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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  I’m a careful optimist. Later, my heart would be exalted to hear the Dalai Lama proclaim to a group of Nobel laureates at the Vancouver Peace Summit that “the Western woman will save the world.” Though I personally don’t think it will necessarily just be the Western women to save us—there are some mighty fine examples of girls and women coming forward from the East and the Middle East and Africa—I nevertheless know that sometimes we have to work a long while before a worthy vision is anchored into the world. But that it will come and that it will be worth all the work, I have no doubt.

  * * *

  Having lived in a largely female household for most of my life, moving in with Steve and Daniel was a big change for me. I liked sharing the Presidio house with them. At least in the beginning. I enjoyed the way they’d analyze things to get at the gold nugget of truth, and then erupt into helpless laughter for how crazy the world was. Steve and Daniel radiated a refined sweetness in their friendship, and their conversations centered around technology and enlightenment and food. I remember one comment that Steve made regarding the best use of personal energy: “To totally express yourself is to refine. To refrain from self-expression is to build power from within.” Wow.

  Daniel added a cheerful presence to the house. Like a child, he took infinite delight not only in what interested him, but in the meta level of how it interested him. And as Steve became more preoccupied at work, I shared hours at the house with Daniel and we got to know each other better. He taught himself to play the piano. I cooked and baked bread, and made myself clothes from cheap Indian tapestries I’d found at Cost Plus stores. The seventies experienced a resurgence in attention to homemaking skills. After the ludicrously mechanized, industrial ideals of the fifties, the sixties and seventies ushered in earthier, healthier practices. This was the counterculture that I embraced. Steve couldn’t have cared less about this aspect of my creativity; he tuned in with a different kind of attention. But Daniel often expressed a wonderful appreciation of my sewing, baking, and cooking. He seemed to like everything I did and expressed amazement that I could accomplish things without recipes and patterns, telling me I had a “native genius.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it sounded great to me. I don’t think it ever occurred to Daniel that I actually had no idea how to follow a recipe or a pattern. My mind was so impatient when it came to rules that I was continually working everything out anew.

  While I was never attracted to Daniel, I could be charmed by him. Steve acknowledged my creativity in an entirely different way, always more interested in studying my approach to things. Daniel simply made me feel seen in ways Steve never really cared about. But this was only part of the picture. I would soon find out that Steve and Daniel’s relationship was based on the most idiotic level of entitlement I had ever seen close-up. I found them chock-full of so many negative female images and projections it might have been cute for being such a caricature, if only I had been endowed with an outrageous sense of humor. In truth, Steve and Daniel played off the very best and very worst qualities in one another. I was often amazed by their lightness while simultaneously being stunned at their insensitivity. Maybe the opposite was true for them of me. I never thought to ask. I just watched them bond as if they were absurdist insiders in the life’s-a-great-big-joke club. As time passed I began to understand that all the joking was the main, if not the only, avenue of exchange between them. And it became very predictable.

  Eventually I would figure out that Steve was a role model and maybe even a father figure to Daniel Kottke, not unlike Robert Friedland was to Steve. And though all three of them were equal as friends, I think a sense of hierarchy was inevitable because Robert (and then Steve) had a thirst for power, whereas Daniel was ambivalent about it, more inclined to align with those he perceived to have power than to hold the reins of it himself. It was for this reason that I thought of Daniel as the acolyte in that brotherhood.

  After about a month of all of us living together, Steve began to exclaim that “men are just so much more interesting than women.” And then Daniel followed suit and repeated the same line and sentiment. It was a dismissive statement, but if it was meant to destabilize and disable me, it didn’t. Instead I just quietly wondered why Steve would take pride in such thinking. Was this some kind of wonky stage of male maturation? Later it dawned on me that brotherhoods, in their less developed states, are about building consensus, celebrating sameness, and jousting to sharpen wits. It’s an arrangement that offsets existential and personal insecurity. And it glorifies manhood to ensure what men, or at least some men, see as security in the world. Steve was looking for sameness soon after Apple started; he seemed to have lost sight of the fact that my value to him was because I was not the same.

  This sameness would gather momentum. In the years that followed the second coming of Steve at Apple, I began to notice that the world had been infiltrated by an army of Steve look-alikes: black turtlenecks, buzz cuts, John Lennon glasses, and blue jeans. Steve’s European casual look was being adopted by men in every American city. It was cultivated simplicity and it was cool. I now believe Steve had an almost unfathomable desire to see himself reflected back. And so it happened. “The Steves” were everywhere. For me, though, it was jarring. This bony, shaved-head look of his seemed to me to have had its origin in Paul Jobs. From my perspective, Steve strove relentlessly for approval from men, Paul being the first. Replicating Paul’s militaristic look was part of that.

  * * *

  What I really wanted and needed at that time was to have a quiet home and be loved and appreciated for who I was. I was just getting to the point where I no longer recalled the sickening feeling of my mother’s uneasy logic and mental illness. Not remembering how my mother thought was a milestone for me, and I began to have whole evenings at home where I could focus and read deeply for my own enrichment. I was starting to heal, a process that seemed to make something in Steve and Daniel want to throw me off center, while they constantly quipped and critiqued me for not being centered enough. I was in a delicate phase and I couldn’t stabilize it in that house with the many disruptions and slights.

  Daniel Kottke, like Steve, always had great confidence in his opinions. They both seemed to perceive the idealized versions of themselves as the whole truth and then evaluate others less generously. I think of it as a little glitch in the programming because I think Daniel, at his core, was not motivated by unkindness. The problem for me in that house was that the guys perceived themselves as the gold standard and me as something corrupted and corruptible. I took it personally, which gave them more to laugh at.

  Daniel liked the intellectual traditions that developed from the spirituality of the seventies and for as long as I have known him he has always explored ideas and tried them on, ever wanting to entertain new possibilities. But he could be found laughing at the wrong things and would often miss the full truth of a situation because, like so many science types in the Bay Area, he could be disconnected from the emotional implications of his insights. We were in the kitchen of the Presidio house one day when Daniel said to me, “You were a courtesan in China in a former life!” blasting a laugh in my face and then curling inward like a conch shell, back into his bright, smug interior. I didn’t know what a courtesan was exactly, or what he was fully implying. Before the ease of Google, I brooded over the notion. It was a statement of ridicule and got under my skin and stayed there for years. (Now in response to that, I would say my chosen archetype would be more like the four-armed Saraswati: the powerful creative feminine aspect in balance with her consort, the realized male aspect, without compromise or prostitution by either. Just fullness of being.)

  Much potential was flowering and flowing at that house—so much vision and promise—but my efforts to speak and be understood were too often co-opted for a laugh. When I told Steve that Kobun had once told me that “Steve has a very deep ignorance,” Steve said he considered it a compliment. He was building himself into an enlightened warrior, so instead of hee
ding the warning, he decided that one deep ignorance wasn’t such a big problem in the grand scheme. At this time, fewer and fewer things made him stop and reflect, unless it was about another’s failure to think as he thought. Sometimes I would go for days without talking because Steve could turn anything I said against me; my only recourse was silent revolt. This made Steve and Daniel laugh more patronizingly, pretending that they understood. As time went by I began to shrink and disappear (even to myself) in equal proportion to Steve’s growing arrogance.

  I realize now that we were all expressing the cultural norms of the time. None of us recognized that we were links in a long chain of broken and unresolved issues. I had no models to teach me about the value of the feminine aspect, and neither Steve nor I had models for an evolved male/female relationship. Adding significantly to this dynamic was the male bias of Kobun’s Japanese culture. More than once I had heard Kobun say that a really good man runs from women who want to marry him. And well he should!! But I never once heard him say that a really good woman should run from men who want to marry her. It seems to me now that the teacher’s influence may have been very worse than none at all.

  * * *

  Steve barely made time for the two of us anymore, so I was happy when he surprised me by suggesting we take a walk together. As we ambled along, however, we ended up listing our grievances with each other. Neither of us felt we were getting what we wanted from the other. And it was turning into a pretty lousy walk when, halfway across the school lawn, we were distracted by a compelling sight. There among a row of newly planted trees was a clump of about a thousand bees hanging from a branch, all clinging tightly onto each other like a dangerous cluster of grapes. It was a buzzing, half-flying, half-heavy thing, weighty enough to bend a tender sapling branch down about five inches.

  We were riveted.

  Neither of us had ever seen such a thing. We came in close to have a look at the mishmash of jillions of tiny repeating insect parts vibrating with their harsh yellow-and-black-colored bodies. The buzzing alone was unnerving. I wondered out loud if they had lost their queen. As fascinated as little kids, we looked around to find a stick to poke at it. We were scared that they’d swarm us but way too curious not to investigate. Steve took the stick and I stood half behind him and with both of us bent over and peering, we got as close as we dared while making ourselves ready to run. Then Steve said, “Okay, one, two, three!” and jabbed into it. Suddenly and anticlimatically, half of the clump dropped to the ground like whipped cement: the bees splattered on the grass, seemingly dazed as they continued to buzz and crawl all over each other. Some flew up to hover and then shoot off. In the rush of shared excitement we finally stopped all the blaming and were quiet. Turning around, we headed home in silence.

  In the chaos of the bees I saw a symbol that my world was disconnecting from Steve’s. We had extraordinary codes for creativity together, but I would be excluded from his trajectory and he from mine. History unfolds like this. Some of the finest impulses in people go unrealized because of the crosswinds of ignorance, distraction, power abuse, jealousy, bad timing, faulty memory, scarce resources, a lack of confidence, sexism, racism, wrongful ambition, laziness, wars.… The list of goof-ups is long. Overwhelmed, I excused myself from him, not wishing to go in the soul-numbing direction he seemed to be headed.

  Soon after that walk, circumstances finally turned forever. It was late on a Saturday morning right before Steve left for work, and he and I were in our unfurnished dining room, arguing. His face contorted as his voice launched the harshest, most critical words at me—heavily concentrated explosives in every syllable. I don’t remember what the fight was about, only the rapid fire of his dronelike strikes. In my defensive state I separated myself out and studied him as if from the wrong end of a telescope, making his horrible behavior tiny and more manageable through its contracted lens. I thought to myself that he was just meaner than anyone ever needed to be. And then I realized that for me it was over between us. Every cell within me, from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, knew I didn’t have what it would take to withstand any more of this. Normally I was caught up in the blame, but this time I became peaceful because it was over. His meanness had won. There was no contest. I was done.

  Once I see something with this kind of clarity, I can never go back, no matter how much I want to ignore myself. And though it would take me time to take all the steps, from then on I was fully programmed to leave. It would be hard to do it because commitment-to-self was not one of the noble metals of my family experience—there were other noble metals, but not that one. So this was where I would stumble toward maturity.

  Ten days and fifteen arguments later Steve was chasing me around his car in our driveway late at night. Daniel was out for the evening so we had some blessed space without his sidekick presence. I was both laughing and crying, trying to let the air out of Steve’s car tires in a playful and tearful attempt to make him stay home with me. He was laughing too, and crying as he chased me from one end of the car to the other. Suddenly, his voice pierced the air with a cry, “I’ve never told you what I wanted you to know.” I stopped short and let that sink in. It was true; in our last years together we had never understood our love in the same way at the same time, and so the love between us never had been fully expressed.

  I received the blow—his vulnerability, our love, and the loss of it hitting me all at once. The grief I felt was so overwhelming, I bent over holding my stomach and wanted to die from the pain. This was Steve all over, always hitting the grief note to accent loss and blame, when continuity of love and kindness could have saved us.

  * * *

  I resisted the idea of actually leaving Steve, but acted on it nonetheless. Eventually I planned to move to Palo Alto, which I thought was a beautiful little jewel of a town well before it was overhauled to become the hub of the computer age and its money. First, I arranged to get an IUD. Once I woke up to how impossible it had all become, I also woke up to a number of things I had not been taking care of for myself. Birth control was at the top of that list.

  Our birth control method up to that point was Steve’s coitus interruptus, also called the pull-out method, which for him was about his conserving his energy for work. Not reaching climax is a practice from the eastern traditions of India and Japan that is passed between teacher and male student for the purpose of building focus and power—presumably for spiritual growth. But it is also a practice taught in the 1937 motivational book inspired by Andrew Carnegie, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which speaks to building power and wealth by conserving one’s vital energies. I knew that coitus interruptus was a bogus form of birth control, but until then I’d suspended my better judgment and watched my cycles.

  I called Family Planning in Sunnyvale. They would only place an IUD at the end of a woman’s menstrual cycle, so I waited until I’d nearly completed a period and then drove down for the procedure. I felt uneasy about the down sides of using an IUD, but it was a better risk than the pill, which would make my body lethargic and fat with the extra hormones. I knew this because I had taken the pill off and on through the years. That night I told Steve that I had gotten birth control and he ridiculed me. Knowing that I had done the right thing enabled me to finally see the pattern: he would continue to demean me for each and every independent thought and action. It was like a disease in him.

  After the IUD had been placed, I felt I could be confident after nearly a year of risky intimacy with Steve. I knew I was not going to get pregnant and I was relieved, even giddy, to have that one huge pressure taken care of. Or so I thought. Within twenty-four hours of getting the IUD, I got pregnant. I know exactly when conception happened because Steve was truly kinder that night. He breathed as if he were letting go of everything and he’d cupped my face with a deep sense of real connection in a way he hadn’t done for some time. For a moment I relaxed, feeling his full acceptance of me. Love shone that night, and then it was eclipsed again.

  SI
XTEEN

  AN OLD STORY

  Within a two-week period, somewhere in early October of 1977, the clock was up on everything. I realized I could no longer endure an intimate relationship with Steve. I got “reliable” birth control as the first of many steps to get out and away. And Rod Holt, one of the first ten employees at Apple, approached me about a paid apprenticeship designing blueprints for the Apples. Steve and Rod saw me as a good fit for the job, and it was, but I was concerned about taking a job like this because I just wanted to be an artist. As a caring older adult offering me a tremendously valuable opportunity, Rod saw my resistance as profoundly misconceived. I told him I would think about it. Then I found out I was pregnant.

  It took me a few days before I told Steve. We were standing in the dining room, talking about something else entirely, and I told him: “I’m pregnant.” Steve’s face turned ugly. He gave me a fiery look. Then he rushed out of the house without a word. That was day one.

  I know it’s widely believed that Steve asked me to have an abortion. And Steve, himself, has apparently been quoted as saying he had asked me to end the pregnancy. He even actively led people to believe that I slept around. But none of this was true. It served Steve’s purposes to appear as the victim of a crazy woman to whom he’d had a slight attraction, but never loved. The truth is that at the beginning of my third trimester Steve shook his head and said: “I never wanted to ask that you get an abortion. I just didn’t want to do that.” And he never had.

  Steve didn’t and wouldn’t talk to me about the pregnancy. When he wasn’t arguing with me, he would hold me off with his tightlipped silence. It would take me years to understand why he wouldn’t discuss something so important to both of us, especially since he and I had dealt with this situation five years before and had come to a mutual and comfortable decision about how to handle it. This time, I tied myself in knots trying to work out why he wouldn’t just talk with me. What I saw is that after I told Steve I was pregnant, and once he’d adjusted, he behaved with unnatural calm in the face of my panic and tears. If I had just gotten mad, I would have broken the spell, come to my senses, and taken action because clearly I had no way to care for a child. But I didn’t even have it in me to get mad because I think I was too deeply affected by his silent abandonment and what amounted to months of his negative projections on me. So I spun between two poles: the pregnancy itself and the chaos that was unfolding around me. I had a sense of there being no place to stand with this.