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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  I had called during the week and was told to come on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. so that I could learn how to “sit” and conduct myself when the group arrived an hour later. A thin man in his thirties was already there. We removed our shoes, and then he took two round meditation pillows called zafus, and two soft mats called zabutons, from a wooden bin outside. He handed me a pillow and a mat, then put his pillow and mat under his arm. I followed suit, and then we began.

  Upon entering the room I was instructed to bow as soon as I stepped in. Then we quietly crossed over to a wooden platform where I was shown three different ways to sit. One was with my legs folded under me on each side of the pillow. He said this was the way Japanese women in a dress would sit. The other positions were half lotus or full lotus, whereupon my guide pointed out the stability I could obtain by triangulating my bottom on the pillow and my knees on the mat. He told me, “Do whatever you can manage for a time.” I was playful with his instruction, making little jokes to make a personal connection with him. “Is falling off the pillow like falling off the wagon?” I asked. But he was all business, and so I settled down and focused. He then showed me how to cup my hands into a symmetrical shape called a hand mudra, and to place this cupping against my lower belly, just below the navel. When the time came, I was to face the wall in complete silence with my chin slightly tucked and the top of my head angled upward so that the back of my spine was straight. I was also to keep my eyelids partly open and unfocused. This way of meditating with open eyes is particular to Zen. Moreover, the exactness of form the body holds is said to be enlightenment itself. In Zen, you don’t strive for enlightenment; logic has it that you are already enlightened, so there is no journey and nothing to attain. It is powerful, elegant, and deceptively simple.

  In time I would discover that all the people at the Zendo were bright and a little peculiar, that they were quiet and paid attention and laughed kindly at odd things. They seemed to all be poets and/or scientists, or married to poets and/or scientists. Most had some affiliation with Stanford University. I would learn that Japanese Buddhism had, in part, been developed for the Japanese intellectual class as a practice for emptying the mind of intellectual sediments. Eventually this all fit together in my understanding, but on that first day it was as if I had stumbled into the middle of an old-growth forest of tree people.

  That evening I sat up in half lotus through a nearly unbearable forty minutes of meditation, until a delicate bell finally rang out. As the tone sounded, signaling the end of the period, everyone bowed. Still maintaining a careful inward focus, people scooted around on their bottoms, continuing to look downward, but this time facing the group and the teacher. Stillness returned to the room at this point, and I felt a deep resonant space open up, each person being a booming well of silence. The room was filled with a profound sense of acceptance. The quiet of the collective power was impressive while the teacher found his words. The teacher was slow to speak—and I was in such agony—that I stole a glance around to make sure everything was as it should be. Oh God! Were we really all just going to keep sitting like this?

  Finally the teacher spoke and with his first words came the most delicate, careful speech. I had never heard such profound and gentle confidence. I remember him saying, “We go to truth with nothing and we return with nothing.” This was the practice of Zazen and it moved straight into me. I could not take my eyes off the teacher, nor did I want to, though I guessed it was probably impolite. The teacher’s robes were layered and beautiful with long, looping table runner–like sleeves. Mostly he was covered in gracious folds of black material with ivory and white underlayers peeking through at the neck and wrists. His posture was tranquil and very present. Every expression was evident on his face, moving from seriousness to humor with infinite nuance. It was the first time I had listened so deeply to anyone from Japan, and between the truth in his kind face and the soft accented words of his amber voice, I became aware of an extraordinary weave of refinement.

  With the powerful teacher and the mature students, my young restlessness calmed and I came to be at one in a room of sitting Buddhas. Over the hour, as the teacher spoke, incense streamed up in a single blue line, only to flutter and disperse a foot above the burn, and tip its fine white ash back into the cup from whence it came. As the sun set, the sky turned dark and a delicate candlelight lit the interior space. Afloat on the teacher’s words and thoughts, a feeling of just we few came into me, but this time with a generosity that seemed to include the whole world. It was like happening upon a perfect bright shell, complex and whole, lying on a shore—a gift from a tourmaline sea. What have I found? I wondered to myself. Over the next three years, I would sit and listen to many lectures like this first one.

  Suddenly the teacher stopped speaking and a cloud cover went over his eyes as he left us to look inward. Two people came in with jingling trays of white cups, two pots of green tea, and small cookies. One by one every person in the room was served—cup, tea, napkin, and cookie—both servers going down the rows, bowing to each person, going down on their knees, and then up again to step forward to the next.

  After the sitting, the lecture, the tea, and the retrieval of the cups, a tiny bell rang and everyone bowed together. It was over. People moved onto their knees to push their pillows back into shape, and then stood up. Holding zafu and zabuton under one arm, they individually bowed with one hand to the place they had just been sitting, paying homage to the space that had held them. Then everyone moved to walk out silently with one final bow at the door before stepping into the cool night. Outside, people talked and laughed in hushed tones as they put their shoes on, their slacks bulging at the knees.

  I was trying to work out the teacher’s name with one of the lay monks, a guy named Trout who had kindly introduced himself. But his demeanor changed when I referred to his teacher, incorrectly, as “Chino.” The teacher’s first name was Kobun and his last name was Chino. Kobun Chino Sensei—“sensei” meaning “teacher.” Later he would become Kobun Chino Roshi—“roshi” meaning “master.” All the syllables of the teacher’s name were so completely unfamiliar to me that I didn’t know where any of the sounds began or ended. I was just doing my best with the whole thing, but my guesses were wrong and I had apparently offended the monk who now seemed incensed. “How would you like it if I called you ‘Brennan’?” the monk exclaimed. My, but you’re easily offended! I thought. Later I would find Trout’s requirement for exactitude the key to many important things.

  Soon afterward, I learned that Kobun, who was then in his forties, had come to the United States to became the Abbot of Tassajara at the request of Suzuki Roshi, and had left Japan without his teacher’s blessing. In a culture of such ceremonial order, refinement, and conformity, Kobun had taken a huge risk in coming to America. Only later—much later—would his teacher praise him in full, telling him he had done well.

  That night at the Zendo made my head swim. As I was gathering up my very first impressions and getting ready to leave, I looked over, and to my utter amazement, there was Steve, just eight feet away. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in months, not since Robert’s farm. He was standing apart from the group, waiting in the half-light. The teacher had his back turned to him, having Steve wait while he greeted people who approached as a part of the evening’s ritual. A student’s waiting for his teacher’s attention is as old as time itself. Steve had that third eye focus, but he looked so thin and vulnerable—he seemed to be barely hanging on. My heart gripped with pity, but I was also simply happy to see him, so walked over to say hello. Once he’d caught sight of me, however, I saw the shadow of a thought cross his face: Oh no, not you.

  “When did you return from the farm?” I asked. “Are you living at your parents’ house?” Steve gave me vague, one-word answers and peered down into me as if I were at the bottom of a very deep gorge. He had become a stranger and it shook me to my core. I said good-bye and left as quickly as I could.

  At the next Wednesday night medi
tation, I ignored Steve to avoid making either of us uncomfortable again, but at the end of the evening he approached me and asked if I would like to come over to his parents’ for lunch the following week. I accepted.

  I was glad to see Clara again, and in the short time we talked I felt that there was something lighter and more gracious about her. She led me to the backyard where Steve was sitting on a little grassy mound watching the sky. He had a pleasant, bewildered look on his face and a buzz of energy around him like someone had just clapped him between two massive cymbals.

  Backyards in the California suburbs are often bordered at the property lines by six-foot-high redwood fences. Typically, they’re comprised of small bean-shaped lawns with bean-shaped patios and bean-shaped pools. They had always seemed miniscule to me after having lived with the huge swaths of green found in the Midwest; but extraordinary, too, like beautiful garden rooms furnished with exotic flowers and sunshine. And I’d always liked the way they seemed to create a private plot of sky—very special and sort of stingy at the same time.

  The Jobses’ backyard had been a barren moonscape for as long as I’d known them. Far from a private little paradise, theirs had been an empty box with an obligatory crabgrass lawn and water stains that looped up the dark fencing like an intricate army of wood-eating lice. But that day I found a transformation from Kansas to Oz. A verdant garden, about sixty feet across and thirty feet deep, covered the back third of the property. A cornucopia of crazed activity, the garden had stakes and twine and circular metal forms holding plants in a cacophonous semblance of order. It was as if the space had waited all these years for this outrageous justice.

  In India it is said that there is no way that a child can return the favor of a life of care that parents have bestowed. I read this in the book by Ram Dass that Steve had given me, Be Here Now. Gratitude to your parents didn’t exactly find favor in sixties or seventies America, but Steve broke rank on that one. It seemed that the first order of business for him when he returned from India was to thank his parents for all they had done for him. This beautiful garden represented his gratitude. It was one of Steve’s great signatures in the world to merge the practical and the poetic. After that, for as long as I knew them, the Jobses always planted a garden in the spring and it seemed they were happier people for it.

  Steve looked over to me from a little raised hill on the right. With a small sigh he got up and as I stood in the doorway holding the screen door open with my body, somehow expecting a greeting or at least a smile, he edged past me to the kitchen. His acknowledgment was so casual—even disappointed—that I wondered if I’d come on the wrong day. Why such indifference? He went to the stove and began to sauté brown rice. At a loss, I walked over to see what he was doing. I had never seen rice cooked like this—perfect, fat grains of translucent short brown rice toasting in tiny bubbles of sesame oil. I was riveted. Even the long-handled saucepan that held it was beautiful. This approach to cooking rice was so completely new to me that it set off a small revolution inside me. I cannot overstate the effect it had. I stood beside him, babbling with excitement, narrating the beauty I saw because I couldn’t stop myself. He remained silent. His manner was off-putting, seemingly as harsh as it was indifferent. I feared my presence must be barely tolerable to him, and all of this while the cooking itself was so transcendent.

  I stepped back to the far end of the small kitchen. Steve then poured water over the sauté and placed a lid on the pan. Everything felt awkward. Not only would he not talk to me, but his attitude canceled my words midair with something like an interference pattern. Then, as he put some steamed string beans from the garden into a bowl, adding salt, I finally realized with relief that he had prepared for my coming. “Sit down!” he commanded, whereupon he threw the beans across the table at me and barked, “Eat!”

  There is a tradition in the East about killing the ego in tough ways. Hindus, Tibetan Buddhists, even Sufi mystics, believe that anything is justified in order to save a person from his own ignorant ego. As the stories go, if a guru tells you to jump off a cliff, you run to the closest one and toss yourself over it headlong because it means your next life will be more awakened. In our own time the celebrated yoga teacher Iyengar has literally punched his students when he felt they were showing off with their yoga. This treatment would get you sued in the United States, but in the East you would consider yourself lucky to have such a teacher.

  Steve was apparently trying on the role of teacher, with me as his student. It was a bit over the top to be practicing on me like this, especially since I had no context. The teacher/student relationship is usually agreed on by both—but I had never made such an agreement with him. It seemed I was to be the object of his charade throughout the entire lunch, and I felt a piercing hurt because he wasn’t talking to me. I wanted to walk out, but I gritted my teeth and stayed. Later, I discovered that everyone newly engaged in an Eastern spiritual practice tries on the behaviors of their spiritual teacher. It’s embarrassing, but everyone goes through it in some way or other depending upon the teacher they are imitating. By the looks of it all, Steve was imitating the sixty-year-old Indian guru, Neem Karoli Baba, because he was scrunching up his face to create the deep lines and big nose of the older man. How can you not want to emulate a master once you actually understand the wisdom he or she represents?

  Sitting at the table, I pulled the plate of beans toward me. I had never liked string beans and was expecting disappointment on top of disappointment while I fulfilled my role as guest. Then I would go home and cry. That was my plan. But that first bite was so unexpectedly delicious that my focus turned to delight and I started babbling at him again. In all my life I had never eaten such amazingly good string beans; in fact I hadn’t eaten anything as good in any category of food as those beans on that day. And, like the perfect setting of a precious stone into fine metal, it clicked: Steve had something worthy going on.

  Steve’s unkindness, in combination with this beautiful cooking, the quality and taste of the food, and our being together in one room, was a jarring juxtaposition of extreme lights and darks. It was as if the whole scene had been filmed with time-lapse photography. I looked for light and right, and ignored the rest. It was a poor strategy, but it was the one I had used to survive my mother and it had given me a bright outlook on life. After lunch, as I was leaving, Steve invited me back the following Saturday. I accepted and braced myself for what might be next. I definitely wanted more beans, though he never served them again. So Steve!

  Paul was lighter when I returned the following Saturday. Lighter than I had ever seen him, though it was light with a bit of a vengeance mixed in. When I stepped into the Jobses’ backyard in the late morning, everything was in bustling motion—choreographed. Steve as the all-knowing director had a great calm and a decided sense of satisfaction as he pointed and told his parents what to do. Paul came tooling past me driving a wheelbarrow three-quarters filled with weeds half-wilted by the sun. He had a big smile on his face and grumbled something at me as he passed. He was, as ever, Paul Jobs, but now he was as transparent as a bright happy child. This time the fragility in him sparkled with wild-eyed joy. Gardens have a way of infecting people with confounding levels of excitement and replenishment. Paul’s happiness was proof of this for me.

  * * *

  Over the next couple of months, as Steve and I spent time together, things got a little easier between us. Though we weren’t terribly reflective about how we communicated, I deeply respected the changes he was going through. He must have liked having me around because he invited me over … semi-regularly. Steve had converted the toolshed in the backyard of his parent’s house into a bedroom. It was a little thin hut of a structure, but it was perfect for adjusting to the United States after India. He slept in his sleeping bag on a foam mat on the bare, wooden floor. It was clean and orderly, and held minimal possessions—a few spiritual books, a candle, and his meditation pillow. The simplicity was just so beautiful and honest that my old
admiration of him was resurfacing.

  One night Steve invited me over at about 11:00 p.m. after I had been out with friends. When I arrived he told me to take off my clothes. Holding out a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s All One Peppermint Soap he said something like, “We need to wash you off.” Steve loved Dr. Bronner’s All One soap. For him it was the perfect commercial achievement: its broad usefulness; its ecological foundation; its philosophically monistic aesthetic. He was holding the garden hose as he told me what to do.

  “I’ll spray you with the water. Then you’ll scrub yourself down with this,” he said, gesturing toward the minty soap. “Then I’ll hose you off again.”

  This wasn’t the first time that one of us thought that the other had gone completely bonkers. It was a cold night, the water would be freezing, and I was in his parents’ yard, not more than fifteen feet from the back door to their house. Three strikes, he was out.

  “No way!” I said with in a hushed yell. “Your parents could come out and find me naked!”

  But he was so intent on my following his instructions that he got angry. His words became a fast blur—demanding, but sort of pleading, too. “Just do it!” he said, glowering. “My parents aren’t going to come into the backyard at this hour! Come on Chris—”