EIGHTEEN

THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD

Idyllwild, California, is tucked away in the San Jacinto Mountains, just above the Palm Springs desert. A quaint resort town with a small-town feel, “Mile-high Idyllwild” has a couple of private art schools and a summer music festival. The local newspaper is called the Town Crier and the residents once elected a golden retriever to the position of mayor. I was relieved to arrive there with baby Lisa in June of 1978, and not just because the air was high-altitude fresh and the town had a creative hubbub. I was there to be with family, and family was what I needed.

My sister Kathy picked me up from the Palm Springs airport with her husband, Mark, and their baby, six-month-old Sarah. My father and his wife drove my car and theirs with all my things, which included a small English-style crib for Lisa that they had found through the want ads. It felt good to arrive at Kathy and Mark’s home, a wonderful 1930s state-built home for the forestry department service people. (Kathy was a ranger and her husband was a forest firefighter, and a writer, too.) Kathy’s house had that particular kind of clean, well-cared-for look that comes after years of good maintenance. Their neighborhood was in the middle of town, a beautiful spacious area with large grassy lawns, outdoor clotheslines, and covered porches. It was like Mayberry.

Kathy and I are half sisters and nothing alike, but our natures are complementary and we’ve enjoyed a rich, collaborative friendship throughout the years. The five months that Lisa and I lived with Kathy and her family were full. We shared our great enjoyment of cooking—and eating, of course—and every evening, after the children were fed, we’d have engaging conversations over sit-down dinners with Mark.

But I had long days by myself when everyone was at work. I was depressed, in shock, really, from the events of the past year so I just sort of floated as I cared for my little baby. There had been so many terrible incidents with Steve; the sheer number of them seemed to indicate that I deserved to be treated badly. I knew in my heart that I didn’t, but at the time I lacked the knowledge that a man who treats a woman badly is simply out of integrity with all life. Now I believe that my whole life has been about the work of understanding not just this, but how love is bigger than cruelty. Back then I felt shattered and numb by Steve’s contempt and abandonment.

I tried to hold everything together, to understand my emotional life, and get organized to make things happen, but it was all too much and the ground was falling in under me. It was like I was living a life on several levels and struggling to come to terms with each one. I was tuned in to the immediacy of daily life with Lisa’s little sweetness and her back-to-back needs, trying to understand whether I should place her for adoption. Nothing was more important than working through this. Besides this I was coping with the dynamics of living with my sister, and dealing with past issues connected to our mother. Then there were the larger issues having to do with Steve, and what he was and was not doing. Pressing in on all of this was the fact that I had precious little money.

I took care of Lisa’s needs. That came first, of course. I loved her and loved playing with her. We would cuddle and I would hold her close to me. I enjoyed her sweetness, but there was no way I could tell how my own unhappiness affected her. My days were filled with dullness, dread, and delight—the three Ds that constantly darkened me and lit me up. Kathy worked during the weekdays. When Mark wasn’t out fighting fires for the national parks (he could be away for weeks at a time), he’d either be writing at home or at the library, or working out at the gym. Sarah went to a babysitter during the week, and I’d putter about at home with Lisa, and also walk around town with her strapped to my front in a baby cozy.

In the evenings, Kathy and I made dinner together while the children sat side by side in little seats that we had placed on top of a big chest in the kitchen. These seats put the babies’ eyes just above the level of the countertop so they could take in what we were doing. Talking, laughing, and playing music while we made dinner we’d sometimes pick the children up and dance. Because they were different ages they balanced their bodies differently when we danced with them. Sarah used a swimming motion to readjust her self so that she was always perpendicular to the floor at every move. But Lisa was so tiny that I’d cradle her in my arms—holding her closely and then outstretching my arms to sweep her around the room. I held her head stable when I did this, and she would flow with the movement and look around in twinkling wonder. “Twinkling wonder” pretty much described Lisa at this time.

When Mark came home he’d join in the mix, sort of like a friendly, visiting dignitary. Mark said that he was going to be the next great American novelist and I, for one, believed it. I still have never met anyone as intelligent as that man, nor do I recall knowing anyone who read as much as he did. Mark read books by the foot, covering a vast array of subjects. He just ate them up, claiming that a true intellectual doesn’t have preconceived notions about what is important, but is interested in anything and everything on its own terms. I loved this information and like many of the things he said, it has served me well over the years because I really like the idea that everything is worthy when you know how to look at it.

Mark brought home some great science fiction books during the time I was there and they left their stamp on my imagination. I still wonder as to the plights of the characters in those futuristic scenarios. Also tucked into my memories of those days were his arriving home and playing the first Bruce Springsteen album I’d ever heard, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Was I surprised by that music.

Springsteen wrote songs that were evocative of an earlier America, yet heralded a new vision into the future at the same time. Songs like “Candy’s Room,” “Racing in the Street,” and “The Promised Land” contained within them a passion for an America coming of age and for American life. The ache and vibrancy in these songs is so alive that it turned me inside out with a kind of urgency I had never felt before. After the Vietnam War, which for many in the sixties and seventies was synonymous with the betrayal by American leadership of Americans and the world, I was struck by Springsteen’s love of country. Fresh, and beyond any false nationalistic sentimentality, his were the songs of the dream and promise of America, sung back into the blood of youth. Give that man a medal.

If weekdays in Idyllwild were about domestic life, weekends were about the great outdoors. Saturday and Sundays we’d all hike in the hills with our children strapped to us—Sarah on Mark or Kathy’s back and Lisa on my front. Kathy knew the best trails, being a ranger, and we’d walk together under the pines, smelling their resin in the light fresh air while trekking deeper into the woods. We followed the most beautiful paths next to rivers, and up onto rock outcroppings. There, under brilliant clear blue skies, we’d enjoy the views over the top of the deep dark evergreen forests to the distant horizons. Having small children is about being in small warm spaces, but this was its opposite and I’d hold Lisa’s little face cupped in my hand as I walked and she’d seem very content. I could tell that she liked it when I was happy because she would look up into my face and mirror my excitement.

*   *   *

Life could be bright and interesting when I lived at Kathy and Mark’s, but there were no real conversations about what I was going through. We were, each of us, under thirty, and my situation was over everyone’s head. How could they understand? My life was so out of balance that I must have seemed like a sinkhole to a lot of people and so we just stayed at the surface of it all.

I wish I’d had a therapist to help me mine the darkness, but that was beyond my resources. So I got up every morning and worked my way through the days without design, except to care, hoping something out of the ordinary would happen, something to move me into a happy flow so I could forget what I was so alone in grappling with. It was at this time that I bought a handbook of crystal identification at the local bookstore. I had so little money that it really was an extravagance, but I had to have it.

The book contained photographs and precise drawings of naturally occurring and idealized crystal formations, along with descriptions as to where the crystals could be found on and in the earth. I just loved this book, and would pore through the pictures to look at all the crystalline shapes that were so beautiful and perfect. As a child I had always had gorgeous rock collections and so I suppose that studying these pages was an extension of that original love of the mineral world. But it was different, too, because looking at the idealized geometric shapes offered me something strong and beautiful, something more than the day-to-day difficulty that I felt. The artist in me couldn’t get enough of looking at them. But as I realize now, it was at this time when I felt buried by Steve’s negative versions of who I was, that the shapes and the way the crystals caught the light reminded me of natural bright elegance and wholeness—the poetics of inspired survival. Indeed they were a precursor to the artwork I would begin to do right as Lisa left for college.

During the days in Idyllwild I loved to watch Lisa and the little searching movements of her nose and hands and feet. She was like the movement of water at its surface: perfect wiggly contentment. People watch fires and TV and even aquariums but a baby’s face? I had no idea that her endlessly nuanced expressions would be such a constant draw for me. Sometimes I would hold her upside down by her little legs because I had discovered how she delighted in seeing her environment from different angles. Her cheeks would fall around her eyes and she would have the most sublime smile as her head turned slowly to marvel at the upside-down world. Like me, she enjoyed variety and movement.

I’d also sing to her—made-up songs and musical scales—and I’d repeat words and sentences in a singsong way to keep us connected and amused. For her part, Lisa would gurgle sweet babbly baby noises that sounded to me like the equivalent of an abstract painting, having all the colors but no real form you could understand. Until, one day, to my utter astonishment, I realized that her sounds weren’t arbitrary. She was imitating every word, song, and tonal repetition with absolute precision. Suddenly her world opened up to me and I understood that she heard and repeated everything I shared with her. This mother and daughter call-and-response pulled the shades off my sadness every time. It was a wonder to me that my tiny baby could pick up so much and then turn it back around and talk to me with it. This is where the everyday mundane suddenly became magical. I had a magical child.

The one thing she didn’t repeat was this gravelly sound I made at the back of my throat when I got her out of bed or changed her diapers. I only kept making this sound because she was so amazed by it. She would look at me with laughter in her eyes, and she’d be riveted. It was as if this was the most remarkable sound in all existence and she was really impressed with me for being able to do it. I mean really impressed, as if I had insider knowledge and was passing the codes of the universe on to her. And who knows, maybe I was.

The first time Lisa smiled at me she was three months old and it broke out in thousands of rays like sunshine over a new world. Things were moving forward.

For Halloween that year I came up with costume ideas for my sister, her husband, and myself. I love to come up with costumes that express a person’s essence. While I don’t sew them, I tuck, fold, rip, cut, paste, pin, and tie materials into place. I was happy and breathless doing this, my hands moving in advance of my thinking. It was pure play. We had so much fun that day and Mark and Kathy kept saying, “Gawd, you really should be making a living at this.” I made Mark into the black and white man with the golden tear, an image I connected with Steve. They were quite alike, Mark and Steve. Both were off all charts intelligent, angst-ridden, and dramatic. Mark started with a top hat, but I did the rest by adding a cape, and painting a black-and-white checkerboard on his face. A golden tear at the corner of his eye was the finishing touch. I made my sister into a nun, a Mother Superior with massive folds of mauve and white cloth that she had around the house. She wore no makeup at all. As for me, I painted my face white and covered myself with a transparent mosquito net. I was a ghost. No kidding, right?

We drove to the party leaving our children with my sister’s babysitter, a caring, trustworthy woman who had children of her own. This was the first time I had given over my daughter’s care to anyone outside the family, having only left Lisa once with my dad and his wife for a couple of hours, and with my sister now and then to go to the store. It revived me immeasurably to be able to go out, and that Halloween I felt the blessed helium of my freedom. Shy from having been so homebound, I hesitated in finding my way into party mode, but with all the corn chips and salsa, the sangria and the music—with all the dancing and laughter—I was just starting to have fun when the babysitter arrived with Lisa beet red and splotchy from nonstop crying. The sitter had tried calming her for three hours without success. And since no one at the party was answering the phone, she eventually drove Lisa to me. Lisa bawled even harder when she was handed to me, because my face was unrecognizable covered in white paint and netting. So Kathy held her as the Mother Superior that night and Lisa finally stopped crying. Oh, the will of her, to cry for three hours straight! Up till then I’d never let her cry for over a minute or two. It broke my heart to see her in such distress, but Mark repeatedly reassured me that there had to be a history of hurtful repetitions before a child could be scarred. He kept saying, “Babies are resilient. She’s really, really, really okay.”

*   *   *

When you have a baby, you need resources. Since babies are physical, you need physical resources. But when I mentioned the need for money to Steve and Kobun, they both responded as if I were a nuisance, a buzzing bee bothering and below them. It’s hard to fully describe the effect they had on me because they spoke with silence—by ignoring me—more often than with language. But I remember.

I had been in Idyllwild about six weeks when Daniel Kottke called. He told me, among other things, that a number of people were asking Steve why he wasn’t just giving me any money, and Steve apparently was saying, “She doesn’t want money, she just wants me.”

I was overwhelmed when I heard this—especially because even Daniel, who should have known better, seemed willing to believe it. How could they be so wrong? The realities of nursing and caring for my small baby took all my time and attention. And the lack of every kind of resource made me depressed. In the mix of this and more, Steve was very low on the totem pole of my personal wants. I was insensible to that kind of longing then; my nervous system was so battered in response to Steve’s meanness that I was too closed down to even think about him in such terms.

Later I wondered if Steve was offended that I wasn’t pining for him. It certainly would be typical of him to make statements that ran the direct opposite of the truth. The real truth was that I didn’t want to mess up Steve’s trajectory because, despite everything, I was excited for him and his potential. I love my own creativity and I extend this kind of joy to others—Steve included, Steve especially. It wasn’t about stopping him from where he wanted to go. I just needed money. This was just another of his deluded and distracting comments.

My mind searched to understand this new injustice that was being passed around—that I only wanted Steve. While I was living in the shadows, I was being cruelly examined under the most dishonest light. Steve was somehow making himself out to seem not only desirable, but principled when, in fact, he was saying “No, I am not going to be responsible to my child or her mother.”

I had no one in my corner, so I worked hard on being in my own corner. Listless at first, enlisting much later, because it is nearly impossible to do well without a tribe. It would have made a huge difference to Lisa and my happiness and to Steve’s well-being had he been held accountable to his humanity. But nobody I ever heard of questioned it. Well, perhaps there was someone. I don’t know if it’s true, but I was told after the fact that Mike Scott at Apple repeatedly said that Steve should just give me money, while nearly all other top executives advised him to ignore me or fight if I tried to go after a paternity settlement. (Curiously, years later when I painted murals at the Ronald McDonald House in Palo Alto, Mike Scott was the only person from Apple whose name I recognized on the donor tiles.)

It was very hard to imagine and accept that, at a time when I had no voice, Steve was using his against me to silence me further. He even told me and others that, “If I could just help Lisa without helping Chrisann, I would be happy to supply money.” This was the beginning of his working to split apart my daughter and me. I think Steve villainized me because, in his twisted logic, he unconsciously believed that if he couldn’t have a loving committed mother then he didn’t want Lisa to have hers. He wanted Lisa in his club.

Years later, after Steve got kicked out of Apple, he apologized many times over for this behavior. He said that he never took responsibility when he should have, and that he was sorry. He even told me, “It wasn’t Kobun’s fault. It was all mine.” (Hmmm, I always become suspicious when people in positions of power claim to take all responsibility. What does it really mean to say such a thing?) But then Steve also said that he loved how I parented so much, he wished I had been his mother. He was in my kitchen and I had my back to him when he said this, and I thought Whoa, that’s a piece of information. That day I could see why I was impressive to him. It wasn’t that I was a perfect parent. I’m a human being with plenty of foibles. But I learned as Lisa grew to pay close attention to good parenting and teaching, to make sure she was thriving, delighted with life, and truly happy every day.

But Steve’s contrition didn’t last. He may have appreciated my mothering Lisa eventually, but after he returned to Apple in the nineties, he went on to reenact the same hateful odd behaviors toward me.

*   *   *

Through the years I’ve watched how Daniel has alternately admired Steve, and felt scandalized by him. I’ve come to recognize that Daniel and I shared some of the same dynamics as we watched Steve become more impressive. And the most interesting thing to me about Daniel is that he sometimes had the most revelatory insight into Steve’s changes.

When I was pregnant and still living at the Presidio house, Daniel came home one day after work and told me, “Steve is winning at work even though he’s going against everything I’ve ever been taught was right and good.” Daniel doesn’t remember saying this, but I do. In fact, I bet that over the years I’ve had about ten important exchanges with Daniel, of which he has no memory. Daniel’s memory seems to slip between insight and being overly sentimental when it comes to Steve. That particular statement at the Presidio house made a big impact on me, because it was the first time I saw Daniel really trying to figure out what was going on with Steve. Also he repeated it several times.

I listened deeply to Daniel each time he said it, because I could feel his incredulity. Yes, like everyone, Daniel seemed to doubt what he was actually seeing. But then I observed how carefully worded and worked out it was. And I also saw that Daniel had to think down to his core to understand what laws of humanity were being so profoundly trespassed.

He said something about how the ideals of human behavior and good character that his parents and professors at Columbia taught him, and that all great classic art exemplifies, were opposite to the values that are advancing Steve. Daniel was dismayed, and I was impressed because I knew that what he was saying was true and perfectly discerned.

He also said, shaking his head, “It’s shocking because the worse he becomes, the more success he achieves.” Daniel was watching how Steve operated at work. I, of course, didn’t see this part of Steve’s life, only how he was behaving toward me. I was always trying to understand Steve, and to that end looked for whatever wisdom about him others had. I had no words or logic for how horrible he was increasingly becoming. All I knew was that Steve wasn’t acting the way people were supposed to act.

I later understood that Apple’s marketing agency had promoted the concept of a massive genius figurehead for the company. Big wink to Regis McKenna. Steve was their boy, when in truth there were many people who built Apple. One of them, Jeff Raskin, was quoted at the time saying that what was happening to Steve was sad because “Steve believed his own press.” I was always looking for foundational wisdom on Steve and this statement by Raskin seemed right.

Daniel also told me that people at Apple had started talking about Steve’s “reality distortion field.” When I heard this, I knew immediately that the phrase was perfect. I could hardly believe someone had been able to identify such an amorphous quality with absolute accuracy. And I marveled that three simple words of such scientific and poetic brevity could get it completely handled. The term “reality distortion field” contained the notion of wizardry, and the idea that Steve had some kind of dubious talent that suggested something of an alien power.

So I wasn’t alone in noticing it.

My own experience was that Steve had a recontextualizing force field around him, like a conceptual miasma that bent meaning whenever you got within a few feet of him. The reality distortion field may have been invisible, but it left an impression on your actual senses. And it was so new and so distinctive that someone—I don’t know who—was compelled to give it a name as a way of dealing with it.

*   *   *

Various publications have said that Steve wasn’t ready to be a father. The truth was that neither of us was ready to be a parent, but Lisa came into the world anyway. Still, people evaluated our roles—and the significance of those roles—quite differently. It was that old double standard, a worldly distortion that says a mother has primary responsibility for the child when it’s blatantly obvious that children need both parents, in whatever way they can show up well.

Steve wasn’t ready to raise a child and neither was I. I needed my own free life and lots of time to grow up. I was a very young twenty-four-year-old when Lisa was born and it was way beyond me to deal with the limitations that her tiny existence imposed on mine. Still, it was in Idyllwild that I arrived at a form of logic that I could rely on, a logic that led me to the conclusion that I would keep and raise my child.

At that time it was hard for me to think anything through clearly, but once I did, I never got lost in the crazy cycles of worry and indecision again. It went as follows: I accepted that I was nowhere near having the experience or wisdom to know if I should keep my daughter or give her up for adoption to a couple more financially fit and emotionally ready. So my backdoor logic ran that if I couldn’t understand whether adoption was right or wrong until way down the road, then I had better not risk letting my own child go. I thought that holding her close—as terribly difficult as the circumstances were—was better than understanding, years later, that losing her was too profound a loss to bear. Or worse, never even understanding how profound a loss it was because such an act would have amounted to killing something in me, and in Lisa, too.

It was a fragile kind of logic but it was a starting point. Though there would be times within the first years of her life that were so hard that I would briefly consider adoption again, acknowledging how much I didn’t know saved me from losing her until I was able to gain the knowledge of her true value to me, and mine to her. Beyond this and bigger than all the rainy and sunny days, between my unhappiness and the times when things got easier, my mind might not have always understood, but always my arms knew to hold on.

She was mine.

I was hers.

Years later, when Lisa was in her thirties (about ten years older than I was at the time of my decision to keep her), we talked about it. I told her that while the situation had felt impossible, I’d decided to keep her, even before I could see what it meant. Given how hard it was, I had worried through the years about whether or not I had done the right thing. Lisa listened deeply, and a week after that, I felt the delight that all parents come to know when my daughter called of her own volition and told me she was really glad I’d kept her. She told me that she had thought it through and she knew it would have been very hard on her if I had let her go.

With that I felt as if Lisa had some kind of self-knowledge that I knew nothing about; not in her or in me. I wondered how she could arrive at such a conclusion. I didn’t understand it. But I believed her. We both knew how difficult it had been to endure Steve’s many faces, so having this discussion helped us see that we had more than survived it. We really love, like, and enjoy each other. And sometimes I think that Steve’s absence was a very good thing given his Tourette’s-like cruelty. Still, back then when Lisa was just a baby, the situation was pretty much unbearable on a daily basis and for years my child had a sad and unfulfilled mother—the one thing Steve could have taken care of.

Kathy and Mark’s generosity had saved the day. They gave me wonderful memories and the stability to take the steps I needed to keep my daughter. When Lisa was seven months old the winds of change blew through Idyllwild and I knew it was time to move on. With my car stuffed and my sweet little darling in her bucket car seat strapped in next to me, we hit the road and I drove up Highway 1, the scenic route, next to the Pacific Ocean and returned to the Bay Area where I knew people and would live for the next few years.