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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  These were my mantras—my self-appointed marching orders—and all that would pass for a life plan in my youth. It provided me with a curious, defiant security based on a stunning belief in my own internal resources. With this, I armed myself for destiny, come what may.

  Before I left my mother’s home to live at my father’s, I remember being suspended in a recurring thought: What if people were just good to each other? What if they only paid attention to what was needed, with deep-hearted common sense and a commitment to kindness for the common wealth? It was a feeling from a dim radiance centered in my heart but it was without words. And because I didn’t have words for it, I developed that “love-in-community project” for years without ever understanding that such an important question was working and working in me. I didn’t know how to wrap my arms around my mother’s lovelessness, so I avoided her. But I got a second chance later, when I was faced with a similar level of unkindness in Steve, and was forced to navigate through it for our daughter’s well-being.

  SIX

  EDEN

  Steve and I found our way into love that spring. We would kiss for hours, at the park and in his car, and we’d try very hard to name exactly what it was that made it so much fun. It was ineffable and we never did figure it out, and soon other things between us needed names, too.

  When Steve visited my house he’d come directly to my bedroom so as to avoid my mother. I’d look up to see his sweet glowing face at my window and have to catch my breath. I can still see his eyes from that time—they were the kindest, softest eyes I had ever known. Steve was my sublime haven and I was happy in my skin when we were together.

  As spring moved into summer, the four trellised columns on my front porch grew thick with star jasmine and filled the air with a humming fragrance. It was then that Steve and I decided to live together for the summer. This was 1972. I can’t recall who suggested it first, but I have a feeling it had to have been coconspiratorial, one idea shimmying its way into the air until we both said, “That’s it.” Neither of us had any ambivalence about the decision. We were determined and clear-eyed about the whole idea. The seventies gave us some permission and the rest we gave ourselves.

  Soon after we’d made our decision I rode my bike to the local junior college where I found an ad on a bulletin board—one room in a cabin in the hills. It sounded perfect, but when I called the landlord he told me that he didn’t have space for a couple. I was really disappointed, but figured there was nothing to be done. Later, when I mentioned the missed opportunity to Steve, he surprised me by asking for the guy’s number. Oh, really, I thought, rifling through my purse for the scrap I had written it on. Long story short—Steve got us an interview, and this alerted me to something remarkable in him. This was a guy who could make things happen. And because of the way he’d asked for the number, I knew he knew it, too.

  That weekend we drove in Steve’s orange Fiat to what was literally the last house on Stevens Canyon Road in Cupertino. We drove past Stevens Creek dam until the road narrowed into twisting two lanes that carried us deep into the woodsy mountains. We passed a lot of small cabins and a local tavern until finally we got to the last turnoff, a hundred feet before the road dead-ended at a footpath. Turning left, we found ourselves on a flat clearing, deep in a valley between some very high hills. Here stood four little cabins, hunkered down in the delicate sunlight. We drove slowly to the farthest cabin, passing an enormous pig in a muddy pen and lots of free-roaming chickens that clucked as they scattered out of our way. Four wild-eyed goats tiptoed in close on their hooves and eyed us as we got out of the car. It looked like some Appalachian back world of stillness and old things.

  Alfonso Tatono greeted us with a mischievous smile, and beckoned us in. His house smelled musty. The first thing I noticed was a big white parachute draped from the ceiling down over the dark wooden walls to increase the lighting in a film project he was working on. We were awed. This was the home of a bona fide hippy. Al showed us around the cabin. The spaces were small and dark and well swept. He had furniture from the forties and fifties, and the accoutrement of the sixties and seventies, including found objects from nature. It was tidy with the kind of care that a man instills on his environment and very far from the ranch-style houses of the stultifying monoculture of the American suburbs we’d just left. I found it exciting and sort of awful all at the same time.

  Al was in his mid-twenties and seemed worlds older than we were. He was studying film at San Jose State and working on a film about his Italian immigrant father. When Steve found out that Al had access to the university’s film library, he was very interested. As they chatted, I wandered around, wondering what it would be like to live there and sleep in the same bed as Steve. We must have done something right, because Al offered to take the roll-out couch in the living room so that we could have his bedroom for the summer.

  It would be two weeks before we’d move to the cabin, two weeks in which I’d lay low and quietly observe the changes in my house. My mother peered at me from behind the scenes during this time, copping an attitude of indifference that seemed to me to betray the depths of her insecurity. I had stayed in her home without being wanted, buried at the bottom of a well of self-doubt, trying to survive her cruelty and cope with her mental illness. She had asked me to leave many times before, and had terrified me by saying she would drop me off at Haight-Ashbury. But now that I was finally going, she was oddly soft and disoriented. There was no wind in her for the hatred. No breath. No force.

  I never knew exactly what the parallel scene looked like at Steve’s house. Steve didn’t talk about it; I don’t think that it occurs to teenagers to talk about some things. But I had observed Steve’s family and I knew that he was always his own authority. I can see him weathering what I imagine was Paul’s disgust about our living together in the quiet way that he dealt with all of Paul’s reactions at that time, sad but certain of his choices.

  In the end I was confounded that my mother responded with grief, that we pulled it off, and that Paul never exacted any revenge. Unlike my mother, Paul had a way of dissolving his frustrations before they mounted into action. Despite his punctuated outbursts, he was wired for harmlessness in some inexplicable way. Clara fell tight-lipped and distant. She kept her judgments to herself. I could sense her disapproval, but she remained considerate in her behavior.

  We invited Steve’s parents over for dinner soon after we moved in, but only Clara came. When I recall that dinner now, I remember being surprised by how she allowed herself to be received by us. Clara showed such a sense of grace at being our guest of honor that she made Steve and me happy to have brought her there. We were so proud of making a whole dinner for her, and we flitted about like little birds, serving the food, talking about how we made it, and wanting to know if she liked it. I had somehow expected there to be an undercurrent of dissonance that evening, but there wasn’t. Instead, Clara—whom I called Mrs. Jobs—sat still and shy in her delight, while we moved about and showered her with our gladness and our best spaghetti and salad dinner. I saw that she was willing to be charmed by us. And I could understand why Paul had married her.

  * * *

  Our nights at the cabin were an Eden. We would wake up at all hours, so deliriously happy that we were together, incredulous that we didn’t have to go home because we were home. Sometimes I’d open my eyes in the middle of the night and suddenly remember that we were together. I’d feel and smell him and I would reach for him and then he would wake up, and we would embrace and kiss, laughing and astonished to be so close and so wildly sweet with love. We’d fall back into sleep in each other’s arms and then he’d wake me up, to kiss and make love all over again. I remember this time for its joy and the freedom to be and love so purely. Our young dreaming bodies were swept away in a swirl of past, present, and future of all time and all worlds, having everything, knowing nothing.

  Within the week, whenever we climbed into bed, Steve began telling me stories of how we were part of a
n affiliation of poets and visionaries he called the Wheatfield Group. (Steve sometimes spelled it Weatfield.) We were looking out a window together, he said, watching the world with the others. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but with all my heart I wanted to see such views. It wasn’t a metaphor for me. I knew it was real. I had ached for enchanted narratives all my life and his were not only the first, but some of the most beautiful and urgent I had ever known. I sometimes thought I could see the impression of the shape of a window where the cabin wall stood, that I could feel the silhouettes of the poets mingling in the room with us.

  Steve always had a profound sense of self-adoration. His private mythologies made that clear. I cherished them, and wanted to protect his blessed poetic vision and the invisible community into which he gave me entrance. I think that sharing the knowledge of the Wheatfield Group must have been an initiation of some sort, because I later found out that a very small group of people at Steve’s funeral put wheat on his casket. He must have carried the Wheatfield Group with him his whole life.

  Steve hung a poster of Bob Dylan on the dark, wood-paneled wall over our bed and we covered ourselves in my great-grandmother’s down comforter that my family had carried, state by state, all the way from Ohio. That, along with her kerosene lamp, kept us warm and happy in the night. My great-grandmother had used that hourglass-shaped lamp as a matter of necessity. In our electrified world we would use it for its soul quality from a simpler time when technology was more connected to the senses. Every night when we lit the lamp it felt to us that we were the luckiest two people ever. We had such a fortune in each other, and it showed in the soft warm light, the downy comforter, and the window into the poet worlds.

  * * *

  During that summer, Steve and I would stay up late to watch movies with Al and his brother. At a time when there was no such thing as home video, VHS, DVDs, Netflix, or live streaming, the intimate clicking of the reel-to-reel projector was a lush and sensuous pleasure. Mostly we watched the student films that Al found in the film library’s archives, many of which contained art from the East. We viewed one gorgeous sacred image after another—mandalas and yantras with intricate symbols worked out thousands of years ago, said to create heightened states of consciousness to balance spirit in matter, and man and woman. These images were extraordinary and perfect in the way that the thick, almost cartoonish art from the sixties was painfully far from achieving. In the late nineties I would come back around to paint this kind of sacred art with an added postmodern, New Age, sci-fi, visionary sensibility.

  Often I couldn’t keep my eyes open past 9:30 in the evening, so I would go to sleep while Steve stayed up late to write poetry or talk with Al. Steve had his own doorways into these nights. He would lug the typewriter into the living room and I would observe him, in my broken sleep, coming into our room for things he’d forgotten, with the blaring living room light cast over the bed. Delicately self-absorbed, with his hand holding his hair back—partly to see more clearly and partly in an adolescent gesture of self-holding—he’d search for the things he was missing, a pen, more paper, a book.

  I would hear his electric typewriter bulleting away in the night until I was completely asleep. He reworked Dylan songs by personalizing them for himself, or for us, or for me. Only now do I understand what he was trying to do. He was a loner and he didn’t talk much, and I think he manipulated Dylan’s songs to make sense of and reflect his world.

  One day he nailed one of these poems—“Mama, Please Stay Out,” a reworking of “To Ramona”—to our front door. It was a response to my mother’s baffling unkindness toward me and her uneasiness over my having moved out. He’d written it in a silent fury after she had come over to the cabin unannounced to see how I was doing. She guessed I might be pregnant. In fact, I was. I never told her, but she had a lengthy conversation with me about how I had to keep the baby. I was struck by her passionate hypocrisy. She had complained so much about the responsibilities of raising children. And later, after Lisa was born in 1978, she would look at my newborn and ask “Why, oh why did you have this baby?” That was her. But that summer at the cabin, Steve and I had already agreed that I wouldn’t have the baby. We were firm in our decision and I had no intention of taking her advice on anything. Still, it upset me.

  I can imagine now that for Steve, my mother was a she-monster and that he thought that he could keep her out with his poem, like a talisman. I sort of remember how it went. Part of it was addressed to my mother:

  So you think you know us and our pain,

  but to know pain means your senses will rise.

  Other parts were for me:

  I can see that your head

  Has been twisted and fed

  By worthless foam from the mouth

  I wasn’t absorbed by Dylan’s work at that time. In fact, I was inwardly dismissive of Steve’s splice poetry and sort of insulted by his saying that my head had been twisted and fed. I wasn’t putting things together as well as he was and he wasn’t very discreet about how he saw me. I did not have his Bob Dylan context. What I saw were a lot of Dylan songs with a few changes. I couldn’t understand why he, of all people, wasn’t more original in his writing. Girls can be so hard on boys.

  I had a romantic image of the poet as a pure being who would sooner walk off a cliff than disconnect himself from the truth and law of his being. That’s how I perceived Steve—as pure a being as ever there was. But now I see that Dylan’s lyrics were brilliant and that Steve was looking for ways to live inside them as if they were mansions, because that’s what they were to him. My heart has searched for a way to change that history to a different version, where I take time to read the original lyrics, ask him questions, and deeply commit to understanding his changes.

  * * *

  Not long after moving in, we discovered that the goats had a nasty practice of bucking us in the back the moment we would get out of the car. These ornery creatures were clever and fast; the whole thing was extremely unpleasant. As soon as we drove off the road and into the valley, the goats would pick up their heads and watch us arrive. Then they’d begin their measured tiptoeing toward the car, holding back ever so slightly so as to not be too obvious. But we knew.

  Twenty feet running distance was enough for them to pick us off if we weren’t paying attention and sometimes even if we were. After having been bucked one too many times, we got strategic. Steve would run and face the leader of the goats, going for the most aggressive black one, grabbing his long horns to push and wrangle with him while I would get everything from the car and run out of harm’s way. Once I got to the top of the porch I would laugh, thrilled by his playful chivalry. Then he’d turn to leap onto the steps as fast as he could to join me, and where we’d laugh and be dismayed together.

  The porch was a great lookout, and because of the goats, I didn’t go wandering around the property that much. Instead I’d stand there to look around and soak up the sun and fresh air. One day when I was doing this I saw the neighbors on their front porch having some sort of little party. I’m not a nosey person by nature, it’s just that the house was only about twenty yards away and I couldn’t help but notice. Al had told us in passing that these neighbors did a lot of drugs while they were waiting around for their inheritance. As lifestyles go it didn’t interest me much, but they were nice enough. Steve and I never really talked about them, and we didn’t talk much to them, either, except to say hi every now and then. But on this occasion, as I was enjoying the fresh air, Steve quietly walked up behind and asked me, “Would you do that?”

  I looked back at him and saw that his eyes had narrowed to a slit, as if he were looking through to some distant plane. “Do what?” I asked. He expected me to know what he was thinking.

  “Wait for an inheritance,” he responded.

  “No,” I answered, and as I said this, the sense rushed through me that this was not how people should use their time. But so did the sense that I was being surreptitiously tested. And because
of this, and because the question was so aimed and dark, I’ve remembered it. Steve the intuitive knew he was going to be extremely wealthy, he’d told me so. Was it that he wanted to gauge not just my character, but the role I would play in his future? And what about his own role in such a future?

  * * *

  In the middle of the summer Steve and I went to a small theater in San Francisco’s North Beach to see Modern Times, with Charlie Chaplin. We had very little money and no foreseeable prospects in the future, but he loved classic movies and loved introducing them to me. At the end of the evening I was a bit stressed to realize we had spent most of what we had left on dinner and the movie, but when we discovered a $25 parking ticket on our car, I turned inside out with despair. Steve was calm and didn’t seem to really care. The truth was he had that look on his face again—sad, surrendered, and thoughtful. I could tell he was seeing into his future.

  We drove to Crissy Field in San Francisco after that, and walked out onto the beach to see the sunset. As we walked, I began talking about money worries for the umpteenth time that day. Steve gave me a long, exasperated look, then reached into his pockets and took all that we had left and threw it into the ocean. Ahh! Who would do that? I was filled with so much frustration and admiration that I started laughing and then crying and then laughing again. How could I not love him? The audacity of the act trumped everything. This was purity. This was the poet, not the one who stayed up late rewriting Dylan’s stuff.

  Later that week Woz came over to the cabin and gave Steve some money for a blue box he had just sold. Until that moment, I had no idea Steve was making money from those things. I just hadn’t connected the dots, likely because they had kept it under my radar. Also up until that time I hadn’t really considered that Woz could bring serious goodness into our lives, though I found myself constantly reevaluating my position on him because he was never one thing or the other. As awkward as our relationship was, I could never fully dislike Woz. Maybe because he loved Steve so much. Or maybe because he seemed like a very bright child to me, innocent and still growing.