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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  Steve didn’t call. Not a word for three days. I was utterly bereft. Outraged, too. I don’t know if he was distracted or cowardly or both. Robert called him in the middle of the third day and nailed him for his despicable behavior and it was blessed to hear. Steve had turned into such a golden boy by this time that no one came close to having the personal power and moral authority over him that Robert had. I listened from the guest bedroom with our daughter in my arms. Steve flew up the next day.

  He stayed for three days. On the first night he came up the stairs and into the bedroom where I was sitting holding the baby. He sat next to me on the Japanese bed on the floor with our backs leaning up against the wall and I started crying. “I just don’t know what I’m going to—” I couldn’t even finish my sentence before Steve cut me off. “You’re clean and dry, so you’re fine!” he said sharply. Then he walked out. This was such an extremely odd response that it startled me out of my fear and sadness. Later I would understand that birth patterns replay over generations. Perhaps the Jobses had said this to Steve. “I was too frightened to love him” were Clara’s simple words to me. I can imagine them saying to Steve, “You’re clean and dry, so you’re fine.…” and left him crying. Many adopted kids believe that they deserve only to have their basic needs met. I often felt that this was true of Steve and that, ironically, it had flipped in him and morphed into his enlarged sense of entitlement.

  It was different at the Friedlands when Steve was there. He was persuasive and oh so capable of rededicating the emotional territory to the low hum of his negativity—the result of his own irresponsibility. I don’t know what he may have said to Abha and Robert, but I felt that when Steve arrived he brought a cloud of darkness with him. It turned out to have been a very good thing that he had not been present at the birth.

  It was on Steve’s last day that Abha pushed us both outside: “You two have to decide on a name for this child. She’s already six days old!” So Steve and I walked out into the fields that surrounded their house and laid out a blanket. We sat under an open sky with a baby name book and our sleeping child between us. Steve liked the name Claire. It seemed like he had arrived ready to suggest it. I didn’t want it. Claire was too close to his mother’s name and I wasn’t going to honor her in this way.

  “They are different names, you know?” he said gently.

  But I couldn’t go along with him. “They’re close enough to be the same, so there’s no way.”

  We continued to look through the book. We both really thought “Sarah” was lovely, but my sister had just given that name to her little one, born six months before. We went through a lot of names and nothing seemed quite right until finally I remembered a name from high school I had always liked.

  “How about Lisa?” I suggested. This name seemed so bright and beautiful I could hardly speak the words fast enough.

  Steve said, “Oh yes!! I like that!”

  We looked up the meaning and found “Light of God.” We liked this, too. Eventually we settled on Nichole for a middle name. “Nichole” has a smooth sense of classic, time-honored beauty, and this fit our child.

  Even as a newborn, she was truly beautiful.

  Lisa Nichole Brennan.

  And later, Lisa Nichole Brennan-Jobs.

  Over the next month, when I started to doubt our choice of name, I discovered that Steve was extremely attached to keeping “Lisa.” This was especially strange because he was also publicly denying paternity. The inconsistencies were really too much to keep up with, but I was too exhausted to do anything but adapt. Daniel Kottke called and told me I ought to get some money out of the name because Steve would pay to keep it. He knew more than he was letting on, but I considered the concept of leveraging money to keep my daughter’s name distasteful in the extreme. I had no idea that Steve was naming a computer The Lisa.

  Later I understood that he had wanted to name our daughter Claire not because, as I had thought, it was close to his mother’s name, but because he wanted to name the next Apple model “The Claire Computer.” The idea here was to project some kind of idealized feminine saint in association with Apple and himself because he fancied himself another St. Francis. St. Claire is considered the patron saint of TV in Italy because she had visions. While on the one hand it feels unexpected to connect a saint’s particular gifts to technology, it’s sort of perfect, too. St. Claire was a cloistered nun and a clairvoyant with a capacity for “remote viewing,” so in a way the camera, the TV, the computer, and the smartphone really are perfect associations. Taken a step further, if people didn’t have the extraordinary vision and intuition to see the future, then this technology could never have been created. Visions have been around way before technology. And yet visions helped pave the way for technology itself. The Claire would have been just a fabulously great name for Steve’s computer. He should have used it.

  It was Steve’s weird fantasy to try to merge biology, mythology, and technology, as if such things don’t have laws of their own. It would seem he was trying to graft everything together for commercial purposes, and also to strengthen his own idealized mythos. Who knows, perhaps he was even attempting to compete with me by trying to birth something in a parallel universe where biology is equal to technology. A computer equal to a child? This made me think of all the men who had tried to infuse life into inanimate objects: Geppetto and his Pinocchio. The Tyrell Corporation and its Replicants. Frankenstein.

  Why Steve wanted to use our newborn’s name, while denying paternity and dishonoring and abandoning both of us, was a question I couldn’t answer then. The truth was so horrific it was sort of good at the time that I couldn’t see everything that was in play. To be clear, Steve didn’t have my permission to use our daughter’s name for his computer. And he never asked. He just appropriated the name Lisa and, like so many other things, hid it under the radar of my comprehension. I later understood that Regis McKenna had his team work with Steve to come up with a suitable acronym. Steve claimed at the time that it meant “Local Integrated Software Architecture.” But we both knew the truth. All this monstrous chaos would extend further when Markkula at Apple took Steve off of The Lisa to put him on the team to develop the Mac. Steve then competed against The Lisa, eventually killing it.

  * * *

  During the month I stayed at the Friedlands’ house I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility of putting my child up for adoption. I felt a love toward my child that was both tender and fierce, and I didn’t imagine that giving her up for adoption would be easy. But I wanted the best life possible for her, even if that meant a life apart from me. Abha and her friend took me to visit a woman in the area who was the head of an adoption agency, and while we walked around the woman’s home she told us her story. She said that she had given birth to two children who were fully grown but she and her husband had gone on to adopt seventeen others. Seventeen! She had adopted many babies and kids who were harder to place. Kids who were considered too old, who had special needs or were mixed race. One child had not been placed because of a birth defect. Another, from Vietnam, ran crying whenever he heard an airplane overhead because he had seen his family and his whole village bombed to smithereens. Each child had a story.

  This woman and her husband had built separate dorms for the girls and the boys in their house, which were painted chalky pink and blue with little bunk beds. I was glassy-eyed to see this wonder and happy that the children had their home and each other. But meeting this woman didn’t bring any clarity to me about whether to put Lisa up for adoption. I knew that Steve would hate me for the rest of my life if I gave Lisa up for adoption, but I was checking out all the possibilities. Kobun’s words seemed less and less of a gold standard as time passed. It seemed possible that Steve would hate me but what drove me on at this point was, of course, more about love for my daughter and what would be best for her. I thought it was odd for Kobun to have framed things through the idea of Steve’s importance and his hatred. It was a manipulation below his station. I
don’t recall Kobun ever advising me for my well-being. Or my daughter’s. It was always all about Steve.

  In the Bay Area I had gone to an adoption agency when I was about seven months along. The head of the agency had talked with me in her office saying, “You have no right to keep this child because you have no way to take care of a baby and you don’t seem mature enough. Look at yourself,” she demanded. “You are not capable of managing this!” She was incensed.

  I like people who say what they really think even when it is difficult to hear, and I later went back to continue the conversation with her. However, on the second visit I was told there had been an emergency and that I had to see someone else. Disappointed, I went to the information desk to schedule an appointment with another counselor when I saw the head of the agency carrying a tiny newborn baby on her arm. She looked like a speed walker, rushing down the hallway and curving swiftly before she ducked into a small room and out of sight. The dewy-eyed child’s head was planted in the woman’s palm, and its legs straddled over her forearm with the diapered bottom against her elbow at her hip. I wondered why she didn’t hold the child to her heart. Then about four women came running after her like a gaggle of geese. They looked like a cartoon of self-important little busybodies. I felt I was seeing through the curtain into the gap that divided the birth mother and the adoptive mother and I didn’t like it. Since that time adoption practices have developed to humanize the process in the same way that birthing practices have been humanized, but back then my head swam in sorrow for the child and in protection for my own. I found myself as judgmental of that woman as she had been of me. Funny how that works.

  I made another appointment with a new counselor at the same agency. This woman was much younger than the head. She seemed clearer and more respectful in her approach with me. She didn’t have a preconceived judgment about what I should do, and her questions were so astute that I finally felt that I could, with her help, work out my next steps. I felt she could help me understand what it would mean to me and my baby to adopt or to be a single parent. She was a gifted counselor.

  My relief was enormous. This woman had a clarifying effect on me. I could focus in her presence. I knew she could help me, step by step, to get through this process in a coherent way. I was hopeful and happy when I set up a second appointment, but she called to tell me that she had decided to leave the agency to be with her own kids. I pleaded with her; wasn’t there some way that she could still work with me? She had been so unusually helpful and I knew no one like her. She reluctantly gave me her home number. Yet within a month’s time I found there was no way to schedule consistently. She was busy with her kids and kept canceling. The one person that I’d found to help me think it through fell out and away beyond my reach.

  After a month at Robert and Abha’s house, I was becoming a strain in their lives. It would have been too much for anyone. Their house wasn’t that big, so Robert ordered a teepee so we would all have our space. It was truly generous of them to say I could stay on their property, and I tried to imagine living in a teepee with a newborn. But my sister Kathy called when she heard about it: “You need running water, a kitchen, and a washer and dryer near at hand. Please come down and live with us for a while.” She and her husband and their child had a home with enough space for Lisa and me. I knew it was the right next step.

  * * *

  When I drove back to the Bay Area on my way to Idyllwild, I shared the driving with a woman who was traveling around with a tape recorder interviewing people who had been close to the guru Neem Karoli Baba. She was collecting stories for his biography and had come to Robert’s house to interview him. Robert and she were old guru buddies and she was a savvy earth mother type, impressive for all the right reasons. It was good to drive with her. A few years later Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba would be on bookstore shelves. Remarkably, it was on the way up to Oregon for Lisa’s birth that I gave a ride to Ken Kesey’s secretary. I had serendipitously traveled with two women, up and back, carrying small tape recorders who were directly connected to two significant counterculture influences of our time. What are the odds!

  I stopped over for two weeks on the SF Peninsula on my way south. I didn’t stay at my father’s house because his wife was concerned about “the baby peeing on the furniture.” So I stayed with Bert and Betty Wilder whose children, Dave and Camille, had gone to school with my sisters and me. Steve came by to see Lisa and me during my stopover. He was used to people not liking him, but he managed to come when the Wilders were out doing errands and so avoided their glares. Not that he ever cared much; it was more of an issue for me that he was so disliked.

  That day Steve asked me if we could go for a walk, so I strapped Lisa to my front. And within fifty feet of the Wilder’s front door Steve’s body slumped in wild agony. His head hung down in shame. He was deeply sincere. He looked at me from an oblique angle and said with a heavy, heavy heart, “I am really sorry. I’ll be back, this thing with Apple will be over when I’m about thirty. I am really, really sorry.” A promise to be back in six years moved through my body like a deep, aching river. Everything in me wanted to hear him say this. This was the most real I had seen him in a very long time. It was the first decent response to what had been happening for almost a year. I felt strengthened by his acknowledgment, disarmed.

  Yet in the next ten seconds and four steps, Steve lit himself up in a super cartoony way and began to tell me about a flowering tree that was in his front yard and how beautiful it was. I observed the emotional roller coaster and watched his crazed showmanship. Here was the inspired maniac. At a loss for any words that could possibly matter, I managed to say, “STEVE, I lived at that house, you know I—lived—at—that—house. I know what the goddamn tree looks like. Why are you talking like this?”

  He responded with a glossy sigh.

  It was all so strange, this weird loss of memory. It was as if Steve had created a fictional state in which he didn’t have to concern himself with responsibility or reality, as if simply not remembering could give him a way out. This odd behavior seemed to me to be all about a lack of connection and an inability to string together shared experiences that made him somehow unique. His sentimentality and inspiration gave him no-stick accountability. It was a way out. Disconnecting from the simple shared experience of the flowering crape myrtle tree that grew in front of the house that we shared, he was in essence telling me that my experience didn’t count for him: that Lisa and I did not count, that he did not recount, and that he was not accountable. And that was the point.

  Kobun used the same methods. During the two-week window of my being in the Bay Area before leaving for my sister’s house, there was a night that my father and his wife took care of Lisa so that I could go to the Zendo for the Wednesday night meditation. I had not seen Kobun since Lisa had been born, although he had called a day after her birth to express his best wishes. At the Zendo that night I practiced the forty minutes of sitting zazen and then listened to the lecture and had tea. When it was all over and everyone was outside putting their shoes on, Kobun asked me if I would be coming to the next Zen retreat that was in about two weeks. My jaw dropped. Who would leave a five-week-old baby to sit a meditation retreat? He had young children at home—how could he possibly think I would leave a newborn for seven days? My mind raced and I felt a weak breathlessness, but I managed only the obvious: “I have Lisa to take care of.” My heart felt like it was contracting with his betrayal. He didn’t ask how Lisa was or how it was going for me. It was as if the last nine months hadn’t happened. I looked at him closely to make sure he knew who he was talking to. But it was like the many dreams I’d had about him, where he held a mildly frozen smile with what seemed like an intentional fog over his eyes. Here it was again, the refined aesthetic of the misty cloud-covered mountain peak. It was pure irreproachable indifference. After all that Kobun had offered, it turned out that in the end, he would never be helpful to me in any way—not memory, not money, not b
abysitting, not food, not even a baby gift, and not in defense of me and Lisa with Steve.

  The truth is I think Kobun taught Steve how to be unaccountable.

  * * *

  Lisa must have been twelve when we met up with Kobun again. It was at Steve’s Woodside house, where she and I had gone for a swim. From the time that Lisa was eight until she was about thirteen, Steve and I had what was, for us, a relatively decent balance in our working together. I had kept the door open and when Steve got kicked out of Apple he did find his way into falling in love with Lisa and returning to a friendship with me. It was never easy between us, but it was workable and sometimes very enjoyable. We would share birthday parties, major holidays, dinners, and some NeXT events. Mostly it was like family downtime, with the significant people in our lives.

  At Woodside that day I discovered that Kobun had moved into Steve’s house with his girlfriend, Stephanie. They had come from Taos, New Mexico, where, according to Stephanie, they had one bathroom to ten people. At the Woodside house it was more like ten bathrooms to one person. Steve was living in Palo Alto at this time, so Kobun and Stephanie had the whole place to themselves. They sort of took care of it, too.

  When we got out of our car, Kobun walked over to us across the huge green lawn from the big backyard. He had on his beautiful traditional Japanese “casual” clothing. I was always curious about how Kobun dressed because there was such beauty to it. His informal wear was what he worked and relaxed in, and that day I noticed that he had leather shoes on, too. Normally, when I saw him, he wore his formal Japanese robes and had the crisp white socks with a tailored indent between the toes so he could fit perfectly into his sandals. I could tell that the leather shoes were very old but had been beautifully cared for and shined for years. Kobun knew how to take care of things and had a rich sense for things themselves, something I had very much enjoyed and admired about him.