The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (27 page)

Kobun told the woman, “Never let anyone who is not enlightened come on your land,” at which the woman pointed at me and said, “Well she’s not enlightened!” They then talked about me in third person as if I weren’t there. I felt bad. The woman had been nice up until that point, so didn’t understand the shift. Kobun replied with something like, “Well, she is with me, so it is okay,” and then he told the woman how much his mother-in-law would love this marijuana, which the woman had grown herself. Might he bring some back to her? The woman opened a big container and generously raked leaves and buds into a big plastic bag, careful not to break up the dried clusters. She gave him a lot, but Kobun asked for more, and more again. I watched the whole thing with uneasiness because the way he pushed beyond her already generous gift wasn’t right. Not to mention that I was stunned, too, to think that his children’s grandmother smoked marijuana. She was just a perky, wrinkled, little white-haired old lady with an edge. I couldn’t imagine her stoned. It seemed sacrilegious. (My parents were way too fifties to have even considered smoking grass, and for once, by contrast Kobun’s behaviors looked childish to me compared to my parents.) Things were becoming clearer.

Eventually it was time to get back on the road and as we were walking to the car, Kobun pointed to a hawk wheeling high up in the sky and told the woman, “Whenever you see an eagle or a hawk flying overhead on your land, you are to know that this is me watching over you and your land.” I could see that the woman was beginning to wonder if Kobun wasn’t just a bit of a cad, interested in self-promotion to an attractive lady. Kobun had said in a couple of lectures that his wife called him a playboy, and now I was wondering about it, too. I felt embarrassed for both of them.

Finally Kobun and I set out for the drive back to the Peninsula, a two-hour sojourn if we didn’t run into traffic. But when we got to the top of the forested hill on the dirt road that led back to the highway from the woman’s cabin, Kobun stopped the car and got out and looked back to where the woman lived and laughed out loud, slapping his thighs with both hands, saying, “I have stolen from her! I am a thief!” He laughed and laughed and repeated proudly that he had stolen from her. This was very like the spiritual teachers of the seventies: they were full of the merriment of the trickster. For example, Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche cracked open the veils for new levels of consciousness in the Western mind, but by all accounts, he drank way too much. For a while these teachers had Teflon-like protection. They used their extraordinary capacities to teach, but also to test and social climb. I guess nobody really understood the ethics in this new game plan of East meets West.

I was dumbfounded. Kobun offended my young sense of idealism because I knew none of this was funny or ethical. I had seen him as the pinnacle of uprightness and I had trusted him. I had reserved all my judgments about him and much had turned in favor of my keeping this pregnancy because he had confirmed that it was the right thing to do and that he would help. But who was he really? Here he had not only just smoked marijuana and “stolen” some for his mother-in-law, but he considered it all hilarious.

A visceral sensation hit me; the stakes were so high, and here this guy was just playing games. What’s more, he was letting me know it, too. Everything was in such precarious balance for me and my child and my whole being was starting to recognize the truth. Several more of these booms would drop before I truly woke up under the full weight and awareness of my own circumstances. I would be alone. He wasn’t going to help me and by his measurement, I was laughable, too. I really did not know what I did not know, but I was getting quite the education.

*   *   *

Steve wanted to control what people thought of him. That’s likely why he started to seed people with the notion that I slept around and he was infertile, which meant that this could not be his child. People believed him, I think, because people wanted a hero. Apple was succeeding, and Steve was brilliant, but mine was an old story, and no one really cared about a single mother. A mother who was married, yes. But a single mother? No.

Steve was succeeding in a big way. And he was growing a big personality. But he didn’t have the emotional maturity to manage it. I remember going to the Presidio house after I moved out (I needed to pick up a few things that I had left there), when Steve came home in a hurricane of a mood. He ran into his room and slammed the door behind him. I waited a few minutes before going in and asking what was wrong. He was sitting on the floor and motioned with his hand, but never looked at me. Instead he kept his eyes focused on a lit candle on a low table. He stared at the candle so intensely that I knew he was using it as an aid of some sort. The whole scene was odd, my standing there looking at him in silence over my big pregnant belly, watching the contrast between the soft candlelight and the buzz of his vengeful intensity, not knowing what to do. I thought back to the scene when we were nineteen and Steve first asked me what I saw in the candle. Maybe everyone in the world knows about this candle technique but I didn’t, and my guess is that he was using a Hindu meditation technique for controlling his infantile outrage. It seemed to work, because the longer he looked at the flame the more his anger was dispelled. It also seemed like there was a weird allowance for my presence in the room that night, too, a negligible disturbance he maybe even wanted, because despite the hurricane, he did not ask me to leave.

Later that week I met up with a friend at one of my birthing classes and she told me what had happened to have aggravated him so. Lori was a secretary at Apple, and when she saw how Steve was behaving toward me, she had offered to be my birth coach. A smart, capable woman a little bit older than me, she just wanted to help. Lori explained that Apple had moved to a new building and Steve had slipped in fast and had taken the best office. It was the corner office full of windows and high views and so should rightfully have gone to Mike Markkula, Apple’s then president. Apparently there were words. I had never represented enough power in opposition to Steve to enrage him like that. For me it was a new Steve.

Lori was my eyewitness into what I would never have otherwise seen, bringing a more balanced view to what was really happening with Steve. Through her I understood that he was just as bad at work as he was toward me. Lori told me that there was a company-wide meeting about getting health insurance. During the meeting, Steve kept harping at the agent who was describing the policy choices, saying to her, “It’s an inferior health insurance company if it doesn’t pay for pregnancies if the couple is unmarried.” Apparently it went back and forth between the agent and Steve many times until finally, the agent said in disgust, “If it’s your baby and you’re a human being, you’ll pay the bill.” Lori told me that it finally stopped the repartee because the comment had hit the bull’s-eye in Steve’s fancy-pants, tricked-out hypocrisy. If you didn’t know the whole story, this exchange would seem forward-thinking, heroic even, on Steve’s part. But the opposite was true.

Lori had told me another story. On February 24, 1978, Steve’s twenty-third birthday, the Apple executives had gotten Steve a huge funeral wreath with a ribbon draped over that said Happy Birthday Steve!!! It was a joke, of course, but Lori said that when Steve walked into the office and saw the funeral wreath in his name he stopped dead in his tracks. He was wide-eyed. Slack-jawed. Skin white as a ghost. I knew this quality in Steve. His response was so personal and dramatic it must have spoken to that big symbolic world inside of him—the closet mystic. Was it a chilling reminder that his life wasn’t going to last that long? Lori told me that it choked her up to see it because even though Steve could be so awful, that quality could flip into a kind of extreme vulnerability that made you willing to run and trip over anything to help him be okay.

*   *   *

In the complexity of all he was and all he was becoming, I had always given Steve room to be changeable. I believed in him, as almost everyone did, because some parts of him were so extraordinary that he was always worth the effort. So when I was seven months pregnant and Steve very tenderly asked me, “Would you like to give birth to our child at the Presidio house?” I considered it. Even after everything, I still hoped for decency as the way through. I thought he might have, finally, come to his senses.

But after about three weeks of serious consideration I knew this baby’s and my well-being were all my responsibility. I could not risk trusting him. I knew the child’s safety made having the birth at his house out of the question. I played it straight and told him, “You know, I’ve really thought about this but I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the birth at the Presidio house.” I had planned to go on and explain more, but as usual Steve interrupted the flow of real communication: “What are you talking about?” He was indifferent and distracted as if he’d forgotten he’d ever suggested it. Then he said offhandedly, “Oh that, okay, no—not a big deal.” The casual response mortified me in the moment, and haunted for me years. Now after all this time, I know that if I had said, “Yes, I would like to have the birth at your house,” he would have also asked, “What are you talking about?”

Winning was always losing with Steve. The more he protected himself, the more callous he became. The more callous he became, the more power was within his grasp. The more power he had, the more money he made. The more money he made, the more he was applauded. This equation didn’t ever really change—it all just got bigger. Because I had no worldly power, my recourse was to witness. Witnessing would end up being the source of my power.

SEVENTEEN

PERFECTION

I don’t think babies should be born in hospitals unless they or their mothers are at risk, but when the birth house I had selected burned down, it looked like a hospital was my only option. I was in my eighth month of pregnancy but oddly confident and calm. This was around the time that Robert and Abha and their children had just returned from India. They were staying at Steve’s for a few days before flying to their home in Oregon. That’s where I went to visit them, and that’s where they saw how Steve’s and my relationship had disintegrated. Decent and good people that they were, they invited me to their farm for the birth. I accepted with delight and relief.

Two weeks before the baby was due, I drove to Oregon so I could settle in. Once I got there, Abha and I began the process of finding a midwife and/or an obstetrician. We were looking into adoption, too, as I was still considering that option. We had plenty of time. Or so we thought. I had been warned that having extra energy meant labor was coming and to lay low and save it up for the birth. Nevertheless, when I got my own little boost I decided to bake some bread. It had come on so early—only two days after I had arrived—and was such a subtle boost that the significance was lost to both Abha and me. I drove to the health food store in town to get some flour and the other supplies I would need.

Seventies health food stores were of a different order than the big bright Whole Foods of today. With dark wood and pungent aromas, they seemed like outposts of a changing culture where customers were like adventurers claiming a new frontier. That day I was enjoying my little shopping trip and thinking about the bread I was going to bake, when suddenly I had this odd feeling. I went to the bathroom to discover my plug had broken. This was it! The rush of excitement ran through me like a wild river. I thought I better find a phone and call Abha when, by pure outrageous chance, she walked into the store. I excitedly told her what was happening and we left the store and drove back to the farm in our two cars.

The baby was coming two weeks early and we had nothing in place. But babies don’t wait. Abha made a few calls and then we got into her truck and drove back into town to meet some doctors. Every bump produced a contraction. I was in and out of ridiculous levels of pain while we searched for the address of two doctors who had a one-room birthing center in Sheridan. We were interviewing each other—the doctors worked as a team—when a woman walked in whose baby had been born the week before. “These two clowns are great,” she told me, and at that all three started joking about how they watched the football game while she was giving birth. Judging from the banter the woman didn’t seem to mind. But, I sure did. What kind of woman would have allowed this? I signaled to Abha that it was a no-go. I cut the interview short and we went back to the farm where she called everyone she knew for the name of a suitable midwife.

Robert took it upon himself to call Steve, whose secretary got him a reservation to fly up that night. In the meantime, however, I discovered that if I stayed quietly by myself I could rest without contractions. This gave Robert the impression that I was in false labor. He called Steve to say that he didn’t think the birth was imminent, and Steve canceled his reservation. But by 5 p.m., my contractions were coming two and a half minutes apart. Robert called Steve again, but it was too late to get another flight.

By early evening Abha had found a midwife team that was willing to come to the farm. They asked her to have ready a new shower curtain and an unopened bottle of olive oil, home birth basics. By 7:30 the midwives climbed the stairs to my room, where we all introduced ourselves and set up for the evening. Besides the midwives, Abha’s friends—about six women with loving faces and warm smiles—came with diapers, baby clothes, a changing table, bouquets of flowers, and candles. It was truly a miraculous coming together. Robert was the only man present and he was photographing the birth, also holding up a mirror so I could see what was happening.

In birthing classes I had been taught to breathe and push, but as my real-life contractions increased that night, this child was coming out so fast that soon it wasn’t a matter of pushing, but of stopping the expulsion. I had no idea this was even a possibility. I was starting to panic. “Slow it down!” the head midwife said. But I couldn’t. Then she shouted, “Slow it DOWN!” Now I really was panicking. Sensing danger, I searched the women’s faces for help. One set of eyes after another. Nothing was helping. I couldn’t stop the speed of the delivery, until suddenly I locked into the assistant midwife’s eyes and found what I needed. Whole worlds of information passed between us wherein some sensibility in her clicked into me and I suddenly was able to slow everything down. After that the waves of labor moved forward more safely.