Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

by Daniel Lyons

  “I’m ashamed of our state right now,” Arnold says. “And you all should be ashamed of yourselves. I hope you are.”

  “We are,” the captain says.

  “This person sitting there with you, this is not a regular person,” Arnold says. “This guy is a guy that is like a Buddhist monk, do you understand? Like the guy who used to be on the TV show, the Kung Fu man. You know? A Shaolin priest. This is not a normal human being. This is an enlightened being. Don’t the California police get training in how to deal with enlightened beings?”

  “We do,” the captain says.

  “And yet you give him meat? For God’s sake!”

  “It was a mistake,” the captain says. “We’re looking into how it happened.”

  “You must know that you can’t do this! A person like this, if you give him meat you could kill him! My God, you could have a dead corpse in that cell right now. There in your lockup. Then how would you be?”

  “It was just a Sausage McMuffin,” the overnight cop says.

  “That’s all, eh? Just a Sausage McMuffin? For your information, for this person, for this enlightened being, a Sausage McMuffin is like having a dead rat to be put into his mouth, with the germs and all that. Would you like it if I come up there and put a dead rat in your mouth?”

  “No, sir, I wouldn’t like that.”

  “Well that’s what you did to this guy, okay? You put a dead rat into his mouth. My God! Steve, I apologize again. If you want to sue the state, I understand, and I’ll support you in this.”

  I tell him no, it’s okay, I’d just like to go home.

  Arnold tells the pigs that he will be collecting their names and they should stay by their posts and await their new assignments, which will involve things like directing traffic and working construction details. He says if anyone breathes a word of this to the press, he’ll have them hung by their nuts.

  “Namaste,” I tell him. “I bow to your inner Buddha.”

  “Yeah, same to you and all that,” Arnold says.

  Outside the sunlight almost knocks me over. The lawyers say I’m barely out of a coma and I should let Ja’Red drive me home. Fair enough. We hop into my car, and I send the lawyers back to headquarters. “Go back to the office and do some work,” I say. “Destroy some evidence or something. Find somebody we can sue.”

  At first I’m glad to be out in the fresh air and looking up at yet another gorgeous California day. But then we get on the 101 and it’s a parking lot. We’re poking along, starting and stopping, people veering in and out of lanes and beeping their horns, trucks spewing diesel exhaust, Asian kids in their ridiculously souped-up Hondas, this big ugly river of frigtards all going through the motions in their frigtarded lives.

  “I can’t believe this. This is awful,” I say.

  “This actually isn’t too bad,” Ja’Red says. “Most days it’s a lot worse than this.”

  “You’re kidding. You sit in traffic like this every day?”

  “Most days. Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “To get to work.”

  “No,” I say, “but I mean, why do we do this? What is the point of putting ourselves through this? Not just me and you. But all of mankind. Why do we live this way?”

  “Dude,” he says, “that’s a good question. Seriously. I don’t know why.”

  Mrs. Jobs is waiting in the driveway when we pull up. Ja’Red drops me off and takes my Mercedes to the office.

  I try to hug Mrs. Jobs, but she pulls away. “I heard about the meat,” she says.

  Mrs. Jobs is even stricter about food than I am. It’s not just meat. We don’t eat candy, or any sugar, or any dairy products. We’re completely organic and unprocessed, gluten-free, holistic, macrobiotic. Mostly it’s a health thing, but there’s also a religious element. It’s all about having respect for the planet, and being able to feel a little bit superior to other people. We’ve even given up fish. Happened to me during the making of Nemo. One night I was screening some dailies and it occurred to me that, wow, these are real creatures with real lives. That was it. No way. I couldn’t do it anymore. And trust me, I used to love sushi.

  “You should shower,” she says.

  I head for the door.

  “Not here,” she says. “You should go somewhere else. Go to the Four Seasons or something. And you need to get rid of those clothes. Just throw them out. Here.”

  She hands me a shopping bag with a fresh set of JobsWear: jeans, Issey Miyake black mock turtleneck, sneakers.

  “I can smell it on you,” she says. “I can smell your sweat. You’ve got meat sweat. And it’s on your breath.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  She turns and begins to retch into the bushes.

  “You should go to the temple,” she says. “You should see the roshi.”

  “I had a few bites of sausage. That’s all.”

  “That’s dead animals,” she says. “That’s death. You ate death, Steve. You put death into your body.”

  She starts crying.

  “I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she says.

  I look at her. I feel nothing. What kind of monster have I become? I don’t know what to say. I walk past her into the house. I go down the hall to my office and lock the door be

  hind me.

  She comes down the hall and starts pounding on the door.

  “Steve, please!” she says. “Please don’t do this!”

  “Go away,” I tell her.

  “It’s death!” she says. “Now you’ve brought it into the house. We’ll have to call the roshi. We’ll have to have every room repainted. We might have to move.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Who are you?” She’s hysterical now. “Who are you?”

  I’m on the floor, curling up into a fetal position, moaning.

  “I’m calling Larry,” she says. Half an hour later Larry is banging on my door saying if I don’t open up and let him in he’s going to have his bodyguard come inside and karate chop the door down. Or they’ll go to Home Depot and get a circular saw but whatever, they’ll get in. So fine, I open the door.

  “Holy shit,” he says. “What the fuck. You look like shit.”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  We sit down. He takes out these incredible buds he’s brought back from Hawaii, bright green with red woven through them and totally sticky with resin. We put some Tuvan throat singers on the stereo and do three hits each.

  I tell him everything that’s been going on. He says he knows this is a shit-sucking period in my life, but there’s no way Apple is going to toss me out, and ditto for Disney. And there’s no way the feds are going to be allowed to do anything bad to me, he says.

  “This is all going to blow over,” he says. “You know how these things are. They make all this noise, and then they get tired of it, or bored, or whatever, and they fine you and move on to the next thing. Like I said before, pay them and make this go away.”

  “It’s not just that,” I say. “It’s the whole thing. The work. Flying back and forth to L.A., going to Asia, never being home.

  Or going into Apple and fighting with these bastards over every

  little detail. I’m tired of it. I’m old.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “I’m fifty-one. You’re sixty-two. You know what the average life expectancy was in Britain in the Middle Ages? Thirty-three years. Guys our age would’ve been like Gandalf the wizard. If there actually were any guys our age, which I doubt. For damn sure we wouldn’t have been working eighteen-hour days, traveling all over the world every week, carrying around all this stress. You know what the life expectancy was at the end of the nineteenth century? Thirty-seven. That was only a hundred years ago.”

  This is all true. I looked all this stuff up when I had cancer and I was sure I was going to die. I told myself, “Well, even if you do die, you’ve had a pretty good run.”

  “You know what you need?” Larry says. “You need an att
itude adjustment. Come on over to my place. Hang out for a couple days. We’ll do peyote and lie on massage tables while Japanese girls rub our feet.”

  We really have done this. It’s extraordinary. If you ever find yourself with lots of free time and enough money that you can do anything you want, I highly recommend it. But it’s not what I need right now.

  “I’ve got to get my focus back. I’ve lost it. It’s like these guys have thrown me. I don’t know. This wouldn’t have happened before. You know? I wouldn’t be so rattled. There’s something wrong with me. I’m slipping.”

  “So take some time off. Take a sabbatical. You want to go hang out in Hawaii? Or Thailand? You remember that time we went to Thailand? Huh?”

  I start laughing, because I do remember: Larry got drunk and picked up two girls on Patpong Road and in the morning they turned out to be lady boys, and better yet, they both had the clap. Hilarious.

  “Or how about this,” he says. “We’ll do some prank calls. We can call that idiot Sculley and fuck with his head.”

  Larry loves to make prank phone calls, especially when he’s blitzed. One time he called a hardware store in the Castro and asked them if they had caulk. The guy let out this weary sigh and said yes, in fact, they did have caulk. “And do you have black caulk?” Larry says. “Is it thick? Will it get hard right away and stay hard? Okay, so you do have thick black caulk that will get really, really hard? Cause I need it hard.” The guy played along for a while but finally he got sick of it and said, “Girlfriend, do you really think you’re the first person who’s ever called here asking for caulk? Do you really think that’s original? And, by the way, Mr. Lawrence Ellison, you might want to turn off your caller ID before you make prank calls, okay? Have a nice day!”

  But even that didn’t stop Larry. He fixed the caller ID and called a Thai restaurant in Mountain View and asked them if they had chicken satay, and did it come with penis sauce? What kind of penis? Was it Asian penis? What did the penis sauce taste like? Was it salty?

  But the calls to old Agent Sculley are the best. I know it’s probably childish of me to still be so angry over something that happened more than twenty years ago. But I’m sorry. I recruited the guy to help run Apple. I trusted him. I considered him a friend. Then he goes behind my back and gets me tossed out of my own company. He’s lucky all I do is prank call him.

  We’ve been doing this for years. Every time we get him he changes his phone number. But we always manage to get the new one and sting him again. We’ll wake him up at three in the morning and ask him if he’s got Prince Albert in a can, or I’ll tell him I’m a telemarketer raising money for the Unemployed CEO Foundation. Or I’ll do the one where I pretend I work for the phone company and I say I’m down at the end of his street and please don’t pick up the phone because if you do I’ll get shocked, and then I call back and when he picks up I scream like I’m being shocked and I go, “Ow! Ow! Ouch! Hey! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Hey! I told you not to pick up the phoooooone!!! G-g-g-g-g-g . . . aaaaaaaarghhhhh!!!”

  But the best one ever, the one where we really got him, was when I called him one night right after dinner and asked him if he would come talk to us about running Apple again.

  “I know we’ve had our differences,” I say, “but I’m so busy with the Pixar and Disney stuff, I can’t do both jobs, I’m burning out, blah blah, and we really need you, I’m begging you, please, just come in and talk to the board, we’re meeting tomorrow, so just hear what we have to say.”

  The poor suffering idiot hasn’t had a real job since Apple tossed him out in 1993. So of course he falls for it and comes bounding in the next day all dressed up in his snazzy suit for his big comeback moment, like he’s probably been up all night jizzing all over himself just thinking about being CEO of Apple again.

  Only when he gets to the lobby our receptionist tells him that nobody is expecting him, and there’s no board meeting. She says she’s never even heard of him. He pushes back, and so she calls for her supervisor.

  “There’s a Mr. Scalley here,” she says.

  Security arrives. They say there must be some mix-up. They tell Sculley I’m not even on the campus, I’m in China. Really I’m up in the Jobs Pod with Larry and Lars Aki, and we’re watching the whole thing and laughing our asses off. Sculley knew it, too. For a long time he just stood there in the lobby staring up at the security camera. Then he gave us the finger and stomped out. We switched to the camera feed from the parking lot and saw him slumped in his Mercedes, staring into space. Priceless.

  “Or how about that guy from Pixar?” Larry says. “Remember? The IT guy? The guy who wanted to be CEO?”

  This was back when I had just rejoined Apple and they hadn’t named me CEO yet. Officially we were doing a job search for that position. This guy, who knew me at Pixar and kind of had a few screws loose, published this long open letter to me on his website, saying he wanted to apply for the job and listing all the things Apple needed to do to get back in shape again.

  So Larry and I called him and told him he had the job. The poor bastard called the San Jose Mercury News and told them he’d been hired to be the CEO of Apple. Then the Merc and all these other newspapers did stories about how this guy had been hoaxed.

  “You know what?” Larry says. “I bet you a thousand bucks that if we call that guy up right now, we could get him to fall for it again. Can you imagine? So where is that guy anyway? You still got his phone number?”

  “You know,” I say, “I heard that guy committed suicide.”

  “You’re shitting me. Jesus. Well, that fucks up everything, doesn’t it? Okay, so let’s find someone else.”

  I tell him I can’t really get into any of this right now. But Larry likes to believe he’s the world’s greatest salesman, so he’s not going to give up that easily. He says, “I’ve got it. We’ll have one of those fake Pixar movie premier parties. We’ll do it up in San Francisco again, and invite all the chiptards from the Valley and put out a red carpet and the klieg lights and the whole deal. We’ll all put on tuxedos, and we’ll hire a bunch of fake paparazzi and some fake autograph hounds. Remember McNealy walking in on the last one, thinking the whole thing was for real, like there actually were people who were dying for his autograph? Brother, that was rich.”

  “Larry,” I say, “are we bad people? Are we evil?”

  “What?”

  “Are we evil?”

  “Who? You and me?”

  “All of us,” I say.

  “Are you crazy? Of course not. We’re not evil. We’re the good guys. We’ve made the world a better place. That’s why we’re rich.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I really do.”

  “How have we made the world a better place?”

  “Well, just for one thing, what about the iPod,” he says. “Look what that’s done. People can carry their music collection with them wherever they go.”

  “The iPod,” I say, “is just a way for the music companies to get people to buy the same recordings all over again. For the third time. First the LP, then the CD, now the iPod. Come on. You know that.”

  “Well you’re making money at it,” he says.

  “Yup.” I sigh. “I’m making money.” I sit there, staring at the wall.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, now don’t start on the money stuff. You’re not going to go shave your head again, are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So let’s do it. We’ll have a movie party. We can send out invitations tomorrow. We’ll even rent a couple of actors to add some sex appeal. How much is Nick Nolte going for these days? Or Melody Bishop? I’m pretty sure I screwed her once, so maybe I get a discount. At least I think I screwed her. Is she the one with the blonde hair and the big fat collagen lips?”

  “We don’t have any new movies coming out.”

  “So we’ll call it a DVD release party. A director’s cut of Nemo, with some bonus cr
ap on the disk.”

  “We’ve got none of those coming out either.”

  “Who cares if you actually have a product to sell? Doesn’t mean you can’t have a release party. We do this all the time at Oracle. It’s called marketing, buddy. Can’t believe I have to explain this to you, of all people. Look, Steve, you know what? I’ll even pay for it. Just to get out of the house and have some fun. Whatever.”

  This time I can’t even answer. I’m sitting there, stoned out of my head, mesmerized by the screen saver on my computer.

  Larry snaps his fingers in front of my face.

  “Jobso,” he says.

  “What.”

  “No more eating meat. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  After he’s gone I call Breezeann on the intercom and tell her to bring me a mango smoothie. It helps. In the afternoon I meet Kuso Sukatoro at the Apple building for a double-duty colonic to flush out the toxins from the meat.

  “You feel better now?” she asks, as she’s putting her equipment away.

  “I do,” I say, but I’m not sure if I’m telling the truth.

  At any given moment the San Jose Jet Center probably has more rich people walking around under its roof than any other building on earth. This is where everyone in the Valley keeps their private jets, and like all of the old-school Valley locations it remains intentionally drab, with crappy furniture and worn-out carpeting and faded paint. Old-money guys in the Valley—by which I mean anyone who’s been rich since before the Internet bubble of the late nineties—totally get off on shabbiness. They might ski in Utah, but not at Deer Valley. That’s for new money people, like Google employees and Web 2.0 strivers. The old guys ski at Alta.

  So a crappy jet terminal with shitty instant coffee in styrofoam cups is just perfect. That may be because it helps us forget that we’re flying around in planes that cost ten thousand dollars per hour to operate. The other reason that nobody cares about how bad this terminal looks, of course, is that nobody ever sits around here. People like me don’t wait for flights. Our planes wait for us. We show up and go.