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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  Steve’s silence reminded me what it was like to be around my mother’s mental illness, where I struggled to make sense of her insane and cruel behaviors. She, like Steve, lived in a symbolically rich world in which she would perceive my actions in starkly negative terms—things just too terrible to repeat. I realize now that I believed her worst perceptions of me rather than admit that my own mother was so mentally ill. Equally, I came to realize that it was easier to think there was something wrong with me than to see that Steve was leveraging my pain and confusion not only because he wanted to protect himself, but because he was inclined to torture. I looked weak and this would have brought it out in him.

  If I had hammered Steve for a conversation, we might have found our way through. But he behaved as if everything was my fault and I didn’t know how to push back with the force necessary to match the strength of all his blame. This all took place just before the common availability of DNA testing, so it was difficult to prove paternity. When Steve ran out the door, or at least soon after, I don’t doubt that he went to a legal adviser who told him that if he said nothing, then nothing could be used against him. I believe that the motivation behind this was all that was happening at Apple.

  Steve was fully aware of the big picture, but I had no way of knowing that Apple would go public within three years and that my pregnancy would have been perceived as a threat to Steve’s public image and therefore, the Apple brand. I think they had it pretty much figured out by then that Steve was a wild card and a public relations nightmare. But spin it just right and you could romanticize him as the upstanding, if quirky, genius. Apple was a young company and needed to build public trust. So they created a persona for the gifted, good-looking young man. It was all identity branding and power. It was about money. Done.

  * * *

  Abortion was an option, and an important one. A woman knows whether she has the capacity to care for another life. Adoption was also available. But I went blank. I had no idea of what action to take. And I wasn’t eating well. I was idealistic about being a vegetarian when I probably needed some meat. I also suspect I had parasites from India that were affecting my focus as well as my strength and sense of well-being. Added to this was the Buddhist precept Do No Harm that was very important to me. Inexperience. Idealism. Health issues. The flood of hormones raging through my body. I just didn’t have the clarity to make smart decisions.

  I didn’t talk with my father. He knew something about having children and supporting a family so likely he would have been very helpful, but I didn’t fully trust his take on things and I think I was a little too private and maybe even arrogant. I didn’t want to talk to him—there had been many betrayals by this time. None of my friends had enough experience to help me, either. They were still growing up into their lovely lives.

  As time went by I felt more alone and more paralyzed by conflict. I did not want a baby, but neither did I want to harm the little one developing inside me. On top of that, I was having a recurring nightmare, charged with bizarre hostility, where I saw a faceless doctor coming toward me with a blowtorch to give me an abortion. So I went to the Zen master. Kobun, unlike Steve, would talk to me. Kobun, unlike my father, didn’t seem full of chaos because he, Kobun, appeared to be kind and intellectually sound. Kobun embraced the situation. He wanted to be helpful and I was relieved to have someone to talk to. Now I see that Steve and Kobun had exchanged roles. Kobun gave me to Steve to help with my enlightenment, and Steve left Kobun to assist with the decision about our pregnancy.

  More than anything, I wanted Steve to just talk to me so we could make a decision together. This was our dilemma but instead he blamed me as if it were mine alone. At one point, well into the pregnancy, he told me he felt like I was stealing his genes. He had begun to think of himself as a high-end commodity—despite the fact that he was acting from low-end accountability. I didn’t dare imagine Steve wanted to marry me. By all his actions it was clear that he had started considering me an embarrassing inconvenience.

  So I threw myself upon the mercy of Kobun for a way out of trouble. “Keep the child!” he said with enthusiasm. “I will help you.” Later in the pregnancy Kobun would tell me, “You’re not the type of woman who could give a baby up for adoption.” I didn’t know if he was being manipulative or honestly believed that; I personally had no idea if I could or couldn’t give a baby up for adoption. But at least I knew that Kobun had promised his support if I decided to keep the baby.

  Kobun had warned in a couple of his dharma talks that “Zen meditation was not to be used for psychological purposes, or purposes unsuited for a spiritual endeavor.” This wisdom floated a bit beyond my grasp at the time. Now I understand it to mean that the development of someone’s spiritual life will always integrate into a person’s psychology and improve character, sometimes in vast ways. But spirituality should never be used to develop personal goals or worldly gain. Such an act empties the seeker of the authenticity that comes from a sincere spiritual quest.

  And yet, despite these words, I came to see that Kobun did manipulate situations for worldly outcomes. One day when I was about six months pregnant, he told me that he was using all his inner power to bring Steve and me and “the child” together, but that it wasn’t working. If this is true, and it might not be, it’s a discerning factor: because any real meditation practice worth its salt is about penetrating to the root causes so that right action takes place of its own accord. Kobun couldn’t penetrate the problem. And he was dumbfounded by his failure. He wasn’t as advanced as I had thought, or maybe as he had thought.

  And he wasn’t curious either, because after this admission, Kobun did what so many do when they don’t do the work it takes to be thorough and honest: he became glossy with sentimentality, that slippery insincere slope of Hallmark cards, skipped steps, and happy endings. “Let life happen through you!” he said with a whoosh of spirit that had absolutely nothing to do with the pressing realities of my situation. And I thought, Wow, what a cheesy, manipulating statement! Later, I told my older sister, Kathy, about this and she said, “I feel like punching him.” That seemed about right.

  * * *

  I teetered on the brink of indecision knowing that the day would come after which I would be too far along to get an abortion. I went to Family Planning to have the IUD taken out, thinking this might determine things. Family Planning in Sunnyvale set up an appointment for a very careful procedure of going into my womb, while saving the pregnancy. But I learned almost immediately that the IUD had expelled itself, likely within a few hours of its being inserted. That’s why I had gotten pregnant.

  Toward the end of the time when I would have had to make a decision about going forward with the pregnancy, Kobun repeatedly told me, “I’ll give you money and I’ll raise the child until you are ready, or even forever if you want.” I knew that Kobun was romanticizing himself and his tradition and for this alone I should have taken greater heed. I also knew, though, that his mother ran something like an orphanage at his father’s monastery, so I thought he was honestly awake to my reality. He told me so many times that he would help me and my child, that I believed him. But I never got anything in writing. Why would I? He was the spiritual leader after all, and no one in the spiritual community ever told me he wasn’t as good as his word. No one. The most I ever challenged him was to say, “Kobun! Your wife would never agree to having my child in her home.” It took nerve for me to say this because it seemed so outspoken to confront him.

  I didn’t know Harriet Chino personally, but I knew how she would look at me sometimes—hard and mean. Plus I had heard stories in his lectures about her tigerlike anger. I suspect that he called her a tiger because she was a strong woman with goals of her own and because she yelled at his students to get out of their house. I was idealistic and couldn’t imagine that she might tire of Zen practitioners intruding on their family life. But Steve often joked about how she disliked him in the early years. In fact, he told me that she thoroughly despis
ed him because of his habit of going to their house late in the evenings and waiting on the sidewalk or in the alley behind their house, willing Kobun to come outside for a breath of fresh air and a cigarette. However, Harriet’s dim view of Steve must have changed once he became famous, after which she would ask him to accompany her on social engagements when her husband was out of town.

  Kobun said to me, “If she objects to my taking your baby, then I will divorce her!” Ohhhh, ho-ho, did this statement signal a darkening turn. And that he announced this with such bravado made me take note. I felt this was way too cavalier under the circumstances. Kobun and Harriet already had two small children and I imagine that she was the main person responsible for keeping the family running smoothly. Kobun, it turns out, wanted more babies and she didn’t. Within two years she would divorce him and take their children with her to live in another state. As for me, I slowly began to recognize that Kobun was putting me, and my baby’s life, in danger.

  * * *

  Rod Holt was still waiting to hear from me about the position at Apple, but I was so distraught that I couldn’t get myself to respond to him in a timely way. He was incensed, and honestly, it was never like me to drop the ball about something as serious as a good job offer, especially one that was both an honor and a fit. But I was caught in the headlights; I couldn’t even tell him what was up because it was so personal. In the end, I just couldn’t imagine staying at Apple. Steve astonished me when he offhandedly, even naïvely, said, “You can be pregnant and work at Apple, you can take the job. I don’t get what the problem is.” But I felt so ashamed: the thought of my growing belly in the professional environment at Apple, with the child being his, while he was unpredictable, in turn being punishing and sentimentally ridiculous. I could not have endured it.

  It must have been around this time that I observed that Steve’s posture was that of a brute, with royal ease. “Brute” because he was treating me with a hefty arrogance that leveraged his self-esteem off my despair. “Royal ease” because he now had the power to make anything look reasonable and the resources to work it all out effortlessly. He told me as much. “If you give up this baby for adoption, you will be sorry,” he said. “And I am never going to help you.”

  I soon quit the little job I had at Apple and went on welfare and started cleaning houses to make a little more money under the table. I also asked Steve for money a couple of times so I could rent a place, and he tilted his head in a kind of little boy way so that I would feel for him and said, “You know I don’t even get around to getting Apple to pay me back for my out of pocket expenses.” And at this he pulled his wallet out to show me the blur of his receipts for the month. This was the extent of his answer. He wouldn’t even take responsibility for saying no. I am sure that he was advised that if there was a legal case that it would not look good for him to have given me money.

  * * *

  Lifetimes later, in September of 2011, literally a month before Steve would die, I sat with Jeff Goodell from Rolling Stone magazine at an outdoor café in Menlo Park, California. He had written several articles about Apple and had interviewed Steve a number of times. Jeff related that he’d read everything there was about the company.

  Through the years, I’d learned not to talk with reporters and I had no intention of talking with Jeff until he surprised me in an e-mail by saying that he had also written a memoir and knew what hell it was. I was years into my own memoir at the time, so this got my attention. Jeff also told me that Steve really had liked him. The latter comment may be a standard way to get an interview with the intimates of famous people, but it seemed so utterly naïve and refreshing that I decided to meet with him. Also, I knew by then that in regard to work-related situations, Steve made sure he had great people around him. If Steve liked Jeff and gave him interviews, it meant he was likely a great person. So I met up with him and, during our only face-to-face conversation, I could see why Steve had liked him. I liked him, too.

  In our nearly four-hour conversation we came around to Jeff telling me that he had also worked for Apple and that he left right before it went public. I felt a sudden, excruciating excitement to know more. I could hardly believe I was sitting at a table with another person who had the comparable history of having left Apple soon before making what would have been a lifetime’s worth of money. In his case, he left it all to go to Lake Tahoe and become a blackjack dealer. I said, “Do you regret it?” That was the only real question I wanted to ask. Jeff casually and confidently shook his head and said, “No, not at all. Not one single bit. Apple didn’t have an environment I could thrive in.” An oasis of a response.

  At the moment of this conversation, the memory of being at Apple and all that gray particulate of computer substance—half-matter, half-blackened energetic discharge—seemed to gather at the table like a miniature sandstorm. Then Jeff said something like, “It would never have been worth it to have stayed there.” Jeff was discreet, polite, and so uber-aware of power that I wondered at all the complicated egos he must have interviewed through the years.

  It was in this conversation that I realized I had so identified with conventional thinking about the very real losses of my life that I never understood the degree to which I had actually made great decisions all the way through. Jeff said, “The cubicle life, the quality of the air and the light inside the buildings, the overweight people who wrote code late into the night, their poor diets and their bad jokes…” He sighed and summarized, “Chrisann, it wasn’t a good environment for me.” Being in Jeff’s presence and seeing the love, the humilty, and confidence he had for his life and family, made my regret melt away into something deeper, truer, and more meaningful. It’s what I already knew, but it was so good to hear it in another. Because for all of Apple’s religion, it just was never my temple. And to be perfectly honest, I had felt profoundly ambivalent about spending my life in such a place. Even a minute of focus in the wrong direction seems too costly to me.

  * * *

  I sat through three or four Zen meditation sesshins during my pregnancy. I wanted the familiarity and warmth of the Zen community, and the comfort of the nutritious food that was served. I also felt that meditating would help me better understand my circumstances and find a way through. Sitting still was my way to find answers. When I wasn’t at a retreat, I ate without joy and grew small. Few people knew I was pregnant until I was about six months along, after which there was no hiding it. I lived in different homes during this time. I always had a place to sleep and cook, but I was basically homeless. I ate only to nurture the child and worried about getting enough protein since I was a vegetarian. My father told me, “You know the nutrients will go to the baby first so you’d better eat well so that you get what you need.” It’s the only time in my life when I considered eating to be a stressful chore.

  It was in meditation that I would see my child’s essence curling up through the center of my torso. And in my mind’s eye I saw that the child had a quality so like Steve that I felt sure I was having a boy. The sex of the child seemed to make all the difference to Kobun, who by this time was becoming a dramatic caricature of himself. He told Steve that he should do more to help me because, he exclaimed, “What if it’s a boy?” Little by little Kobun made it clear that, for him, a male child would be of more value. And by association, so would I.

  This piqued my attention. The idea that boys and men are more valuable than girls and women is not something I could ever believe. And so in this way the dialogue that ensued about the sex of the child allowed me to see more clearly and brought up the lights on what Kobun and Steve really believed. To me this was something I imagined might be a perception in a country oppressed by fundamentalist religion, but not in a tolerant American society. If this was what they believed, then we disqualified each other; I wasn’t in their club and they weren’t in mine. If I had to put words to how I felt at that time, they would be, “My God, I am bigger than these two shysters.” Steve as boy-wonder genius and Kobun as unfa
thomable Zen master were promoting a concept of reality that I was deeply stunned by for its total lack of moral vision.

  Worse yet, when Kobun would say, “What if it’s a boy?” Steve would smile with a big secret confidence and say, “I’m not worried. It’s not a boy.” I felt incredulous at their little society, and I used it to finally purchase a stark independence for myself.

  But who wants independence when she’s pregnant?

  * * *

  That spring Kobun taught a meditation retreat in Cloverdale. I signed up and ate well. The kitchen had the sweetest fresh milk from local cows. I drank cups and cups of it with honey and fresh homemade Tassajara bread with butter. The sesshins were a place of rest even though it was a big deal for me to keep my spine straight, given how much physical and emotional pressure I was under. At one of the lectures I remember that Kobun talked about a spiritual kind of logic saying, “To say ‘No’ is to go higher and to say ‘Yes’ is to go deeper.” He also went on to tell people that tilting your head to left means “yes,” and to the right means “no.” My dyslexia often makes it hard for me to remember left from right so it could have been the other way around, but what I do recall is that suddenly Kobun burst out laughing and in front of the whole group said, “Chrisann, your ‘yes’ is everyone else’s ‘no.’” I took the warning. He was basically saying I had separated myself from the tribe, the sangha, the collective. Basically, he was saying I was on my own.