The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs

by Brennan, Chrisann

  However profound Steve’s insights were, they could also be alarmingly negative. One day I met him in the exact place I had first set eyes on him a few months before. He had just come from a science class and was describing experiments with lab rats that he was learning about in behavioral studies. “If you give a rat only positive feedback,” he said, “the rat can learn a trick. And if you give him only negative feedback, he can learn a trick. But if you give a rat both positive and negative feedback he’ll go crazy!” He had a shadowy smirk on his face. It was like this was information that he was pocketing for later use.

  * * *

  Steve’s world was different from mine. His was a mix of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Shakespeare, science, math, and different kinds of psychology than I was familiar with. I couldn’t get enough of science fiction and magic realism. I pored over the bright scenes of floating people, weddings, villages, rabbis, and animals within Chagall’s paintings. I loved the deep golden resonance and earthy social realism of Rembrandt’s works, and the soulful honesty in nineteenth-century Russian painting. I listened to Jefferson Starship, Jethro Tull, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, the electric violin in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and—like Steve—John Lennon.

  Steve also introduced me to the Beat Poets. He studied their literature and their cool. There was some wedge of light from that former time in him, too—the clear, hip sophistication of a handsome nerd/poet/shaman. It was a thin wire that vibrated through the center of his being, a particular rhythm in his words, humor, and ideas. I’m sure that through Steve the Beat aesthetic helped shape the future of the Apple aesthetic.

  I was no blank slate when we started our relationship, that’s for sure, but Steve planted many seeds that enlarged my considerations. He once shared with me the notion that Shakespeare was thought to have been enlightened. Enlightened? A word from the East applied to a Western European literary genius? I laughed; the idea seemed preposterous. But Steve believed it to be true. Some of his ideas would loop in my brain and never let go until I understood many years later what he had been talking about. Now I agree.

  An idea of enlightenment was fueling many, consciously and unconsciously. Our whole high school was a little petri dish growing creative students and teachers, many of whom struggled to bring about a bright new conversation based on bright new values. Seven years after graduating from high school, I would talk with Time reporter Michael Moritz, who told me that he interviewed teachers at Homestead about Steve and Woz, many of whom had independently commented that the years between 1967 and 1974 were a creative anomaly at the school, a true experimental flowering in full tilt boogie. And then one day, without warning, it was gone. Done. Kaput. Over. According to Moritz, the teachers were left stunned, asking each other: “What just happened?” “Where did it all go?”

  From my current view, I am hard pressed not to consider that all of that explosive cultural magma came to distill itself into the cool circuitry of the infinitesimally small computer chip—a rational response for the building of social complexity, organization, and connection. The world was demanding change and a higher level of functioning. It called out not just for a new science and technology, but for new laws to handle it, and new types of art and music to express it. Honestly new kinds of everything to integrate new levels of responsibility and love. And we were a part of that new stage.

  At the end of my junior year, Homestead had started to make physical changes to the campus that seemed designed to stamp out the kind of creativity we represented. Small grassy areas were, one by one, covered with cement. As I recall, they were painted pale green. Surveillance floodlights were put into the quad, and an eight-foot fence was erected around the entire campus. A year after I left, the cinder blocks were painted a suffocating, off-white enamel. Maybe it was done in the interest of preservation, protection, and cost cutting, but it seemed that the school was being redesigned for control. Our time came and went, and with it, a unique culture. Now, however, thirty years later I have to say, the school is stupendously beautiful. Things change. And there are different purposes growing inside a new generation of children at Homestead now. I can see and feel it. And these children are softer and kinder than we were, too.

  Looking back on everything now, I recall how close Steve and I were, how much time we spent together. Like young couples everywhere, we went to the movies. We saw films by François Truffaut, Fellini, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, and others—films about Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Lenny Bruce, and Woody Guthrie, all of which we would see at Steve’s behest. The romantic in Steve particularly loved Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim and Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. And though I loved and was captivated by the textures in these movies, I’m afraid I just didn’t get the depth of the drama. Both films had a terrible sense of devastating romantic loss that escaped my understanding. Not until much later, when I saw The Enigma of Kasper Hauser in 1988, did I experience the truth of my own devastating emotional theater for the first time. Leaving the movie house that day I felt as if I were walking on the bottom of the ocean. So this is what that was for him, I thought. Sadly, there were many instances back then when my full appreciation for Steve’s emotional life would be subject to great time delays.

  The extent to which Steve could be affected by a film was made clear to me one night we went to Camera One in San Jose. The 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back was playing, and I recall at one point I turned away from the movie to look at Steve because his energy was so intense it was as if terrible electricity moved through his body. The movie had made a point of comparing Dylan with another contemporary folk singer, Donovan. Identified as he was with Dylan’s musical superiority and success, I saw in Steve how personal it was to him to be on the winning side of this competition as his dark, seething expression revealed a ruthless contempt toward Donovan’s “lesser talent” that took my breath away.

  FOUR

  THE IMPOSTER

  Homestead in the seventies was a vibrant mix. We had musicians and actors, smart people, and stoners. There were photographers, English lit kids, and various artistic types—those into fine art like me, but also cartoonists and ceramicists. Homestead had its scientists and its nerds, of course, as well as a group of boys who rode motorcycles and wore Harley-Davidson jackets, but whom we called the “Hardly Hards” because they were such sweet guys. Then there were the kids who were just themselves, with no group association you could pin on them.

  Students at Homestead overlapped in their associations. Steve and I did; we bridged different worlds. His friends were odd and smart, with a shared a sense of mischief and a bright individuality. They were always finding ways to cut through the rules that others lived by. And they were loyal, like an elite band of thieves. (My friends weren’t this way. We didn’t need the double vision that clever insincerities call for.)

  Steve had the kind of intellectual honesty that you find in very bright people who are used to tolerating a less-than-brilliant world. That Honest Abe quality again. Yet while he stayed true to himself in so many remarkable ways, he was also disconnected and awkward. Steve’s baseline was a mix of genius, authenticity, and emotional woodenness. Wooden like Pinocchio, but not a Disneyfied version of that story: something ancient, about the tale of the motherless, enchanted boy. Real boys knew things that he didn’t. His birth mother’s love, for example. His birth father’s pride. And just what did this father do for a living? Stuff most people take for granted.

  Some of his qualities derailed me and made me uneasy. At seventeen, I didn’t have the intellectual sophistication to know that false sentimentality can have an underbelly of indifference and brutality to offset the numbness. But I could feel it. His oft-quoted refrain that he was “The Imposter” indicated that somewhere he grasped the nature of the problem. My feelings in response to him ranged from being deeply moved to being totally removed. Not knowing better then, I questioned whether there was something wrong with me, and I observed our friendship for clues about what was pr
esent and missing in both of us—because that’s what teenagers do.

  This was the age of splitting the atom, an aspect of science that contributed to the development of the computer. And Steve was a child of his time, an extraordinary child who would learn to create in spite of—or perhaps even because of—the great gulf of his interior life. Of course I didn’t think in these terms then.

  Steve invented the name “Oaf Toabar” for himself. Oaf was a secret name, he said, and I wasn’t to tell anyone about it. It seemed a tender expression of vulnerability and self-confessed awkwardness, although his oafishness wasn’t such an attractive quality to me. He signed love letters with “Love, Oaf.” And like a note slipped under a door, this name made me wonder about his hidden sense of identity. Steve often made a big deal about being an oaf and laughing at himself; it’s why he loved the psychological complexes of Woody Allen’s characters. Yet the nature of Steve’s feelings of awkwardness would give way to another layer of insight. Steve was a magician, and it was as if from within the secret logic of fairy tales that he leveraged his shyness and low self-esteem into its opposite expression, to become a man of exceeding self-confidence and invulnerability. It was a deft sleight of hand, but it felt slightly sketchy to me. I was aware of feeling uncomfortable with a false intimacy when he told me not to tell anyone about this secret name. (Much later I would discover that it was the code name he used to identify himself in the underground business of selling blue boxes with Woz.)

  One day early in our relationship I saw Steve standing by himself, holding his body in a way that I found so disturbing that it made me question if I was seeing right. It was an aspect of him that never appeared when he was animated and talking, but after observing it several times in the months that followed I knew for sure I was seeing a different side of him. When he was by himself, Steve’s posture sometimes took on the quality of a mad cripple. Whether he was standing or leaning against a wall, he would hold himself frail and stooped, with a bony knee bent and torqued inward. His head would be dropped and he’d peer out with one eye under his forward falling hair. Steve could be standing in the brightest sunshine, but his angled posture would create sharp shadows. A buzz of mean darkness would gather around him at these times, leaving the unmistakable impression of a devastating loneliness. The emotional starvation in him pierced right through me.

  I remember one of his friends at that time was a girl who was solid and witty, not especially pretty, but so self-possessed that she was beautiful and impressive. This girl would challenge Steve in ways that seemed beyond me, ways that made me sit up and take note. I think she saw something in him that she felt called to engage. She had a pinch of the dominatrix in her and she was getting him to be brave by doing things that were socially undesirable.

  This girl’s strange requests made me uncomfortable. You could almost hear her say, “Now my puppet…” I remember how she would sidle up close to him and whisper some new idea: “This is what I want you to do.” She’d always begin that way. “Now this is what I want you to do.” Steve would come under her spell. And a rhythm would move through his body as he readied himself for the challenge. Any chance to win the prize of her approval.

  Steve couldn’t back out; she wouldn’t allow it. He tried once, and I watched how she stood her ground, how she confronted him and repeated her challenge. I suspect now that he was attracted to her strength. I wasn’t jealous of her, but I was uneasy with the way she spoke to him and the things she got him to do. They were funny, these challenges, and at the same time not funny at all. I wish I could remember the many examples, but I can recall one time when she had him cut in front of about fifty people to get tickets for a theater performance in San Francisco. She asked and he did it. That cleared it all up for me: these requests were designed to get the awkward boy to stand up to his own outrageous potential. I must have looked like a gnat to her and all her power.

  Another of his friends, whom I’ll call “Lew,” was a tall, thin Eurasian guy. He looked slightly tipped, as if he had fallen out of a Paul Klee painting. There was something lyrically off balance about the two tall friends, something idiosyncratic in their sweetness and respect for each other, too. Steve told me that Lew wanted to become a San Francisco cab driver after high school, so he could learn the streets of the city. I was fascinated by this idea and the way he intended to, as I thought of it then, stack his purposes one on top of the other. For him it was simple: make an income while learning the city streets as if he were both a cab driver and an undercover agent. Lew’s plan tipped me off to a creative principle about organizing complexity. I had never considered achieving multiple outcomes in one action like this. Silly as it might sound—because this is all anyone ever does now—the way Lew stacked his purposes indicated the creation of a multiuse device. Like a smartphone that’s also a camera and an address book and everything else under the sun. This idea seemed exciting and generative to me as an artist. And it was a glimpse into their conversations that I was otherwise never in on. I am sure that Steve told me about it because he was musing over it, too.

  One day Steve told me that Lew’s father drank and beat Lew. Steve had always made a big deal out of the fact that he never had been spanked or hit by his parents in any way; once again, I believe this was important to him because something similar may have happened to his father, Paul.

  Lew’s situation seemed to have a tremendous impact on Steve. It turned him into something of a healer. In all the time I knew Steve this was a role I rarely saw him take on. But he had a huge capacity for empathy when it came to men’s stories. I think that Lew and Steve recognized the reality of male brutality together, bonding in the brotherhood of a terrible shared knowledge.

  * * *

  My best friend in high school was Laura Schylur. A dancer, musician, and poet, she had a beautiful childlike face. Laura also had a quality of being different—perhaps because she, like me, was dyslexic. Laura and I would hang out together in nature, in the apricot orchards that were so abundant in our area back then, and in the hills behind St. Joseph’s Seminary close to her home. Together we learned to play music on recorders, later on flutes: folk songs, ballads, Beethoven, Bach, and John Lennon’s “Oh My Love,” which was the song that Lennon wrote after going through primal therapy with Yoko Ono. The tenderness of this simple song touched something important in me; it offered a vision of the kind of emotional intimacy I yearned to know with a man.

  Laura wasn’t happy about my relationship with Steve, and not just because he took up so much of my time. Steve was dismissive of her and she resented it. Laura remembers the way I once ran up and told her that Steve and his friend, Woz, were making blue boxes, and according to her I announced that “Steve is a geeeeeeenius!” I sort of remember this, too, and I can picture Laura’s response. Unimpressed. Deflated.

  Which brings me to Steve Wozniak. Woz. Whenever Woz and Steve met up, they connected like excited children. They’d be so thrilled by their discoveries and breakthroughs, so lifted by the helium of their excitement, that they’d literally jump up and down and all around each other, speaking in sharp, rapid bursts, hysterical yelps, and deep-throated laughs. Their sounds were unnerving to me, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. They’d drive me away from the garage and out of earshot within seconds because the pitch was just so awful.

  Woz didn’t like sharing Steve with me. Likely they both preferred having me out of the garage when they were working together. But this really wasn’t the problem. Nor was it the genius that they rightly shared in all of its explosive joy. No, there was something else about it that jarred my nervous system. If there’s ever a musical adaptation of Apple, say an opera, there should be dystopian scenes in the famous garage as ground zero, where sound mangles, torques, warps, and then completely tears the physical world of time and space away from the human dimension. Because this is what it felt like to me. When Steve and Woz were excited like this it was as if they were ripping the fabric of the universe. Now I wonder if t
his was the precursor to what people would later refer to as Steve’s reality distortion field.

  Woz was older than Steve and I, and already in college, but he seemed younger in many ways. He had no use for me, a girl, and I must admit I found him alarmingly unattractive and couldn’t figure out how to talk to him. He wasn’t fun or friendly to me. When one of us found the other with Steve, we’d both be disappointed in some quiet way. We were the two most important people to Steve, and yet we had nothing to say to each other.

  Woz and I once shared each other’s company on a road trip to see Steve in Portland after he had started at Reed College. We left hours before dawn and when the sun came up near Shasta I commented on how beautiful the clouds were: pinks and yellows and peaches climbing in a fresh blue morning sky. His response? A flat “I’ve seen better.” I remember our stopping at a gas station—this was the same trip—and hurrying back from the bathroom because I had a feeling that Woz was thinking about driving off without me. He did leave me once, at the San Francisco airport. Woz had taken Steve to the airport and I had gone along to see him off. Woz drove away and left me there, claiming later he’d had the impression that I was flying out with Steve. No doubt about it: Woz was ornery then.

  Yet for all this, I so admired the monster prankster in these two. They were off-the-charts funny. There was an infectious, pure joy running through them, especially when they would do things that were illegal, but so brilliantly conceived that no one could catch up to them. I remember the time Woz drove to L.A. on Highway 5 months before it had opened to the public. No police. No traffic. No speed limit. No problem. And there was Woz at 150 miles an hour. Then there were the blue boxes, devices that got around having to pay for phone calls. Woz and Steve weren’t the first inventors, but they did figure out how to make and improve them. These guys had a gangster brilliance. And there was something exhilarating and enlarging about their teamwork.