The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan Page B

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.
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    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