FOUR

THE IMPOSTER

Homestead in the seventies was a vibrant mix. We had musicians and actors, smart people, and stoners. There were photographers, English lit kids, and various artistic types—those into fine art like me, but also cartoonists and ceramicists. Homestead had its scientists and its nerds, of course, as well as a group of boys who rode motorcycles and wore Harley-Davidson jackets, but whom we called the “Hardly Hards” because they were such sweet guys. Then there were the kids who were just themselves, with no group association you could pin on them.

Students at Homestead overlapped in their associations. Steve and I did; we bridged different worlds. His friends were odd and smart, with a shared a sense of mischief and a bright individuality. They were always finding ways to cut through the rules that others lived by. And they were loyal, like an elite band of thieves. (My friends weren’t this way. We didn’t need the double vision that clever insincerities call for.)

Steve had the kind of intellectual honesty that you find in very bright people who are used to tolerating a less-than-brilliant world. That Honest Abe quality again. Yet while he stayed true to himself in so many remarkable ways, he was also disconnected and awkward. Steve’s baseline was a mix of genius, authenticity, and emotional woodenness. Wooden like Pinocchio, but not a Disneyfied version of that story: something ancient, about the tale of the motherless, enchanted boy. Real boys knew things that he didn’t. His birth mother’s love, for example. His birth father’s pride. And just what did this father do for a living? Stuff most people take for granted.

Some of his qualities derailed me and made me uneasy. At seventeen, I didn’t have the intellectual sophistication to know that false sentimentality can have an underbelly of indifference and brutality to offset the numbness. But I could feel it. His oft-quoted refrain that he was “The Imposter” indicated that somewhere he grasped the nature of the problem. My feelings in response to him ranged from being deeply moved to being totally removed. Not knowing better then, I questioned whether there was something wrong with me, and I observed our friendship for clues about what was present and missing in both of us—because that’s what teenagers do.

This was the age of splitting the atom, an aspect of science that contributed to the development of the computer. And Steve was a child of his time, an extraordinary child who would learn to create in spite of—or perhaps even because of—the great gulf of his interior life. Of course I didn’t think in these terms then.

Steve invented the name “Oaf Toabar” for himself. Oaf was a secret name, he said, and I wasn’t to tell anyone about it. It seemed a tender expression of vulnerability and self-confessed awkwardness, although his oafishness wasn’t such an attractive quality to me. He signed love letters with “Love, Oaf.” And like a note slipped under a door, this name made me wonder about his hidden sense of identity. Steve often made a big deal about being an oaf and laughing at himself; it’s why he loved the psychological complexes of Woody Allen’s characters. Yet the nature of Steve’s feelings of awkwardness would give way to another layer of insight. Steve was a magician, and it was as if from within the secret logic of fairy tales that he leveraged his shyness and low self-esteem into its opposite expression, to become a man of exceeding self-confidence and invulnerability. It was a deft sleight of hand, but it felt slightly sketchy to me. I was aware of feeling uncomfortable with a false intimacy when he told me not to tell anyone about this secret name. (Much later I would discover that it was the code name he used to identify himself in the underground business of selling blue boxes with Woz.)

One day early in our relationship I saw Steve standing by himself, holding his body in a way that I found so disturbing that it made me question if I was seeing right. It was an aspect of him that never appeared when he was animated and talking, but after observing it several times in the months that followed I knew for sure I was seeing a different side of him. When he was by himself, Steve’s posture sometimes took on the quality of a mad cripple. Whether he was standing or leaning against a wall, he would hold himself frail and stooped, with a bony knee bent and torqued inward. His head would be dropped and he’d peer out with one eye under his forward falling hair. Steve could be standing in the brightest sunshine, but his angled posture would create sharp shadows. A buzz of mean darkness would gather around him at these times, leaving the unmistakable impression of a devastating loneliness. The emotional starvation in him pierced right through me.

I remember one of his friends at that time was a girl who was solid and witty, not especially pretty, but so self-possessed that she was beautiful and impressive. This girl would challenge Steve in ways that seemed beyond me, ways that made me sit up and take note. I think she saw something in him that she felt called to engage. She had a pinch of the dominatrix in her and she was getting him to be brave by doing things that were socially undesirable.

This girl’s strange requests made me uncomfortable. You could almost hear her say, “Now my puppet…” I remember how she would sidle up close to him and whisper some new idea: “This is what I want you to do.” She’d always begin that way. “Now this is what I want you to do.” Steve would come under her spell. And a rhythm would move through his body as he readied himself for the challenge. Any chance to win the prize of her approval.

Steve couldn’t back out; she wouldn’t allow it. He tried once, and I watched how she stood her ground, how she confronted him and repeated her challenge. I suspect now that he was attracted to her strength. I wasn’t jealous of her, but I was uneasy with the way she spoke to him and the things she got him to do. They were funny, these challenges, and at the same time not funny at all. I wish I could remember the many examples, but I can recall one time when she had him cut in front of about fifty people to get tickets for a theater performance in San Francisco. She asked and he did it. That cleared it all up for me: these requests were designed to get the awkward boy to stand up to his own outrageous potential. I must have looked like a gnat to her and all her power.

Another of his friends, whom I’ll call “Lew,” was a tall, thin Eurasian guy. He looked slightly tipped, as if he had fallen out of a Paul Klee painting. There was something lyrically off balance about the two tall friends, something idiosyncratic in their sweetness and respect for each other, too. Steve told me that Lew wanted to become a San Francisco cab driver after high school, so he could learn the streets of the city. I was fascinated by this idea and the way he intended to, as I thought of it then, stack his purposes one on top of the other. For him it was simple: make an income while learning the city streets as if he were both a cab driver and an undercover agent. Lew’s plan tipped me off to a creative principle about organizing complexity. I had never considered achieving multiple outcomes in one action like this. Silly as it might sound—because this is all anyone ever does now—the way Lew stacked his purposes indicated the creation of a multiuse device. Like a smartphone that’s also a camera and an address book and everything else under the sun. This idea seemed exciting and generative to me as an artist. And it was a glimpse into their conversations that I was otherwise never in on. I am sure that Steve told me about it because he was musing over it, too.

One day Steve told me that Lew’s father drank and beat Lew. Steve had always made a big deal out of the fact that he never had been spanked or hit by his parents in any way; once again, I believe this was important to him because something similar may have happened to his father, Paul.

Lew’s situation seemed to have a tremendous impact on Steve. It turned him into something of a healer. In all the time I knew Steve this was a role I rarely saw him take on. But he had a huge capacity for empathy when it came to men’s stories. I think that Lew and Steve recognized the reality of male brutality together, bonding in the brotherhood of a terrible shared knowledge.

*   *   *

My best friend in high school was Laura Schylur. A dancer, musician, and poet, she had a beautiful childlike face. Laura also had a quality of being different—perhaps because she, like me, was dyslexic. Laura and I would hang out together in nature, in the apricot orchards that were so abundant in our area back then, and in the hills behind St. Joseph’s Seminary close to her home. Together we learned to play music on recorders, later on flutes: folk songs, ballads, Beethoven, Bach, and John Lennon’s “Oh My Love,” which was the song that Lennon wrote after going through primal therapy with Yoko Ono. The tenderness of this simple song touched something important in me; it offered a vision of the kind of emotional intimacy I yearned to know with a man.

Laura wasn’t happy about my relationship with Steve, and not just because he took up so much of my time. Steve was dismissive of her and she resented it. Laura remembers the way I once ran up and told her that Steve and his friend, Woz, were making blue boxes, and according to her I announced that “Steve is a geeeeeeenius!” I sort of remember this, too, and I can picture Laura’s response. Unimpressed. Deflated.

Which brings me to Steve Wozniak. Woz. Whenever Woz and Steve met up, they connected like excited children. They’d be so thrilled by their discoveries and breakthroughs, so lifted by the helium of their excitement, that they’d literally jump up and down and all around each other, speaking in sharp, rapid bursts, hysterical yelps, and deep-throated laughs. Their sounds were unnerving to me, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. They’d drive me away from the garage and out of earshot within seconds because the pitch was just so awful.

Woz didn’t like sharing Steve with me. Likely they both preferred having me out of the garage when they were working together. But this really wasn’t the problem. Nor was it the genius that they rightly shared in all of its explosive joy. No, there was something else about it that jarred my nervous system. If there’s ever a musical adaptation of Apple, say an opera, there should be dystopian scenes in the famous garage as ground zero, where sound mangles, torques, warps, and then completely tears the physical world of time and space away from the human dimension. Because this is what it felt like to me. When Steve and Woz were excited like this it was as if they were ripping the fabric of the universe. Now I wonder if this was the precursor to what people would later refer to as Steve’s reality distortion field.

Woz was older than Steve and I, and already in college, but he seemed younger in many ways. He had no use for me, a girl, and I must admit I found him alarmingly unattractive and couldn’t figure out how to talk to him. He wasn’t fun or friendly to me. When one of us found the other with Steve, we’d both be disappointed in some quiet way. We were the two most important people to Steve, and yet we had nothing to say to each other.

Woz and I once shared each other’s company on a road trip to see Steve in Portland after he had started at Reed College. We left hours before dawn and when the sun came up near Shasta I commented on how beautiful the clouds were: pinks and yellows and peaches climbing in a fresh blue morning sky. His response? A flat “I’ve seen better.” I remember our stopping at a gas station—this was the same trip—and hurrying back from the bathroom because I had a feeling that Woz was thinking about driving off without me. He did leave me once, at the San Francisco airport. Woz had taken Steve to the airport and I had gone along to see him off. Woz drove away and left me there, claiming later he’d had the impression that I was flying out with Steve. No doubt about it: Woz was ornery then.

Yet for all this, I so admired the monster prankster in these two. They were off-the-charts funny. There was an infectious, pure joy running through them, especially when they would do things that were illegal, but so brilliantly conceived that no one could catch up to them. I remember the time Woz drove to L.A. on Highway 5 months before it had opened to the public. No police. No traffic. No speed limit. No problem. And there was Woz at 150 miles an hour. Then there were the blue boxes, devices that got around having to pay for phone calls. Woz and Steve weren’t the first inventors, but they did figure out how to make and improve them. These guys had a gangster brilliance. And there was something exhilarating and enlarging about their teamwork.

A couple of years after Apple had started Woz asked me, through Steve, if I would help him decorate his apartment. It was a surprising request because I knew he had never really liked me. Yet it confirmed to me what everyone knows, that Woz didn’t have any malice in his heart. Steve and I went over to Woz’s place, where I gave him ideas on color and suggestions on where to place some plants. I felt awkward about it, but he was affable and considerate. I think he had asked me over because he was just becoming interested in women—or maybe a woman—and wanted to impress her with his good taste. Maybe, too, he wanted to make amends.

That was the day he showed me his Dial-A-Joke machine. As I remember, it was just a big clunky tape machine connected to the phone to generate nerdy science-guy puns. The jokes were funny only because they were so silly. Silly punny jokes are like the verbal equivalent of slapstick—unexplainably funny. Woz has a gift for this. When he showed me the joke machine, he told me that he sometimes answered the phone and delivered the joke live, pretending he was the recording and then surprising the caller with a live response. That machine was like a prototype for online dating searches; Woz actually used it to attract his first wife, who must have been impressed by his funny, goofy guy puns. So there was real sweetness to him after all.

*   *   *

Steve told me many times, and in oblique ways, that he was terrified he would “lose his humanity in the business world.” Sometimes he would couch it in terms of his concern for Woz. “I’m so afraid Woz is going to lose himself in the business world,” he’d tell me, widening his eyes dramatically. He never got specific about how or why this might happen and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask questions about. It was too big for language.

Steve’s relationship with time and the future—and just about everything else—was different from that of nearly anyone I ever knew. I gradually became aware that he knew his destiny in big ways and that his intuition had given him very specific information about his life way before he would live it. He knew, for example, that he would be in a relationship with Joan Baez, the folk singer and Dylan’s famous former girlfriend. He knew that he would be a multimillionaire. He told me many times that he would die in his early forties; then one day, when we were in our early forties, he changed the prediction to his mid-forties. When he had become a billionaire but hadn’t died by his mid-forties, I remember him repeating, “I am living on borrowed time,” as if the still-young shaman was angling to carve out a bit more future for himself.

Yet as much as he knew some odd and precise details, Steve was in the dark about others. It was only later, as I was looking at our sleeping daughter in my arms, that I remembered how fearful Steve had been of losing his humanity. That’s when my understanding gelled; it wasn’t Woz who would lose his humanity, it was Steve. Woz, who had a solid, loving bond with both of his own parents, would be fine. Steve had been talking about himself and he’d known it all along. It was always like him to approach matters of personal concern in riddles. I picture him now as a blind man tapping words out with a white stick—out beyond his feet, out beyond the present—communicating between his false and real selves, wanting to confide in me, to not be alone in the mixture of the terrible fear and irrepressible joy of such a rare destiny.