There would be other occasions, other times and places when people would see the love between Steve and me. They’d remark on it, very clearly, and I would be perplexed that others saw what I didn’t see. Teens often live in a haphazard state of hit and miss, and they need the insights and the framing that an adult’s experience can provide. It took me a while to realize all this, but in the years since there’s never been a time when I wasn’t mentoring at least one young person. Having come to realize how much I didn’t understand when I needed to understand love, I now feel compelled to shorten the years of ridiculous, unnecessary trouble in others.
* * *
Steve may have had a long lovely summer at the cabin, but it wasn’t carefree for the simple reason that Steve himself wasn’t carefree. “I’m already nineteen and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he said, fretting about his life’s big picture. I was kind of shocked by the statement. Impressed, too. I wondered if men had to be more serious about their futures, because, by comparison, I was just enjoying life and not at all stressed because I didn’t know what I was going to do. “But why on earth do you think you could know so much at nineteen?” I asked. At this he became a pantomime of despair. Unable or unwilling to just tell me what the problem was, he threw his arms up into the air in abject frustration. He simply would not use words. And in the silence I wondered what pressures Steve was under. Now I understand that he was both confused and alarmed that his future hadn’t yet started. I think he was worried that he might miss it. After all, he thought he was going to die at forty-two, so it stands to reason that he had no time to waste.
After Steve had dropped out of college, and before he went to India, he entered into one long aboriginal-like walkabout. He was an American boy searching for a way to access the huge potential within him. He was, in turns, full of hope and despair, advance and surrender, cheerfulness and devastation. He tried everything. Following his intuition and his common sense, Steve hitchhiked back and forth between Oregon and the Bay Area. He worked. He gathered new ideas. He met new people and stayed with old friends. Sometimes he’d rent a room. He’d find me, too, when he felt the need. His was a case of moving from the sublime to the ridiculous and then back again until one day all the infinitesimally small steps started to piece together. Later in my twenties, when I was floundering, Steve got mad at me. “Look,” he said. “If you’re having problems, work it through. Chase after everything until you’ve understood it!” Oh, had he ever earned the right to give that advice.
There were many times in the course of his sojourn when Steve would call out of the blue to tell me he was in town and that he had something to show me. It started with the harmonicas, which he kept in his pockets and backpack. I think he was learning to play them between rides when he was hitchhiking. Then he tried to get me to look into candles, as if they were flickering messages from a higher plane. And then he showed me how to use the I Ching, first with coins and then with yarrow sticks, offering his interpretations of the hexagonal combinations that we threw. Steve explained a kind of thinking that was new to me, one that was based on ancient wisdom and the workings of chance. This knowledge had been available to me intuitively, but it took me time to understand that the potential of a moment was readable in the toss of some coins. The I Ching actually changed my understanding of time. I used it for years after that.
It was around this period that Steve introduced me to Georgia, a forty-something-year-old woman who lived in San Francisco. Generous and lively, she reminded me of Maude from the movie Harold and Maude. Steve was working with her on a color-based therapy system she had developed for clearing past emotional trauma. He was midway through his process when he asked me to work with her, too. I soon found out that she had been a former colleague and girlfriend of Werner Erhard of EST fame. EST was a personal growth regime of weekend seminars that started in the seventies with an overly aggressive template for getting people to take responsibility for their lives. It has since changed a bit, and after renaming itself several times, it’s now called The Forum. How Steve first came across Georgia I don’t know.
We started with seven pieces of colored paper, red, blue, yellow, brown, purple, green, orange, and one big white sheet, twice the size of the others, which was to be a summary sheet. Then we cut images from magazines and put them on the colored paper of our choice. Mostly Steve and I cut images from back issues of National Geographic that we bought used at a resale store in Palo Alto. In the beginning we had no idea what the colors, the sizes, and the images meant. We’d just gather the pictures we were attracted to and glue them to what seemed to us the appropriate color. When that was done, Georgia would interview us, taking notes on our thoughts and explanations for our choices and what they meant to us. Then the boom would fall and she would decode what we had done so that we could see our issues and work to move beyond them.
I remember most of my images and two of Steve’s. The best of his was a delicately granulated, color-treated photo of a stone relief depicting an Egyptian god of Intuition. He had placed the image on a piece of orange paper where it just floated with ethereal light. It was breathtaking, and we were, all three, in awe because it was clear that if ever there were a god seeing over Steve, it would be the Egyptian God of Intuition. Steve used one image per colored sheet, evidencing his minimalist aesthetic. We both knew it was superior and he gloated over it. I loved his awareness of his own design excellence, but was a little perplexed by his sense of competition.
My time with Georgia brought new awareness to my thinking. She told me, “I sense you have a huge capacity for love.” This comment was like a stunning rebirth after the terrible ways my mother had spoken to me. Georgia valued me and she helped me value myself. But in the end, she became ill and I never completed her program. Later, after I got pregnant with Lisa, I called Georgia in tears and it was then that she told me that Steve had sat with her for hours and hours in grief because I didn’t love him enough.
Georgia had some unspecified illness when I knew her, and it was getting worse. One day she told us that Werner Erhard had been stealing her creative energy and that this had been making her ill. I had no idea how to evaluate such a statement. It was so matter-of-fact, yet so outside the borders of accepted reality. But the notion that such a thing might be possible stayed with me. It was terrible, of course, but also exciting because I was ever looking at the way things might be working behind the scenes. All told, Georgia provided me with a much better self-image and offered me my first experience using a color system as a tool for transformation. I would go on to use many others through the years.
* * *
Little by little, Steve and I separated. But we were never able to fully let go. We never talked about breaking up or going our separate ways and we didn’t have that conversation where one person says it’s over. I guess we just didn’t know enough to be final about it. Later, Steve would make jokes about our breaking up by telling people, “I knew it was over when she bought a sleeping bag that didn’t zip to mine.” It was like him to find the defining, humorous spin. But it wasn’t quite truthful. Not in my experience.
I remember a different turning point in our relationship, a particularly dramatic moment that played out late one afternoon in August of ’73 when Steve was still living on Skyline. My father, my little sister, and I drove Steve home. When we got to the top of the mountain to drop him off, Steve stepped out of the car and held his stomach as if in intense pain. But he looked as if he was stepping out into a desolate no-man’s-land. It would have been comical for its extreme drama, but this was real. He couldn’t even say good-bye. He spun around on his long spindly legs and staggered from one foot to the other as his stiff body stepped toward his cabin, like a cowboy who had just been shot. I watched, trying to comprehend what was happening. I glanced at my father and sister, who also looked baffled. Had I wounded him? Had there been some misunderstanding? Later I wondered if it was about my being with my family that triggered a sense of p
rofound loneliness and isolation in him.
After that afternoon, we moved increasingly apart. He didn’t seek me out as often and our paths didn’t cross. I don’t really know what he was doing at this time, because I was busy in school and working at a café. But seeing him so rarely allowed me to better grasp the changes he was going through. One day he called to see if I wanted to go for a walk. I hadn’t seen him for a while and I didn’t know until then that he had moved back into his parents’ home. I drove over to Los Altos and walked in to find him sitting on the floor in his bedroom playing a guitar and singing. I can see now that he had staged himself for effect, and he did a good job at it. He was holding a beautiful guitar with a wide tapestry strap; he had a harmonica brace around his neck with a harmonica attached. He looked up at me, a misty depth in his eyes, this time fully channeling himself as the rock star.
I was instantly taken in. He curled his vowels. His phrasing was beautiful. Spit flew as his mouth went back and forth between the words and the harmonica, and I could see that he was mastering the coordination between the energetic intensity of his singing and the grace of the song. Basically he was saying, Look at me! I stood there blinking, overwhelmed by how good he was and how far he’d come. Up to that time I simply hadn’t believed that he was a musician. Ten different kinds of brokenness in me could have prompted me to make that judgment, or maybe I had been right all along.
Musicians made up a large body of my friends in high school. For those friends, music was a way of life. But it wasn’t a way of life for Steve. He knew he was going to be famous, but it’s likely he couldn’t imagine anything beyond Dylan at that time. That day I was hard pressed not to reconsider all of my assumptions. And I would have, had he kept going with it.
Through the years I have toyed with the idea of an alternate scenario: if, in that moment, I had fallen at his feet in adoration, would it have incited him to become a mystic poet musician instead of a billionaire businessman? His truth and beauty turned me inside out with admiration. But instead of giving over to it, I hung back, uncertain of how to speak and scared to fully acknowledge him and the effect he had on me.
* * *
Weeks, if not months, would go by without us having contact, but Steve would always find me. When I worked at the health food café he’d stop by in the off hours. When I worked as a live-in babysitter he would come over in the night and knock at my bedroom window. We’d talk through the screen and sometimes he would stay over. On those nights, after making love, I would fall into a deep sense of peace that would enfold me for days. From this I would walk around trying to fathom how it was that he could make me feel this way. I didn’t understand my own experience.
Steve was the person I measured everyone and everything by. If I had entered into a not-so-great relationship with a boy, just seeing Steve would be enough to get me out of it. If he showed me some new thing—Medjool dates, a spiritual book, or that science supply store that used to be in Palo Alto—I’d go back to them repeatedly. He and his eyes brought sanity to my heart and soul. His take on things lit me up. He once said to me, “Do you not sense how deep our history is?” In this he was referring to past lives. “No,” I said. “And you do?” I looked up into his face, knowing he’d say yes. He nodded seriously, and scanned the horizon. He knew I didn’t get it.
During that floating time Steve traveled to Oregon to go through primal therapy. Between John Lennon’s song “Oh My Love,” and all that Steve had told me about primal therapy, I had intense expectations. I looked for the changes when I saw him about four months later, but I noticed nothing. I urged myself to scan more deeply and to be more perceptive, but still, I found absolutely nothing different. I had assumed at the very least that his voice would deepen and that his massages would improve. But his voice was the same and his massages still hurt. Steve had a way of always pushing into the place where skin runs thinnest over the sharpest bone, and an uncanny ability to press on the exact location of a new bruise. This hadn’t changed.
Compared to everyone I knew, Steve was the Spock character from Star Trek in my life. I had thought—imagined—that primal therapy would make him more human. In the end I discovered that Steve hadn’t completed the course. In fact, he’d hardly even started. I sensed something had gone wrong with the therapy or the relationship with the therapist, but when I asked him what had happened, he brushed me aside with “I ran out of money.” This didn’t ring true. Steve always had money when he needed it. But I knew him well by then, and if he didn’t want to tell me something, he simply wasn’t going to.
Later, Steve spoke quietly about a trauma that he had dealt with, regarding a memory of his mother, Clara. He was five at the time, and Clara had taken his sister Patty indoors and left Steve outside, alone on the swings. Clara had excluded Steve from her intimate world with Patty and it must have played utter havoc on the psyche of a little boy who felt he’d been abandoned once already by his birth parents. He’d asked his mom about it when he got back to the Bay Area, and I imagine Clara looking into herself to answer as fully as she could because her response was “Patty was an easier child to take care of.” Boy, was that the understatement of the century. Clara’s words couldn’t have been more simple or profound. And they were followed up with an apology: “I didn’t mean to leave you out,” she had told him. “I didn’t know I was hurting you. I am sorry.” I’m so very sure she was.
Steve’s failure to complete the full primal scream course made a huge impression on me. Here was the magnificent opportunity for transformation and he had just walked away from it. I had fully believed that the miraculous was possible because of how Steve had talked about primal scream therapy. I had so wanted for him to be okay. But when I understood that he had quit, then nothing was sure for me anymore. And for him, I saw a kind of disillusionment set in, maybe even a quiet, slow bitterness at the edge of everything, like ice growing over a pond. It seemed that when the hope of that therapy died, a pragmatism set into Steve’s life and soured the tenor of his sweetness. This sort of thing isn’t ever totally obvious, and because Steve kept his thoughts and his feelings to himself, I can’t point to one big thing that changed, except that he became a little more sarcastic. Steve had exhausted his childhood plan and at that point began to internalize the loss of a dream. He kept himself busy after that—and it wasn’t with a guitar.
* * *
On one of Steve’s hitchhikes home from Oregon, he got picked up by a guy I’ll call Thomas. Thomas lived in unincorporated Cupertino, right across from where I was staying at my father’s apartment. (I had by this time quit the babysitting job.) I never did meet the man. Steve had his own reasons for keeping people apart, but I remember Thomas because, with all of Steve’s hitchhiking, he had never told me about anyone he had taken a ride from, until this guy. Apparently they had made a good connection. Steve even told me that Thomas asked to buy Steve’s North Face hiking boots—right off Steve’s feet!
Thomas was a scientist in his forties. This was already impressive to me because I saw Steve as a scientist type and I liked that this man was older. But there was something more going on here. I sensed Steve was trying to tell me about it in an oblique way so I found myself listening more deeply. I was confused by the boot story. “What a weird thing for him to ask to buy your boots,” I said. “Are you going to sell them?” Steve then threw another line out, hinting: “The guy can get his own.” A nonanswer, so I asked, “Then why did he want to buy yours?” Steve gave me a really long look, like I was soooo sloooow. “He wanted contact with me again,” he said, slightly embarrassed.
Steve’s embarrassment was always charming to me. He had an unusual quality that I would later see in Mona when I would compliment her writing. It must have been in the DNA. I think there was so much beauty in their extraordinary minds it made them feel uncomfortably cornered when it was acknowledged. Years later, I asked Mona why she behaved that way when she was complimented. She shook her head and with a rush of embarrassment said,
“I just don’t know what to say.”
It was after he met Thomas that Steve started talking about “going through,” and how once you’re through, “there’s no going back.” I am sure in their friendship the two men were talking through the nature of truth and enlightenment. I felt that this friendship bolstered Steve, that it helped him with something very important. He would tell me a little obsessively, “No mistake is possible, there is no going back, once you’ve gone through, you’re through. You cannot slip back out.” I believe he was telling himself this as much as he was telling me. Steve was beating a drum, rhythmically repeating, invoking and hinting, but he would never come right out and say, “I’m going to be enlightened. It’s finally happening.” All of this is in the tradition of “The Way,” Steve would say, “It’s like a bush. You can’t ever just say what it is.… You can only point to it!” This was like Alan Watts’s remark about pointing to the truth, something like “You can point to the full moon but you cannot touch it and most people only want to suck your finger.” These were the metaphors of the time.
In the extremely refined and sophisticated traditions of the East, you would never say you are enlightened because the tradition abhors it. There are ways of thinking and using language that can turn you away from a true state of awakening. Exclaiming that you’re enlightened or going to be enlightened would be one of them. I was always excited about Steve being so remarkable, but the masculine systems of philosophy and spirituality irked me. The systemization of special words and behaviors has always seemed to me to be exclusive and, contrary to all expectation, extremely egoistical. It never touched my heart or engaged my imagination, either. Later I would be apprised that the female aspect was enlightened in a different way. This made sense to me, but no one talked about the differences then, they just said it was all the same when it really wasn’t.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 9
