The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (3 page)

But I soon understood that this yellow was an exception. Everything else in the Jobses’ house was predictable and austere: the beige couch; the big brown La-Z-Boy and ottoman; the blond wood dining and coffee tables. A large TV took center stage in the living room, and above it a bookshelf that displayed the family’s entire collection of about fifteen books (including the Book of Job), along with school photographs of Steve and his sister Patty. Steve’s photograph showed a chubby fifth grader with that one eye half-closed, and whose beautiful face was mischievous and sweet, but inscrutable nonetheless.

The Jobses’ home had economy-size bags of candy lying around the living room and grocery-store jelly rolls in their ’40s-style kitchen. They had a big boat in the driveway (Steve and Patty water-skied), and a pet rabbit that roamed freely around the house and backyard, which surprised me no end. I mean, no end. And when I glanced into the master bedroom I saw twin beds. Steve’s parents slept separately like a 1950s TV couple. There was no romance here. This was a home filled with things well considered for practicality, a home without nuanced beauty. It was the kind of place I imagined would have belonged to someone’s grandparents.

*   *   *

Paul Jobs was a thin man, just shy of six feet tall. He had a military haircut, which was a little unusual in those days, even on fathers, when sideburns were the norm. He had elongated lines in his pinched cheeks, and watery gray eyes. His nerves were close to the surface and he was given to small bursts of exasperation. His voice ran to a rattling high pitch when he was stressed, and he would often talk about giving someone a
knuckle sandwich
. There were times he reminded me of a Popeye cartoon and the first time I heard him use the phrase
knuckle sandwich
I looked around to see if I was supposed to laugh. I definitely wasn’t.

Paul was hard on Steve, often fretting that Steve was doing everything wrong. I mainly remember Steve lumbering under what seemed like a constant flow of disapproval. Years later, one of Steve’s other girlfriends, Tina Redse, told me that she thought Paul Jobs had been beaten as a child, and though I have no idea if that was true, it makes sense from the way he sometimes behaved. Steve would respond to his father with sad smiles and a painstaking patience. I believe that Steve was an empath and I imagine that highly empathic people can flip and become cruel, as was the case with Steve. That Steve’s life was compelled in part to rectifying the wrongs done to Paul was something that has always had the feel of truth to me. Sometimes I think that Steve’s profound sense of empathy got scrambled and used up in response to Paul.

Paul Jobs wasn’t an easy man to be around. Quite apart from his
knuckle sandwich
routine, that first day I met him he kept repeating “Pretty is as pretty does.” I didn’t really understand what he meant, but since this was my new boyfriend’s father and I was trying to be agreeable (and since Steve had left me to handle this by myself), I just kept responding to him very conscientiously, saying, “Oh.” It took me a while to understand that not only was Paul referring to me, but he regarded me as a problem. On another occasion, I remember his barking with irritation that teachers were lazy, and that they shouldn’t be paid in the summer months. I disagreed with him—politely—but he repeated his opinion four times over the next fifteen minutes. Steve let me handle this by myself, too. At the time I wondered if perhaps Paul thought I was going to be a teacher.

Paul was an industrious man who made his two-car garage into a well-equipped workshop. It was an impressive space filled with tools, machinery, workbenches, and stored household and vacation items. A large sheet of pegboard served as home for hundreds of tools—some with shapes I’d never seen before—and each tool had been outlined by a black marker so it could be put back in its proper place. The garage was so well organized—so filled with interesting things—that it was wonderful to see.

I don’t know what Paul did in his normal workday, but his garage was the place of a second job and source of income. On weekends, he fixed up older American cars he’d bought through newspaper ads, reselling them at fair prices. I’d often see him bending over engines and sliding beneath cars, sweeping and hosing the driveway in his coveralls, with an oily red rag hanging out of his back pocket. He was purposeful, always working, and often irritated and vocal about what griped him, except when he was focused. A business magazine once described Paul Jobs as a “used car salesman,” but this leaves a completely inaccurate impression. Paul’s work on cars was a hobby and, I felt, a public service. He was really competent at what he did and cared about doing a good job. I bought my first car from Paul, a four-door Chevy, for $250. I bought my second car from him, too, and each time he took great care to explain everything about the vehicle to me.

I learned early on not to take him too seriously. I felt that he had a deep sense of powerlessness that made him combative. And I always cared about him; it never occurred to me not to. After all, he was Steve’s dad.

*   *   *

Clara Jobs was a sensible-looking woman who seemed both youthful and mature at the same time. Her eyes were shy and sweet, and her voice had a caramel tone. Like many women of her generation, she smoked. Clara Jobs had slightly dark skin and warm, brown hair. She had wide cheekbones and a wide smile. Steve may not have been Clara’s natural child, but they shared a strong resemblance. I mentioned this once to Clara, and she turned red. Some years later I met Steve’s biological mother, Joanne Simpson, and saw that she and Clara did indeed have similar features and coloring: broad cheekbones and warm-toned skin and brown eyes.

Through the years Clara told Steve that his birth mother was one of the most beautiful women she and Paul had ever seen. Steve repeatedly told me in a self-assured way, that
his
mother was
beautiful
. The ideal of her beauty became an untouchable, personal triumph for him, remarkable and perfected in the gap of her absence. When he talked about her, I felt my heart move toward something like pity. Not because Steve was pitiful, but because not knowing where he came from mattered so much to him, and for so many unnamable reasons.

The value Steve attached to beauty was peculiar to me. Once he showed me a professional glam photo of the younger Clara. His enthusiasm for it was way over the top and made me wonder if Clara had built up an image of his birth mother’s beauty not only because of his longing to know where he came from, but because she could see how much glamour and beauty meant to him.

Not long after I met the Jobses, I was standing alone in their living room waiting for Steve, when Clara came in and made a startling admission. With no real lead-in, she told me that she and Paul had adopted Steve at birth, but that soon after, Steve’s biological mother had taken them to court in an effort to place him in a different home. Steve’s biological mother had felt that the Jobses didn’t have the profile she wanted for her baby. In fact, she had originally chosen a different home for her son: Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy. But at the last minute that family had opted out because they wanted a girl. So the Jobses got Steve and Steve got the Jobses. But it wasn’t to be easy. She and Paul had to go to court and fight to keep their infant son as his birth mother decided that she wanted him placed with a different—some might say
better
—family.

“I was too frightened to love him for the first six months of his life,” Clara told me. “I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him.” Her eyes widened as if she was telling me the deep, broken truth of their lives. I could see how she blamed herself and felt guilty, but there was more to it. When I think back on it now, I wonder if she had been trying to warn me off or simply explain.

I was very young when I met Clara; I don’t think she understood how young. I just nodded with as deep an appreciation as I could, to comfort her and acknowledge that she had told me something profound. But I was also embarrassed because I knew that I was ill equipped to speak to an adult’s reality. Up to that time I had, at most, met Clara on only three occasions. She was my new boyfriend’s mother, and in an era when most young people didn’t trust adults, Clara’s confession seemed utterly remarkable to me. I felt sad and way out of my depth. I remember scanning the floor wondering if they loved him now.

Steve nodded his head thoughtfully when I recounted what his mom had told me. He said that the case had gotten settled when his parents legally committed to sending him to college. By the time I met Steve, he had already been accepted by Reed College, so that agreement had been honored. Steve repeated a number of times, “I just shut my eyes, and pointed at the book with the names of all the colleges and when I opened them, my finger was pointing to Reed College. That’s how I picked Reed.”

Steve told me that the kids in his grade school had taunted him about his adoption. “What happened?” they would ask. “Didn’t your mother love you?” It must have been ten years after the fact when Steve recounted this episode to me, but still his mouth twisted with bitterness. This grade school bullying was so damaging to Steve that he came home one day and told his parents he would no longer tolerate it. He wasn’t going back to that school.

Steve always had a sense of authority about himself. An absolute authority.

I can imagine that Paul and Clara recognized this and knew that they had to do something to protect their son. And they did, moving to Los Altos and another school district. I’ve always been in awe that the Jobses actually moved houses to protect Steve. At that time most parents I knew of would have sent their kid back into the bullying, telling him to “fight back.” Oddly, though this response wasn’t enough, as Steve would grow up to express very sophisticated levels of emotional and psychological bullying himself.

*   *   *

I was impressed by how much freedom Steve had to be himself and how much his parents seemed to respect him. Steve had a poetic streak and an intuitive turn of mind. He would often say things that seemed to come from the high winds of a vast plain. I never failed to be struck by how these hard-working, blue-collar parents, these people with common sense but so few books, gave him the space to be completely otherworldly. To be extraordinary, in fact.

To me, it was like the creamy, yellow paint in Patty’s room; there was a strain of something very sophisticated about Paul and Clara, despite their lack of education. And when Steve showed signs of his prosody, everyone seemed to breathe more deeply, look down, and move in a different direction, as if they were dancers responding to a new choreography.

I wasn’t very conscious during those early years about how Steve’s subterranean world of loss and worry must have focused him. But the tension was there, like an arrow pulled back in the bow, taut and concentrated by the terrible losses he’d endured. But when he let that arrow fly—wow! It would move him and by extension me, forward in delight and discovery. Inspiration is always a response to what’s missing. The creative process is about filling the gap. That’s why, for example, Picasso never painted another guitar after he bought one for himself.

Steve could always surprise me. One day he expressed a sentiment that let me glimpse the man in the child—and the child in the man. He said something about bombing the Communists and it struck me as revealing a kind of a Cold War mentality. At the time I was idealistic in my belief that peace was the goal and, as the Beatles sang,
love is all you need.
I thought that polarizing comments about U.S. and Soviet relations were a ploy by the lesser gods of the media to keep people unthinkingly nationalistic. I rejected nationalism because I thought ours was a new generation meant to look beyond for more enlightened answers to the problems of our day, but Steve’s comment made me stop and recognize that he had an older political context. It jarred me.

In truth a Cold War mentality was very much a part of my own life, although sub rosa. My father was employed by Sylvania, a company that did a lot of work for the Department of Defense. Due to the constraints around his work with classified information (he operated within layers of security clearances), we simply did not talk about politics or U.S. relations around the dinner table, even though it was what provided us with our upper-middle-class life. In every state we lived in, all of our neighbors would be interviewed by government authorities so my father could keep or increase his security clearances. I was blithely unconscious of the implications of all this in my own life; nevertheless, I felt Steve’s Cold War outlook marked him as naïve.

Still, it was Steve’s boy-ness that I loved. His mind and his silliness fed me like nothing else. At seventeen, he would do imitations of ’50s robots where he would burst out laughing like a wiggly child and then pull himself into a structured metallic being, acting in response to an imagined control center outside of his brain. Arms outstretched like Frankenstein, he would walk forward stiffly, tilting on one foot then the other, droning out commands from a higher office. And running into the kitchen one day, he took the phone off the hook, pressed the pound key, and told me he had just blown up the world.

Steve was in a kind of child’s dialogue with the issues of the day, but he was also bitter like an adult when, of all things, he told me of the time he’d learned that Santa Claus didn’t exist. “I was mad that they had lied to me.” He repeated this on several occasions and each time I could see that he was still unforgiving, still angered by the humiliation. For Steve, the vulnerability of childhood wasn’t about suspending disbelief with enchanted narratives; it was about getting the facts straight and knowing how things really worked. Here again we were the opposite because I always loved and yearned for enchantment. It’s why I loved him.

THREE