The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (6 page)

One day Steve told me that Lew’s father drank and beat Lew. Steve had always made a big deal out of the fact that he never had been spanked or hit by his parents in any way; once again, I believe this was important to him because something similar may have happened to his father, Paul.

Lew’s situation seemed to have a tremendous impact on Steve. It turned him into something of a healer. In all the time I knew Steve this was a role I rarely saw him take on. But he had a huge capacity for empathy when it came to men’s stories. I think that Lew and Steve recognized the reality of male brutality together, bonding in the brotherhood of a terrible shared knowledge.

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My best friend in high school was Laura Schylur. A dancer, musician, and poet, she had a beautiful childlike face. Laura also had a quality of being different—perhaps because she, like me, was dyslexic. Laura and I would hang out together in nature, in the apricot orchards that were so abundant in our area back then, and in the hills behind St. Joseph’s Seminary close to her home. Together we learned to play music on recorders, later on flutes: folk songs, ballads, Beethoven, Bach, and John Lennon’s “Oh My Love,” which was the song that Lennon wrote after going through primal therapy with Yoko Ono. The tenderness of this simple song touched something important in me; it offered a vision of the kind of emotional intimacy I yearned to know with a man.

Laura wasn’t happy about my relationship with Steve, and not just because he took up so much of my time. Steve was dismissive of her and she resented it. Laura remembers the way I once ran up and told her that Steve and his friend, Woz, were making blue boxes, and according to her I announced that “Steve is a geeeeeeenius!” I sort of remember this, too, and I can picture Laura’s response. Unimpressed. Deflated.

Which brings me to Steve Wozniak. Woz. Whenever Woz and Steve met up, they connected like excited children. They’d be so thrilled by their discoveries and breakthroughs, so lifted by the helium of their excitement, that they’d literally jump up and down and all around each other, speaking in sharp, rapid bursts, hysterical yelps, and deep-throated laughs. Their sounds were unnerving to me, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. They’d drive me away from the garage and out of earshot within seconds because the pitch was just so awful.

Woz didn’t like sharing Steve with me. Likely they both preferred having me out of the garage when they were working together. But this really wasn’t the problem. Nor was it the genius that they rightly shared in all of its explosive joy. No, there was something else about it that jarred my nervous system. If there’s ever a musical adaptation of Apple, say an opera, there should be dystopian scenes in the famous garage as ground zero, where sound mangles, torques, warps, and then completely tears the physical world of time and space away from the human dimension. Because this is what it felt like to me. When Steve and Woz were excited like this it was as if they were ripping the fabric of the universe. Now I wonder if this was the precursor to what people would later refer to as Steve’s reality distortion field.

Woz was older than Steve and I, and already in college, but he seemed younger in many ways. He had no use for me, a girl, and I must admit I found him alarmingly unattractive and couldn’t figure out how to talk to him. He wasn’t fun or friendly to me. When one of us found the other with Steve, we’d both be disappointed in some quiet way. We were the two most important people to Steve, and yet we had nothing to say to each other.

Woz and I once shared each other’s company on a road trip to see Steve in Portland after he had started at Reed College. We left hours before dawn and when the sun came up near Shasta I commented on how beautiful the clouds were: pinks and yellows and peaches climbing in a fresh blue morning sky. His response? A flat “I’ve seen better.” I remember our stopping at a gas station—this was the same trip—and hurrying back from the bathroom because I had a feeling that Woz was thinking about driving off without me. He did leave me once, at the San Francisco airport. Woz had taken Steve to the airport and I had gone along to see him off. Woz drove away and left me there, claiming later he’d had the impression that I was flying out with Steve. No doubt about it: Woz was ornery then.

Yet for all this, I so admired the monster prankster in these two. They were off-the-charts funny. There was an infectious, pure joy running through them, especially when they would do things that were illegal, but so brilliantly conceived that no one could catch up to them. I remember the time Woz drove to L.A. on Highway 5 months before it had opened to the public. No police. No traffic. No speed limit. No problem. And there was Woz at 150 miles an hour. Then there were the blue boxes, devices that got around having to pay for phone calls. Woz and Steve weren’t the first inventors, but they did figure out how to make and improve them. These guys had a gangster brilliance. And there was something exhilarating and enlarging about their teamwork.

A couple of years after Apple had started Woz asked me, through Steve, if I would help him decorate his apartment. It was a surprising request because I knew he had never really liked me. Yet it confirmed to me what everyone knows, that Woz didn’t have any malice in his heart. Steve and I went over to Woz’s place, where I gave him ideas on color and suggestions on where to place some plants. I felt awkward about it, but he was affable and considerate. I think he had asked me over because he was just becoming interested in women—or maybe
a
woman—and wanted to impress her with his good taste. Maybe, too, he wanted to make amends.

That was the day he showed me his Dial-A-Joke machine. As I remember, it was just a big clunky tape machine connected to the phone to generate nerdy science-guy puns. The jokes were funny only because they were so silly. Silly punny jokes are like the verbal equivalent of slapstick—unexplainably funny. Woz has a gift for this. When he showed me the joke machine, he told me that he sometimes answered the phone and delivered the joke live, pretending he was the recording and then surprising the caller with a live response. That machine was like a prototype for online dating searches; Woz actually used it to attract his first wife, who must have been impressed by his funny, goofy guy puns. So there was real sweetness to him after all.

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Steve told me many times, and in oblique ways, that he was terrified he would “lose his humanity in the business world.” Sometimes he would couch it in terms of his concern for Woz. “I’m so afraid Woz is going to lose himself in the business world,” he’d tell me, widening his eyes dramatically. He never got specific about how or why this might happen and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask questions about. It was too big for language.

Steve’s relationship with time and the future—and just about everything else—was different from that of nearly anyone I ever knew. I gradually became aware that he knew his destiny in big ways and that his intuition had given him very specific information about his life way before he would live it. He knew, for example, that he would be in a relationship with Joan Baez, the folk singer and Dylan’s famous former girlfriend. He knew that he would be a multimillionaire. He told me many times that he would die in his early forties; then one day, when we were in our early forties, he changed the prediction to his mid-forties. When he had become a billionaire but hadn’t died by his mid-forties, I remember him repeating, “I am living on borrowed time,” as if the still-young shaman was angling to carve out a bit more future for himself.

Yet as much as he knew some odd and precise details, Steve was in the dark about others. It was only later, as I was looking at our sleeping daughter in my arms, that I remembered how fearful Steve had been of losing his humanity. That’s when my understanding gelled; it wasn’t Woz who would lose his humanity, it was Steve. Woz, who had a solid, loving bond with both of his own parents, would be fine. Steve had been talking about himself and he’d known it all along. It was always like him to approach matters of personal concern in riddles. I picture him now as a blind man tapping words out with a white stick—out beyond his feet, out beyond the present—communicating between his false and real selves, wanting to confide in me, to not be alone in the mixture of the terrible fear and irrepressible joy of such a rare destiny.

FIVE

CROSSCURRENTS

My name, Chrisann, comes from the flower, the chrysanthemum. It’s the symbol for transformation in many cultures, although in very different ways. In European cultures, the chrysanthemum is seen as the doorway out of this world, and so it is given at funerals. In the ancient Hindu sacred system, the 8th chakra that is above the head is a multiple petal chrysanthemumlike flower. A doorway again—this time between the physical body and the higher realms of self. Japanese and Chinese cultures place a very high value on transcending the ego and in these cultures the chrysanthemum means long life and joy, as it’s a symbol for integrating the spirit and soul into the body for true happiness in earthly life. In Japan, the Imperial Order of the Chrysanthemum is the highest Order of Chivalry and the emblem and seal of the emperor himself, wherein this symbol is no less than the full realization of the divine in the human, and the human in the divine. My name, given to me by my mother, was like a blessing in difficult circumstances. It was a bright rose window of a name. And I was going to need it.

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I was born in 1954 in Dayton, Ohio, the first born in a new generation of the Brennan clan. I grew up with three siblings: one older half sister, Kathy, and two younger sisters, Jamie and Linda. We were a beautiful little family in Ohio, full of the promise of new beginnings. We lived in a big house at the end of a road that was bordered by a deep, wooded area. Surrounding us were grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts. You could see a cornfield from our front porch, in the middle of which was a hundred-year-old schoolhouse with its bell still hanging intact. We’d ice skate in the flooded woods in wintertime. In summer we’d make forts and pretend worlds in the trees. On Sundays we’d sit down to big family dinners, and on holidays we’d go to church. Easter was new dresses with matching bonnets. Christmas was ridiculously lush.

When I was seven, my father was promoted and we moved away from Ohio and our extended family to Colorado Springs. My father was transferred two more times after that: to Nebraska and finally California. I was twelve when we moved to Sunnyvale, California. My parents would separate within the year. They would divorce soon after.

My father, James Richard Brennan, had been a handsome and talented athlete in his youth: a crack diver and football star in high school, a competitive boxer in the navy, and a skier until he was sixty-nine. At eighteen he went into the service and never went on to college. But with an affable disposition and the training he received in the navy, he was able to build a successful white-collar career and provide us with a good life.

In his youth my father looked like Marlon Brando, with mystical eyes, a powerful jaw, and a face as open as a big full moon. In older age, he had white hair and laugh lines communicating a sensitive nature that belied a broken nose never reset after a navy boxing match. My father had grown up in a rough neighborhood at a rough time and carried pent-up alarm under the surface of his muscular frame. He was kind, yet extremely defensive, and he set high value on being polite and considerate. That’s probably why he was ever mindful to keep his real thoughts and feelings to himself. Though my father could be emotionally distant, he also had a refreshing appreciation of life and a love for his daughters and grandchildren that grew as he aged.

My father was conventional. He had a strong sense of right and wrong and always played by the rules. As was often the case in the fifties, he left the emotional responsibility for the family to our mother, while he built his career. As a result, he was wholly unprepared for the shock as he witnessed his beautiful wife’s devolution into mental illness and the impact of the sixties revolution on his four daughters. When Steve and my father met, as my father would later recall, Steve presented himself as the arrogant, self-absorbed eternal boy. He told my father that he planned to grow up to be a bum. Two worlds collided. The last thing my father needed or wanted was for his daughter to be smitten with such an immature fellow.

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My mother, Virginia Lavern Rickey, was an extremely bright and attractive woman. In the home movies of her early twenties, she appears as a petite, pretty girl who had a soft feminine look and a somewhat disconcerting sense of her own sexuality. She had a childish mouth, like Elizabeth Taylor, an unremarkable nose, and deep gray eyes with a caught-in-the-headlights look. Years later, when I was in my thirties and saw my first original Georgia O’Keeffe painting, all I could think of was my mother’s hands.

My mother wasn’t a particularly nice woman. She saw herself as superior to most people. My mother had been a latchkey child in the thirties while my grandmother had worked full time as a cook for the VA, supporting her daughter and her then-husband through the Depression. After the Depression, when her father was no longer around, my mother adapted to years of long, lonely afternoons. She read a lot of books and drank small bottles of Coca-Cola from a time, as she later told us, “when Coke was good!”

My mother lived in fear most of her life. Her father had molested her when she was very young, and in an unusual move in any era, my grandmother had thrown him out of the house because of it. When my mother was nine, her father committed suicide. My grandmother remarried four times and one of her later husbands also molested my mother—this time when she was fourteen. She carried damage from those experiences with her for life.

As a teenager in the forties my mother had modeled herself on the hard-bitten femme fatale so popular in the movies of the time. Donning a tough attitude that contrasted with her fragility, she would peer down over her reading glasses, take a big drag on her cigarette, and tell us, “Sincerity and a dime will get you a cup of coffee, kid.” Such was the root of her humor.