The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (16 page)

At the next Wednesday night meditation, I ignored Steve to avoid making either of us uncomfortable again, but at the end of the evening he approached me and asked if I would like to come over to his parents’ for lunch the following week. I accepted.

I was glad to see Clara again, and in the short time we talked I felt that there was something lighter and more gracious about her. She led me to the backyard where Steve was sitting on a little grassy mound watching the sky. He had a pleasant, bewildered look on his face and a buzz of energy around him like someone had just clapped him between two massive cymbals.

Backyards in the California suburbs are often bordered at the property lines by six-foot-high redwood fences. Typically, they’re comprised of small bean-shaped lawns with bean-shaped patios and bean-shaped pools. They had always seemed miniscule to me after having lived with the huge swaths of green found in the Midwest; but extraordinary, too, like beautiful garden rooms furnished with exotic flowers and sunshine. And I’d always liked the way they seemed to create a private plot of sky—very special and sort of stingy at the same time.

The Jobses’ backyard had been a barren moonscape for as long as I’d known them. Far from a private little paradise, theirs had been an empty box with an obligatory crabgrass lawn and water stains that looped up the dark fencing like an intricate army of wood-eating lice. But that day I found a transformation from Kansas to Oz. A verdant garden, about sixty feet across and thirty feet deep, covered the back third of the property. A cornucopia of crazed activity, the garden had stakes and twine and circular metal forms holding plants in a cacophonous semblance of order. It was as if the space had waited all these years for this outrageous justice.

In India it is said that there is no way that a child can return the favor of a life of care that parents have bestowed. I read this in the book by Ram Dass that Steve had given me,
Be Here Now
. Gratitude to your parents didn’t exactly find favor in sixties or seventies America, but Steve broke rank on that one. It seemed that the first order of business for him when he returned from India was to thank his parents for all they had done for him. This beautiful garden represented his gratitude. It was one of Steve’s great signatures in the world to merge the practical and the poetic. After that, for as long as I knew them, the Jobses always planted a garden in the spring and it seemed they were happier people for it.

Steve looked over to me from a little raised hill on the right. With a small sigh he got up and as I stood in the doorway holding the screen door open with my body, somehow expecting a greeting or at least a smile, he edged past me to the kitchen. His acknowledgment was so casual—even disappointed—that I wondered if I’d come on the wrong day. Why such indifference? He went to the stove and began to sauté brown rice. At a loss, I walked over to see what he was doing. I had never seen rice cooked like this—perfect, fat grains of translucent short brown rice toasting in tiny bubbles of sesame oil. I was riveted. Even the long-handled saucepan that held it was beautiful. This approach to cooking rice was so completely new to me that it set off a small revolution inside me. I cannot overstate the effect it had. I stood beside him, babbling with excitement, narrating the beauty I saw because I couldn’t stop myself. He remained silent. His manner was off-putting, seemingly as harsh as it was indifferent. I feared my presence must be barely tolerable to him, and all of this while the cooking itself was so transcendent.

I stepped back to the far end of the small kitchen. Steve then poured water over the sauté and placed a lid on the pan. Everything felt awkward. Not only would he not talk to me, but his attitude canceled my words midair with something like an interference pattern. Then, as he put some steamed string beans from the garden into a bowl, adding salt, I finally realized with relief that he
had
prepared for my coming. “Sit down!” he commanded, whereupon he threw the beans across the table at me and barked, “Eat!”

There is a tradition in the East about killing the ego in tough ways. Hindus, Tibetan Buddhists, even Sufi mystics, believe that anything is justified in order to save a person from his own ignorant ego. As the stories go, if a guru tells you to jump off a cliff, you run to the closest one and toss yourself over it headlong because it means your next life will be more awakened. In our own time the celebrated yoga teacher Iyengar has literally punched his students when he felt they were showing off with their yoga. This treatment would get you sued in the United States, but in the East you would consider yourself lucky to have such a teacher.

Steve was apparently trying on the role of teacher, with me as his student. It was a bit over the top to be practicing on me like this, especially since I had no context. The teacher/student relationship is usually agreed on by both—but I had never made such an agreement with him. It seemed I was to be the object of his charade throughout the entire lunch, and I felt a piercing hurt because he wasn’t talking to
me
. I wanted to walk out, but I gritted my teeth and stayed. Later, I discovered that everyone newly engaged in an Eastern spiritual practice tries on the behaviors of their spiritual teacher. It’s embarrassing, but everyone goes through it in some way or other depending upon the teacher they are imitating. By the looks of it all, Steve was imitating the sixty-year-old Indian guru, Neem Karoli Baba, because he was scrunching up his face to create the deep lines and big nose of the older man. How can you not want to emulate a master once you actually understand the wisdom he or she represents?

Sitting at the table, I pulled the plate of beans toward me. I had never liked string beans and was expecting disappointment on top of disappointment while I fulfilled my role as guest. Then I would go home and cry. That was my plan. But that first bite was so unexpectedly delicious that my focus turned to delight and I started babbling at him again. In all my life I had never eaten such amazingly good string beans; in fact I hadn’t eaten anything as good in any category of food as those beans on that day. And, like the perfect setting of a precious stone into fine metal, it clicked: Steve had something worthy going on.

Steve’s unkindness, in combination with this beautiful cooking, the quality and taste of the food, and our being together in one room, was a jarring juxtaposition of extreme lights and darks. It was as if the whole scene had been filmed with time-lapse photography. I looked for light and right, and ignored the rest. It was a poor strategy, but it was the one I had used to survive my mother and it had given me a bright outlook on life. After lunch, as I was leaving, Steve invited me back the following Saturday. I accepted and braced myself for what might be next. I definitely wanted more beans, though he never served them again. So Steve!

Paul was lighter when I returned the following Saturday. Lighter than I had ever seen him, though it was light with a bit of a vengeance mixed in. When I stepped into the Jobses’ backyard in the late morning, everything was in bustling motion—choreographed. Steve as the all-knowing director had a great calm and a decided sense of satisfaction as he pointed and told his parents what to do. Paul came tooling past me driving a wheelbarrow three-quarters filled with weeds half-wilted by the sun. He had a big smile on his face and grumbled something at me as he passed. He was, as ever, Paul Jobs, but now he was as transparent as a bright happy child. This time the fragility in him sparkled with wild-eyed joy. Gardens have a way of infecting people with confounding levels of excitement and replenishment. Paul’s happiness was proof of this for me.

*   *   *

Over the next couple of months, as Steve and I spent time together, things got a little easier between us. Though we weren’t terribly reflective about how we communicated, I deeply respected the changes he was going through. He must have liked having me around because he invited me over … semi-regularly. Steve had converted the toolshed in the backyard of his parent’s house into a bedroom. It was a little thin hut of a structure, but it was perfect for adjusting to the United States after India. He slept in his sleeping bag on a foam mat on the bare, wooden floor. It was clean and orderly, and held minimal possessions—a few spiritual books, a candle, and his meditation pillow. The simplicity was just so beautiful and honest that my old admiration of him was resurfacing.

One night Steve invited me over at about 11:00 p.m. after I had been out with friends. When I arrived he told me to take off my clothes. Holding out a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s All One Peppermint Soap he said something like, “We need to wash you off.” Steve loved Dr. Bronner’s All One soap. For him it was the perfect commercial achievement: its broad usefulness; its ecological foundation; its philosophically monistic aesthetic. He was holding the garden hose as he told me what to do.

“I’ll spray you with the water. Then you’ll scrub yourself down with this,” he said, gesturing toward the minty soap. “Then I’ll hose you off again.”

This wasn’t the first time that one of us thought that the other had gone completely bonkers. It was a cold night, the water would be freezing, and I was in his parents’ yard, not more than fifteen feet from the back door to their house. Three strikes, he was out.

“No way!” I said with in a hushed yell. “Your parents could come out and find me naked!”

But he was so intent on my following his instructions that he got angry. His words became a fast blur—demanding, but sort of pleading, too. “Just do it!” he said, glowering. “My parents aren’t going to come into the backyard at this hour! Come on Chris—”

“I won’t,” I hissed back. “You’ve got to be kidding, it’s freezing out here.
And
you don’t know that your parents won’t come out!”

I was so alarmed, the harshness of the request felt hateful. I can imagine now that he thought I needed to “wake up” like an ascetic doing penance through flesh-denying ablutions. For all I knew he had just given himself the treatment before I got there, but again, he gave me no context and I wasn’t one to follow orders any more than he was one to explain.

In general, I resisted Steve’s many Pygmalion impulses out of principle. When I think on it now, it seems like all the times I had to say no to Steve connected inside me like a system of inner caves. He may have been completely convinced that he should be my guru, my teacher, my leader—a theme that would present itself for many years to come—but it was never the truth for me. I think I felt sorry for both of us that night.

And yet, how could I not be absolutely taken by him when he was so driven by purpose? Steve, the bewildered lunatic shaman, the extraordinary darling, was more extraordinary than ever that summer and I found myself, as always, moved to protect his shattered and shattering beauty. We didn’t have a sexual relationship at that time. A ball of light had been let loose in Steve in India and I think he was holding himself separate for what that would yield. I don’t even think he knew what was happening to him. I appreciated this and respected him for it because it was real.

I didn’t know what he meant to me. He didn’t know what I meant to him. We didn’t know what we meant to each other. I was just trying to get along because he was important to me in some inexplicable mountain range of a way. My feeling is that he was in an amorphous state, not exactly one thing or another but blinking in and out, neither and both. That he trusted what was happening to him when he was so unstable seems phenomenal to me now. And although I’m sure I don’t know the whole story, it might be fair to say that during this period Steve was stabilizing himself after the blowout from India. That he was preparing himself for the man he would become.

*   *   *

In the science about the transformation of insects there is a term called
imaginal disks
that refers to a group of cells in the body that get activated for metamorphosis. I think people have imaginal disks, too. Not everyone realizes such full potential, but Steve did. And this was the time that it began its unfolding to deliver a new kind of code for the massive changes through which he would develop. He was coming into a master level of consciousness.

But it was a tricky thing because I think he was off register, too. In all his exquisite effort to achieve some kind of higher, purer state, I felt and saw that Steve also started to reject the feminine aspect as inferior to the glorious masculine. Oh, yes, that ancient theme. Once he had returned, I felt increasingly uneasy about his view of me, and women in general. He had plenty of views on the subject of women, and he wasn’t afraid to voice them. He would level sharp critiques full of dramatic repetitions, like “a bad woman is like a snake in the grass” (that comment came out of
Be Here Now
) and “if women were good, they wouldn’t experience labor pain.” I wish I could remember more. What I do remember is that these comments would be followed by an all-knowing laugh or a buttoned-up silence, also all-knowing. When it came to the female, Steve didn’t question his right to critique or assign value. If Steve had one God-given talent it was an authoritative voice. But his ideas about women were bizarrely fundamentalist.

Steve was in some kind of profound spiritual transformation, but he was also coming of age in a man’s world and adopting the negative myths men have forged about women throughout time. One was melded to the other. I remember that when I was growing up people used to honk their horns whenever they saw a newly married couple. Just Married would be written all over the wedding car in shaving cream or washable paint, and tin cans would be tied to the rear bumper. When my father heard these honks, he would look up and say, “Ah, another good man bites the dust.” At the time, this seemed extremely funny to me and I would laugh at his joke, but the deeper reality of this view meant that I would have no place to stand as a female and no future as a woman in a relationship with a man that wasn’t problematic. Steve left me with that same sense of having “no place.”

When President Kennedy’s space program and the feminist movement came into my girlhood awareness, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. I never thought of wanting to be the wife of a man who walked on the moon because it was always clear to me that I wanted and could have adventures of my own. Now I think the space program couldn’t have existed without the women’s movement. That they erupted at the same time indicated that they were a part of the collective dialogue between the masculine and the feminine. Sorting out the whole concept of what it meant to be a man and a woman was very much a part of the confusion of my time. But at least the dreams of little girls became bigger and bolder then, and this put pressure on all of us to form a future in which those dreams might be realized.