I don’t recall the conversation that first spring afternoon. I just remember that it was a little work to get beyond the awkwardness of a new friendship to find out who the other was, who we were together, and how much might be possible. There was that excited feeling in the air. Since he had invited me there and I had accepted, I think both of us knew that doors were opening and love was coming.
* * *
Mark’s project was finishing by mid-May and most everyone who had been a part of the weekly events came to celebrate. We threw a formal dinner party in the middle of the night in the central campus, the motherboard of our communal lives. Converging in the freedom of the night air one last time, we, a band of bright happy creatures dressed in gowns and tuxedos (Steve had managed to score a top hat), toasted, ate, and laughed around a long candle-lit table in full Felliniesque style. A quartet and a strobe light made us all feel as if we were in some elegant silent film.
During that spring, with the film and some Saturday afternoon baseball games as backdrop, Steve and I got to know each other better. He didn’t talk a lot but he was funny and vibrant and really good at making me laugh. But he was shy. So shy, in fact, that he couldn’t give me our first kiss. I was so embarrassed by his trying that I finally kissed him.
After we were together for a while, Steve ventured to tell me that I was his “North Country Girl,” the one from the Dylan song who was a true love, the one he would know before fame and wealth came, the one hit by heavy winds. Even then he had placed me in his “life-as-Bob-Dylan” timeline. I didn’t understand that I was somehow being set up to play a part in some mythic script he was designing for himself.
I was a small-boned, petite girl—just five feet two. I had long, light brown hair turned gold on the outer layers by the sun. I have a high forehead and slightly elongated face, refined, expressive hands, and green eyes. I am dyslexic, which has had the effect of making me differently wired, creative, and a voracious problem solver—bright, but more than slightly clueless to convention. I suppose Steve would have intuited that I had a perceptive mind with a sense-oriented awareness of the world around me.
What did I see in Steve?
I knew he was a genius when I first saw him because his eyes shone with brilliant, complicated cartwheels of light. In time I came to understand how fully off-the-charts intuitive and mature beyond his years he was, like an old soul with quiet knowledge. He had deep brown hair and marble-white skin—skin that was supersensitive and yet also thick, which I would later realize was not unlike his personality. He had a slight lisp and his upper and lower teeth met perfectly, giving his Middle Eastern lips and nose an even more distinctive look. His smile had the glint of a pirate with treasure in the hull. There was a profound sadness about him that drew me in, but there was also an unspoken fullness in his stature that gave the impression he had the humility and strength to walk through the world as he truly was. I admired this right from the start. I know humility might sound unlikely to some, but it’s like the salt in chocolate, the small contrasting flavor that makes you know that the strength is real and true. The mix of all of this came to life in a personality that was irreverent, bright, offbeat, awkward, funny, and full of mystery. I adored him beyond everything, pure and simple.
We were different from each other in many ways. I was sense- and soul-oriented and he was logical and intuitive. Yet we shared basic creative values and were both fiercely experimental. Steve and I wanted to find the pathways through any and all limitations, and that impulse was stronger than the fear of making mistakes. Neither of us placed great importance on the need to be right. The notion that we were a true yin and yang still resonates for me, even though in time this same quality would become polarized—destructive, even.
In those days, I considered Steve a guide for me because I saw an intellectual honesty in him. He was tall and had the sophisticated, unadorned presence I imagined Abraham Lincoln to have had: self-effacing and honest, funny, nothing extra. I was dealing with a corrosive home life, which was shattering my ability to build the next stages of my life, but Steve was further along in thinking about the shape of his adulthood and the road that would take him there. He had an aerial view of things and I could see he was cataloging information that implied scope and goal. He spoke in cloaked metaphors and had a big conversation going on inside. I wanted to know more about that conversation. I needed to know more and found myself quick to pay attention to his young stores of knowledge to get the sense of how he saw things. I believe that he was equally delighted and interested to see the world through my impulses, perceptions, and creativity.
Steve would play with words that were quirky and obscure to me, often saying that he was “The Imposter,” or mysteriously repeating that something was going to last “for forty days and forty nights,” or that it was “thirty-nine past the hour.” Then there were the numerous rounds of The Fool is the highest card, a reference that indicated an archetype and more, because The Fool—marked by the zero in the tarot—is about nothing and everything. It’s all about potential. Placing himself in this starring role and winking at me with a shiny smile, Steve was The Fool, the one who would walk over the edge of the known world and willy-nilly take the consequences. Oh yes, he was the courageous fool who knew from a very early age that he had something to do in the world. But this all contrasted with the darker warning he would give that he was a “no good boyo” from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which I wondered at each time he said it. Finally there was the “I’m living on borrowed time” refrain. I never knew what he was talking about, but I would tilt my head to listen as if from an inner ear, searching for clues in the mix of it all.
We had both been hit by the winds of the sixties and had developed a core distrust of convention and an unbounded excitement for the amazing possibilities that lay ahead. Whatever we were to become, we shared this teenage stage of hunting and gathering that would keep us delighted and unfolding. From this shared ground and atmosphere we were willing, indeed bursting, to be experimental. We might have been called visionaries, except back then I never would have connected this word to the urgent need to expand beyond the known. It was just what was.
TWO
AN ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY
For the first six weeks of our friendship, Steve and I existed almost exclusively in our teenage world: high school, the nighttime movie set, baseball games on the Cupertino middle school lawn. But it would be some time before we would meet each other’s parents.
It was a late Saturday morning when I first met Paul and Clara Jobs. They were painting his sister Patty’s bedroom, and in the background hum of introductions I noticed the most beautiful yellow I had ever seen. The tone caught me off guard and made me wonder who these people were to have chosen it. My mind raced: no one in all of my extended family had ever used such a color, or even come close. Its soft warmth aroused in me a spirit of awe. Harder to understand were the other feelings it provoked—a sense of having missed something, of disappointment in my own family.
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.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 2
