The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (4 page)

EXPERIMENTAL FLOWERING IN FULL TILT BOOGIE

The high school grounds must have felt like home away from home to Steve and me; that’s the only reason I can think of to explain our decision to take LSD on the Homestead campus. We must have been innocent and arrogant to believe it was a good idea, but to our credit, the grounds were large, hidden from the main street, and blessedly deserted on a Saturday.

I don’t remember how we got the LSD, but I’m pretty sure that I would have been the one to get it because Steve had never tried it before. I have a slight memory of pulling the two wrapped hits out of my pocket to show Steve, thinking that we might split one by just ripping it in half. But that’s not what either of us wanted, so we swallowed the little pieces of paper whole. And then we waited.

We sat in the stairwell under the covered enclosure of the two-story humanities building in thrilling expectation. At least I was thrilled. This was Steve’s first time and though he had a lot of bold theories, he seemed frightened as we waited for things to take effect. And then, out of the blue, he started to tell me that I would need to tell him “not to put on airs” should he “act out.” The word “airs” was so Shakespearean, I thought it was exaggerated but also magnificent. But then he said he actually wanted me to practice saying, “Don’t put on airs,” so I would be prepared to handle “it.”
Prepared for what?
I had no idea what he was talking about. It was strange and embarrassing, but he was so earnest that I went along.

“
Don’t
put on airs!” I said.

“No! You’ve got to say it with more conviction.” He was serious.

“Okay,” I said. Hem-hem … “DON’T put on airs!”

But, no, this still wasn’t strong enough for him.

“NO!” He raised his voice. He was getting impatient with me but trying to be polite. “Try it again. This is important. You won’t be able to stop me if you’re not stronger.”

Stop what?
I laughed with alarm. It was all coming out of left field.

After my third attempt he stood up and repeated himself, taking great pains to explain. “No! You have to do it like
this,
you have to
DO
it with more force!” Then with his arm outstretched, he yelled, like this, “DON’T PUT ON AIRS!”

Lordy. I was doing my best, but the whole thing seemed so hilarious that I started laughing. But Steve wasn’t laughing, just looking at me and repeating, “Speak like you MEAN it!” His brows furrowed. “Do it, say it!!!” Try as I might, I was soon laughing so hard that I couldn’t form a single word with any conviction. And I wasn’t improving with practice. I was getting worse.

Steve’s sweetness was unspeakable to me, made more so by the seriousness with which he perceived a problem that I apparently wasn’t grasping. I wondered how we were going to get beyond this when I realized that the LSD was already taking effect.

“Hey, it’s started!” I yelled. “You’re fine!”

A lifetime later, I visited Steve after he was married. Our daughter Lisa was about thirteen and Steve’s son, Reed, was a tiny baby in a stroller. We were all outside his house in Palo Alto and about to go for a walk when, without warning, Steve blurted out the meanest, most ridiculous, terrible comments at me, like a machine gun spraying bullets across me. It was so unexpected and awful, something about why I was such a total failure of a human being that I gasped. You can’t prepare for this sort of behavior, no matter how many times it happens. I fell silent, but Steve’s wife, Laurene, yelled at him to stop. Even she was indignant on my behalf. Thinking back to Steve’s first day on LSD—was it this he was scared of? He must have known he was capable of this Tourette’s-like behavior. It sort of breaks my heart now to grasp how much he understood and tried to keep hidden back then.

But on that day many years earlier, when Steve realized that nothing terrible was going to happen, he relaxed into a kind of awe and dropped the worry without any residue. We spent the next nine hours playing, talking, peering into each other’s faces, and laughing and serious in turns. Him making jokes about himself and me. Making me laugh. Making me think. It was very rich. Everything shimmered and vibrated with the LSD and the state of being so in love. Our kissing each other felt wet and bizarre and then instantaneously we merged into each other and everything floated pink and we touched our eyelashes to see what it felt like. There was nothing to hide. No fear, no barriers, no sense even of time as the sun slowly trekked across the sky until our stomachs were growling in the late afternoon when we realized that we hadn’t eaten all day and were famished. Then we took just one adventure from our humanities base camp, to a nearby orchard at the corner of Stelling and Homestead (sadly not there anymore), for some apricots, the only food we would eat that whole trip. And it was enough.

That day we did the kinds of nothing that new lovers do and it was everything. In the evening, after the intensity had started to wear off, we parted and went to our homes. The next Monday at school Steve told me with great excitement that he could feel the lining of his stomach as a result of the LSD experience. He was so excited. I could tell it meant more to him than I could make sense of.

After that first time we took acid, Steve dropped with some of his friends at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. He told me that it was so much fun for him that he wanted to do it again with me. I think he loved riding the Ferris wheel in an altered state, something about looking at the people below and the huge expanse of ocean under the moonlit sky. It never sounded like a good idea to me though, and now I can say with certainty that there’s nothing more terrible than taking LSD at an amusement park. I was freaked as I looked into the gross faces of the crowd, left unhinged by the loud noises and flashing lights. All I wanted to do was crawl under a rock and wait it out until it was all over. We did ride the Ferris wheel but I was so terrified that I gripped the side and held onto Steve praying for it to be over. It was the longest Ferris wheel ride of my life.

Steve and I decided to leave the boardwalk, but he was oblivious to his condition and to the fact that he couldn’t handle driving, so my body literally got sick at the car door to stop him from trying. After that we huddled at the edge of the Santa Cruz boardwalk, sitting on the sand for hours looking at each other, laughing and waiting late into the evening until the acid had worn off enough that it was safe to drive.

It was there, with nothing to do and all the layers of personality peeling away, looking into the sweetness of his smiling face that I understood how purely and profoundly in love I was with Steve, and he with me. This was a love unlike anything I had ever known. The hours went by like a flipbook. I could barely talk, the river of life was moving through us so fast that I could not find the vocabulary to speak and so we just looked into each other’s eyes and Steve made jokes until I told him I felt better. We headed north up the coast and found a beach with a huge shore. There we laid our sleeping bags, far enough from the water to make sure we didn’t wake up in the waves. Snuggling in together, Steve soon fell asleep curled up next to me. I couldn’t sleep, but lay awake for hours, soothed by his breathing and the waves.

During this time I had one of the most profound and lasting visions of my life. In the vestigial effects of the LSD (which is the best part of LSD because all stress is gone and simply breathing is pure wondrous joy), I experienced a form of lucid dreaming in which I saw transparent, light-filled chimes that were billions of miles high clanging together into the universe. Watching and listening for hours to these bell towers of the sky that rang through my body every time the waves crashed, I saw that color and sound were one great continuum. Where before I had divided my perceptions between the senses, after that night there has never been a time when I didn’t see sound, hear color, and sense color, form, and sound as one big connectedness. I believed then that that vision of the bells had come from our merged consciousness. I still do.

LSD is like going to the mountaintop and getting a life-altering vision. And once you have it, it never leaves. (Or if it does, it’s only because you go beyond it or something more mind-blowing subsumes it.) After taking LSD, you don’t even know that your whole life has reorganized itself around those moments of blasting insight. This is always the case with insight. It takes years to know. It can be a reckless ride if you don’t use it with some kind of sacred intent, but use it with reverence and you can access realms of potential not yet in the world. It’s a fire-of-the-gods kind of stuff, a game changer that opens doors to vital perceptions that never close again. Not to put too fine a point on it, it can change a person’s destiny.

What did Steve take from it? I don’t know. Can it turn muggles into Jedi? I don’t know that, either. I think it can offer a good religious experience, but it’s not a substitute for a spiritual practice. Steve would later publicly talk about the glories of LSD, which gives me the impression that he thought it made an important difference for him. But I don’t think either of us used it past the age of nineteen or twenty when adult responsibilities began.

More than anything, I think that the wide use of LSD was part of the response to the nuclear bomb. While Ram Dass would later say that we could access much higher states with meditation (and that it would be more stable and longer lasting than drugs), I consider LSD very much in step with the time, part of a profound urge to open the world up to a new vision based on life, not death. And even though the movements of the sixties and seventies might seem naïve by today’s standards, they informed the complex and sophisticated country we know today.

Encounter groups worked to get men to cry, and to get men and women to exchange role-playing for more authenticity in their lives and relationships. All kinds of grassroots groups organized for a more humane world. It was an iterative process that breathed through people and gathered momentum. And it created new systems of thought, vision, art, and technology meant to develop a better world: feminism; the Black Panthers; the Human Potential Movement; The Hunger Project; and the musical
Hair
all lit up for a new horizon. Hunter Thompson famously coined the rallying cry, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!” saying
anyone
was qualified to make a difference if they had the heart, mind, and will to do so. Many did.

*   *   *

Steve had read Arthur Janov’s book
The Primal Scream,
and he explained to me how both LSD and primal screaming opened up and released the stored trauma of childhood. “If we experience the feelings of our deepest unmet needs,” he told me, “we can release blocked emotions and live life more fully. Anyone can do it.” He said that Janov had developed the primal screaming methodology because one of his patients had been haunted by a theater performance of a guy walking around in diapers yelling, “Daddy come home! Mommy, don’t leave!” The performance artist had cried out again and again, until he actually threw up on stage.

Slowly, the logic behind releasing trauma made sense to me and I saw the picture Steve was deciphering. He said, à la Janov, that the flood of hallucinations that come from LSD are the result of the speed of trauma being released from the body through some kind of bio-psychological mechanism in the medulla at the back of the skull. I imagined steam from a boiling teapot streaming through the medulla, first creating a tiny hole, then a bigger one that released and transformed neurosis into images that would then dissolve in thin air. “Except with LSD,” Steve said, “neurosis will always return, whereas with primal therapy, it would be fully felt and resolved.”

Steve would repeatedly talk over Janov’s ideas about how mothers and fathers who failed to love their children—who had walked out on them in any number of ways—would create and perpetuate patterns of trauma. I followed him in these conversations many times over. It was as if they were the liturgy and he was the shaman drumming, building and amplifying a powerful idea through repetition. Eventually, the idea that it was actually possible to reclaim sacred innocence, that everything could be recovered and made wholly new again, slipped into my awareness and changed my foundational concepts forever. I think it must have been Steve’s greatest hope for himself to recover what was lost due to the adoption, but it was also a joyfully infectious idea that gave me access to my own wide vistas of potential. “Potential” itself was the aesthetic of our time.

Steve was aware earlier than most that food could be used as a way to tap into potential, to clear neurosis, and develop consciousness. Arnold Ehret’s book,
Mucusless Diet Healing System,
tipped him off to practices that he used to have superior health for years. Ehret’s book is one of these quirky gems written earlier in the twentieth century by an odd guy who still has a relatively large following today. In fact, Ehret might well be considered one of the godfathers of today’s raw and super foods movements. Ehret proposed that by eating a mucusless diet, people could clear up emotional blocks trapped in their bodies and open themselves into greater levels of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual clarity and integration. Steve would recount Ehret’s notion of how to heal, which was to stop eating meat and cheese and sugar. He would explain that healing was innate to the body; you just had to stop eating the “bad” foods. Steve told me that “With real foods like apples or salad, your body knows when it’s full. But with junk food, the body’s intelligence can’t get a read on the nutrients and so can’t tell you when to stop eating.” I loved this understanding and recognized it as a higher level of information.

Steve explained other body chemistry, too. I had discovered coffee the year before I met him, and it had literally changed my life because the focus I gained from the caffeine helped me overcome childhood ADHD and the dyslexia that had always interfered with my reading for more than twenty minutes in one sitting. Without my having told Steve my history, he explained to me that doctors gave amphetamines to hyperactive children in order to overload their nervous systems so they could calm down.
So,
I thought to myself,
this is why the coffee made the difference in my reading.
I was too embarrassed to tell him I couldn’t read well before caffeine, but once again marveled at how he’d answered the question. Later I asked a doctor if he’d gotten it right. The doctor sort of winced at me, as doctors can, but he told me Steve had, at least partially.