SEVEN

THE HANDBOOK OF BECOMING

Steve left for Reed College in September. Woz and I went to see him in October, leaving before dawn for the nearly twelve-hour drive to Portland. We got there late in the afternoon, locked our luggage in the hatchback, and raced up to find the glorious boy.

Steve’s dorm was in an old brick building with gargoyles on the rooftops. These creatures were uniquely grotesque and so realistic that I felt them shifting around, flapping their leathery wings, and peering out from the heights of some medieval authority.

There were about six people in Steve’s room when we got there. And in the midst of the flurry of introductions, Steve grabbed my hand and ran, leading me into the privacy of a co-ed bathtub stall where he kissed me like he had never kissed me before.

I didn’t see Woz again until it was time to go home.

I stayed with Steve for two days on that first visit. We’d sleep in his narrow student bed and sneak into the bathroom to take baths in a claw-footed tub. I shared Steve’s meal plan, with the added guest expense of $1.35 per meal, but when we wanted to be alone we’d eat in his bedroom. We made meals on Steve’s Bunsen burner—Campbell’s tomato soup with crackers, mostly, which we’d sip out of camping cups and eat with saltines. I’d explore the bookstore when Steve was in class, which is where I found the full set of pictures from a series of cards he had been sending me by a contemporary painter named Muldoon Elder. I remember that I felt moved that Steve and I both loved the same artist’s work. I’d also bide my time listening to music (usually Beethoven) in the private world of Steve’s headphones. I sang blithely along to the music—until one day Steve came in and started laughing at my tuneless threading notes.

I met Daniel Kottke for the first time on this visit. Like most of Steve’s friends from the period, Daniel—with his long blond hair and soft, mustached face—looked like a version of Jesus. But I had a limited picture of what Steve’s life was like at Reed because my visits were always brief and we shared little time with others.

When I think back on all this now, I have a much greater appreciation of the intensity of teenage emotions. Steve and I missed each other terribly. It was difficult to live so far apart after being so close in the summer, and we wrote frequently to each other during this time.

Some three years later when Steve was helping me move my things out of my father’s garage, he found the large shoebox in which I had stored all of his love letters. I remember him standing there with the S curve of his harlequin body, the soft angle of his long neck gracefully bent as he read. He cast a cold incredulous look at me and said: “Hey, I was romantic!” At the time he said this, our on-again off-again relationship was off, so I felt he was also asking Why didn’t you stay with me?

Being romantic was so important to Steve; it can hardly be overstated. I’ve long since lost those letters and all but one of the cards, but I still have some of the books by Kenneth Patchen with Steve’s handwritten notes inside the back cover. He would practice his calligraphy in brown or gray inks and disregard the spelling and grammar, which I wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

Weatfield club (nighttime branch) invites you to its meetings ~ every night in the weatfield of your mind. bring your lover along too. See you There, OAF.

Sad eyed lady of the low lands, where the sad eyed prophet says that no man comes—my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, shall I leave them by your gate or sad eyed lady should i wait? [quoting Bob Dylan]

“. . the words on the last page are the same as Miriam Patchen used when talking about her husband and his death. he talked about love that way also, the forces behind things continue, life, love, even hate. it is in this sense that I say that Dylan Thomas and the Wheatfield group are there when we are together.”

“All that leaves is always here.”

i love you,

Steve

I will love you until the end of time. ~Oaf

I cherished Steve’s letters and longed to hear his voice, but phone calls were expensive. (It’s amazing to consider that long-distance calls were so costly when gas was only 32 cents a gallon.) Enter the blue box, the now famous electronic device made to circumvent the phone system. Steve and Woz had figured out how to make them and were selling them as an income source. And now I would use one. Steve arranged for Woz to meet me one Saturday on the Homestead campus. We had to use a public telephone because the blue boxes were illegal and could be traced to a home number; the pay phones at Homestead were safe because we used them in the inner quad where they were out of view of the street.

The boxes, approximately three inches square, were made of high quality plastic casing. They were clunky, with push button numbers on top of the box and a wire leading to a small speaker that emitted a series of bleeps, screeches, and tonal undulations that bypassed the need for coins. Setting a call up with a blue box was a two-handed operation as I recall. You had to hold the little speaker to the mouthpiece of the phone while stabilizing the box against your stomach and the shelf below, and then dial 0. Before an operator answered you pressed the numbers in the right order, in response to the sounds that came out of the phone. It was machine on machine. Woz was kind and teacherlike in his explanation and told me that, basically, the blue box talked and responded to the phone system prompts. Later he or Steve wrote the directions on a scrap of paper so I could know the order.

When Steve’s phone started ringing, Woz looked up to see the delight on my face. He then stepped out of hearing range, where he waited patiently. I don’t recall what Steve and I talked about that day. I do, however, remember looking out to see Woz in my peripheral view, where he stood for over an hour. His arms were folded, and he looked down quietly in his own thoughts for the entire time. I was so very grateful. I was struck by his patience and kind demeanor that day in a way that I had never been before. It was the first time I’d seen him as a whole, mature person, and by that one impression alone I regarded him with new eyes thereafter.

Later Steve and Woz must have decided that it was okay for me to have a blue box because for a while I carried one around in a small paper bag between Steve’s visits home. I knew it was FBI illegal, but I never thought about the risk. I didn’t believe I was doing any harm, so I had no qualms about it. In fact, it was exciting, heady even, to have in my possession a piece of technology that reduced Ma Bell to a trifle.

*   *   *

Later in the fall, I took a plane to Portland to be with Steve. Our plan was to hitchhike back to the Bay Area together, two days later. The patina of sixties idealism was wearing off and hitchhiking wasn’t as safe or easy as it had been, if it ever was. But the romantic in Steve still loved hitchhiking so we made our plans.

My father asked me about the trip. I told him about my flight and that I was going to hitchhike home with Steve. Incredulous, he decreed, “You flat out can’t go!” We went round and around arguing for three days until I told him that Steve had arranged for us to catch a ride with a friend who would be driving to the Bay Area. Exhausted, my father seemed to believe my lie. Or maybe he figured he’d let me deal with the consequences of my own dishonesty. He wasn’t going to disrespect both of us by asking for proof. I felt awful about it, but I was a determined teenager and though I tried very hard to be considerate of my father’s concerns, in situations concerning Steve he was simply no match for my will.

So I flew to Portland and we hung out for two days, and when it was time to return, Steve and I set off a bit too late on Friday afternoon. I think it must have been about 4:30 when we walked to the street next to Reed and got our first ride out to the freeway. Then after a bunch of little rides and dinner, we got stuck for over three hours just outside of Eugene, Oregon.

The ground was frozen and we were cold and I sat on my backpack with my head in my arms, tired and miserably unhappy. I felt terrible about having lied to my father and feared that I had made a big mistake. Steve stayed cheerful and jumped to the road to put his thumb out whenever cars came near. Finally, at about 11:30, a huge semi pulled up and offered what would be our longest ride home. Grateful, and so very relieved, we climbed into the cab with a blast of warmth hitting our faces. The seat was huge, and bouncier than I could have imagined. We sat monstrously high up above the road. I had never been in a semi before and the feeling of being held in the cozy arms of its brute power was marvelous. After about twenty minutes the trucker encouraged me to rest, “Why don’t you climb behind the seats and get some sleep, there’s a bed back there.” Wow, I thought. These things have beds, too? I wondered if the guy was safe and if the bed was clean, but he insisted in a kind way and because I was so very sleepy, I decided to trust. Steve stayed talking with the driver for about two hours and then he curled up with me for a night of shifting with the curves, happy for the miles we were leaving behind.

Just before dawn the trucker woke us and told us to put ourselves together because he was about to drop us off. The next thing I knew he had pulled over onto a gravelly shoulder next to the road, where the tunnel burrows through about a thousand feet of solid rock above Sausalito. We were near home and the sun was just beginning to peak into dawn.

Sausalito is a magical place with a deep mystery at its center. With jewel-like houses meandering up a steep hillside, it overlooks the San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, Berkeley, and San Francisco itself. Sausalito has a European feel and an interesting history. It’s where Anaïs Nin lived in a houseboat and wrote parts of The Diary, and where some of the scenes from Orson Welles’s classic movie The Lady from Shanghai were shot. Sausalito was where many of the beat poets hung out in the fifties. It’s also where Otis Redding wrote “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

Steve and I dropped out of the truck’s dark cab and into the predawn morning. Our breath made big, purple plumes as we braced ourselves in the freezing air. Making sure we had all our stuff at our feet, we waved a fond good-bye to the trucker and watched as he maneuvered the huge beast back out on the road, down the thousand-foot drop right onto the Golden Gate Bridge.

From that location we had the view of the gods, and as we waited for our next ride the sun’s rays broke through the buildings that made up the San Francisco skyline. It was the purest light I had ever experienced. And as it rose, it made the Bay Area seem like one luminous room of sea and sky. Steve looked down at me with a smile that was like the beginning of time. He could do that. And we stood there so happy to be alive and close to home, thrilled that we’d gone for the adventure.

*   *   *

We were just kids taking care of our responsibilities in the best way we knew. And being kids, we were living in the moment, too. Although it was, perhaps, too much in the moment for me. I had distinguished myself by winning three awards: for my work in a district-wide painting contest; as a contributor on Mark’s film “Hampstead,” which won honorable mention in a state competition; and for talent and artistic accomplishment, taking Homestead’s highest art award in my graduating class. But I wasn’t making plans for college. It wasn’t something my parents thought about for me and we never discussed it. To be fair, my father had also won awards in his youth and never thought he could go to college, so that may have been part of it. Still, in the absence of such planning, I hadn’t come up with goals to weave into my lust for adventure. I didn’t understand that opportunities weren’t unlimited, that time was finite. I just filled in the blanks with the notion that there would always be some wonderful next step to take, not actually realizing that you can waste time and opportunity if you don’t actually plan next steps.

Then came the day in the mix of this mulligan stew (I think it was in early November of that first year or maybe January of the next), that Steve called to tell me he was dropping out of college. It was the first thing he said and it came anguished and without warning. “I just can’t spend my parent’s money like this anymore,” he said. I understood; he didn’t need to explain. Steve had a keen sense that his education was too great a financial burden on his parents. We had talked about this a few times before he went to Reed, but I thought everything was going to be fine once he was there. My mind raced and I pictured the big boat in the Jobses’ driveway; that made me think they could manage the cost. I deeply admired Steve for the way he considered his father’s feelings, but I felt that Paul was a small, battling man who complained way too much. These complaints weighed heavily on Steve, who kept his worries and his calculations in a cave to himself. By the time he called me he had made his decision.

He told me that he was going to drop out, and then he paused. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m going to start auditing classes.”

“Oh,” I said, intrigued. “What does ‘audit’ mean?”

“It means I can take all the classes I want but not pay for them.”

I was stunned. “You can do that?” Magical worlds of access unfolded before my eyes.

“Yes, although I won’t get any credit.”

“Oh,” I said again, sort of sad this time.

“But I don’t need the credit. I just want the classes.” He said this with a sense of steely-eyed realism. And there it was—evidence of the creator’s synthesizing mind. Earnest and pared, Steve had figured out how to go to college without using his parents’ money.

When I look back on all of this now, I wonder how the adoption lawsuit in Steve’s infancy might have factored into not just this decision, but how it had affected his life early on. At a time when adoption was culturally less reflective and variable than it is today, Steve’s birth mother, Joanne, seemed uniquely remarkable and courageous to have challenged the placement of her child. And maybe incredibly stupid, too. I imagine her having acted boldly, even in the midst of what must have been nearly unbearable grief over the loss of her son, not to mention his father’s departure, the man she must have deeply loved. She was only twenty-three or twenty-four, but her fierceness and sense of authority stand out for me. And so does her lack of reflection and compassion for Steve and his new family’s emotional environment.

What I imagine now is that Joanne could have had a back alley abortion but chose to give birth. And in the nine months the child grew in her, she must have thought through what kind of influence she could have on his life when she wouldn’t be there. Her blessings would include a Catholic upbringing with its Divine Mother to oversee him all his days; adoptive parents whose higher education would ensure that his environment reflected his birth parents’ deep regard for learning; and an adoptive family wealthy enough to afford her child big choices in life. But it all torqued out of shape because the family she’d chosen changed their minds at the last minute and decided they wanted a girl.

The Jobses had not attended college. They weren’t Catholic and they weren’t wealthy. So after the adoption was finalized, Joanne demanded that her plan for her child be honored. I understand that. But then there are the other painful pieces that float in my mind; Joanne’s beauty, her returning to take him away from the Jobses and put him into what she perceived to be a better home with better people. And the Jobses, first-time parents being told they weren’t good enough, fighting like hell to keep the newborn that they’d named Steven Paul. They probably even wondered if they were doing the right thing by fighting. Why not just give the baby up as the mother wanted? All through it I can hear Paul, blustery and pragmatic, saying, “Damn it, lady, you let go of him, he’s ours now.”

Understandably, the court’s impending decision interfered with Clara’s ability to feel safe enough to love the infant for his first six months. It was seventeen years after the fact when she told me this and the whole thing still haunted her. The Jobses’ home must have tottered with profound uncertainty until they finally won the case. And all of Joanne’s bright dreams for her son narrowed to one single requirement: that the Jobs promise that Steve would go to college. With that agreed, at least it meant that everything was settled.

In light of it all, Clara’s later guilt over not wanting to mother such a difficult child when Steve was two makes the picture even more poignant. And because Mona, Steve’s sister by his birth mother, later told me that Joanne had never saved any money for her college education, it makes me think there was shattering in everyone that had come from both the adoption and lawsuit. It would seem that Steve’s existence set off detonations from the very beginning.

Steve had nerve. It was a thin line that ran up through the middle of him. If you plucked it with a less than a careful comment, he would speak harshly about his parentage: “My parents are the ones who raised me, not the person who gave birth to me. She gave me away. She doesn’t deserve to be called my mother.” This refrain seemed to me to acknowledge not just the fact that the Jobses were the ones who did all the work, but Steve’s bitter sense of loss and what I imagine were years of Paul Jobs spitting tacks about it and everything else he felt powerless to control.

Back then Steve was so empathic that I think he overidentified with his father and wanted to shore up his insecurities. And so, at the tender age of seventeen, he took things into his own hands. He made the decision to drop out of his degree program and audit courses instead. It was a funny hybrid of his own desire to learn exactly what he pleased without it breaking his parents’ bank account, and complying with his birth mother’s requirement. I never heard him regret it. Not once. And there were plenty of times he might have, because the next few years were rough.

That his parents allowed for the change is revealing, too. Here was one of the smartest students at a high school known for extremely bright kids, so advanced that he met once a week with a handful of students chosen from a pool of thousands for an elite math class. It seems to me that a child of his intelligence should have been cultivated, but that would not have been the Jobses’ context. Once he had made the decision to stop matriculating at Reed, as young as he was, he had in some way become his own man. He wouldn’t have given his parents any say in the matter and that, ironically, was consistent with the Jobses’ worldview. That would have calmed Paul down and made Steve look good to him.

Steve acted happy about the change and his fledgling confidence grew as he embraced his Grand Experiment. I could feel his slightly overloaded enthusiasm to fake it until he could make it. Steve was inventive, for sure, and he was great at finding alternative ways of doing things, like using other people’s unused meal tickets and sleeping on couches and on dorm room floors in his sleeping bag. Steve liked being a vagabond in the tradition of Woody Guthrie. He fully enjoyed the experience of being homeless and free with the wind at his back. Steve was an experimental romantic at heart, and may very well have had his eye on the rugged beauty of that former time. I think this was what he meant when he told my father that he wanted to grow up to be “a bum,” and to me it suggests a Henry V blueprint of the foolish days of the young prince before he ascends to the throne.

Steve went back and forth between the Bay Area and Oregon a lot over the next year. I’d drive him to an on-ramp entrance of a freeway so he could hitchhike. And driving away from those drop-offs sort of broke my heart because with his shoulders up around his ears and his black hair ruffled and flying in the chill wind he looked like a cold and lonely raven, like a bird on a wire. I remember him smiling and waving good-bye, determined to make the best of it. It still gets to me.

*   *   *

Everything that happened for him at that point was a complete surprise to me. Steve audited Shakespeare, poetry, dance, and calligraphy. I was baffled he didn’t take more science and math, because that’s what he was good at and what Reed was known for. It’s remarkable to me that he followed his instinct to develop himself through the arts. He must have told me twenty times that he loved his dance class. “I’m not very good,” he’d say, shaking his head at his willingness to be seen like that, “but I love it, I just love it!” He couldn’t stop repeating himself. He loved all his audited classes, but … dance? I tried to imagine him in a leotard, but I couldn’t quite see it. Steve had been a competitive swimmer in high school and until he went to India, he had a beautiful swimmer’s body with a muscular upper body and arms. But he could also be awkward and clumsy in all things physical. His massages hurt and he was extremely self-conscious, tripping and falling over his own feet more than anyone can possibly imagine. And yet, he also had a sense of sublime grace in many of his movements. I would try to see into how this all might have worked for him in a dance class. I may have snickered a little, too.

At one of the winter breaks, Steve hitchhiked with a friend from Reed to the Bay Area. They stayed at my house, since my father was out of town on a business trip. The two were excited about their clever plan to hitchhike to Mexico on a private airplane flying out of the little airport in Palo Alto, which then was only known as a college town for Stanford. Rainy Portland could be very dreary, and Reed in those days had one of the highest suicide rates of any college in the United States. Bright, sunny, cheap Mexico must have seemed like the best idea anyone had ever thought of. The guys had put an advertisement in the local paper saying they needed a ride, but they got no response, so they decided just to show up at the airport and shake the pilots down for a ride. Steve’s body moved like a song and a prayer in the hopes of free air passage.

The three of us spent the next day and a half in Cupertino, and then I dropped them off at the Palo Alto airport in my father’s VW bug, fingers crossed that they would be picked up. I knew they had done it when they hadn’t called by nightfall. Steve came back a week later, sunburned and happy, bearing a gift to me of a beautiful rainbow-colored Mexican blanket, which I had for years until someone stole it out of the back of my car. (You know who you are!)

On the evening they stayed with me before their trip, while Steve and I sat on the couch and talked, I noticed that his friend was wandering around the living room with a look of dumb loss on his face. Steve was completely ignoring his friend, and I felt that the guy was disconnected from us, in a sort of no-man’s-land that alarmed me. The change in the two boys’ dynamic was subtle, but I found the friend’s expression more profoundly disturbing than might easily be explained.

In a flash of indignation I got off the couch to draw his friend back in, and as I got up, I looked back over at Steve to see a hazy, almost drunken look on his face. It was as if he were in an altered state of his own. I couldn’t understand it: neither of us used marijuana very often and that night we definitely had not. I was miffed at Steve because I felt he was excluding his friend in some weirdly powerful way. I moved away from Steve and found his friend bedding, food, and water and we talked a bit because I had a strong instinct to care for him. I’m not really the mothering type; as an artist I tend to relish my own experience. But I’m sensitive to people in my environment and on this evening, my attention was reordered in a way that told me that something was way off. I had a feeling that Steve, so crippled that he needed to be the center of my focus, had actually blanked his friend right out of the room.

In retrospect, it seems to me that there was a dark vortex next to Steve for as long as I knew him. But that was the first time I recognized it. After that, I always knew, just below the level of words, when that aspect of Steve would show up. Through the years, I’d see that buttoned-up look of shock and loss overcome people when they went from inclusion to invisibility when they were with him. It always left me pale with the feeling that something was terribly wrong. The words “there it is again” would move silently through me when I saw that lost-from-self look in people.

I never thought of Steve as having serious mood swings because they were so mild back then. But after he became the Steve Jobs the world would know, I would hear about the extremes other people witnessed. I still thought it seemed unlike him until much later, when I better understood my own creativity and so could appreciate his. I know now that it would have been impossible for Steve to keep his extremes hidden after Apple had started because it is through the movement between the highs and the lows that creativity and invention flesh out new spaces. Highs and lows are what it takes to break the mold of previous consciousness and allow world-shattering ideas to be birthed. Not only did Steve have a big hole in him from the adoption, he had an enormous id that fed on nearly everything to fill it up. Looking for the love he missed, he made sure all eyes were on him so he could get what he needed. He’d wipe people out in the process.

But that night in Cupertino, prior to his Mexico trip, I wasn’t mature enough to understand that Steve was himself in deep trouble, and that was why he was creating a sense of loss in others. It was over my teenage head and I was just so tired of his haunting social ineptitude that it triggered something self-protective in me and I started to back out of the relationship. I didn’t know that I should talk about it with him, much less how to talk about it. In this I am sure I was caught by my own limitations as well as by his. I felt like growling and screaming and shouting because he was using his weaknesses to manipulate people who didn’t know what was happening. I just didn’t have a vocabulary for this and, even if I had, he likely wouldn’t have been willing to hear it.

*   *   *

By the spring of ’73, I didn’t visit Steve at school anymore. Once he had dropped out, there was no place for me to stay and I didn’t want to visit him anyway. So our distance, emotional and otherwise, increased. He was distraught.

One day in early spring, Steve called to tell me he had rented a room in a house near Reed. He asked if I would move up to Portland to live with him as soon as I graduated from high school. “No, I’m sorry, but no,” I told him. He seemed so sad I hated to refuse, but I didn’t have a life up there and I didn’t feel good about him at that point. In truth, I felt that all that was unconscious between us was too great to foster happiness. Eventually I came to understand that he had been seeing other girls at this time. He himself bragged and bragged about it years later. He was in college and surrounded by all kinds of beautiful and interesting young women, it made sense. But the real issue—and the one that I didn’t understand at the time—is that he asked me to move up there to stop him from having these other relationships. It was his attempt not to destroy ours.

I think Steve called with the invitation because he had a beautiful dream for the two of us as a couple. He wanted me to come up Portland and start painting seriously, while he wrote poetry and learned to play the guitar. But this was sort of in the talk bubble above his head where he shelved his imaginary copy of the Handbook of Becoming Bob Dylan. It was a great plan but it was far more formulated in his mind than any plan I’d had for myself. I couldn’t have made myself into a painter at that time because I didn’t know how to focus or work hard. I needed training and experience and more feedback from good teachers. And because I didn’t see him as a musician, I didn’t have the foundational belief needed to support an idea of marrying our fortunes in such a way.

I was disenchanted.

Steve had come to seem like a floppy marionette that had lost the taut lines connecting to his excellence. I would never lose sight of his beauty or the knowledge that he was extraordinary. I would always believe in him. But he was so spun around and tangled up that I knew of nothing I could have done to help right then. That was when he began his descent into what I think of as one of the darkest periods of honest confusion that I ever saw in Steve. It was embodied in Dylan’s paradoxical lines about there being no success like failure and failure being no success at all. I personally never knew how to be so honest while in as much difficulty, as he knew how to be, and so these were some of the times I felt my deepest, most profound awe of him. This was the beginning of when I came to trust failure in Steven Paul Jobs, far more than success.

*   *   *

One day around March of 1973, Steve’s mother sort of angled in obliquely to ask if I wanted to live at their house, in Steve’s room, until I completed high school. I think she asked in a careful way so as not to shock me. But I was shocked and wondered where the question came from. Why was she offering me a place to live? My mind searched—did she know my mother was mentally ill? It’s likely that the whole school knew, but I had no way of talking about it publicly.

Not meaning to be ungrateful to Clara, I mumbled a response, something like “No thank you, no, but thank you.” NO! I thought to myself as I scanned the implications. The truth was that I had just met Jim, a guy in my art class, and we were spending a lot of time with each other. I could never stay at Steve’s parents’ house while my affections were blooming with this new boy. It would have been dishonest. But there was more to it. Clara’s offer frightened me; I felt like I was an outcast in my own family and I had no idea how to fit into another’s. Also it would have felt like a prison. At a time when kids didn’t trust the older generation, her offer seemed like a generous bolt from the blue. But I didn’t have a close relationship with her and I didn’t want her generosity. None of it made sense and it only occurred to me much later that Steve had more than probably asked her to offer this as a way of keeping me in his life. I’m sure she never would have considered it without his first requesting it anyway. It was always very like Steve to ask people to mediate for him.

Spring moved toward summer. I lived at my father’s apartment in Cupertino and was free to be and do as I liked when my dad was away on business trips. I would stay out until all hours with Jim and we would walk all over Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and Cupertino, down the long dark streets and through the blooming cherry and apricot orchards, sometimes until dawn, getting to know each other. This was the bohemian lifestyle that I have always had a great appetite and natural inclination for, and I still kept up my grades. Under those deep blue starry nights we talked quietly and laughed a lot as we walked down quiet streets, sometimes running over the nights and over the tops of cars in our bare feet, climbing over fences and out of windows and up onto rooftops, treetops, hilltops, listening to lonely dogs bark to each other across great distances. The nighttime had a way of redrawing the daytime territories, and in this I found my way out of structure and back into full-blown wonder.

Jim’s sensibilities were warm, human, and earthy. Our relationship wasn’t sexual; we were more like happy soulful playmates falling in love, yet not too seriously. Like me, he liked to live inside alternative worlds. He was crazy in love with the Tolkien Trilogy and was in the middle of illustrating the whole thing, beautifully, when we met. Once, when he was lying on his back on my couch and I was sitting on the floor close up next to him with our hands and arms playfully entwining between deep kisses, I felt his breath on my face as he quietly said, “I love you.” I could hardly bear the words before my entire being dropped down to what felt like hundreds of thousands of miles below all surfaces. The expression of his love was profound and I confess that later I compared it to Steve’s expressions of love, which at that point seemed more about insecurity than anything else. Still I was drawn powerfully to Steve and a love that seemed both broken and big. It was big. In this present age where the tendency is to pathologize everything, it’s easy to think that Steve and I were attracted to each other because we were both, in essence, motherless kids. But that’s not how it was. In fact, it was motherlessness that got in the way of a love that was real. I loved Steve. He was time and timelessness to me and I measured everything by him. I would have thrown my lot in with Steve over anyone if I’d known how. But I didn’t know how.