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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  * * *

  I used to go roller-skating all over Menlo Park in the early days at Oak Grove. This was 1979 and I had the classic skates with the big orange wheels. In the beginning skating was a near-death experience; I didn’t know how to stop and the roads vibrated my eyes so much I could hardly see. But once I somehow got past that stage it turned to pure happiness. I found that no matter what, no matter when, where, or how, skating turned into a three count. It was a waltz rhythm and I was always humming “The Blue Danube,” changing from left to right on the first count and elongating the last count with a prolonged glide, 1-2-3——1-2-3——. The rhythm and motion were addictive. The more I skated the more I wanted to skate. The texture of movement under my feet, the air in my hair, and the freedom of all things speeding by was happiness itself.

  In the beginning, I’d go next door to the church parking lot when Lisa was napping. There I’d practice twirling. The momentum of the fast spiraling turns would lift my arms outward in graceful lifts, and then I’d flip around fast to stop on my toe guards. It was as if the air were my dance partner.

  I fell a lot in the beginning but it didn’t matter, I loved it and was proud of my various scratches and bruises. When Lisa was awake, I’d put her in her stroller and we’d fly together. Much later, when Steve discovered that I had skates, he wanted some, too. So it was on a bright Saturday early afternoon, when Lisa was old enough to have her own skates, that the three of us went down to the Palo Alto Sport Shop and Toy World and he bought a pair for himself and Lisa (both with those big orange wheels), so that we could all go skating together.

  On weekends we’d go up to Stanford or across old Palo Alto to Caffe Verona because they had the best soup, pasta, and cappuccinos. After some time, Tina, Steve’s girlfriend, joined us. And Mona after that. Mona was neither as coordinated as me nor as recklessly bold as Steve, and I remember the unspeakably sweet look of her on skates as like that of a grinning schoolgirl. Tina looked like Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner, tall and athletic, sweet in all her magnificence. Eventually, Lisa and Steve started to go out for hours on their own. It could have been at one of our skating outings or at a dinner together or just a time when we were all hanging out talking, when Steve said that he would take Lisa one night a week when I was at school in Oakland. Every semester I stacked all my classes because I didn’t want to be far from Lisa more than two days a week. Babysitting was always an issue, so Steve arranged his life so that he could take Lisa every Wednesday evening. He wanted to be a dad and this seemed like a fabulously great next step for all of us. Lisa was nine years old. It would be the first time Steve would take responsibility for his daughter on a regular basis and he wanted the chance to do it, like a real father.

  The logistics ran as follows: every Wednesday, one of Steve’s secretaries would meet Lisa at the bus stop in Menlo Park right when she got dropped off at about 3:45. The secretary would take Lisa to NeXT where she would hang out until the end of Steve’s workday, doing her homework and generally being cute and precocious in what was otherwise an adult’s world. Steve would have her around and she could see him in action in his work life. So every Wednesday Steve had his own take-your-daughter-to-work day. I was flipped-out happy about their being together without me. I never knew what those afternoons looked like exactly, but I trusted the situation because even if Steve was occupied, and just a bit of a new clueless parent, I knew his secretaries to be very conscientious people.

  One day Lisa let me in on a little scam she had going at Steve’s office. She and I used to draw the sculptures at the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford University, and there was a day she’d gotten me so involved in her drawing by asking good questions that I’d abandon my own piece to do more and more on hers. As I was teaching her how to draw and working away, it occurred to me that I wasn’t working on my drawing and so laughingly I complained. It was then that the light descended. With her little face looking brightly into mine she told me, “Mommy, this is how I get the secretaries to do my homework at NeXT!” “What!” I said. Then Lisa said, “I tell them that they are really good at how they think about my homework.” I laughed, unable to hide my admiration of her audacity. I knew she had natural leadership qualities when, at age five, she made it possible for the girls to play in the boys-only sandbox. Now I was seeing that she had figured out how to motivate the adults around her without anyone really noticing because it was so fun to help Lisa.

  I was thereafter aware of how much time I was working on her drawings, as I played the edge of her very real and remarkable reception of what I was showing her with the fact that my little darling simply wanted to lay claim to a better drawing. It was all in good fun and it wasn’t long before I recognized that the collaborations between her artistic awkwardness and my skill resulted in better, far more interesting drawings than anything we ever did individually. Lisa helped me loosen the grip on my all too factual renderings and I helped her tighten her artful lack of dexterity. We were well matched!

  After work, Steve and Lisa would go home to his house and they would make dinner and eat and then watch a movie on the VCR from his bed. Then she would go to sleep in her own bed in the room next to his. Mona had bought Lisa a beautiful bed for Steve’s house and made a nice room for Lisa. On those nights Steve introduced Lisa to all his favorite movies, Harold and Maude being one of them. It was something marvelous between father and daughter and I was so delighted by Steve’s sharing his love of movies with her. Lisa and Steve liked to kick me out of their world, and eventually I found that they would only get me involved if they were having a problem in their relationship. At those times I would help them come back together and then they’d kick me out again. A form of success, I suppose.

  There’s a hormonal balance like a wash that comes over women when we know that good is happening for everyone in our sphere of care. I can barely describe the exquisite feeling I had of all being as it needed to be because Steve and Lisa were entering into the world of the normal day-to-day stuff together. I was happy for Lisa, happy for Steve, and happy for me. Yet for every next level of complexity there would be new devastation, so I can only say that I’m glad I was young and of good health.

  After what was probably a couple of months of Steve taking Lisa on Wednesday nights, there was one evening when my class was canceled due to finals. I drove back to Steve’s house to see if they wouldn’t mind my joining them for dinner. There were no cells phones then, so I just drove the forty-five miles. It was night, but the front door was always open at the Woodside house. When I stepped inside, I heard their small faraway sounds in the kitchen. Simultaneously knocking and walking in, I sung out, “Hi! Do you mind if I join you?” Both looked up surprised to see me, after which Steve, with a confident smile, motioned me in to sit down. “Yes of course, of course, come in, come in! Have a seat.”

  I cozied up to explain what had happened and to watch their interactions and Steve’s cooking. The whole scene was charmingly animated. I hadn’t been a part of these nights and felt something close to bliss at being included. But in that awkwardly shaped and horribly lit kitchen, my heart sank. Steve was teasing Lisa nonstop about her sexual aspirations. She didn’t know what any of it meant, and her face was blank with pain and confusion. He was ridiculing her with sexual innuendos that she wasn’t old enough to understand. And of course she couldn’t understand why her father would talk to her this way. Steve was joking about bedroom antics between Lisa and this or that guy. It was so off. I could see that Lisa was in shock.

  I will be clear. Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on. I haven’t studied psychology so I still have difficulty framing it, but my sense is that part of Steve’s fractured emotional development resulted in a his ludicrously fetishizing sexuality and romance. And this, in combination with the fact that he was often obsessively looking for ways to disconnect people from their natural confidence. Well, imagine the scene.… I never saw Steve organize around such behaviors, it
just happened at times, reflexively. He was on a slide whistle between human and inhuman. He wasn’t conscious of the behaviors because, really, how could someone be so awful? I don’t say this to excuse him, it’s just the stunning fact.

  My sadness is beyond telling and sadness is not quite the word for what I felt: damage, betrayal, stupefaction. They come close. I was blown through and vacant and really had no breath to call it anything. I simply wanted to move my body between them, to hold Lisa to my heart, and get her the fuck out of there. Yet I couldn’t even do that because Steve’s behavior had a paralyzing effect on me, too. But I knew I wasn’t going home without her that night. I changed the subject, dinner was served, and after that I gently suggested I take Lisa home with me since I was already there. “That way, Steve, you won’t have to bother getting her to the bus stop.”

  I felt very bad for Steve. Somewhere in himself, he knew. I could see it all over him.

  No matter how incomprehensibly off Steve was at times such as this, afterward I always forgot. Later when my highly respected Ph.D. psychoanalyst was taken aback by yet another story I told her about Steve, I got mad at her saying, “How the hell is it that after all I have told you that you are shocked by what he does!” and with a wide-eyed, near loss for words, she said, “I am a human being, one never gets used to it with him.” It was balm to my heart to hear her speak these words because they helped me understand my own experience and to forgive myself.

  After this I didn’t stop Steve from being with Lisa. I did my own calculations, slowly: Steve and Lisa liked and loved each other and there was every reason in this world and the next to support their being together. I would have been like a wrecking ball if I had tried to speak out about it because anything I would have said or done would have created a big mess. It would have damaged what was good. So I decided to take their being alone together on a case-by-case basis. After that evening, I tended to join them or stay home when they were together so I could go get Lisa if she called. She knew to ask me to pick her up if she felt uncomfortable about something in Steve. Steve always gave her a choice in the matter so it was never a problem for him. They both knew when it wasn’t working for them. In the end, I found another place for her to be on Wednesday nights where she felt cozy and cared for and I think it was a relief for him to stop. He never asked why I had changed the arrangement. It was as if there was an unspoken agreement to slide over it.

  * * *

  In traveling the forty-five miles across land and water to the school in Oakland there came a time in the early spring of 1989 when I started to be concerned about what I would do if there was an earthquake. Both Steve and my boyfriend were often out of town on business so I could not assume their help in the event of an emergency. There was no perfect solution, so I transferred to San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1989 so as not to have a body of water between me and my little daughter. That October, right after I had transferred, the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the area and broke the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland for months. I had finally anticipated a problem in a timely fashion.

  The new school had a fabulous history and views of the San Francisco Bay that included Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. I felt a great romance at being there. I was older than most of the undergraduate students by ten years and I soon discovered that I drew better than nearly all of them. Kids would approach me smiling to say, “Wow! You actually know how to draw.” I was so surprised, even irritated that they didn’t. What kind of art school was this!? A few other students were even jealous and behaved badly toward me. I wondered if I had made a big mistake in transferring. On the other hand, it was a gift to be ahead of the game because it gave me some extra time to learn to write. I really needed to make money, and writing was a weak point for me. I needed better communication skills so I could market my art. But I had other reasons, too.

  In the beginning I wanted to broaden my own academics to understand what paintings were really saying over time as a way to understand the forces behind culture and social movements. I wanted to understand my own era, I wanted to understand how women were framing the issues compared to men. I wanted to understand the subversive instinct, in myself and in artists like Goya and Manet and even Monet. Simply put, I wanted a dialogue in myself for understanding my creed as an artist. My hunger for this cannot be overstated. I studied writers Linda Nochlin, Camille Paglia, Lucy Lippard, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Frank Stella, who all gave me the handles for art and social analysis that fed my intellect. And thus began my wide arc toward my left brain. I took drawing, painting, and etching classes but my core tussle was in getting myself to put words onto the page for the ideas that mattered to me.

  In the beginning I went blank with real terror when I had to write a paper. My mind scattered and I felt utterly undefended as I worked to surface even single words out from under the bottom of the oceans of my perceptions. Instinct alone told me to walk around the house on the days I wasn’t in class and talk out loud so I could hear myself and be present in the body to take words and sentences from speech into writing. Talking out loud in a big room by myself was alarming but also revitalizing. I have heard of other dyslexics learning to write in the same way.

  As I walked and talked out loud to myself, I held a pencil and paper in my hands to capture the words and sentences. Often I had the feeling that my mind was a fast river, so fast that I could only participate by sitting quietly and watching on the bank. Eventually I thought to turn on National Public Radio in the background to bring an influx of ambient language into my mind so as to kick-start word fascination while I focused on this or that school topic. By half listening to the random conversations on the radio, I was able to tap into a confident parallel stream of talking where more and more individual words caught my attention like shiny fish and helped my deeper self fly up to where the mind could sparkle them into wordy shape.

  In analyzing it now, I feel that the intense promptings to write were the beginning of an urge in me to get both hemispheres of my brain, image and language, to balance, relate, and work together. And it is as interesting for me to think of letters as pictorial forms as it is for me to think of paintings as documents of information like written reports.

  Later I put these promptings and skills to use with a job in an emerging field called “graphic recording.” In the late nineties, I started to visualize information for corporations. It was a new kind of work and by using colored pens on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls, I tracked and captured words as well as visualized content as it flew around the room during corporate meetings. Graphic recording was the art of the iteration, and by God, thanks to Steve and my learning to work together, I knew something about the art of iteration! As many companies in the Bay Area were hiring, I started getting jobs and more experience. I was fabulously well paid for what I privately thought of as “corporate graffiti.” Most people who did this work came from an organizational development background and then learned cartooning techniques, but I came from the opposite end, moving from a fine arts background into learning about the organization of information. I was sort of the Jackson Pollack of graphic recorders and I could not believe I was being paid so well for something that was so outrageously experimental and fun. There were particular groups and companies that really liked how I was approaching it and they kept rehiring me. I also did summary maps for weeklong company offsite meetings. These allowed me to bring greater image-making skill and mythology to crystallize the visions that the companies were creating for themselves at the retreats. Years later, the group at Hewlett-Packard, for whom I had worked a lot, told me I was one of the best graphic recorders they’d ever had. I did this work until the dot-com bust in 2001 when companies returned to a meaner and leaner focus again because of the economy.

  * * *

  Steve came by one day to pick Lisa and me up in his little black Porsche to go to a party at his girlfriend’s, Tina Redse’s, house. With Lisa buckled in on my lap, Steve
drove the three of us to the little town of Pescadero, about an hour west of the Bay Area over the small mountain range and down to the coast. I was enjoying the ride and feeling the lovely pull on my body as Steve took the fast curves in his low car. Halfway through, as we were just getting near the skyline, Steve started to tell me how it was that Lisa had two thirds his genes and only one third of mine. I don’t know if I’d caught him in an especially inspired state on a day when we just happened to be together or if Steve had been planning for this brilliant conversation.

  For years I had seen people tune Steve out because he would at times pull for a concept of reality that was just so off that one dropped into patience waiting for it to be over. Sometimes there would be the noble soul who loved the art of debate and so took time with him to argue the points and laugh and give him a run for his money. But this was never, ever my forte, I just found it annoying, until I really thought through what he was saying at times like this and then it was just outrageous. Okay, I said to myself at the point of this particular conversation, I know he really, really likes and admires Lisa so much he can hardly believe she is his, and this is his lame expression of it. In a convivial manner, I lightly implored in an offhanded way, “Come on Steve, she’s not more you than me.” He was pleasant and enthusiastic but kept going. It was his mental habit to cajole during this kind of conversation. I tuned out because I did not want to dip into his logic or bear up under the implications. Also, I knew that if I had paid close attention there was a good chance I was going to get my feelings hurt and then I’d get mad. He was making me invisible by percentages, again. For most of the ride I was sort of batting it away like a persistent fly while I diffused my awareness by massaging Lisa’s little hands (she loves massages), breathing in the fresh scents of the redwood trees and with the ocean air that was stronger as we got nearer to our destination. We were going to a party on a beautiful afternoon and I was predisposed to being happy.