* * *
On the nights when Steve and I didn’t have something to do together—and there were more and more of these—he would often come home late and wake me up to talk and make love. On the nights he just wanted to talk, I knew he had been with Kobun. I would wake up to find Steve gently ecstatic, speaking to me in symbolic language with the Zen master’s distinct speech pattern. A number of times he spoke to me about how he had been given “five brilliant flowers.” His demeanor would gleam when he said this, and I would listen to find out what the symbol meant to him. My best guess after months of these reveries was that the flowers were five different people whose enlightenment Steve would be involved in. These blooms apparently included me. In the beginning he talked about “one brilliant flower” and he would touch my nose when he said it, as if to say, “That’s you!” but then it rose to three and then five. I’d wondered who the others were.
Steve was assuming the role of my spiritual master once again and I felt uneasy about it. What if I didn’t want to be one of his brilliant flowers. Beyond this, the general lack of transparency when it came to Steve and Kobun didn’t feel right, especially when it involved me. A few years earlier Steve had tried to get me to primal scream “Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy” when we had taken LSD because he thought he was fit to oversee that kind of opening up in me just from having read a book. The fact that he had never gone through primal therapy himself didn’t seem to concern him. It was that Pygmalion thing again. Now he and Kobun thought Steve should oversee my enlightenment?
Also during this time Steve bragged about being lazy. He was working like a maniac but he’d throw his head back with his eyes unfocused and croon, “I am just the laziest man in the world.” After about the tenth refrain I quietly translated this to mean that he was only active in response to inspiration, and so in this way, action was effortless, thus, he was lazy. It smacked of the coded language between him and Kobun. Further, it felt self-aggrandizing. I was left out of the late-night conversations between master and student, but I got these trailers when I was half asleep. Some of it was beautiful and I was glad Steve wanted to share it with me, but some of it felt really skewed. Steve had a way of being spiritually advanced while also being emotionally underdeveloped, and I started to wonder why Kobun didn’t understand this. Why indeed.
I was wary because I didn’t think enlightened people bragged, and I sensed that these two were too infatuated with themselves. The touch on the nose was patronizing. Steve, who was my boyfriend, not my guru, had some confusion about me surrendering to his ego instead of to my own higher purpose and presence. In the end, I think he may have been jealous of me for having my own power and insight. He seemed to want either to own everything or diminish its value.
One evening, Steve and I had a party at the Presidio house. I don’t remember much about the party or who was there—likely, Bill Fernadez, Woz, and Daniel, and their girlfriends. What I do remember is that the next morning there was a confusing moment when Steve, looking around and squinting, asked what we should do with “it.” I didn’t understand the question until I realized that he was asking if there was a service we could call in to take care of the dirty dishes. Doing the dishes ourselves was simply no longer an option for Steve. He had entered into an elite world where others took care of the lower-level functions so that he could operate with more efficiency, on his presumably higher plane. I not too happily cleaned them up by myself. This put me into the wrong kind of position with him, because in no world should I ever have been in a service role to Steve in this way. I just didn’t understand how to take care of myself in the face of his enlarged sense of self-importance.
* * *
A few weeks after the party Steve started telling me that I had too many wrinkles on my forehead. I’m of Irish and French descent and have thin skin from the Irish side. In my early twenties, I had a wrinkle-free face, but when I raised my eyebrows, I had a bazillion tiny lines, like pages of a book. Steve would point this out and then, like a stage mother, literally reach over and smooth my forehead whenever I furrowed my brow. This was a new Steve. I have never liked this sort of thing in mothers, much less in boyfriends.
I am not the kind of woman who places high stakes in her appearance. That’s not a natural outcome of who I am. But I was puzzled. Steve had always really liked the way I looked before, but now my very face was not okay? I fell to tears, rejected and burdened by it all.
I now understand that Steve was learning how to gain power by insinuating negative self-images onto others. He was starting to define me more by what I wasn’t, than by what I was. This was a whole new category of unkindness and it confused me. It was mean and I felt rejected, but I just didn’t have a comeback.
I needed a more mature level of insight, so I went to Kobun’s house one afternoon to talk to him about it. He was there with two of his more advanced students, men who had always been impressive to me. Not only because they were older and had flown across the country to be with Kobun, but because each had such a deep, clear kindness in his face. On that day, though, I was surprised and somewhat uncomfortable that Kobun had scheduled my time when others were present. He had never done this before. At first Kobun sat with me in the well-lit dining area of his house as I told him in a whisper what was happening. I was so afraid that he would conclude, “Yes, you are not beautiful enough for Steve’s growing fame and now you know.”
Instead, he sighed. “So, Steve has said this to you?” he asked. “Yes,” I told him. “He has.” And as we talked, I started to calm down in the presence of Kobun’s vast sense of allowance.
About twenty minutes later Kobun signaled the two men into the room with us. I was so embarrassed I wanted to bolt. I couldn’t believe he had done this. But I didn’t bolt and the men sat with me as Kobun told them what had happened. At once they understood. At once they were gracious. These men were kind and honorable. They told me I was lovely and they were sincere about it. About forty minutes later I left Kobun’s house fragile and shaken, but feeling more solid because what we talked through made sense. Months later one of the men sent me a short story by Sherwood Anderson about the beauty in women. It transcended everything Steve had said to me.
* * *
As Apple grew, so did Steve’s sense of self-entitlement; in parallel they both seemed to take on lives of their own. And his behaviors didn’t improve with success, they changed from adolescent and dopey to just plain vicious. For example, in the pre-Apple days whenever we’d go out for dinner (which wasn’t that often), Steve would often be sarcastic toward the restaurant staff. The host would say, “Two?” and Steve would reply, “No, fifteen!” driving for the implicit “DUH!” But after Apple started we ate out a lot more and Steve’s behavior toward service people changed into a different kind of disempowerment.
Steve would order the same meal night after night, yet he’d complain bitterly each evening about the little side sauces that were served with it, cutting the air with disdain for the waitstaff who would serve up such greasy-salty-tasteless-mock-fine cuisine. He seemed to assume that everyone at the restaurant should know better than to serve up such wallpaper paste—not only to him, but at all. Steve would run down the waitstaff like a demon, detailing the finer points of good service, which included the notion that “they should be seen only when he needed them.” Steve was uncontrollably critical. His reactions had a Tourette’s quality—as if he couldn’t stop himself.
Of course, it must have been sort of wild to have your genius recognized at the age of twenty-two, to be thrust into such a role of authority. Steve had always been a brilliant misfit, but at this time—to be generous—he wasn’t managing his growing power very well. In fact, he was positively despotic. Excellence had always been a gorgeous thing in Steve, but now he was using it like a weapon. He’d look for excellence and when he didn’t find it, he’d behave badly and take it out on people. It was as if the values of aesthetics were replacing decency and ethics in the mad pursuit to be the be
st of the best.
Steve may simply have lacked maturity, like a lot of techie types for whom a breadth of emotional awareness just isn’t the point. It could have been the result of the creative process and the effect of designing with such Bauhaus minimalism that made him so severe. After all, what we create, in turn creates us. Or maybe Steve had lost a sense of grace and spaciousness in his desire to pare everything down to the flat and the essential. (Wasn’t that the point in Zen and in computer design—to pare everything down to the essential?) Maybe it was that brilliant myopic quality found in the sciences, so supreme in its capacity to focus on the almighty goal that it somehow disconnects people from having perspective. Or then again it could have been Steve’s extraordinary competitiveness, the desire to win at all costs that clicked into his sensibilities and took over every other consideration.
I also felt that there might have been some sort of mean by-product to Steve’s rocketing ascent, a kind of fallout from the acceleration—the Faust particle. Thus seduced by the mind and the possibility of total technical excellence, Steve was unable to keep his soul wired into the whole of his life. (Although ironically, his “religion of excellence” would inspire a cultlike following.) It’s my current working theory, and goodness knows I’ve had plenty, that it was by creating a world-changing technology that every excellent and broken thing on earth rose up through Steve as a part of everything he created and became. So it was in this way that the mutable young man came to express some of the best and worst of our time.
As Steve’s first girlfriend I increasingly experienced what it felt like to have him turn against me. And so was at this time that I began to perceive that awesome and awful could be but a hair’s breadth apart. And where Steve’s fullness met mine with staggering beauty (there was a reason he called fifteen years later to acknowledge the importance of the nights we’d shared), he was also becoming so creatively unstable, so out of integrity with himself that everything could slip out of alignment in an instant. That’s when my heart would freeze over. That’s when I’d be left speechless and gasping. Though I would try to adapt to the change, it all soon outweighed his value to me.
FIFTEEN
THE WORLD OF MEN
At age twenty-three I was just beginning to enter the world of grown men. The way I perceived men, and my relationships with them, was influenced as much by the changing values of the time as it was by personal experience. My father, who kept himself emotionally hidden, was a man of his time. He had little sadistic and masochistic streaks that would show up when he didn’t know how to handle things, but mainly, he was wired for goodness and duty. He was always a solid income earner for his family, and he defined himself by being able to make good money and hold his liquor. He followed a traditional white-collar path, working hard from the bottom up to build his career, earning the position of vice president in marketing at a number of big companies. He bought increasingly nicer homes for us in every state we moved to, with spacious lawns and two-car garages. But he never developed a life that reflected his own profound way of being, as this was something few of his era expected of their lives.
When I was a little girl I saw my father as shiny and smooth like Roy Rogers, “the King of the Cowboys.” He was sparkly and intensely interesting to me, no matter if he was shaving or hosing down the driveway. I liked to watch him work. On Saturday mornings he would come into the TV room and laugh so hard at our cartoons that tears would stream down his face, which made them hundreds of times funnier to us. And at the dinner table he would use knives to introduce our little minds to the concept of infinity. He would model thought experiments by demonstrating how you could use a knife to cut something in half, then in half again, and again and again and again to show us that there was never an end to all the halves and that this was infinity. Then he’d watch our faces to see the marvelous notion land and sink in.
When we lived in Colorado I saved up and bought a $40 reflector telescope from the back of a cereal box. Life changed at our house when it arrived. My father would spend one evening a week focusing and refocusing the telescope to get a look at the night skies. Everyone got lots of turns looking through the telescope, and our whole neighborhood of parents and children would join us on our back patio for hours of viewing. Brilliant Jupiter and her four large moons thrilled me. Mars was a ruddy red. And then there were the perfect crystalline patterns from the meteorites that bit into the surface of the moon thousands of years ago and had exploded outward for what must have been literally thousands of miles—the visual equivalent of a symphony.
My father had a sense of grace and when he came into a room I could swear I saw the lights turn a blue hue, which fed my spirit and made me feel safe. Yet I also knew that there was something not so straightforward about him. When he talked about infinity it seemed like the knife’s endless cutting didn’t always expand his vision as much as drive it into sad, truncated corners. Children may think their fathers hold up the sky, but I discovered early on that there was a sense of intellectual chaos in the one I got. It seems to me that we all tried to help him with the lifting, but eventually the effort made us, a house of five females, disappointed and angry.
My father raised four daughters and cherished all of us, but I think I irritated him more than the rest of my sisters put together. Instead of supporting my creativity, he was often embarrassed by it. He dismissed my art supplies as “cancers,” ignored my work, and yelled at me in front of my friends when he found us in a darkened room taking turns wrapping each other up in paper and twine to experience “breaking out.” It was a seventies thing. To us it was harmless and full of hilarity. But to my father it was messy and utterly incomprehensible. It made him mad. Another time, my dad arrived home from a business trip. It was early (he had taken a red-eye) and he came in to find Steve and me sleeping together on the floor. He didn’t say a thing but later I heard him telling his friends, “If anyone had told me two years ago that I would find one of my daughters sleeping with a boy in the middle of the living room floor, I would have thrown him through the window.” As a teen I rendered my dear dad outraged and mute, in turns.
My father wanted a daughter who was compliant and who dressed in matching sweater sets. But I was out in a wilderness, experimenting with what interested me because I was never happier than when I was on the outer edge of new experience. I couldn’t comply, and having my dad not meet me in my teenage world meant that I never had the advantage of being able to confide in a man for whom my best interest was in his best interest. Sadly, all this resulted in the kind of miscommunication that created betrayals between us. And when I was twenty-two, and my father saw that Steve was disrespectful toward him and dangerously unconscious of me, we weren’t able to talk it through.
* * *
It stuns me now to imagine the world in which my mother lived. When my family was still living in Nebraska, she inappropriately confided to us that she would be able to legally divorce our dad once we got to California. As late as 1968, it was illegal for a woman to divorce her husband in Nebraska. We girls knew by that time that she didn’t like him very much. I think her sense of powerlessness to free herself from the marriage may have triggered the onset of her inevitable mental illness. My father, for his part, repeated to us a number of times while I was in my late teens, “I should never have let your mother go to college. It gave her ideas.” This confounds me for its cluelessness by a man with four daughters in the time of burgeoning feminism. My father would later catch up and understand in spades, but the seventies were a time of slow awakening for the stalwarts who kept to their secret alliances inside male-dominated companies. Also, he had a point: by 1970 some in the feminist movement had lost the threads of its greater purposes and had so radicalized out of total frustration that they were basically directing women to throw the babies out with the bathwater.
I didn’t really have enough experience to understand the Women’s Movement or why someone would say, “A woman without a man is like a fish wit
hout a bicycle.” It was a hilarious statement that begged to be understood. I also didn’t know what to make of it when I overheard Kobun finishing a phone call in which he bemoaned the qualities of American women. I stood at the edge of the door waiting as Kobun, kneeling on the floor at the far end of his office, laughed and said something like, “Oh, they are not like these American women.…” implying the superiority of some other group of women who were more deferential to men. Perhaps he had intended to signal me since he knew I was standing within earshot.
I witnessed many such things long before I had enough experience to understand their implications, much less respond to them. But one thing was certain: during the seventies the antagonism between the sexes was crazy-pronounced and weighed in no one’s interest—not the men, not the women, and definitely not the children. I might have been more of a casualty of the times were it not for my eventually meeting a couple of spiritual teachers who helped me resolve the polarizing perspectives I’d grown up with. Now I like to think that the real truth behind the discordant seventies is that it was all a work in progress. Or better yet, like the discombobulated strains of an orchestra warming up before a performance. Perhaps the period of my coming-of-age was just the messy beginnings of the good coming into form.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 18
