SIXTEEN
AN OLD STORY
Within a two-week period, somewhere in early October of 1977, the clock was up on everything. I realized I could no longer endure an intimate relationship with Steve. I got “reliable” birth control as the first of many steps to get out and away. And Rod Holt, one of the first ten employees at Apple, approached me about a paid apprenticeship designing blueprints for the Apples. Steve and Rod saw me as a good fit for the job, and it was, but I was concerned about taking a job like this because I just wanted to be an artist. As a caring older adult offering me a tremendously valuable opportunity, Rod saw my resistance as profoundly misconceived. I told him I would think about it. Then I found out I was pregnant.
It took me a few days before I told Steve. We were standing in the dining room, talking about something else entirely, and I told him: “I’m pregnant.” Steve’s face turned ugly. He gave me a fiery look. Then he rushed out of the house without a word. That was day one.
I know it’s widely believed that Steve asked me to have an abortion. And Steve, himself, has apparently been quoted as saying he had asked me to end the pregnancy. He even actively led people to believe that I slept around. But none of this was true. It served Steve’s purposes to appear as the victim of a crazy woman to whom he’d had a slight attraction, but never loved. The truth is that at the beginning of my third trimester Steve shook his head and said: “I never wanted to ask that you get an abortion. I just didn’t want to do that.” And he never had.
Steve didn’t and wouldn’t talk to me about the pregnancy. When he wasn’t arguing with me, he would hold me off with his tightlipped silence. It would take me years to understand why he wouldn’t discuss something so important to both of us, especially since he and I had dealt with this situation five years before and had come to a mutual and comfortable decision about how to handle it. This time, I tied myself in knots trying to work out why he wouldn’t just talk with me. What I saw is that after I told Steve I was pregnant, and once he’d adjusted, he behaved with unnatural calm in the face of my panic and tears. If I had just gotten mad, I would have broken the spell, come to my senses, and taken action because clearly I had no way to care for a child. But I didn’t even have it in me to get mad because I think I was too deeply affected by his silent abandonment and what amounted to months of his negative projections on me. So I spun between two poles: the pregnancy itself and the chaos that was unfolding around me. I had a sense of there being no place to stand with this.
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 despised 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 unfathomable 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.
I drove home with Kobun after that sesshin. There were three of us in the car and we were to drop off the first person, a woman, in the hills around Sebastopol, and then Kobun and I would drive back to Los Altos together. When we stopped to let her off, she invited us into her place before heading home. Kobun accepted. We had tea. Within a short time the two of them had lit up a joint and were smoking some marijuana. I did not join them because I was pregnant. I sat at a distance, smelling the burning marijuana and watching them through a bluish haze.
Kobun told the woman, “Never let anyone who is not enlightened come on your land,” at which the woman pointed at me and said, “Well she’s not enlightened!” They then talked about me in third person as if I weren’t there. I felt bad. The woman had been nice up until that point, so didn’t understand the shift. Kobun replied with something like, “Well, she is with me, so it is okay,” and then he told the woman how much his mother-in-law would love this marijuana, which the woman had grown herself. Might he bring some back to her? The woman opened a big container and generously raked leaves and buds into a big plastic bag, careful not to break up the dried clusters. She gave him a lot, but Kobun asked for more, and more again. I watched the whole thing with uneasiness because the way he pushed beyond her already generous gift wasn’t right. Not to mention that I was stunned, too, to think that his children’s grandmother smoked marijuana. She was just a perky, wrinkled, little white-haired old lady with an edge. I couldn’t imagine her stoned. It seemed sacrilegious. (My parents were way too fifties to have even considered smoking grass, and for once, by contrast Kobun’s behaviors looked childish to me compared to my parents.) Things were becoming clearer.
Eventually it was time to get back on the road and as we were walking to the car, Kobun pointed to a hawk wheeling high up in the sky and told the woman, “Whenever you see an eagle or a hawk flying overhead on your land, you are to know that this is me watching over you and your land.” I could see that the woman was beginning to wonder if Kobun wasn’t just a bit of a cad, interested in self-promotion to an attractive lady. Kobun had said in a couple of lectures that his wife called him a playboy, and now I was wondering about it, too. I felt embarrassed for both of them.
Finally Kobun and I set out for the drive back to the Peninsula, a two-hour sojourn if we didn’t run into traffic. But when we got to the top of the forested hill on the dirt road that led back to the highway from the woman’s cabin, Kobun stopped the car and got out and looked back to where the woman lived and laughed out loud, slapping his thighs with both hands, saying, “I have stolen from her! I am a thief!” He laughed and laughed and repeated proudly that he had stolen from her. This was very like the spiritual teachers of the seventies: they were full of the merriment of the trickster. For example, Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche cracked open the veils for new levels of consciousness in the Western mind, but by all accounts, he drank way too much. For a while these teachers had Teflon-like protection. They used their extraordinary capacities to teach, but also to test and social climb. I guess nobody really understood the ethics in this new game plan of East meets West.
I was dumbfounded. Kobun offended my young sense of idealism because I knew none of this was funny or ethical. I had seen him as the pinnacle of uprightness and I had trusted him. I had reserved all my judgments about him and much had turned in favor of my keeping this pregnancy because he had confirmed that it was the right thing to do and that he would help. But who was he really? Here he had not only just smoked marijuana and “stolen” some for his mother-in-law, but he considered it all hilarious.
A visceral sensation hit me; the stakes were so high, and here this guy was just playing games. What’s more, he was letting me know it, too. Everything was in such precarious balance for me and my child and my whole being was starting to recognize the truth. Several more of these booms would drop before I truly woke up under the full weight and awareness of my own circumstances. I would be alone. He wasn’t going to help me and by his measurement, I was laughable, too. I really did not know what I did not know, but I was getting quite the education.
* * *
Steve wanted to control what people thought of him. That’s likely why he started to seed people with the notion that I slept around and he was infertile, which meant that this could not be his child. People believed him, I think, because people wanted a hero. Apple was succeeding, and Steve was brilliant, but mine was an old story, and no one really cared about a single mother. A mother who was married, yes. But a single mother? No.
Steve was succeeding in a big way. And he was growing a big personality. But he didn’t have the emotional maturity to manage it. I remember going to the Presidio house after I moved out (I needed to pick up a few things that I had left there), when Steve came home in a hurricane of a mood. He ran into his room and slammed the door behind him. I waited a few minutes before going in and asking what was wrong. He was sitting on the floor and motioned with his hand, but never looked at me. Instead he kept his eyes focused on a lit candle on a low table. He stared at the candle so intensely that I knew he was using it as an aid of some sort. The whole scene was odd, my standing there looking at him in silence over my big pregnant belly, watching the contrast between the soft candlelight and the buzz of his vengeful intensity, not knowing what to do. I thought back to the scene when we were nineteen and Steve first asked me what I saw in the candle. Maybe everyone in the world knows about this candle technique but I didn’t, and my guess is that he was using a Hindu meditation technique for controlling his infantile outrage. It seemed to work, because the longer he looked at the flame the more his anger was dispelled. It also seemed like there was a weird allowance for my presence in the room that night, too, a negligible disturbance he maybe even wanted, because despite the hurricane, he did not ask me to leave.
Later that week I met up with a friend at one of my birthing classes and she told me what had happened to have aggravated him so. Lori was a secretary at Apple, and when she saw how Steve was behaving toward me, she had offered to be my birth coach. A smart, capable woman a little bit older than me, she just wanted to help. Lori explained that Apple had moved to a new building and Steve had slipped in fast and had taken the best office. It was the corner office full of windows and high views and so should rightfully have gone to Mike Markkula, Apple’s then president. Apparently there were words. I had never represented enough power in opposition to Steve to enrage him like that. For me it was a new Steve.
Lori was my eyewitness into what I would never have otherwise seen, bringing a more balanced view to what was really happening with Steve. Through her I understood that he was just as bad at work as he was toward me. Lori told me that there was a company-wide meeting about getting health insurance. During the meeting, Steve kept harping at the agent who was describing the policy choices, saying to her, “It’s an inferior health insurance company if it doesn’t pay for pregnancies if the couple is unmarried.” Apparently it went back and forth between the agent and Steve many times until finally, the agent said in disgust, “If it’s your baby and you’re a human being, you’ll pay the bill.” Lori told me that it finally stopped the repartee because the comment had hit the bull’s-eye in Steve’s fancy-pants, tricked-out hypocrisy. If you didn’t know the whole story, this exchange would seem forward-thinking, heroic even, on Steve’s part. But the opposite was true.
Lori had told me another story. On February 24, 1978, Steve’s twenty-third birthday, the Apple executives had gotten Steve a huge funeral wreath with a ribbon draped over that said Happy Birthday Steve!!! It was a joke, of course, but Lori said that when Steve walked into the office and saw the funeral wreath in his name he stopped dead in his tracks. He was wide-eyed. Slack-jawed. Skin white as a ghost. I knew this quality in Steve. His response was so personal and dramatic it must have spoken to that big symbolic world inside of him—the closet mystic. Was it a chilling reminder that his life wasn’t going to last that long? Lori told me that it choked her up to see it because even though Steve could be so awful, that quality could flip into a kind of extreme vulnerability that made you willing to run and trip over anything to help him be okay.
* * *
In the complexity of all he was and all he was becoming, I had always given Steve room to be changeable. I believed in him, as almost everyone did, because some parts of him were so extraordinary that he was always worth the effort. So when I was seven months pregnant and Steve very tenderly asked me, “Would you like to give birth to our child at the Presidio house?” I considered it. Even after everything, I still hoped for decency as the way through. I thought he might have, finally, come to his senses.
But after about three weeks of serious consideration I knew this baby’s and my well-being were all my responsibility. I could not risk trusting him. I knew the child’s safety made having the birth at his house out of the question. I played it straight and told him, “You know, I’ve really thought about this but I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the birth at the Presidio house.” I had planned to go on and explain more, but as usual Steve interrupted the flow of real communication: “What are you talking about?” He was indifferent and distracted as if he’d forgotten he’d ever suggested it. Then he said offhandedly, “Oh that, okay, no—not a big deal.” The casual response mortified me in the moment, and haunted for me years. Now after all this time, I know that if I had said, “Yes, I would like to have the birth at your house,” he would have also asked, “What are you talking about?”
Winning was always losing with Steve. The more he protected himself, the more callous he became. The more callous he became, the more power was within his grasp. The more power he had, the more money he made. The more money he made, the more he was applauded. This equation didn’t ever really change—it all just got bigger. Because I had no worldly power, my recourse was to witness. Witnessing would end up being the source of my power.