on a new life. It was an appropriate second chance for a really bright kid who had gotten caught up in things over his head. He took the opportunity, which is how he came to be at Reed College. I think he met Steve when he was running for class president (and winning) as a part of his parole obligations.

Robert was older than all of his classmates at Reed. When I knew him, I had the feeling that he had a huge capacity for life. It wasn’t just that he was super bright, it was that he had a deep sense of humanity and a meta-level awareness of other people’s circumstances. In short, he was someone who could truly meet Steve as he was—the orphan in all his princely constellations—and still have room for more.

I suspect that Robert and Steve connected immediately as kindred souls. And I can imagine how they must have quickened into fast recognition of one another’s bold, uncommon intelligence. And even though Steve and Robert were equals as friends, I have always felt that Robert had an aspect of care for Steve that was genuinely fatherlike. It would have been like Robert to step into a role after having seen a need.

Beyond this, I saw that the two would come to identify a shared desire and ability to strategize for elite levels of success, in part through the uses of esoteric knowledge found in the East. And I don’t in any way believe that it was by accident or dumb luck that Steve through Apple and Robert through mountaintop mining would both build multibillion dollar businesses within twenty years of meeting.

Back when their facial hair was soft, Robert encouraged Steve to go to India to meet Neem Karoli Baba. India! The golden land on the other side of the world, where Gautama Buddha was born. Where Jesus is said to have walked in the lost years, and where Gandhi developed satyagraha. India! It is one of the few places on earth where both the gods and the goddesses are still visible, complex, and in relationship with each other. It is a place where a huge world-creator type like Steve might well receive something he needed.

After India, Steve would toss aside all therapeutic models and reorganize everything under a spiritual rubric. From my observations, it was in India that the cosmological switch got flipped in Steve. And even though Neem Karoli Baba had died before Steve got there, he was touched by something, because by the time I saw him again, Steve knew his place in the universe.

The morning of the day Steve left for India he came to my house to say good-bye and to give me a $100 bill. He had made a bit of money at Atari and he just wanted to give me this gift. I hadn’t seen him in a while and was standing with my new boyfriend at the entrance to the apartment when Steve walked up. Steve touched my forehead to indicate that I was his, which I found outrageous. When I objected to the money, Steve demanded I not play the game of rejecting it. Steve was nothing if not ceremonial in his passages and this money was about him, not me, so I took it and thanked him. The next time I saw him would be four months later after he had returned to the United States and was convalescing at Robert’s farm an hour to the south of Portland.

NINE

ALL ONE FARM

Laura Schylur and I decided to celebrate our high school graduation with a three-week road trip. We weren’t sure what our graduations meant to us, but we knew that a celebration was in order, so we talked about what we would do and then made the money to do it. I put new tires on my ivory Chevrolet and we took off with a screech, happy to be leaving it all behind before returning to waitress jobs and junior college in the fall.

Everything was planned when, about two weeks before our trip, Steve wrote out of the blue to say he had returned from India and was reacclimating to the United States somewhere in Oregon. I was delighted to hear from him and wrote back saying that Laura and I would soon be traveling through the northwest ourselves. To my surprise, Steve sent another letter inviting us to visit.

Laura and I drove north from San Francisco up the California coast on Highway 1. Our first stop: Eureka, California. It was a long drive made longer by our decision to take the coastal route, where we passed picturesque fishing towns as charming as any Welsh seaport the imagination can conjure. I had read a lot of Dylan Thomas, which is why, I suppose, the notion of the Welsh seaport came to mind. Those outposts of human endeavor colored our drive in every sense of the word, and they turned me inside out with aching wonder about a kind of life I would never know.

The northern California shoreline offers a rugged uncommon beauty. Pristine and wild with riptides that tear at the land, with waves that crash their sloppy magnificence all over craggy cliffs and sharp jutting rocks. We stopped to swim when we found a bank of sandy access to the water’s edge with a safe place to pull off the road and park. I had been taking cold showers all that spring which enabled me to walk straight into the ocean without anything but pure lust for its bracing coldness. This was a new kind of freedom, like sprouting wings or, something just as fantastic, swimming bare skinned into the northern Pacific as if it were temperate.

In Eureka we stayed with both of our older sisters, who lived there with their boyfriends and attended Humboldt State. We visited for four days, taking hikes in the damp wilderness, walking around the cute college town, and spending good time with family before setting off for Oregon, All One Farm, and Steve. If we stopped overnight in a camping ground on the way, I don’t remember now; I just remember that from Humboldt we turned inland, and that it was a relief to trade the winding road of the coastal highway for the ease and speed of the open freeway. I also remember that it was a small thrill to cross the state line into Oregon.

Getting close to our destination by midafternoon, but not sure of the directions, Laura and I took turns calling the farm from gas station pay phones. A woman named Abha always answered—Abha with the lovely ethereal voice—and she would hand the phone over to her husband, Robert, who would direct us from our newest lost location. It didn’t matter that we called six times, Robert was patient and kind each time he spoke to us. Eventually, we found our way.

We could hear the gravel kick out from under our fat tires as we drove down the long drive to All One Farm. We followed some tire tracks under a hood of deepest greens, until suddenly everything opened into broad daylight and we saw a bright expanse of burnished silver rolling hills, dotted with dark pockets of lacy trees, and a sky of confident blue overhead.

Laura was driving when we reached the farm. She sat with her left leg tucked under her, leaning forward to peer carefully ahead on the long, cool, driveway. Her feminine conscientiousness always made me wonder what it felt like to be her. With her big sometimes care-laden blue eyes and her high sweet voice, she didn’t look as if she could get angry. And she couldn’t. Not convincingly, anyway. (She would eventually become a kindergarten teacher.) Laura was a large-boned, well-proportioned young woman with a little girl’s sweetness in her beautiful face. She could have been the immortal inspiration to a German clockmaker of an earlier time. Maybe her great-great-grandmother had been such a muse. Laura was bright-faced, intricately watchful, towering, a little unsure of herself because she ran so tall, too big to hide. But that’s where the laughter came in, like waves of delicate chimes at the top of every hour. No choice but to crest and fall into laughing at it all. Laura and I loved to laugh. And we laughed a lot.

We parked where we were told—just north of a big tree—and got out to stretch. We looked at each other from over the top of the car with raised eyebrows. Laura was teasing me, wiggling her brows up and down. She knew my stomach was filled with butterflies to see Steve again. It felt good to shut the motor off and repressurize to the weightless expanse of the great outdoors. The air was fragrant with fresh smells of nature and bright with the sun overhead. I still remember the smells. Looking around at our home for the next week, we saw an old, weathered barn, a large vegetable garden, and a big cow that we’d later find out had come along with the purchase of the farm. The main house was to the south.

It was Robert Friedland who greeted us. He went over everything about being on the farm and sort of humorously laid down the law: we were to get up at dawn to meditate under the big tree with everyone else, and we were to help with the work. Robert, who was then called Sita Ram, was nicer than I expected, but I was on my best behavior because I’d only met him a few times (and briefly), when he came with Steve to the café where I worked, and at Reed. I assured Robert that Steve had told me about the requirements and that we would be very happy to contribute in every way we could,
and
to meditate, too.

Robert then pointed to the barn down the hill and told us there would be a small room to the right in the back of the barn’s main hall where we could stay. From my dyslexic blur I straightened up and got myself to suss out right from left, and we then proceeded, lugging our backpacks and sleeping bags.

We found Steve resting in his blue sleeping bag in the center of the main room of the cavernous barn. He looked terrible. Worse than I had ever seen him. “Hi,” he groaned out. “I’m sick with parasites.” He was so ill and he was also reserved. I sensed that he was ambivalent about my being there, and it made me a little mad because he had invited me. I wanted him to be happy to see me, but he didn’t show it if he was. Nonetheless, he was kind enough, and encouraged us to run around and meet everyone.

Laura and I were both shy but we made our way up to the kitchen to meet Abha. In the early evening of that first day we helped lay colorful blankets on the grass in preparation for the dinner. We also brought out huge bowls of salad, which everyone ate with chopsticks, sitting on the blankets picnic fashion. I was curious to find that there were three or four different salads served at every meal, and a strong emphasis on zwieback breads and almond butter over peanut butter. The whole farm was vegan, with a focus on nonmucus forming foods. The Mucusless Diet! Its helps the emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual bodies integrate, and this place was serious about it. About eighteen people sat down for dinner that night—some who lived and worked there and some, like us, who were there for a short stay. Steve was too sick to join the group for the meal, so I felt freer to meet people on my own terms. The conversation moved like popcorn and I enjoyed the fond familiarity and the cajoling about the day’s work. I was delighted to be sitting with these people, each of whom was under thirty.

That first night, after the dishes had been done, Laura and I returned to the barn and laid out our sleeping bags. I was deeply aware that Steve was sleeping less than twenty feet away from me. Laura and I whispered about the day so as not to disturb him. Then she fell asleep and the barn came to life with miniscule and unfamiliar sounds: little animals, creaking timbers, and the quiet shuffles of people coming in at all hours. I heard them moving about as they got ready for bed, and imagined them lighting tiny candles, and meditating, in the transparent windswept building. I lay awake for a long time feeling the massive structure as if it were an extension of my own body.