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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  I gave Woz a lot of space. Small, bright boys sometimes play in a way that is more like a feverish unfolding—breathless, busy, and nonrelational. At twenty years old, Woz seemed to still be packed tight and bubbling with things to bring into the world. And here he was grinning and splitting the money with Steve. I was so grateful to him. At the time I thought he was simply being nice to share it. I still hadn’t managed to wrap my head around the idea that he and Steve were equal partners in an underground business.

  Later that summer, the three of us went to De Anza College to look on their job boards. We found an opening for four people to dress up as Alice in Wonderland characters at a Santa Clara shopping mall. The pay was $250 each for two days work—a lot of money in 1973. We jumped at the chance, and brought along our roommate Al as the fourth.

  I looked very much like the original Alice: a large head on a small body, with long ringlets and serious little circles under my eyes. The three guys, who traded off the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit, would wear these huge head constructions that went down to their knees. That weekend the mall’s air conditioner had broken, and the weather was smoldering hot, so they could barely handle being in costume for more than ten minutes at a time. Even after stuffing bags of ice inside the heads, the three of them kept running into the dressing room to trade off heads and drink water. It was painful to watch. Hilarious, too.

  * * *

  Looking back now, it seems so bizarre and fitting: the big heads and the little girl falling down a hole portended the future like nothing else could have. In light of what came later, I think it would be rather nice to be able to package my memories in the form of a fairy tale, something soft and bright and fanciful that I could look at from time to time, and then put safely away.

  The truth is, when I shared my world with Steve I made myself into an orphan so that he would feel less lonely. But I was no orphan. Yes, my mother was ill, but I had a big family who loved me and wanted me. I think I imagined I had it all to spare because like many young people—maybe even all people—it’s hard to know how much you have and what it all means until it’s gone. I let Steve exert the wrong kind of pull on my heart. It took me almost twenty years to understand how much harm I had done to myself by that kind of wrongheaded inspiration, but I can say now that it was a false response that made for huge losses over time.

  That fall, before Steve went to college and I returned to high school, I made a painting as a tribute to our summer. The painting, long gone, was of a marionette floating in the middle of starry patches of blues and greens. It was a little French marionette that looked like Steve, with a sad smile inside a big, happy one. It had soft billowy pantaloons with big, lit-up buttons, like chakras running down the front of the body. Big droopy feet poked out from under the pantaloons, and they hung ungrounded in midair. There was only one string to the marionette and it swirled up from his hand and over his head ending in a series of soft, overlapping circles. Steve cherished the picture. Eventually I think we both understood that it was a snapshot of what he would become.

  SEVEN

  THE HANDBOOK OF BECOMING

  Steve left for Reed College in September. Woz and I went to see him in October, leaving before dawn for the nearly twelve-hour drive to Portland. We got there late in the afternoon, locked our luggage in the hatchback, and raced up to find the glorious boy.

  Steve’s dorm was in an old brick building with gargoyles on the rooftops. These creatures were uniquely grotesque and so realistic that I felt them shifting around, flapping their leathery wings, and peering out from the heights of some medieval authority.

  There were about six people in Steve’s room when we got there. And in the midst of the flurry of introductions, Steve grabbed my hand and ran, leading me into the privacy of a co-ed bathtub stall where he kissed me like he had never kissed me before.

  I didn’t see Woz again until it was time to go home.

  I stayed with Steve for two days on that first visit. We’d sleep in his narrow student bed and sneak into the bathroom to take baths in a claw-footed tub. I shared Steve’s meal plan, with the added guest expense of $1.35 per meal, but when we wanted to be alone we’d eat in his bedroom. We made meals on Steve’s Bunsen burner—Campbell’s tomato soup with crackers, mostly, which we’d sip out of camping cups and eat with saltines. I’d explore the bookstore when Steve was in class, which is where I found the full set of pictures from a series of cards he had been sending me by a contemporary painter named Muldoon Elder. I remember that I felt moved that Steve and I both loved the same artist’s work. I’d also bide my time listening to music (usually Beethoven) in the private world of Steve’s headphones. I sang blithely along to the music—until one day Steve came in and started laughing at my tuneless threading notes.

  I met Daniel Kottke for the first time on this visit. Like most of Steve’s friends from the period, Daniel—with his long blond hair and soft, mustached face—looked like a version of Jesus. But I had a limited picture of what Steve’s life was like at Reed because my visits were always brief and we shared little time with others.

  When I think back on all this now, I have a much greater appreciation of the intensity of teenage emotions. Steve and I missed each other terribly. It was difficult to live so far apart after being so close in the summer, and we wrote frequently to each other during this time.

  Some three years later when Steve was helping me move my things out of my father’s garage, he found the large shoebox in which I had stored all of his love letters. I remember him standing there with the S curve of his harlequin body, the soft angle of his long neck gracefully bent as he read. He cast a cold incredulous look at me and said: “Hey, I was romantic!” At the time he said this, our on-again off-again relationship was off, so I felt he was also asking Why didn’t you stay with me?

  Being romantic was so important to Steve; it can hardly be overstated. I’ve long since lost those letters and all but one of the cards, but I still have some of the books by Kenneth Patchen with Steve’s handwritten notes inside the back cover. He would practice his calligraphy in brown or gray inks and disregard the spelling and grammar, which I wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

  Weatfield club (nighttime branch) invites you to its meetings ~ every night in the weatfield of your mind. bring your lover along too. See you There, OAF.

  Sad eyed lady of the low lands, where the sad eyed prophet says that no man comes—my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, shall I leave them by your gate or sad eyed lady should i wait? [quoting Bob Dylan]

  “. . the words on the last page are the same as Miriam Patchen used when talking about her husband and his death. he talked about love that way also, the forces behind things continue, life, love, even hate. it is in this sense that I say that Dylan Thomas and the Wheatfield group are there when we are together.”

  “All that leaves is always here.”

  i love you,

  Steve

  I will love you until the end of time. ~Oaf

  I cherished Steve’s letters and longed to hear his voice, but phone calls were expensive. (It’s amazing to consider that long-distance calls were so costly when gas was only 32 cents a gallon.) Enter the blue box, the now famous electronic device made to circumvent the phone system. Steve and Woz had figured out how to make them and were selling them as an income source. And now I would use one. Steve arranged for Woz to meet me one Saturday on the Homestead campus. We had to use a public telephone because the blue boxes were illegal and could be traced to a home number; the pay phones at Homestead were safe because we used them in the inner quad where they were out of view of the street.

  The boxes, approximately three inches square, were made of high quality plastic casing. They were clunky, with push button numbers on top of the box and a wire leading to a small speaker that emitted a series of bleeps, screeches, and tonal undulations that bypassed the need for coins. Setting a call up with a blue box was a two-handed operation as I recall. You had to hold the little spe
aker to the mouthpiece of the phone while stabilizing the box against your stomach and the shelf below, and then dial 0. Before an operator answered you pressed the numbers in the right order, in response to the sounds that came out of the phone. It was machine on machine. Woz was kind and teacherlike in his explanation and told me that, basically, the blue box talked and responded to the phone system prompts. Later he or Steve wrote the directions on a scrap of paper so I could know the order.

  When Steve’s phone started ringing, Woz looked up to see the delight on my face. He then stepped out of hearing range, where he waited patiently. I don’t recall what Steve and I talked about that day. I do, however, remember looking out to see Woz in my peripheral view, where he stood for over an hour. His arms were folded, and he looked down quietly in his own thoughts for the entire time. I was so very grateful. I was struck by his patience and kind demeanor that day in a way that I had never been before. It was the first time I’d seen him as a whole, mature person, and by that one impression alone I regarded him with new eyes thereafter.

  Later Steve and Woz must have decided that it was okay for me to have a blue box because for a while I carried one around in a small paper bag between Steve’s visits home. I knew it was FBI illegal, but I never thought about the risk. I didn’t believe I was doing any harm, so I had no qualms about it. In fact, it was exciting, heady even, to have in my possession a piece of technology that reduced Ma Bell to a trifle.

  * * *

  Later in the fall, I took a plane to Portland to be with Steve. Our plan was to hitchhike back to the Bay Area together, two days later. The patina of sixties idealism was wearing off and hitchhiking wasn’t as safe or easy as it had been, if it ever was. But the romantic in Steve still loved hitchhiking so we made our plans.

  My father asked me about the trip. I told him about my flight and that I was going to hitchhike home with Steve. Incredulous, he decreed, “You flat out can’t go!” We went round and around arguing for three days until I told him that Steve had arranged for us to catch a ride with a friend who would be driving to the Bay Area. Exhausted, my father seemed to believe my lie. Or maybe he figured he’d let me deal with the consequences of my own dishonesty. He wasn’t going to disrespect both of us by asking for proof. I felt awful about it, but I was a determined teenager and though I tried very hard to be considerate of my father’s concerns, in situations concerning Steve he was simply no match for my will.

  So I flew to Portland and we hung out for two days, and when it was time to return, Steve and I set off a bit too late on Friday afternoon. I think it must have been about 4:30 when we walked to the street next to Reed and got our first ride out to the freeway. Then after a bunch of little rides and dinner, we got stuck for over three hours just outside of Eugene, Oregon.

  The ground was frozen and we were cold and I sat on my backpack with my head in my arms, tired and miserably unhappy. I felt terrible about having lied to my father and feared that I had made a big mistake. Steve stayed cheerful and jumped to the road to put his thumb out whenever cars came near. Finally, at about 11:30, a huge semi pulled up and offered what would be our longest ride home. Grateful, and so very relieved, we climbed into the cab with a blast of warmth hitting our faces. The seat was huge, and bouncier than I could have imagined. We sat monstrously high up above the road. I had never been in a semi before and the feeling of being held in the cozy arms of its brute power was marvelous. After about twenty minutes the trucker encouraged me to rest, “Why don’t you climb behind the seats and get some sleep, there’s a bed back there.” Wow, I thought. These things have beds, too? I wondered if the guy was safe and if the bed was clean, but he insisted in a kind way and because I was so very sleepy, I decided to trust. Steve stayed talking with the driver for about two hours and then he curled up with me for a night of shifting with the curves, happy for the miles we were leaving behind.

  Just before dawn the trucker woke us and told us to put ourselves together because he was about to drop us off. The next thing I knew he had pulled over onto a gravelly shoulder next to the road, where the tunnel burrows through about a thousand feet of solid rock above Sausalito. We were near home and the sun was just beginning to peak into dawn.

  Sausalito is a magical place with a deep mystery at its center. With jewel-like houses meandering up a steep hillside, it overlooks the San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, Berkeley, and San Francisco itself. Sausalito has a European feel and an interesting history. It’s where Anaïs Nin lived in a houseboat and wrote parts of The Diary, and where some of the scenes from Orson Welles’s classic movie The Lady from Shanghai were shot. Sausalito was where many of the beat poets hung out in the fifties. It’s also where Otis Redding wrote “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

  Steve and I dropped out of the truck’s dark cab and into the predawn morning. Our breath made big, purple plumes as we braced ourselves in the freezing air. Making sure we had all our stuff at our feet, we waved a fond good-bye to the trucker and watched as he maneuvered the huge beast back out on the road, down the thousand-foot drop right onto the Golden Gate Bridge.

  From that location we had the view of the gods, and as we waited for our next ride the sun’s rays broke through the buildings that made up the San Francisco skyline. It was the purest light I had ever experienced. And as it rose, it made the Bay Area seem like one luminous room of sea and sky. Steve looked down at me with a smile that was like the beginning of time. He could do that. And we stood there so happy to be alive and close to home, thrilled that we’d gone for the adventure.

  * * *

  We were just kids taking care of our responsibilities in the best way we knew. And being kids, we were living in the moment, too. Although it was, perhaps, too much in the moment for me. I had distinguished myself by winning three awards: for my work in a district-wide painting contest; as a contributor on Mark’s film “Hampstead,” which won honorable mention in a state competition; and for talent and artistic accomplishment, taking Homestead’s highest art award in my graduating class. But I wasn’t making plans for college. It wasn’t something my parents thought about for me and we never discussed it. To be fair, my father had also won awards in his youth and never thought he could go to college, so that may have been part of it. Still, in the absence of such planning, I hadn’t come up with goals to weave into my lust for adventure. I didn’t understand that opportunities weren’t unlimited, that time was finite. I just filled in the blanks with the notion that there would always be some wonderful next step to take, not actually realizing that you can waste time and opportunity if you don’t actually plan next steps.

  Then came the day in the mix of this mulligan stew (I think it was in early November of that first year or maybe January of the next), that Steve called to tell me he was dropping out of college. It was the first thing he said and it came anguished and without warning. “I just can’t spend my parent’s money like this anymore,” he said. I understood; he didn’t need to explain. Steve had a keen sense that his education was too great a financial burden on his parents. We had talked about this a few times before he went to Reed, but I thought everything was going to be fine once he was there. My mind raced and I pictured the big boat in the Jobses’ driveway; that made me think they could manage the cost. I deeply admired Steve for the way he considered his father’s feelings, but I felt that Paul was a small, battling man who complained way too much. These complaints weighed heavily on Steve, who kept his worries and his calculations in a cave to himself. By the time he called me he had made his decision.

  He told me that he was going to drop out, and then he paused. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m going to start auditing classes.”

  “Oh,” I said, intrigued. “What does ‘audit’ mean?”

  “It means I can take all the classes I want but not pay for them.”

  I was stunned. “You can do that?” Magical worlds of access unfolded before my eyes.

  “Yes, although I won’t get any credit.”

  �
�Oh,” I said again, sort of sad this time.

  “But I don’t need the credit. I just want the classes.” He said this with a sense of steely-eyed realism. And there it was—evidence of the creator’s synthesizing mind. Earnest and pared, Steve had figured out how to go to college without using his parents’ money.

  When I look back on all of this now, I wonder how the adoption lawsuit in Steve’s infancy might have factored into not just this decision, but how it had affected his life early on. At a time when adoption was culturally less reflective and variable than it is today, Steve’s birth mother, Joanne, seemed uniquely remarkable and courageous to have challenged the placement of her child. And maybe incredibly stupid, too. I imagine her having acted boldly, even in the midst of what must have been nearly unbearable grief over the loss of her son, not to mention his father’s departure, the man she must have deeply loved. She was only twenty-three or twenty-four, but her fierceness and sense of authority stand out for me. And so does her lack of reflection and compassion for Steve and his new family’s emotional environment.

  What I imagine now is that Joanne could have had a back alley abortion but chose to give birth. And in the nine months the child grew in her, she must have thought through what kind of influence she could have on his life when she wouldn’t be there. Her blessings would include a Catholic upbringing with its Divine Mother to oversee him all his days; adoptive parents whose higher education would ensure that his environment reflected his birth parents’ deep regard for learning; and an adoptive family wealthy enough to afford her child big choices in life. But it all torqued out of shape because the family she’d chosen changed their minds at the last minute and decided they wanted a girl.

  The Jobses had not attended college. They weren’t Catholic and they weren’t wealthy. So after the adoption was finalized, Joanne demanded that her plan for her child be honored. I understand that. But then there are the other painful pieces that float in my mind; Joanne’s beauty, her returning to take him away from the Jobses and put him into what she perceived to be a better home with better people. And the Jobses, first-time parents being told they weren’t good enough, fighting like hell to keep the newborn that they’d named Steven Paul. They probably even wondered if they were doing the right thing by fighting. Why not just give the baby up as the mother wanted? All through it I can hear Paul, blustery and pragmatic, saying, “Damn it, lady, you let go of him, he’s ours now.”