Before Alice and I were divorced, Alice told me about a friend of hers, Sherry, who was interested in buying a movie theater. A real running theater. It was the Mayfair Theater in San Jose. Alice thought I should buy it, and I could never turn Alice down when it came to anything she wanted to do.
So I bought it.
Sherry and Alice had gotten involved with a group called Eastern Star, a group of women who had relatives in the Freemasons. Because she was in Eastern Star, she was spending a lot of time there, a lot of nights away there. In order to have more time with her, I decided that I would become a Freemason. Freemasons, after all, regularly have joint events with Eastern Star. So I went down to the Masonic lodge and did a lot of training, and after some period of time and three big events, I became a third-degree Mason. Then I got more time with Alice. I eventually became an officer and everything.
I should tell you that although I am a lifetime Freemason, I’m not like the other people who are Freemasons. My personality is very, very unlike theirs. To get in, you have to say all this stuff about God, the Bible, words that sound a little bit like they come from the Constitution, and none of this ritual stuff is the way I think, you know? But I did it, and I did it well. If I’m going to do something, I always try to do it well. And I did this for one reason, as I said: to see Alice more. I wanted to save the marriage. I would go so far as to join the Freemasons if that’s what it took. That’s how I was.
So anyway, pretty much near the end of the marriage, I was a Freemason and I bought that theater. Alice’s friend Sherry and Sherry’s boyfriend, Howard, would run it. It had been their idea from the start, to run a theater. They’d gotten to Alice, as a friend, so she got to me. And now I owned it.
The Mayfair Theater was in kind of a low-income area of town. I remember we had to paint the bathroom black because of all the graffiti, and even afterward, people would still put graffiti in it, only in white paint. At least we could wash the walls.
I felt like making it into something special. I never had the idea that it was going to make a lot of money, but I wanted it to be kind of special and I put in nice seats and a good sound system. I had a couple of guys running it, and they scraped off a wall one day and found there was this beautiful natural wood artwork underneath this blah wall someone had tacked up on top of it. So we actually brought in some experts who sanded everything down, and they were able to recover the original artwork. I loved that theater.
But then Alice and I got divorced, and I was stuck with the theater. I went there every day after work at Apple. I drove down there, set up my computer so I could get some work done, saw what movies were playing, and said hi to everybody. The theater was this fun group of people, a really small operation. It was neat to see how it operated. I mean, it was a small, low-budget theater. We didn’t get that many customers. And we only got pretty low-rate movies. For instance, we had Friday the 13th. That was probably the biggest movie we ever showed, and we only got it long after it opened.
Actually, the only movies we ever sold out on were gang movies, like The Warriors. That made sense, considering what part of town we were in!
I’d only been single a few weeks when I asked out the woman who would be my second wife, Candi Clark. I knew her because once, when I bought a bunch of advance tickets to a Star Trek movie and offered them half price to Apple employees, she’d asked for a bunch because she had a lot of brothers. I thought she was pretty cute, so I asked her to come to one of those low-budget science fiction movies we were showing at my theater, and she did. The next day, we raced bumper cars at the Malibu Grand Prix track near the San Francisco airport and I beat her really well.
I thought she was just super pretty. She was blonde, medium build, and it turned out she had been an Olympic kayaker. (I found that out when I saw a picture of her and Ronald Reagan on the wall of her apartment after our second date.) She worked at Apple creating database reports for managers, that sort of stuff.
So now I had a girlfriend and that was it. It was all really quick.
It wasn’t very long after I’d divorced Alice and met Candi that we decided to get married. She had an uncle down in San Diego who made jewelry, and I had this idea. Let’s get a ring for me, I said, that has the diamond on the inside so nobody can see it. I thought that would be more special than a normal ring. We would know there was a diamond, but the world wouldn’t.
So we decided to fly down on a plane, on my V-tail Beechcraft, which I’d bought right after getting my pilot’s license six months before. I think today that it was the most beautiful and unorthodox single-engine plane there is. It was so distinctive, the shape of its tail was so unique, and I was so proud to fly it. I had it painted—by a painter named Bill Kelly, he’d done PR for Apple—in the nicest earth tones.
The first time in my life that I was able to take a passenger alone, it was with Candi. I took her down to San Jose one night and it was raining. Of course, I had never flown in the rain at night, but I did and we got back safely. I think that might have been my best landing ever.
But no, I wasn’t at all cocky about my flying. I knew how to do a flight plan and how to do flights. I knew the rules to follow. But still, I was a beginner pilot. I was still a pretty rough new trainee. But anyway, Candi and I took a few trips in the new plane, and then one day we decided to fly down to San Diego where Candi’s uncle could design that wedding ring with the diamond on the inside.
Candi and I flew from San Jose to a small airport in Scotts Valley to pick up Candi’s brother Jack and Jack’s girlfriend, Chris. Usually I would just taxi around and then take off, you know? So I’m going around, and suddenly I notice I’m blocked by another plane that’s just sitting there, stalled on the taxiway. I’m thinking, Great. Great. I can’t even get out of there.
So I looked around—I think we turned the airplane around—and I go off some other side way. By then the stalled airplane was gone and finally I got to the start of the runway. And I did all the little start-up procedures and reached for the throttle and you know what?
I remember reaching for the throttle at the start of the runway, and that’s it. I can remember every other detail of the airport and everything that day up to that point. But I can remember absolutely nothing about what happened after that point. I have no memory of what happened next. (Later, I figured out that maybe Candi, who was sitting in the front, accidentally leaned on one of the controls, but we’ll never know exactly what caused that accident.)
I woke up in the hospital, so they tell me, but it wasn’t until five weeks later that I was able to remember that I was in a plane crash.
My friend Dan Sokol later told me that he saw news of the accident on TV. He said he turned on the TV and clicked onto the news channel when he heard something about an executive of a Silicon Valley computer company crashing his plane in Scotts Valley. And he immediately turned around just in time to see about two seconds of the Beechcraft upside down. I had crashed in the parking lot of a skating rink.
Of course, as I told you, I remember absolutely nothing about what happened, not even about being in the hospital or anything. It was some head injury! Dan told me my room was filled with gifts and toys and stuff from people at Apple. Handmade cards, off-the-shelf cards, and junk food. It was all there, Dan said, but I have no memory of it. Zero memory. Dan even told me that I asked him to smuggle in a milk shake and pizza for me, which sounds exactly like me, so at least I know that I was really in there. I mean, people took pictures of me in there playing computer games, which is what I would do, but I have no memory of that. No memory at all.
At some point, I guess a week or two later, I was finally released and allowed to go home. I didn’t go to Apple to work, I presume because I thought every day was a weekend. That’s the only explanation I can think of now as to why I didn’t go to work, and also why I didn’t notice my dog was missing. (He’d been checked into a kennel.)
For a few weeks after, I was living in my house in Scotts Valley in this weird, not-fully-functional state. I mean, people later told me I seemed hazy. They say I was driving around on my motorcycle, but people really had to direct me to do things. Like: “You go here. You have to do this now. Now you have to do this.” I was apparently functioning, but I hardly have any memories of it. I was living this halfway weird life. I didn’t realize that my dog had been boarded for five weeks away from me, for instance. It just seemed like every day was the same day. I didn’t even realize I was missing a tooth for five weeks—one of my front teeth! How do you not spot something like that? I don’t know, I can’t explain it.
Now, Candi and her brother, I found out much later, were also injured in the crash. She even had to get some plastic surgery afterward. But I was the one who was the hardest hit. As I said, I ended up having what is known as anterograde amnesia, even though the doctors didn’t know it at first. Anterograde amnesia means that you don’t lose memories; you just lose the ability to form new ones.
But I guess, when I think about it now, it was actually a good thing because in my mind, I never had a plane crash to get over. It just isn’t there. I underwent hypnosis to see if I could come up with any recollection of what happened to cause the crash. I really would’ve liked to know. But nothing came to me.
So in those five weeks—the weeks of my amnesia—I remembered everything from before that. I had all my old skills and memories, and those memories are still there up till that point. But during that five-week period, whatever I was doing, I wasn’t remembering it.
And then suddenly I came out of it.
The first, the very first, memory I had was that I was somehow at the Macintosh building talking to associates I’d been working with on the Macintosh. And they were telling me something about how the project was going. And I don’t remember exactly who, but I think it was Andy Hertzfeld (designer of the Macintosh graphical user interface) who mentioned something about a plane crash. A plane crash? And the instant he said the words “plane crash,” I knew there was this thing about a plane crash in this dream I’d been having.
So I said to myself, Oh, this is a dream I’m having right now. And in a dream, I can always tell myself that I can just turn around and walk the other way. You can go any which way and a dream follows you. But this time I thought, No, I’ll play by the rules of this dream and I’ll keep talking to Andy. So I sat there talking to him, and that’s my very first memory. But it was a very weak memory.
That night, I remember Candi and I went to see the movie Ordinary People. I don’t remember a single detail of that movie, only that we saw it. Then we got home and we were in bed. I was lying on my back and thinking, Wait, did I have a plane crash that I heard about and kept dreaming about, or didn’t I? I mean, I didn’t have any memories of such a crash, and it seems like you would remember such a thing, wouldn’t you?
Is it possible I had a plane crash and didn’t remember it?
So I turned over and asked Candi, “Did I have a plane crash or was it a dream?”
I guess she thought I was joking, because she said, “It was a dream, Steve.” That’s what she said. That it was a dream. She wasn’t playing with my head. She just had no idea that I had no idea I’d been in a plane crash.
This was a mental dilemma because I was struggling to prove in my head that it could be true.
So now I’m sitting there wondering if I’m ever going to get anybody to tell me if I had a plane crash or not. I suppose if I’d been smart, I would have looked in the newspaper or asked other people, but this was actually the first time I was starting to think that maybe I had in fact had a plane crash and it wasn’t a dream.
So I sat there that night, feeling my body. And my body didn’t have any broken bones or signs of a plane crash. Ha. I didn’t think to look for a missing tooth!
So I kept thinking. I kept trying to pin it down. How do you figure out if something didn’t happen? I could remember every single detail of that day up to the point of reaching for the throttle, but I couldn’t remember pushing it. And then I thought of something logical. I thought, Wait a minute. I don’t remember landing in Santa Catalina. If I had landed the plane, there’s absolutely no way I would’ve forgotten that landing.
As soon as I thought that thought, I realized that my brain had been working very strangely. I realized that I’d been in a plane crash and it was real. And I just jerked my head up right away and realized that everything I was starting to suspect was real. My head started working immediately and retrieving and forming memories, I could feel it. And what was strange was, I could feel both states of mind. I had just come from a state where I wasn’t forming memories, and now I was moving into this different state where I was forming memories. I could feel both states of mind at the same time, which was so strange.
Then I looked at the bed stand next to me, and there were something like a hundred cards from people I had received while I was in the hospital. They were sending me best wishes, saying get well and all that. And I read them. They were all from my very closest friends and associates.
And I said, Oh my god, I didn’t even know they were there.
But I must have seen them every single night. Because they were there every single night. So it was like coming out of a very strange state and realizing that your head has not been forming any memories. That’s what I deduced.
The very next day, my father called to remind me that I was supposed to show up for an appointment with the psychologist I’d been seeing. I had no memories of ever seeing a psychologist. But I went up to Stanford to see that psychologist and I kind of excitedly started explaining to him that I hadn’t been forming memories or remembering the plane crash, and suddenly I’d come out of it. My head just switched over, I told him. It was amazing.
And would you believe it? He didn’t believe me! I suppose I was so excited when I told him about this that he kept telling me I was a manic-depressive. I was stunned, and told him that I didn’t have big highs or big lows like a manic-depressive would. I told him I was a very stable person. He said, “Well, manic depression usually starts when you’re thirty.” I was thirty. He had interpreted my excitement about my memory returning as being manic. What a quack.
Well, those five weeks after the plane crash, when I was finally and fully out of the amnesia, I decided this was a lucky opportunity. I should finish college, and not go back to Apple right away.
I realized it had been ten years since my third year of college, and if I didn’t go back to finish up now, I probably never would. And it was that important to me. I wanted to finish. And I had already been out of Apple for a while anyway—five weeks without knowing it, actually—so that made it easier to just go back to school and not go back to Apple right away. I decided that life is short, right? So I decided.
I applied and got accepted and registered under the name Rocky Raccoon Clark. (Rocky Raccoon was the name of my dog, and Clark was my fiancée Candi’s soon-to-be maiden name.)
And soon after I made that decision, Candi and I set the date to get married: June 13, 1981. It was an amazing party. We had the Apple hot-air balloon there in the front yard of Candi’s parents’ house. It was a spectacular party. Emmylou Harris, the famous folksinger, sang at the reception.
The day after the wedding, I got an apartment in Berkeley to get ready to begin my fourth year of college. And on the weekend, the plan was that I would go back to this house we had bought on the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was amazing. Just a huge castle of a place.
It had a lot of flat land, which is unusual, so I had tennis courts built. And Candi turned a little pond into a nice little lake. I also bought an adjoining property, making twenty-six acres in all. It was a paradise. (Candi, now my ex-wife, still lives in that paradise.)
Candi stayed there working on the house while I spent the week in this college apartment a couple of hours north, in Berkeley. It was a great year, and a fun year. Because I was going under the name Rocky Raccoon Clark, no one knew who I was. I had fun posing as a nineteen-year-old college student, and the engineering classes were so easy for me. Every weekend, I went back home to the castle.
One of the first things I did at Berkeley, in addition to taking engineering courses for my degree, was to enroll in both psychology courses (for majors) and two courses specifically about human memory. After my accident and amnesia, I was intrigued by such strange aspects of memory, and I wanted to understand it more.
As far as my own condition went, it turned out to be relatively well known. It happens frequently to people after car and plane accidents, and it’s associated with damage near the hippocampus section of the brain. It was a typical condition. There is no excuse for why my doctors—especially my psychologist—didn’t figure this out.