The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (24 page)

When we lived in Colorado I saved up and bought a $40 reflector telescope from the back of a cereal box. Life changed at our house when it arrived. My father would spend one evening a week focusing and refocusing the telescope to get a look at the night skies. Everyone got lots of turns looking through the telescope, and our whole neighborhood of parents and children would join us on our back patio for hours of viewing. Brilliant Jupiter and her four large moons thrilled me. Mars was a ruddy red. And then there were the perfect crystalline patterns from the meteorites that bit into the surface of the moon thousands of years ago and had exploded outward for what must have been literally thousands of miles—the visual equivalent of a symphony.

My father had a sense of grace and when he came into a room I could swear I saw the lights turn a blue hue, which fed my spirit and made me feel safe. Yet I also knew that there was something not so straightforward about him. When he talked about infinity it seemed like the knife’s endless cutting didn’t always expand his vision as much as drive it into sad, truncated corners. Children may think their fathers hold up the sky, but I discovered early on that there was a sense of intellectual chaos in the one I got. It seems to me that we all tried to help him with the lifting, but eventually the effort made us, a house of five females, disappointed and angry.

My father raised four daughters and cherished all of us, but I think I irritated him more than the rest of my sisters put together. Instead of supporting my creativity, he was often embarrassed by it. He dismissed my art supplies as “cancers,” ignored my work, and yelled at me in front of my friends when he found us in a darkened room taking turns wrapping each other up in paper and twine to experience “breaking out.” It was a seventies thing. To us it was harmless and full of hilarity. But to my father it was messy and utterly incomprehensible. It made him mad. Another time, my dad arrived home from a business trip. It was early (he had taken a red-eye) and he came in to find Steve and me sleeping together on the floor. He didn’t say a thing but later I heard him telling his friends, “If anyone had told me two years ago that I would find one of my daughters sleeping with a boy in the middle of the living room floor, I would have thrown him through the window.” As a teen I rendered my dear dad outraged and mute, in turns.

My father wanted a daughter who was compliant and who dressed in matching sweater sets. But I was out in a wilderness, experimenting with what interested me because I was never happier than when I was on the outer edge of new experience. I couldn’t comply, and having my dad not meet me in my teenage world meant that I never had the advantage of being able to confide in a man for whom my best interest was in his best interest. Sadly, all this resulted in the kind of miscommunication that created betrayals between us. And when I was twenty-two, and my father saw that Steve was disrespectful toward him and dangerously unconscious of me, we weren’t able to talk it through.

*   *   *

It stuns me now to imagine the world in which my mother lived. When my family was still living in Nebraska, she inappropriately confided to us that she would be able to legally divorce our dad once we got to California. As late as 1968, it was illegal for a woman to divorce her husband in Nebraska. We girls knew by that time that she didn’t like him very much. I think her sense of powerlessness to free herself from the marriage may have triggered the onset of her inevitable mental illness. My father, for his part, repeated to us a number of times while I was in my late teens, “I should never have let your mother go to college. It gave her ideas.” This confounds me for its cluelessness by a man with four daughters in the time of burgeoning feminism. My father would later catch up and understand in spades, but the seventies were a time of slow awakening for the stalwarts who kept to their secret alliances inside male-dominated companies. Also, he had a point: by 1970 some in the feminist movement had lost the threads of its greater purposes and had so radicalized out of total frustration that they were basically directing women to throw the babies out with the bathwater.

I didn’t really have enough experience to understand the Women’s Movement or why someone would say, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” It was a hilarious statement that begged to be understood. I also didn’t know what to make of it when I overheard Kobun finishing a phone call in which he bemoaned the qualities of American women. I stood at the edge of the door waiting as Kobun, kneeling on the floor at the far end of his office, laughed and said something like, “Oh, they are not like these
American women
.…” implying the superiority of some other group of women who were more deferential to men. Perhaps he had intended to signal me since he knew I was standing within earshot.

I witnessed many such things long before I had enough experience to understand their implications, much less respond to them. But one thing was certain: during the seventies the antagonism between the sexes was crazy-pronounced and weighed in no one’s interest—not the men, not the women, and definitely not the children. I might have been more of a casualty of the times were it not for my eventually meeting a couple of spiritual teachers who helped me resolve the polarizing perspectives I’d grown up with. Now I like to think that the real truth behind the discordant seventies is that it was all a work in progress. Or better yet, like the discombobulated strains of an orchestra warming up before a performance. Perhaps the period of my coming-of-age was just the messy beginnings of the good coming into form.

I’m a careful optimist. Later, my heart would be exalted to hear the Dalai Lama proclaim to a group of Nobel laureates at the Vancouver Peace Summit that “the Western woman will save the world.” Though I personally don’t think it will necessarily just be the Western women to save us—there are some mighty fine examples of girls and women coming forward from the East and the Middle East and Africa—I nevertheless know that sometimes we have to work a long while before a worthy vision is anchored into the world. But that it will come and that it will be worth all the work, I have no doubt.

*   *   *

Having lived in a largely female household for most of my life, moving in with Steve and Daniel was a big change for me. I liked sharing the Presidio house with them. At least in the beginning. I enjoyed the way they’d analyze things to get at the gold nugget of truth, and then erupt into helpless laughter for how crazy the world was. Steve and Daniel radiated a refined sweetness in their friendship, and their conversations centered around technology and enlightenment and food. I remember one comment that Steve made regarding the best use of personal energy: “To totally express yourself is to refine. To refrain from self-expression is to build power from within.” Wow.

Daniel added a cheerful presence to the house. Like a child, he took infinite delight not only in what interested him, but in the meta level of
how
it interested him. And as Steve became more preoccupied at work, I shared hours at the house with Daniel and we got to know each other better. He taught himself to play the piano. I cooked and baked bread, and made myself clothes from cheap Indian tapestries I’d found at Cost Plus stores. The seventies experienced a resurgence in attention to homemaking skills. After the ludicrously mechanized, industrial ideals of the fifties, the sixties and seventies ushered in earthier, healthier practices. This was the counterculture that I embraced. Steve couldn’t have cared less about this aspect of my creativity; he tuned in with a different kind of attention. But Daniel often expressed a wonderful appreciation of my sewing, baking, and cooking. He seemed to like everything I did and expressed amazement that I could accomplish things without recipes and patterns, telling me I had a “native genius.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it sounded great to me. I don’t think it ever occurred to Daniel that I actually had no idea how to follow a recipe or a pattern. My mind was so impatient when it came to rules that I was continually working everything out anew.

While I was never attracted to Daniel, I could be charmed by him. Steve acknowledged my creativity in an entirely different way, always more interested in studying my approach to things. Daniel simply made me feel seen in ways Steve never really cared about. But this was only part of the picture. I would soon find out that Steve and Daniel’s relationship was based on the most idiotic level of entitlement I had ever seen close-up. I found them chock-full of so many negative female images and projections it might have been cute for being such a caricature, if only I had been endowed with an outrageous sense of humor. In truth, Steve and Daniel played off the very best and very worst qualities in one another. I was often amazed by their lightness while simultaneously being stunned at their insensitivity. Maybe the opposite was true for them of me. I never thought to ask. I just watched them bond as if they were absurdist insiders in the life’s-a-great-big-joke club. As time passed I began to understand that all the joking was the main, if not the only, avenue of exchange between them. And it became very predictable.

Eventually I would figure out that Steve was a role model and maybe even a father figure to Daniel Kottke, not unlike Robert Friedland was to Steve. And though all three of them were equal as friends, I think a sense of hierarchy was inevitable because Robert (and then Steve) had a thirst for power, whereas Daniel was ambivalent about it, more inclined to align with those he perceived to have power than to hold the reins of it himself. It was for this reason that I thought of Daniel as the acolyte in that brotherhood.

After about a month of all of us living together, Steve began to exclaim that “men are just so much more interesting than women.” And then Daniel followed suit and repeated the same line and sentiment. It was a dismissive statement, but if it was meant to destabilize and disable me, it didn’t. Instead I just quietly wondered why Steve would take pride in such thinking. Was this some kind of wonky stage of male maturation? Later it dawned on me that brotherhoods, in their less developed states, are about building consensus, celebrating sameness, and jousting to sharpen wits. It’s an arrangement that offsets existential and personal insecurity. And it glorifies manhood to ensure what men, or at least some men, see as security in the world. Steve was looking for sameness soon after Apple started; he seemed to have lost sight of the fact that my value to him was because I was not the same.

This
sameness
would gather momentum. In the years that followed the second coming of Steve at Apple, I began to notice that the world had been infiltrated by an army of Steve look-alikes: black turtlenecks, buzz cuts, John Lennon glasses, and blue jeans. Steve’s European casual look was being adopted by men in every American city. It was cultivated simplicity and it was cool. I now believe Steve had an almost unfathomable desire to see himself reflected back. And so it happened. “The Steves” were everywhere. For me, though, it was jarring. This bony, shaved-head look of his seemed to me to have had its origin in Paul Jobs. From my perspective, Steve strove relentlessly for approval from men, Paul being the first. Replicating Paul’s militaristic look was part of that.

*   *   *

What I really wanted and needed at that time was to have a quiet home and be loved and appreciated for who I was. I was just getting to the point where I no longer recalled the sickening feeling of my mother’s uneasy logic and mental illness. Not remembering how my mother thought was a milestone for me, and I began to have whole evenings at home where I could focus and read deeply for my own enrichment. I was starting to heal, a process that seemed to make something in Steve and Daniel want to throw me off center, while they constantly quipped and critiqued me for not being centered enough. I was in a delicate phase and I couldn’t stabilize it in that house with the many disruptions and slights.

Daniel Kottke, like Steve, always had great confidence in his opinions. They both seemed to perceive the idealized versions of themselves as the whole truth and then evaluate others less generously. I think of it as a little glitch in the programming because I think Daniel, at his core, was not motivated by unkindness. The problem for me in that house was that the guys perceived themselves as the gold standard and me as something corrupted and corruptible. I took it personally, which gave them more to laugh at.

Daniel liked the intellectual traditions that developed from the spirituality of the seventies and for as long as I have known him he has always explored ideas and tried them on, ever wanting to entertain new possibilities. But he could be found laughing at the wrong things and would often miss the full truth of a situation because, like so many science types in the Bay Area, he could be disconnected from the emotional implications of his insights. We were in the kitchen of the Presidio house one day when Daniel said to me, “You were a courtesan in China in a former life!” blasting a laugh in my face and then curling inward like a conch shell, back into his bright, smug interior. I didn’t know what a courtesan was exactly, or what he was fully implying. Before the ease of Google, I brooded over the notion. It was a statement of ridicule and got under my skin and stayed there for years. (Now in response to that, I would say my chosen archetype would be more like the four-armed Saraswati: the powerful creative feminine aspect in balance with her consort, the realized male aspect, without compromise or prostitution by either. Just fullness of being.)

Much potential was flowering and flowing at that house—so much vision and promise—but my efforts to speak and be understood were too often co-opted for a laugh. When I told Steve that Kobun had once told me that “Steve has a very deep ignorance,” Steve said he considered it a compliment. He was building himself into an enlightened warrior, so instead of heeding the warning, he decided that one deep ignorance wasn’t such a big problem in the grand scheme. At this time, fewer and fewer things made him stop and reflect, unless it was about another’s failure to think as he thought. Sometimes I would go for days without talking because Steve could turn anything I said against me; my only recourse was silent revolt. This made Steve and Daniel laugh more patronizingly, pretending that they understood. As time went by I began to shrink and disappear (even to myself) in equal proportion to Steve’s growing arrogance.