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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  Trout had a knack for getting the details straight. One day he asked me, “Who of the two of you, Steve or you, Chrisann, found the Zendo first?” I told him the truth; that we had found it completely independent of each other, at about the same time. He then told me when he had asked Steve the same question, that Steve told him that he had found it and brought me there. The lie was typical of Steve. (I just didn’t know it yet.) And questioning was typical of Trout. That he would even think to ask me the question after Steve had given his answer alerted me that he was giving us equal consideration. Moreover, that he didn’t necessarily buy into Steve’s authority. Amazing.

  * * *

  One day Kobun talked to me about Steve, telling me that he, Kobun, had always wanted a student who was strong. He emphasized the word “strong,” at the back of his throat. With his lips curled outward and his chest puffed high as he held his arms away from his side, Kobun looked like he was crowing. He told me, “No man who ever went to Tassajara could possibly be strong.” But now he would have a leader! Kobun was keenly aware of having a special student in Steve. “I have never had a student master the information in so short a time. Three months!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide, his mouth dramatically elongated. “It is the shortest time possible for anyone to understand.” His happiness was thick and evident.

  I have always liked it when men confide in me from their worlds, and I was truly happy for Kobun. However, on this day and in this conversation, I had a feeling that something wasn’t right. Kobun was gloating. Why was he comparing Steve to the zazen practioners from Tassajara? At some level, even though I knew I had been ignored and passed over by Kobun, I wasn’t jealous because I loved Steve and his daring-to-fully-be qualities as much as Kobun did. But as Kobun and I walked through his house that day, stopping and starting as he exclaimed this and that about Steve, I wondered what might be under his communication. Why was he sharing this level of their relationship with me? He never had before.

  An addendum to this conversation came a few months later. Kobun told me that when Steve was painfully ambivalent about going forward with Apple, he said: Just do it. Kobun spoke with bright urgency, making sure I understood his pivotal position of importance. “I said this to him!” he repeated. And here it was, Kobun was coming to me and he wanted me to understand that he was the one who’d given the boy wings. And here, in this conversation, I picked up on the ever so slight change in the teacher’s power and position. Steve had already flown the coop, and Kobun was expressing the loss of his importance, and to me of all people. More to the point, he may have been lamenting Steve’s lack of acknowledgment. I would see this play out badly over time.

  * * *

  After I returned from India I realized that Steve was entering the world stage through two bastions of male power from two hemispheres. Through Apple, it was the value system of American big business: big money, big stakes, big players, and big know-how. Through Kobun, it was twenty-five hundred years of Buddhism translated by way of Japan, home to one of the most refined cultures our world has ever known.

  Steve’s trajectory was being fueled by some combination of highly refined plutonium and a royal jelly nutrient-rich superfood that made for the highest-grade energy possible. Of course, he was young and could easily put in ten- to sixteen-hour days, six to seven days a week. And at least once a week in the evenings he was also being supercharged and focused by a Zen master’s more metaphysical practices for building power. East fueled West and West fueled East. Steve was some new kind of shaman, walking between the worlds. He must have seemed like a boy wonder to them all as he wove into himself the business of the day, the esoteric teachings of the night.

  I heard people say that Steve was just lucky in the beginning. But I didn’t think it was luck, even back then. Not only because Steve had told me it was going to happen, but because I saw how some of it unfolded. I believe that in the beginning it was Robert Friedland who, in a very intentional way, tied the spiritual-esoteric dimension to business. And I think that together he and Steve wanted to see how far they could go. And I am certain that they collaborated and compared notes about this. Both of them used food and cleansing diets in combination with spiritual practices to open up and build consciousness. Fasting and meditation is the time-honored approach that creates the intense practical alchemy required for massive change. I did enough fasting to know that it created heightened awareness and new insight. But while Indian lore contains cautionary tales about not adapting spiritual insight and practices for worldly gain, this kind of power building for ambition is not that common in the West. Steve and Robert may have been alert to the dangers, but in the face of such exciting opportunity, perhaps they simply didn’t care. Maybe the point was to be an outrageous worldly success by any means possible.

  Beyond those times with Robert, Steve’s work was greatly furthered with a similar kind of collaboration with Kobun. Except that Kobun’s spiritual development was mind-bogglingly more advanced. It had to have been a very rare thing in the history of the world, for a full-on, bona fide spiritual master to help a young entrepreneur succeed with a world-changing technology. What I saw was that through Kobun’s vast capacity and Steve’s warriorlike ability to develop his business acumen, Steve was becoming unstoppable—streamlined, less personal, and highly charged. Pure function.

  So what were the ingredients that made for Steve’s “luck?” I think it was a confluence of aesthetics: the broad-based usefulness and the capacity of the microchip, combined with Steve’s deep need to be acknowledged. Then there was his super-food diet, a Zen master in his back pocket, and his willingness to be shot through the cultural equivalent of a cannon onto the world stage. This East/West combination seemed to have offered Steve the most delicious sense of purpose. And in the beginning at least, the honest blend of his genius and humility seemed to deepen and flower. I witnessed Steve gear up for power, moving through one level after another, literally looking over his own shoulder to see the remarkable stages of his becoming—the once hapless marionette turning into a prime player.

  THIRTEEN

  LIFE ON TWO LEVELS

  While I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock I experienced upon my arrival in India, I knew to expect it. What I never saw coming was the culture shock I felt on returning to the United States. I needed big spaces, fresh air, and nature. Lots of nature. So, within two months of coming back from India, I left my father’s home and moved to a place called Duveneck Ranch in Los Altos Hills. Once a single-family farm, Duveneck had developed into a hostel and an environmental education center, a place for children from all over the Bay Area to come and learn about nature, farm life, and ecology. It’s still going strong, but now, after Josephine and Frank Duveneck have died, it’s called Hidden Villa Ranch. Living at the ranch after India would give me the best environment to ease back into American life. And it would give Steve and me a place to spend the nights together.

  The ranch sits between about eight hills on a relatively wide valley floor that fans out to Moody Road, a bending two-lane highway that will take you into town or, if followed long enough, to the Pacific Ocean. Duveneck had farm animals, gardens, hiking trails, olive trees, and a big clinking bamboo garden. And it had barn-type buildings for every kind of farm need, crouched in corners all over the property, delightful in total. Back then, in any given year, the Duveneck had a cow or two, lots of chickens, about four sheep, and two to three pigs. The numbers would increase with newborns in spring, and would decrease again in the fall.

  I lived at Duveneck for four months, moving into one of the rear cabins in exchange for thirteen hours of work each week. I did odd jobs at first, but it was Trout who suggested I teach. In addition to being a lay monk at the Zendo, Trout was the head of the children’s nature program at Duveneck Ranch. He saw me playing with newborn lambs one day and had the children stop and hang with me because, I think, he wanted them to pick up on how much affection I felt for the sweet floppy creatures. Soon after that, he invit
ed me to be a part of the teaching staff for the city kids who came to visit. I am a born teacher but Trout wouldn’t have known that. It was the philosophy at the farm to teach children, not through filling them with lots of information, but by allowing a natural passion for nature and animals in the children themselves. Feelings first, names and facts later, and only after children had connected to their awe and were asking questions from a place of intrinsic curiosity.

  It was a gift to me to be given a job that was inclusive, playful, and interesting. I’m sure Trout knew this. The two most remarkable groups of kids to come through the program were a group of wealthy children from a school for the gifted in Hillsborough, and a disadvantaged group from East Palo Alto. So it was the wealthiest and most highly served children and the poorest and most underserved children who touched me the most. The kids from East Palo Alto had so much joy moving through them—so much life—that I can still feel their explosive wonder. And the kids from the gifted school were just so off all charts in terms of being self-possessed and intelligent, that I tagged that memory and would later send my own child there.

  I had spent some time at the ranch before I’d left for India—Steve, too—because five times a year the Los Altos Zen Center made it into a Zendo for their meditation retreats. At these times the sangha members transformed the hostel into a monastery by removing the furniture in the dusty old community center and covering the floors with tatami mats. We cleaned windows, swept porches, and placed pictures and statues of Bodhidharma and Gautama Buddha around the walls and on altars. Outside we hung huge bells and slabs of wood with big mallets for the 3:55 a.m. wake up, and the other calls to meditation that the strict monastic schedule required.

  In 1974 and 1975, after Steve had returned from India but before I went, we both sat for many retreats. My impression of those times was of Steve setting himself apart from almost everyone. He seemed frail and alone, without root but gathering strength under the pressures of solitude. Steve chose whom he wanted to befriend, but otherwise seemed to glare at people. There was a kind of dark buzz around him that came up to the edges of his body and ate at him. To me he was both magnificent and tragic.

  Steve seemed slightly amused by my presence at those retreats in 1975; but it was a bemusement mixed with slight hostility. (It was how I imagined the early Christian and Buddhist monks felt about women.) He stood apart from me, and if he considered me at all, it was from a wary distance. For my part, I was a little magnetized, but also afraid to look at him. I tried not to pay any attention, but unless I was disciplined, I ended up tracking his locations. And I always knew where his meditation pillow was. If Steve and I caught each other’s eyes, we mirrored each other with feelings that I did not want to feel. I would shudder at the cold darkness in him. I wanted to reach beyond, but didn’t dare. He sort of called the shots because he was so harsh. Other times he was friendly like the old friend he was.

  But in the spring of 1977, Steve and I were close again and though I could remember what he was like before, this was a new time and we were falling in love all over again. Steve would come to find me at the farm after work, wearing Birkenstocks, jeans, and pressed white shirts wrinkled in all the right places. With his soft-mustached face and his dark sparkling eyes, he would arrive with the bright air of his well-spent hours. I loved seeing him at the end of the day. When he came early enough we went out for dinner, and three or four nights a week we’d spend the night together in my threadbare little cabin, which I otherwise shared with some spiders. When Steve came in late he’d throw his clothes on the bunk that was against the other wall, then get into bed with me, all laughing and gorgeous. I would see him in the moonlight that cut through the old cabin windows, and it was in this brief breezeway between the earth bed and the towers of the skies that my India and his mounting trajectory at Apple swirled together and then scrambled.

  Steve and I had opposite qualities running through us then. His days were defining, accelerating, and focused. He was working in an office carrying out a big plan with older businessmen. My days were spent outside in the fresh air with animals and children, doing odd jobs and living a be-here-now life. It was the promise of everything anyone could hope for between a young man and a young woman. I believed that I’d always loved Steve, that there had never been a time when he wasn’t important to me. And though he had been harsh off and on since he was twenty, I knew the same was true for him. Through the lens of the double negative, he’d also never not loved me.

  At Duveneck I had the room to integrate back into Western life. India had given me a way to more naturally know the feminine in myself. In that ancient matriarchal society I could literally make the physical motion of covering my head with my sari and look down, a gesture that would communicate the right of the female to go inward. Walking around with a little tent of color over my head gave me such a luscious feeling of quiet protection in the chaos of the marketplace. But in the United States, I felt undefended in my femininity. I knew of no equivalent action I could take to be in the world, while also being covered. It was a relief that at Duveneck, I could camouflage myself within the subtlety of nature.

  * * *

  Steve wrestled in his sleep. And I think it was in his ascent to power that he worked out many things from his dream states. One of the most dramatic expressions of this happened on a night when we were together at Duveneck and he sat bolt upright from a dead sleep and shouted: “A man must lead.” With his right arm outstretched, Steve repeated this even louder, in a noble, Shakespearian tone, “A MAN MUST LEAD!” God, he was cute. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or if he was on the steppes of Mongolia roaring at the world, but I knew for sure that the message had Kobun’s signature on it. Inevitably after these outbursts, he would fall back onto his pillow, completely asleep, and I would be left awake and wondering.

  I would bet that, when one value system takes over another, or we’re wrestling with big changes in ourselves, the evolution manifests itself first in our dreams. Steve and I were not only working out the power dynamics between us, but he was processing the power that was being newly vested in him from the other aspects of his life as well. That’s what I believe I witnessed when Steve got really sick with a fever and Clara asked if I would take care of him through the night. We were in Patty’s bedroom for some reason, and I sat in a chair beside the bed where he lay, watching him toss and turn, breathlessly fighting, shouting out and mumbling. I had never seen anything like it: an archon in a blur of sound and movement, wild with anxiety and fever. It would seem that Steve was processing a huge amount of information, that vast territories of time and space were being argued over, chosen, and cut up. He wanted me there with him, but whenever I touched his forehead or searched for his hand to offer comfort he’d scream, “Get away!” and the sharp crack of his voice would rip through me.

  Then there were the nights when I wrestled in my own stunning dreams. In one recurring nightmare I was being suffocated underneath hundreds of masks. In the way of dreams, these masks were also prison locks. And not just normal prison locks, but prison locks of such technical sophistication that I knew, even within the dream state, that they could not have been of my own making. One night in the middle of one of these dreams, I woke up and pulled myself out from under the layers of the locks to get myself down to the bathroom. But when I stepped outside the cabin door, I saw a ghost for the first in my life. At least it certainly seemed like a ghost and not fifteen feet away. It was glowing and it had the silhouette of Kobun in his robes. I told Steve about it when he came to visit me later that week, but he must have been in league with the ghost because he jumped up with a big circus smile and asked, “Well, did you shake his hand?”

  At Duveneck, I went about thinking about next steps for my life on both a practical and metaphysical level. I worked hard at my meditations every morning because I had the sense that there was a ledge I needed to climb up and onto. Josephine Duveneck inspired me in this. A Quaker and a very practical woman, sh
e was also metaphysical. Her farm—the very land—was alive with these two qualities. Later she would write a book about it, called Life on Two Levels. This impressed me as a wonderful way to be. Indeed it was. And the longer I was at Duveneck—the more I worked and developed newfound capacities to see beyond the mundane—the more I, too, began to live life on two levels.

  One day I was sitting on a log in the cool damp valley area behind the hostel cabins, under some big spreading bay trees. A buck approached and stood in dappled sunlight. It was about eighteen feet away and we stared straight into each other’s eyes for at least ten minutes. While we stared, I would shut my eyes for breaks and when I did, images appeared in my mind’s eye, rendered in a style of art I had never seen before. They were not unlike Peter Max’s artwork from the sixties, except these were fresher and bolder, with an aesthetic brevity of startling honesty. The images were of hills and dales and flowers and sky, with flowing water and various plants, all in primary colors. These simplified images were clear, soft yet boldly shaped. I felt without question this was cross-species communication, and from the deer’s huge unblinking eyes I knew that he knew he was sending me these pictures. I still find it almost unbearably touching that the buck trusted me enough to show me its world. It was as if he were saying; “These things I know and love and I share them with you.”

  I attempted to tell Steve about the buck and the pictures that week and he told me, “Humans are not meant to mate with animals.” He said this calmly as if he were giving me some sage advice. I just blinked. This was the type of comment that my mentally ill mother could have made, insinuating bestiality and missing the point of the story by a million miles. The way Steve’s mind perceived me at times like this caused me to retreat into my own silent world, overwhelmed. I literally couldn’t get myself to respond. It represented an enormous betrayal, and a warning that I couldn’t trust him to understand me.