iWoz (31 page)

Candi and I flew from San Jose to a small airport in Scotts Valley to pick up Candi's brother Jack and Jack's girlfriend, Claris. Usually I would just taxi around and then take off, you know? So I'm going around, and suddenly I notice I'm blocked by another plane that's just sitting there, stalled on the taxiway. I'm thinking, Great. Great. I can't even get out of there.

So I looked around—I think we turned the airplane around— and I go off some other side way. By then the stalled airplane was gone and finally I got to the start of the runway. And I did all the little start-up procedures and reached for the throttle and you know what?

I remember reaching for the throttle at the start of the runway, and that's it. I can remember every other detail of the airport and everything that day up to that point. But I can remember absolutely nothing about what happened after that point. I have no memoiy of what happened next. (Later, I figured out that maybe Candi, who was sitting in the front, accidentally leaned on one of the controls, but we'll never know exactly what caused that accident.)

I woke up in the hospital, so they tell me, but it wasn't until five weeks later that I was able to remember that I was in a plane crash.

My friend Dan Sokol later told me that he saw news of the accident on TV. He said he turned on the TV and clicked onto the news channel when he heard something about an executive of a Silicon Valley computer company crashing his plane in Scotts Valley. And he immediately turned around just in time to see about two seconds of the Beechcraft upside down. I had crashed in the parking lot of a skating rink.

Of course, as I told you, I remember absolutely nothing about what happened, not even about being in the hospital or anything. It was some head injury! Dan told me my room was filled with gifts and toys and stuff from people at Apple. Handmade cards, off-the-shelf cards, and junk food. It was all there, Dan said, but I have no memory of it. Zero memory. Dan even told me that I asked him to smuggle in a milk shake and pizza for me, which sounds exactly like me, so at least I know that I was really in there. I mean, people took pictures of me in there playing computer games, which is what I would do, but I have no memory of that. No memory at all.

At some point, I guess a week or two later, I was finally released and allowed to go home. I didn't go to Apple to work, I presume because I thought every day was a weekend. That's the only explanation I can think of now as to why I didn't go to work, and also why I didn't notice my dog was missing. (He'd been checked into a kennel.)

For a few weeks after, I was living in my house in Scotts Valley in this weird, not-fully-functional state. I mean, people later told me I seemed hazy. They say I was driving around on my motorcycle, but people really had to direct me to do things. Like: "You go here. You have to do this now. Now you have to do this." I was apparently functioning, but I hardly have any memories of it. I was living this halfway weird life. I didn't realize that my dog had been boarded for five weeks away from me, for instance. It just seemed like every day was the same day. I didn't

even realize I was missing a tooth for five weeks—one of my front teeth! How do you not spot something like that? I don't know, I can't explain it.

Now, Candi and her brother, I found out much later, were also injured in the crash. She even had to get some plastic surgery afterward. But I was the one who was the hardest hit. As I said, I ended up having what is known as anterograde amnesia, even though the doctors didn't know it at first. Anterograde amnesia means that you don't lose memories; you just lose the ability to form new ones.

But I guess, when I think about it now, it was actually a good thing because in my mind, I never had a plane crash to get over. It just isn't there. I underwent hypnosis to see if I could come up with any recollection of what happened to cause the crash. I really would've liked to know. But nothing came to me.

So in those five weeks—the weeks of my amnesia—I remembered everything from before that. I had all my old skills and memories, and those memories are still there up till that point. But during that five-week period, whatever I was doing, I wasn't remembering it.

And then suddenly I came out of it.

The first, the very first, memory I had was that I was somehow at the Macintosh building talking to associates I'd been working with on the Macintosh. And they were telling me something about how the project was going. And I don't remember exactly who, but I think it was Andy Hertzfeld (designer of the Macintosh graphical user interface) who mentioned something about a plane crash. A plane crash? And the instant he said the words "plane crash," I knew there was this thing about a plane crash in this dream I'd been having.

So I said to myself, Oh, this is a dream I'm having right now. And in a dream, I can always tell myself that I can just turn around and walk the other way. You can go any which way and a

dream follows you. But this time I thought, No, I'll play by the rules of this dream and 111 keep talking to Andy. So I sat there talking to him, and that's my very first memory. But it was a very weak memory.

That night, I remember Candi and I went to see the movie
Ordinary People.
I don't remember a single detail of that movie, only that we saw it. Then we got home and we were in bed. I was lying on my back and thinking, Wait, did I have a plane crash that I heard about and kept dreaming about, or didn't I? I mean, I didn't have any memories of such a crash, and it seems like you would remember such a thing, wouldn't you?

Is it possible I had a plane crash and didn't remember it?

So I turned over and asked Candi, "Did I have a plane crash or was it a dream?"

I guess she thought I was joking, because she said, "It was a dream, Steve." That's what she said. That it was a dream. She wasn't playing with my head. She just had no idea that I had no idea I'd been in a plane crash.

This was a mental dilemma because I was struggling to prove in my head that it could be true.

So now I'm sitting there wondering if I'm ever going to get anybody to tell me if I had a plane crash or not. I suppose if I'd been smart, I would have looked in the newspaper or asked other people, but this was actually the first time I was starting to think that maybe I had in fact had a plane crash and it wasn't a dream.

So I sat there that night, feeling my body. And my body didn't have any broken bones or signs of a plane crash. Ha. I didn't think to look for a missing tooth!

So I kept thinking. I kept trying to pin it down. How do you figure out if something didn't happen? I could remember every single detail of that day up to the point of reaching for the throttle, but I couldn't remember pushing it. And then I thought of something logical. I thought, Wait a minute. I don't remember landing

in Santa Catalina. If I had landed the plane, there's absolutely no way I would've forgotten that landing.

As soon as I thought that thought, I realized that my brain had been working very strangely. I realized that I'd been in a plane crash and it was real. And I just jerked my head up right away and realized that everything I was starting to suspect was real. My head started working immediately and retrieving and forming memories, I could feel it. And what was strange was, I could feel both states of mind. I had just come from a state where I wasn't forming memories, and now I was moving into this different state where I was forming memories. I could feel both states of mind at the same time, which was so strange.

Then I looked at the bed stand next to me, and there were something like a hundred cards from people I had received while I was in the hospital. They were sending me best wishes, saying get well and all that. And I read them. They were all from my very closest friends and associates.

And I said, Oh my god, I didn't even know they were there.

But I must have seen them every single night. Because they were there every single night. So it was like coming out of a very strange state and realizing that your head has not been forming any memories. That's what I deduced.

The very next day, my father called to remind me that I was supposed to show up for an appointment with the psychologist I'd been seeing. I had no memories of ever seeing a psychologist. But I went up to Stanford to see that psychologist and I kind of excitedly started explaining to him that I hadn't been forming memories or remembering the plane crash, and suddenly I'd come out of it. My head just switched over, I told him. It was amazing.

And would you believe it? He didn't believe me! I suppose I was so excited when I told him about this that he kept telling me I was a manic-depressive. I was stunned, and told him that I

didn't have big highs or big lows like a manic-depressive would. I told him I was a very stable person. He said, "Well, manic depres sion usually starts when you're thirty." I was thirty. He had inter preted my excitement about my memory returning as beinj', manic. What a quack.

Well, those five weeks after the plane crash, when I was finally and fully out of the amnesia, I decided this was a lucky opportunity. I should finish college, and not go back to Apple right away.

I realized it had been ten years since my third year of college, and if I didn't go back to finish up now, I probably never would. And it was that important to me. I wanted to finish. And I had already been out of Apple for a while anyway—five weeks without knowing it, actually—so that made it easier to just go back to school and not go back to Apple right away. I decided that life is short, right? So I decided.

I applied and got accepted and registered under the name Rocky Raccoon Clark. (Rocky Raccoon was the name of my dog, and Clark was my fiancee Candi's soon-to-be maiden name.)

And soon after I made that decision, Candi and I set the date to get married: June 13, 1981. It was an amazing party. We had the Apple hot-air balloon there in the front yard of Candi's parents' house. It was a spectacular party. Emmylou Harris, the famous folksinger, sang at the reception.

• o •

The day after the wedding, I got an apartment in Berkeley to get ready to begin my fourth year of college. And on the weekend, the plan was that I would go back to this house we had bought on the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was amazing. Just a huge castle of a place.

It had a lot of flat land, which is unusual, so I had tennis courts built. And Candi turned a little pond into a nice little lake. I also bought an adjoining property, making twenty-six acres in

.ill. It was a paradise. (Candi, now my ex-wife, still lives in that paradise.)

Candi stayed there working on the house while I spent the week in this college apartment a couple of hours north, in Berkeley. It was a great year, and a fun year. Because I was going under I lie name Rocky Raccoon Clark, no one knew who I was. I had fun posing as a nineteen-year-old college student, and the engineering classes were so easy for me. Every weekend, I went back home to the castle.

One of the first things I did at Berkeley, in addition to taking engineering courses for my degree, was to enroll in both psychology courses (for majors) and two courses specifically about human memory. After my accident and amnesia, I was intrigued by such strange aspects of memory, and I wanted to understand it more.

As far as my own condition went, it turned out to be relatively well known. It happens frequently to people after car and plane accidents, and it's associated with damage near the hippocampus section of the brain. It was a typical condition. There is no excuse for why my doctors—especially my psychologist—didn't figure this out.

Chapter 17
Have I Mentioned I Have the Voice of an Angel?

After the plane crash in 1981 and after I decided to go back and finish my degree at Berkeley, something else happened that I never would have expected.

It was during that first quarter at summer school when I was taking a class in statistics so I could enroll the following year. I was driving around in my car listening to a radio station—KFAT out of Gilroy, California—a station that had heavily influenced me during the Apple days. You see, I'd changed my music tastes from normal rock and roll to a type of really progressive country by then.

This was a new and strange type of music I'd never been exposed to before—a lot of folk, a lot of country, and a lot of comedy. It wasn't some dumb old countryish beat and song and themes; these songs were a lot about life. They very much reminded me of the sort of thinking Bob Dylan did, being as familiar with his lyrics as I was. And these songs went as deep— they pointed out what was right and wrong in life. The way they were written and the way I experienced them brought out a lot of emotion in me. I mean, there was a real meaning attached to these songs, and I was heavily influenced by this station.

At around this time, I recall seeing the movie
Woodstock.

There was a meaning attached to that movie, too. A meaning that had to do with young people growing up and trying to find alternative ways of living. And so much of that was brought up in the words of these new progressive country songs I was listening to, like a music revolution was starting all over again.

And it hit me. I thought: Why not? Why not try to do a kind of Woodstock for my generation? I realized at this point that I had so much more money than I could ever dream of spending. I was thirty at the time and probably worth a hundred million dollars or more. I thought: My god, why not put on a big progressive country concert with these groups I loved? A lot of people might come.