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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  “I won’t,” I hissed back. “You’ve got to be kidding, it’s freezing out here. And you don’t know that your parents won’t come out!”

  I was so alarmed, the harshness of the request felt hateful. I can imagine now that he thought I needed to “wake up” like an ascetic doing penance through flesh-denying ablutions. For all I knew he had just given himself the treatment before I got there, but again, he gave me no context and I wasn’t one to follow orders any more than he was one to explain.

  In general, I resisted Steve’s many Pygmalion impulses out of principle. When I think on it now, it seems like all the times I had to say no to Steve connected inside me like a system of inner caves. He may have been completely convinced that he should be my guru, my teacher, my leader—a theme that would present itself for many years to come—but it was never the truth for me. I think I felt sorry for both of us that night.

  And yet, how could I not be absolutely taken by him when he was so driven by purpose? Steve, the bewildered lunatic shaman, the extraordinary darling, was more extraordinary than ever that summer and I found myself, as always, moved to protect his shattered and shattering beauty. We didn’t have a sexual relationship at that time. A ball of light had been let loose in Steve in India and I think he was holding himself separate for what that would yield. I don’t even think he knew what was happening to him. I appreciated this and respected him for it because it was real.

  I didn’t know what he meant to me. He didn’t know what I meant to him. We didn’t know what we meant to each other. I was just trying to get along because he was important to me in some inexplicable mountain range of a way. My feeling is that he was in an amorphous state, not exactly one thing or another but blinking in and out, neither and both. That he trusted what was happening to him when he was so unstable seems phenomenal to me now. And although I’m sure I don’t know the whole story, it might be fair to say that during this period Steve was stabilizing himself after the blowout from India. That he was preparing himself for the man he would become.

  * * *

  In the science about the transformation of insects there is a term called imaginal disks that refers to a group of cells in the body that get activated for metamorphosis. I think people have imaginal disks, too. Not everyone realizes such full potential, but Steve did. And this was the time that it began its unfolding to deliver a new kind of code for the massive changes through which he would develop. He was coming into a master level of consciousness.

  But it was a tricky thing because I think he was off register, too. In all his exquisite effort to achieve some kind of higher, purer state, I felt and saw that Steve also started to reject the feminine aspect as inferior to the glorious masculine. Oh, yes, that ancient theme. Once he had returned, I felt increasingly uneasy about his view of me, and women in general. He had plenty of views on the subject of women, and he wasn’t afraid to voice them. He would level sharp critiques full of dramatic repetitions, like “a bad woman is like a snake in the grass” (that comment came out of Be Here Now) and “if women were good, they wouldn’t experience labor pain.” I wish I could remember more. What I do remember is that these comments would be followed by an all-knowing laugh or a buttoned-up silence, also all-knowing. When it came to the female, Steve didn’t question his right to critique or assign value. If Steve had one God-given talent it was an authoritative voice. But his ideas about women were bizarrely fundamentalist.

  Steve was in some kind of profound spiritual transformation, but he was also coming of age in a man’s world and adopting the negative myths men have forged about women throughout time. One was melded to the other. I remember that when I was growing up people used to honk their horns whenever they saw a newly married couple. Just Married would be written all over the wedding car in shaving cream or washable paint, and tin cans would be tied to the rear bumper. When my father heard these honks, he would look up and say, “Ah, another good man bites the dust.” At the time, this seemed extremely funny to me and I would laugh at his joke, but the deeper reality of this view meant that I would have no place to stand as a female and no future as a woman in a relationship with a man that wasn’t problematic. Steve left me with that same sense of having “no place.”

  When President Kennedy’s space program and the feminist movement came into my girlhood awareness, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. I never thought of wanting to be the wife of a man who walked on the moon because it was always clear to me that I wanted and could have adventures of my own. Now I think the space program couldn’t have existed without the women’s movement. That they erupted at the same time indicated that they were a part of the collective dialogue between the masculine and the feminine. Sorting out the whole concept of what it meant to be a man and a woman was very much a part of the confusion of my time. But at least the dreams of little girls became bigger and bolder then, and this put pressure on all of us to form a future in which those dreams might be realized.

  * * *

  Steve brought new spiritual ideas home from India and craved experiences based on them. That’s probably why, not so long after the Dr. Bronner’s incident, it all broke open between us when he asked if I would make tantric love with him in his garden shed. The question came flying out of him like a cry. In an instant, I felt paralyzed, as my head raced. Cautious but calculating fast, I wondered, Did Steve want to use tantra because it justified sex when he was so committed to being some kind of ascetic? Did he even know how to practice tantra?

  I’m generally open to taking risks (perhaps too open), but with this request I felt a deep sense of self-preservation—in part because of how Steve was asking me, and in part because of the way he had been treating me. The one thing I knew about real tantra is that you’re not supposed to mess with it unless you are an initiate, prepared over time with purifications, and overseen by a master. I didn’t think Steve had been prepared. I sure knew that I hadn’t. Did Steve think he was smart enough to figure it out for both of us? Did he even think?

  Tantra is the qualified use of spirit in matter. It takes training and purity to manage the energy of spiritual movement called the kundalini in the body. I knew that the kundalini could be released in one person or between two people, in divine union. However, without the right approach, the kundalini fire can rip through the etheric body so fast that it will cause incalculable harm for life. As far as I was concerned, raising the kundalini was the biggest mistake you could make if you did it wrong, and the most important thing you could ever do right. Who knows why I knew so much, but I did because this was the kind of thing I pay attention to. I was worried about what powers could be let loose through us, or just as bad, that nothing would be different and that I would be party to Steve’s self-deception. But I didn’t say any of this to Steve. I just didn’t know how. The only word I had was an emphatic “No.”

  * * *

  I think a lot of people have to fulfill something spiritual in themselves before they go into their true professions. Branch Rickey, my great-uncle, went to divinity school before going into baseball and changing race relations in U.S. sports. Steve went to India because, with all due respect to Bob Dylan, he needed something bigger than the singer-songwriter to inspire him to do what he would go on to do.

  They say that we don’t choose the gods but that they choose us when we are ready, and I felt that something like this happened to Steve in India. Some big archetypal god had chosen Steve. He seemed so different after he returned that I felt he had been marked. He knew something deep inside. He seemed more comfortable in his skin. Despite, or perhaps because of his extreme vulnerability and instability, I could see that something in Steve had been lit and confirmed. He was in the awkward middle stage (he was living in the backyard shed at the time), before he had fully integrated the transformation. But it was coming.

  In India, the divine masculine principle is represented by a trinity of gods. There is Brahma, the creator; Shiva, the destroyer; and Vishnu, the preserver—all of whom
are creator gods but in different ways. I now think it was Shiva, the Destroyer, who chose Steve because his fingerprints were all over the boy. Shiva, the trickster. Shiva the austere one. Shiva the arrogant creator who destroys all that comes before in order to bring forth the new. Steve went on to change everything he ever touched and the world has never been the same.

  ELEVEN

  THE GUARDIAN AT THE GATE

  Since Steve and I could not come together in a meaningful way, we went on with our lives. Steve worked in earnest with Kobun and Woz, and others, too. I went to junior college to work with the best art teacher I have ever had the privilege of studying with.

  Gordon Holler was a phenomenon. His talks on the evolution of art were brilliant and he was so cuttingly honest, so awake, that he was actually scary. I remember one lecture in the middle of a semester when the lights went off and a classmate leaned over and whispered, “Buckle up!” It was good advice. And I took it. Gordon Holler was a model for young artists, not just because his work had been bought and hung by the major art museums in New York, but because he and his work were so beautiful, intelligent, and frightening. He taught that Jackson Pollack’s action paintings were about the age of nuclear war, that they themselves contained the energy of the bomb. He taught us to recognize that more often than not the spills on the floor—like skid marks on the road—had more energy than our paintings. He encouraged people to make art, not from what we knew, but from the moment of direct perception. And for better and for worse, he convinced me to stay true to myself as an artist. I have never stopped working, in large part, because of his influence.

  In studio drawing classes, where most art teachers try to get their students to simply draw well, Holler talked about the energetic power of visual information itself. He worked like a demon to get us to make images from a nonnarrative level of awareness. We used all sizes and weights of charcoal, along with smudgy rags, sponges, brushes, and sticks we found on the ground, which we dipped in ink solutions, from total black to soft subtle grays. The idea here, he said, was to use materials that would stop the student from getting too precise. Holler liked energy and he liked the energy of mistakes. “If you’re going to make a mistake,” he would say, “make the biggest mistake possible because then at least you’ll learn from it.” Yet in all of his hollering we were expected to create exquisite images. Because even though he bombarded us with a wholly new kind of instruction, good image making was ever the goal.

  Beyond the class hours of studio work were several weekends of around-the-clock conceptual art events. People made all kinds of projects for these weekends. I especially remember a guy who let someone give him a haircut on stage, during which he talked continually about what it was like for him to be willing to trust someone with his image in the world, and why that was important to him. We may have been at a small junior college in Los Altos Hills, but we were connected to an important art movement, and to a teacher who was the real thing.

  Gordon Holler had weekend-long conceptual art events of his own work, too. He set up rooms where naked, half-lit young men floated in luminous tanks of water or were mummified in plastic wrap. The men were wired with stethoscopes on their beating hearts and their rhythmic, heavy breathing amplified throughout the performance space. People milled around looking at everything as Holler photographed the models: he’d later make the photos into large-format silkscreens. His homoerotic images were brutal and off-the-charts disturbing, and yet they were so sublimely beautiful. You wanted to look and look away at the same time. And this made sense since he always talked about simultaneity.

  Gordon Holler was star fire, lighting everyone up. The students who gathered around him were full of whatever it is that makes people remarkable. I got As from him, which he rarely gave out. One day he told the class not to worry about their grades, that he gave only about five As a year and that the people who got them didn’t care. This was true. I didn’t care.

  * * *

  In the mix of all this Greg Calhoun came down from All One Farm and I let myself fall in love with him. He was sexy and smart and cute. We had fun, and as our affections grew, we decided to live together. I moved up to his renovated chicken coop and became a part of the life at All One Farm for about six months.

  Greg drew little glyphlike pictures, the first drawings of abbreviated form and light and sound that I had ever seen. They had a brightness that I could feel and sounds I could hear. After so much time rendering complex form in art classes, I marveled at the power of his little line drawings. I still have them. Years later, still inspired, I developed a kind of alphabet to visualize information generated in corporate meetings. I even started a business around it. Like so many things from All One Farm, Greg’s drawings were a nod to the future because this type of graphic facilitation wasn’t widely used until the mid-nineties.

  Inevitably, or so it seemed at the time, Greg and I decided to go to India. Almost everyone we knew was either in India, yearning for India, making money for India, or just back and recovering from India. Traveling to the subcontinent was the most exciting possibility anyone could think of. And Greg and I were next in line. So we moved back to the Bay Area because it was the best place to make money for the trip. We were just about to sign a rental agreement for a place to live when Steve stepped in to tell us that he didn’t have a good feeling about the place or the people we were about to commit to. Moreover, he had found us a better place to live, with better people. I imagined him in his hippie van, driving around to housing boards, checking out places on our behalf. It was very like Steve to be vigilant and generous in this way. As it turns out, Steve had been right. Once we moved in, we really liked our house, as well as our roommates. When we threw parties, Steve was always invited.

  During the time we worked and saved, Steve warned Greg not to take me to India with him because, as he said, I would interfere with Greg’s spiritual experience and development. I guess he didn’t place any value on my own spiritual development. Steve said, “All the women who go to India just get fat!” Steve could mete out convictions like a blacksmith hammers an anvil. While his thoughts usually had at least some flying sparks of truth, he rarely had it completely right. At the time he offered this unasked-for advice, Greg and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

  It took us six months, but we made enough money and left for India. Steve drove us to the airport and handed us a last bit of advice on the way: “Be sure to drink the water as soon as you arrive so that you get sick right away and get it over with. That way you’ll be free to drink the water everywhere you go and not have to worry about getting sick again.” We didn’t ask the obvious questions about parasites. We just thought it was a brilliant piece of advice and said so.

  Greg and I landed in Hong Kong after an exhausting twenty-three hours of traveling, which included two hours spent in Anchorage due to engine trouble. We had one night in Hong Kong in which to grab some sleep, stretch our legs, and walk around in the city seaport before we boarded our next flight. I had chosen Frank Herbert’s Dune as my airplane reading and continued with it on the plane to New Delhi. Talk about imaginal disks. Flying over the parched deserts of India while reading about a boy who discovers he’s an avatar on a sand-covered planet was nothing less than surreal. I finished the book exactly upon landing in New Delhi, our home base for the next year.

  We’d been warned about the beggars at the airport, men and women who held tiny drugged babies with arms and legs cut off to elicit horror and money from newly arriving tourists. We’d also been warned that the cabbies and rickshaw drivers would take newbies all over the city to plump up their meters before arriving at their hotels, sometimes hours later. Luckily, friends had told us what to expect to pay, so Greg moved into action and negotiated our bill in advance of getting into the car. He was damned well going to make sure that we weren’t going to get ripped off and I was glad for it.

  We drove over potholes in a tin can car that zigzagged through the traffic-filled str
eets. Dazzled by the sun and the heat and the noise, I was glad to arrive at the dingy little hotel that Steve had recommended. Greg checked us in while the porter took our luggage and led me up to our dark and meager room. As I laid down my things to reach in my wallet for a tip, the young Indian man shut the door and grabbed me, exclaiming with the kind of dramatic gesture found in a Bollywood extravaganza, “It is because of your eyes that I am in love with you!”

  Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock had warned me that something like that could happen, but nothing could have prepared me for that or the hot spicy food or the twenty-four-hour nonstop noise or the relentless heat. We were barely able to eat or sleep those first days. Still, we had each other and a room. And we were okay.

  Two days after we arrived, Sita Ram—aka Robert Friedland—brought us to Vrindavan. Luckily, his current time in India overlapped with ours. Robert was wonderfully convivial on the two-hour bus ride, sharing stories and answering questions before it even occurred to us to ask them. Robert said, “Westerners have been traveling to India en masse for over ten years. The Indians have seen it all, so don’t worry about making mistakes.”

  The brightly ornamented bus to Vrindavan was loud and lurched in a top-heavy, big bus way. It had an altar on the dash with lit incense. Heck, the whole bus was like a mobile altar to the gods, with its glittery ribbons and framed pictures of deities like Ganesh displayed upfront. (There’s always a Ganesh, because he’s the remover of obstacles both spiritual and material.) Some of the buses even play devotional songs on loud scratchy speakers—whether you like it or not. Blessedly, not this one. We could, at least, hear each other talk.

  Robert sat on the seat behind us and leaned forward. “The thing is,” he said, “you only need about two hundred and fifty words to speak Hindi.” And to prove it, he translated some chatter he heard in the bus. But he stopped translating when the Indians spoke about me, a female traveling with two men. “It is really too terrible to repeat,” he said. I wanted him to tell me what they were saying, but he tactfully moved the conversation on to a young woman he knew, an American around my age who was studying Indian singing with her guru. “She was on one note for an entire a year,” he exclaimed. “After she mastered it, the guru gave her three more notes.” He continued. “She is so beautiful, she could be a model in the United States, but she gave it all up, all the men and all the glamour, to study music with this guru.” He also talked about her diet, which was sattvic, meaning of pure high vibration, and said that if she traveled and ate onions it would take her two weeks to recover her notes again. I was amazed that an American woman would have been given access to this level of sacred Hindu musical instruction. I wondered, too, how she made her way to that decision or if Robert wasn’t fibbing just a little. Mainly I sensed he was working to engage my spiritual imagination.