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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  Understandably, the court’s impending decision interfered with Clara’s ability to feel safe enough to love the infant for his first six months. It was seventeen years after the fact when she told me this and the whole thing still haunted her. The Jobses’ home must have tottered with profound uncertainty until they finally won the case. And all of Joanne’s bright dreams for her son narrowed to one single requirement: that the Jobs promise that Steve would to go to college. With that agreed, at least it meant that everything was settled.

  In light of it all, Clara’s later guilt over not wanting to mother such a difficult child when Steve was two makes the picture even more poignant. And because Mona, Steve’s sister by his birth mother, later told me that Joanne had never saved any money for her college education, it makes me think there was shattering in everyone that had come from both the adoption and lawsuit. It would seem that Steve’s existence set off detonations from the very beginning.

  Steve had nerve. It was a thin line that ran up through the middle of him. If you plucked it with a less than a careful comment, he would speak harshly about his parentage: “My parents are the ones who raised me, not the person who gave birth to me. She gave me away. She doesn’t deserve to be called my mother.” This refrain seemed to me to acknowledge not just the fact that the Jobses were the ones who did all the work, but Steve’s bitter sense of loss and what I imagine were years of Paul Jobs spitting tacks about it and everything else he felt powerless to control.

  Back then Steve was so empathic that I think he overidentified with his father and wanted to shore up his insecurities. And so, at the tender age of seventeen, he took things into his own hands. He made the decision to drop out of his degree program and audit courses instead. It was a funny hybrid of his own desire to learn exactly what he pleased without it breaking his parents’ bank account, and complying with his birth mother’s requirement. I never heard him regret it. Not once. And there were plenty of times he might have, because the next few years were rough.

  That his parents allowed for the change is revealing, too. Here was one of the smartest students at a high school known for extremely bright kids, so advanced that he met once a week with a handful of students chosen from a pool of thousands for an elite math class. It seems to me that a child of his intelligence should have been cultivated, but that would not have been the Jobses’ context. Once he had made the decision to stop matriculating at Reed, as young as he was, he had in some way become his own man. He wouldn’t have given his parents any say in the matter and that, ironically, was consistent with the Jobses’ worldview. That would have calmed Paul down and made Steve look good to him.

  Steve acted happy about the change and his fledgling confidence grew as he embraced his Grand Experiment. I could feel his slightly overloaded enthusiasm to fake it until he could make it. Steve was inventive, for sure, and he was great at finding alternative ways of doing things, like using other people’s unused meal tickets and sleeping on couches and on dorm room floors in his sleeping bag. Steve liked being a vagabond in the tradition of Woody Guthrie. He fully enjoyed the experience of being homeless and free with the wind at his back. Steve was an experimental romantic at heart, and may very well have had his eye on the rugged beauty of that former time. I think this was what he meant when he told my father that he wanted to grow up to be “a bum,” and to me it suggests a Henry V blueprint of the foolish days of the young prince before he ascends to the throne.

  Steve went back and forth between the Bay Area and Oregon a lot over the next year. I’d drive him to an on-ramp entrance of a freeway so he could hitchhike. And driving away from those drop-offs sort of broke my heart because with his shoulders up around his ears and his black hair ruffled and flying in the chill wind he looked like a cold and lonely raven, like a bird on a wire. I remember him smiling and waving good-bye, determined to make the best of it. It still gets to me.

  * * *

  Everything that happened for him at that point was a complete surprise to me. Steve audited Shakespeare, poetry, dance, and calligraphy. I was baffled he didn’t take more science and math, because that’s what he was good at and what Reed was known for. It’s remarkable to me that he followed his instinct to develop himself through the arts. He must have told me twenty times that he loved his dance class. “I’m not very good,” he’d say, shaking his head at his willingness to be seen like that, “but I love it, I just love it!” He couldn’t stop repeating himself. He loved all his audited classes, but … dance? I tried to imagine him in a leotard, but I couldn’t quite see it. Steve had been a competitive swimmer in high school and until he went to India, he had a beautiful swimmer’s body with a muscular upper body and arms. But he could also be awkward and clumsy in all things physical. His massages hurt and he was extremely self-conscious, tripping and falling over his own feet more than anyone can possibly imagine. And yet, he also had a sense of sublime grace in many of his movements. I would try to see into how this all might have worked for him in a dance class. I may have snickered a little, too.

  At one of the winter breaks, Steve hitchhiked with a friend from Reed to the Bay Area. They stayed at my house, since my father was out of town on a business trip. The two were excited about their clever plan to hitchhike to Mexico on a private airplane flying out of the little airport in Palo Alto, which then was only known as a college town for Stanford. Rainy Portland could be very dreary, and Reed in those days had one of the highest suicide rates of any college in the United States. Bright, sunny, cheap Mexico must have seemed like the best idea anyone had ever thought of. The guys had put an advertisement in the local paper saying they needed a ride, but they got no response, so they decided just to show up at the airport and shake the pilots down for a ride. Steve’s body moved like a song and a prayer in the hopes of free air passage.

  The three of us spent the next day and a half in Cupertino, and then I dropped them off at the Palo Alto airport in my father’s VW bug, fingers crossed that they would be picked up. I knew they had done it when they hadn’t called by nightfall. Steve came back a week later, sunburned and happy, bearing a gift to me of a beautiful rainbow-colored Mexican blanket, which I had for years until someone stole it out of the back of my car. (You know who you are!)

  On the evening they stayed with me before their trip, while Steve and I sat on the couch and talked, I noticed that his friend was wandering around the living room with a look of dumb loss on his face. Steve was completely ignoring his friend, and I felt that the guy was disconnected from us, in a sort of no-man’s-land that alarmed me. The change in the two boys’ dynamic was subtle, but I found the friend’s expression more profoundly disturbing than might easily be explained.

  In a flash of indignation I got off the couch to draw his friend back in, and as I got up, I looked back over at Steve to see a hazy, almost drunken look on his face. It was as if he were in an altered state of his own. I couldn’t understand it: neither of us used marijuana very often and that night we definitely had not. I was miffed at Steve because I felt he was excluding his friend in some weirdly powerful way. I moved away from Steve and found his friend bedding, food, and water and we talked a bit because I had a strong instinct to care for him. I’m not really the mothering type; as an artist I tend to relish my own experience. But I’m sensitive to people in my environment and on this evening, my attention was reordered in a way that told me that something was way off. I had a feeling that Steve, so crippled that he needed to be the center of my focus, had actually blanked his friend right out of the room.

  In retrospect, it seems to me that there was a dark vortex next to Steve for as long as I knew him. But that was the first time I recognized it. After that, I always knew, just below the level of words, when that aspect of Steve would show up. Through the years, I’d see that buttoned-up look of shock and loss overcome people when they went from inclusion to invisibility when they were with him. It always left me pale with the feeling that something was terribly wrong. The words “ther
e it is again” would move silently through me when I saw that lost-from-self look in people.

  I never thought of Steve as having serious mood swings because they were so mild back then. But after he became the Steve Jobs the world would know, I would hear about the extremes other people witnessed. I still thought it seemed unlike him until much later, when I better understood my own creativity and so could appreciate his. I know now that it would have been impossible for Steve to keep his extremes hidden after Apple had started because it is through the movement between the highs and the lows that creativity and invention flesh out new spaces. Highs and lows are what it takes to break the mold of previous consciousness and allow world-shattering ideas to be birthed. Not only did Steve have a big hole in him from the adoption, he had an enormous id that fed on nearly everything to fill it up. Looking for the love he missed, he made sure all eyes were on him so he could get what he needed. He’d wipe people out in the process.

  But that night in Cupertino, prior to his Mexico trip, I wasn’t mature enough to understand that Steve was himself in deep trouble, and that was why he was creating a sense of loss in others. It was over my teenage head and I was just so tired of his haunting social ineptitude that it triggered something self-protective in me and I started to back out of the relationship. I didn’t know that I should talk about it with him, much less how to talk about it. In this I am sure I was caught by my own limitations as well as by his. I felt like growling and screaming and shouting because he was using his weaknesses to manipulate people who didn’t know what was happening. I just didn’t have a vocabulary for this and, even if I had, he likely wouldn’t have been willing to hear it.

  * * *

  By the spring of ’73, I didn’t visit Steve at school anymore. Once he had dropped out, there was no place for me to stay and I didn’t want to visit him anyway. So our distance, emotional and otherwise, increased. He was distraught.

  One day in early spring, Steve called to tell me he had rented a room in a house near Reed. He asked if I would move up to Portland to live with him as soon as I graduated from high school. “No, I’m sorry, but no,” I told him. He seemed so sad I hated to refuse, but I didn’t have a life up there and I didn’t feel good about him at that point. In truth, I felt that all that was unconscious between us was too great to foster happiness. Eventually I came to understand that he had been seeing other girls at this time. He himself bragged and bragged about it years later. He was in college and surrounded by all kinds of beautiful and interesting young women, it made sense. But the real issue—and the one that I didn’t understand at the time—is that he asked me to move up there to stop him from having these other relationships. It was his attempt not to destroy ours.

  I think Steve called with the invitation because he had a beautiful dream for the two of us as a couple. He wanted me to come up Portland and start painting seriously, while he wrote poetry and learned to play the guitar. But this was sort of in the talk bubble above his head where he shelved his imaginary copy of the Handbook of Becoming Bob Dylan. It was a great plan but it was far more formulated in his mind than any plan I’d had for myself. I couldn’t have made myself into a painter at that time because I didn’t know how to focus or work hard. I needed training and experience and more feedback from good teachers. And because I didn’t see him as a musician, I didn’t have the foundational belief needed to support an idea of marrying our fortunes in such a way.

  I was disenchanted.

  Steve had come to seem like a floppy marionette that had lost the taut lines connecting to his excellence. I would never lose sight of his beauty or the knowledge that he was extraordinary. I would always believe in him. But he was so spun around and tangled up that I knew of nothing I could have done to help right then. That was when he began his descent into what I think of as one of the darkest periods of honest confusion that I ever saw in Steve. It was embodied in Dylan’s paradoxical lines about there being no success like failure and failure being no success at all. I personally never knew how to be so honest while in as much difficulty, as he knew how to be, and so these were some of the times I felt my deepest, most profound awe of him. This was the beginning of when I came to trust failure in Steven Paul Jobs, far more than success.

  * * *

  One day around March of 1973, Steve’s mother sort of angled in obliquely to ask if I wanted to live at their house, in Steve’s room, until I completed high school. I think she asked in a careful way so as not to shock me. But I was shocked and wondered where the question came from. Why was she offering me a place to live? My mind searched—did she know my mother was mentally ill? It’s likely that the whole school knew, but I had no way of talking about it publicly.

  Not meaning to be ungrateful to Clara, I mumbled a response, something like “No thank you, no, but thank you.” NO! I thought to myself as I scanned the implications. The truth was that I had just met Jim, a guy in my art class, and we were spending a lot of time with each other. I could never stay at Steve’s parents’ house while my affections were blooming with this new boy. It would have been dishonest. But there was more to it. Clara’s offer frightened me; I felt like I was an outcast in my own family and I had no idea how to fit into another’s. Also it would have felt like a prison. At a time when kids didn’t trust the older generation, her offer seemed like a generous bolt from the blue. But I didn’t have a close relationship with her and I didn’t want her generosity. None of it made sense and it only occurred to me much later that Steve had more than probably asked her to offer this as a way of keeping me in his life. I’m sure she never would have considered it without his first requesting it anyway. It was always very like Steve to ask people to mediate for him.

  Spring moved toward summer. I lived at my father’s apartment in Cupertino and was free to be and do as I liked when my dad was away on business trips. I would stay out until all hours with Jim and we would walk all over Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and Cupertino, down the long dark streets and through the blooming cherry and apricot orchards, sometimes until dawn, getting to know each other. This was the bohemian lifestyle that I have always had a great appetite and natural inclination for, and I still kept up my grades. Under those deep blue starry nights we talked quietly and laughed a lot as we walked down quiet streets, sometimes running over the nights and over the tops of cars in our bare feet, climbing over fences and out of windows and up onto rooftops, treetops, hilltops, listening to lonely dogs bark to each other across great distances. The nighttime had a way of redrawing the daytime territories, and in this I found my way out of structure and back into full-blown wonder.

  Jim’s sensibilities were warm, human, and earthy. Our relationship wasn’t sexual; we were more like happy soulful playmates falling in love, yet not too seriously. Like me, he liked to live inside alternative worlds. He was crazy in love with the Tolkien Trilogy and was in the middle of illustrating the whole thing, beautifully, when we met. Once, when he was lying on his back on my couch and I was sitting on the floor close up next to him with our hands and arms playfully entwining between deep kisses, I felt his breath on my face as he quietly said, “I love you.” I could hardly bear the words before my entire being dropped down to what felt like hundreds of thousands of miles below all surfaces. The expression of his love was profound and I confess that later I compared it to Steve’s expressions of love, which at that point seemed more about insecurity than anything else. Still I was drawn powerfully to Steve and a love that seemed both broken and big. It was big. In this present age where the tendency is to pathologize everything, it’s easy to think that Steve and I were attracted to each other because we were both, in essence, motherless kids. But that’s not how it was. In fact, it was motherlessness that got in the way of a love that was real. I loved Steve. He was time and timelessness to me and I measured everything by him. I would have thrown my lot in with Steve over anyone if I’d known how. But I didn’t know how.

  EIGHT

  WALKABOUT

  Steve m
oved back to the Bay Area late in the summer of 1973. He was living with a roommate in a house off Skyline Boulevard, a two-lane highway that tears a perfect hilly line between the mountains and the sky. Steve had scored a great place, with a big redwood deck surrounded by old-growth trees. I would visit him at this cabin by hitchhiking up the mountain on 84, taking rides only from pickup trucks so I could sit in the open air and catch the glorious views as the driver ascended the mountain road.

  Our relationship was complicated. I couldn’t break the connection and I couldn’t commit. Steve couldn’t either. One night, when he had the cabin to himself, he invited me to spend the night. We slept outside on the deck, on a heated waterbed, which was a kind of perfection in those days, maybe even now, too. Softly entwined outside under huge old evergreens in the deep quiet of night, yet with the protection of the cabin and the comfort of a warm bed … it just doesn’t get any better. If only we had understood.

  In the morning, the air filled with happy birdsong and when we got up, Steve played Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken” as we made breakfast and puttered about. Just then a friend of Steve’s roommate dropped by. “My God,” he exclaimed. “There is so much love in this house!” That may sound like a very seventies thing to say, but the truth is I had never heard anyone say anything even remotely like it. The remark startled me. How could someone else know such a thing when I couldn’t see it myself? But when I looked around I realized that the stranger was right: the house was bright and radiant with our love. I was amazed by the power and simplicity of the love between us. Steve had known it all along. I was the one who hadn’t realized what we had.