The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (20 page)

It was on this one hallmark of an evening that I realized how unaware I was of everything he was doing during his workday. If I had not known Steve personally, I never would have paid attention to a rising star in the world of computers. If the Apple products had been ugly, I would have been even later to the show. I confess I don’t know Apple’s history except where it intersected with my own. Steve thought I lacked curiosity, but it wasn’t that. There was a level of hype around Apple and Steve that I could never key into. I found Steve interesting and beautiful for his refinement and intuition and poetic sensibilities, but I found his business personality caustic and unappealing. Still, the plastic case he was holding was concrete, and that night I began to pay more attention.

One of the most unusual changes I’d noticed in Steve was his new way of watching TV. It had been a passive thing before, but now he sat up very close to the screen and studied. All the muscles in his supersensitive face twitched along with the drama, while his eyes followed every minute action. He watched as if he was reading, as if he was processing an enormous amount of information. Completely engaged, he strained to collect and calculate, peering into the TV as if he was trying to see around doorways and through walls. To this day, I have never seen anyone watch TV as he did. Not by a long shot. At the time I felt that he used the phenomenon of the TV to accelerate his learning about the world of power and sexual relationships. I also noticed that he turned the TV and the radio off if there was messaging in the program that he didn’t want to receive. It was a kind of spiritual discernment and discipline for him. Most people vegetate, taking everything in when they watch a show, but for Steve, TV had been turned into a tool for creative self-imagining and insight into building power.

Another day that spring I noticed a piece of paper with my name on it lying on the Jobses’ dining room table. I was running through the house to the backyard when I saw it. Swinging to a stop, I picked it up, and found that Steve had had my astrological chart drawn up. There was one for him, too. Steve walked up as I was looking at it.

“Whoa,” I said. “Did you have this done?” I was surprised and also curious that he’d taken the initiative because he’d once told me that astrology wasn’t a worthy symbol-system for self-analysis.

“Yes … there’s a computer program that does astrological charts and I had them done for us.”

“Why?” was the only thing I could think to ask. As I examined the colorful diagrammatic splays I noticed that all of Steve’s planets were on the top of the horizon and that all of mine, except one, were below. I had one planet in the upper hemisphere in the 7th house.

“Wow, all your planets are above and most of mine are below.”

“What do you think it means?” he asked.

“I don’t know at all,” I said. “Do you?”

He just looked at me. In the past when Steve asked me what I thought something meant, he was kind. But this time his lack of response had a different quality. Despite what I had considered our renewed closeness, I was beginning to notice a deep unfriendliness etching into our relationship. And I was dodging it more often than I liked to admit.

With regard to the astrological charts, I soon found out that the top hemisphere meant a life out in the world while the bottom indicated a predominately introspective life. I was disappointed to hear this because I’m naturally so extroverted and was looking forward to a big life. This must have been obvious to the astrologer explaining it to me, because he took pains to point out that both ways of life can be fulfilling.

*   *   *

Perhaps Kobun was influencing Steve’s attitude toward me at the time. During my first meeting with the sensei—this was long before I went to India—he spoke to me about my clothing. He said, “Clothing is not just for you. It’s for other people who look at you, too.” He said it should be modest and simple and not offend people. Not
more
modest and simple, but modest and simple. It wasn’t a bad first teaching because clothing speaks to the intersection of the inner and outer realities—where personality and spirituality express as one and individual meets community. But I was modest in my dress and wondered why he was telling me this. It seemed so superficial. Moreover, I felt that Kobun was slightly shaming me with this information, that he was telling me that I wasn’t enough as I was. In total it alerted me that something was missing. I remember thinking,
This isn’t what we should be talking about.
More to the point,
This guy doesn’t see me. He doesn’t know who I am.
I felt angry and invisible. I didn’t know how respond to him.

Later, when I was more savvy, I wondered about the socioeconomic dynamic around Kobun. Japanese culture has a system in place to support spiritual teachers of Kobun’s stature. American culture does not. Japanese culture is highly structured, American culture is not. When Kobun came to the United States, he was surrounded by an elite group of educated, wealthy, and in some cases, famous people. It made sense: these were the people who would be naturally attracted to Zen coming into America. They were the forward thinkers, the early adopters. With these backers, Kobun had every hope and expectation that he would become the best Zen master he could possibly be. I didn’t have the markings of elite society: no wealth, no fabulous education, but I am smart and I’ve always been something of an early adopter.

I wonder now if Kobun didn’t see who I was or if he had simply decided that I wouldn’t be useful to him. I was the youngest female in a community of accomplished people five to twenty-five years my senior. I had little life experience and no promise of fame, so perhaps Kobun decided that I was not important. It wasn’t that he was unkind, but if he was looking to externals as an indicator of my capacity, I can imagine that I didn’t look like much. These are my guesses, but I still wonder why he was not awake to the seeds
inside
all the people who came to him? What kind of master was he? Why didn’t he recognize
me
?

Kobun was a worthy teacher. I returned again and again to listen to his talks, to practice zazen, and to call on his advice. The Los Altos Zendo had a huge door with a wide opening. I felt welcome. Indeed, people had told me, “You get what is going on here.” I am sure I was at the right place at the right time. But I would never receive any kind of real teachings from this teacher. Eventually I’d understood this because of how he treated me compared to Steve.

When I had returned from India, Kobun told me, “You weren’t human before you left but now you are. What happened over there?” There were many times that he asked me, “What happened in India?” Repeating and repeating, “You weren’t human before.” He would laugh and sort of tease me when he said this, but he seemed genuinely curious. I didn’t know how I was supposed to answer such an ignorant question. I tried to respond politely, while inwardly I thought his frank views were cruel.

Years later, a spiritual teacher told me that Kobun had not worked with me because, as she said, “He simply did not recognize you as an American female destined for enlightenment in this lifetime. He’d never seen it in your form before.” At the time, however, I didn’t know enough to move on from Kobun because I didn’t know how to ask the right questions. People who know how to articulate good questions amaze me. It denotes layers of experience that I didn’t have back then. Jim Black—Trout—was such a person. A lay monk at the Zendo (he was the person who got me straight about Kobun’s name on my first evening there), he looked like my idea of Little John in Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men. He worked with children, had a jovial round belly, and a face that was sane, kind, and intelligent.

Trout had a knack for getting the details straight. One day he asked me, “Who of the two of you, Steve or you, Chrisann, found the Zendo first?” I told him the truth; that we had found it completely independent of each other, at about the same time. He then told me when he had asked Steve the same question, that Steve told him that he had found it and brought me there. The lie was typical of Steve. (I just didn’t know it yet.) And questioning was typical of Trout. That he would even think to ask me the question after Steve had given his answer alerted me that he was giving us equal consideration. Moreover, that he didn’t necessarily buy into Steve’s authority. Amazing.

*   *   *

One day Kobun talked to me about Steve, telling me that he, Kobun, had always wanted a student who was strong. He emphasized the word “strong,” at the back of his throat. With his lips curled outward and his chest puffed high as he held his arms away from his side, Kobun looked like he was crowing. He told me, “No man who ever went to Tassajara could possibly be strong.” But now he would have a leader! Kobun was keenly aware of having a special student in Steve. “I have never had a student master the information in so short a time. Three months!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide, his mouth dramatically elongated. “It is the shortest time possible for anyone to understand.” His happiness was thick and evident.

I have always liked it when men confide in me from their worlds, and I was truly happy for Kobun. However, on this day and in this conversation, I had a feeling that something wasn’t right. Kobun was gloating. Why was he comparing Steve to the zazen practioners from Tassajara? At some level, even though I knew I had been ignored and passed over by Kobun, I wasn’t jealous because I loved Steve and his daring-to-fully-be qualities as much as Kobun did. But as Kobun and I walked through his house that day, stopping and starting as he exclaimed this and that about Steve, I wondered what might be under his communication. Why was he sharing this level of their relationship with me? He never had before.

An addendum to this conversation came a few months later. Kobun told me that when Steve was painfully ambivalent about going forward with Apple, he said:
Just do it
. Kobun spoke with bright urgency, making sure I understood his pivotal position of importance. “I said this to him!” he repeated. And here it was, Kobun was coming to me and he wanted me to understand that he was the one who’d given the boy wings. And here, in this conversation, I picked up on the ever so slight change in the teacher’s power and position. Steve had already flown the coop, and Kobun was expressing the loss of his importance, and to me of all people. More to the point, he may have been lamenting Steve’s lack of acknowledgment. I would see this play out badly over time.

*   *   *

After I returned from India I realized that Steve was entering the world stage through two bastions of male power from two hemispheres. Through Apple, it was the value system of American big business: big money, big stakes, big players, and big know-how. Through Kobun, it was twenty-five hundred years of Buddhism translated by way of Japan, home to one of the most refined cultures our world has ever known.

Steve’s trajectory was being fueled by some combination of highly refined plutonium and a royal jelly nutrient-rich superfood that made for the highest-grade energy possible. Of course, he was young and could easily put in ten- to sixteen-hour days, six to seven days a week. And at least once a week in the evenings he was also being supercharged and focused by a Zen master’s more metaphysical practices for building power. East fueled West and West fueled East. Steve was some new kind of shaman, walking between the worlds. He must have seemed like a boy wonder to them all as he wove into himself the business of the day, the esoteric teachings of the night.

I heard people say that Steve was just lucky in the beginning. But I didn’t think it was luck, even back then. Not only because Steve had told me it was going to happen, but because I saw how some of it unfolded. I believe that in the beginning it was Robert Friedland who, in a very intentional way, tied the spiritual-esoteric dimension to business. And I think that together he and Steve wanted to see how far they could go. And I am certain that they collaborated and compared notes about this. Both of them used food and cleansing diets in combination with spiritual practices to open up and build consciousness. Fasting and meditation is the time-honored approach that creates the intense practical alchemy required for massive change. I did enough fasting to know that it created heightened awareness and new insight. But while Indian lore contains cautionary tales about not adapting spiritual insight and practices for worldly gain, this kind of power building for ambition is not that common in the West. Steve and Robert may have been alert to the dangers, but in the face of such exciting opportunity, perhaps they simply didn’t care. Maybe the point was to be an outrageous worldly success by any means possible.

Beyond those times with Robert, Steve’s work was greatly furthered with a similar kind of collaboration with Kobun. Except that Kobun’s spiritual development was mind-bogglingly more advanced. It had to have been a very rare thing in the history of the world, for a full-on, bona fide spiritual master to help a young entrepreneur succeed with a world-changing technology. What I saw was that through Kobun’s vast capacity and Steve’s warriorlike ability to develop his business acumen, Steve was becoming unstoppable—streamlined, less personal, and highly charged. Pure function.

So what were the ingredients that made for Steve’s “luck?” I think it was a confluence of aesthetics: the broad-based usefulness and the capacity of the microchip, combined with Steve’s deep need to be acknowledged. Then there was his super-food diet, a Zen master in his back pocket, and his willingness to be shot through the cultural equivalent of a cannon onto the world stage. This East/West combination seemed to have offered Steve the most delicious sense of purpose. And in the beginning at least, the honest blend of his genius and humility seemed to deepen and flower. I witnessed Steve gear up for power, moving through one level after another, literally looking over his own shoulder to see the remarkable stages of his becoming—the once hapless marionette turning into a prime player.

THIRTEEN

LIFE ON TWO LEVELS