Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (16 page)

“But in my dream I’m being crucified too. What’s that all about?”

“Separate issue. You’re being persecuted. You’re being tried for sins that you didn’t commit. You might be punished. I suppose you feel like you’re being punished already. The bad press, for example. I imagine that’s very hurtful.”

“It is.” I reach for a Kleenex, and wipe my eyes. I’m trying not to cry, but it’s not easy.

I tell him about the trip to China, and how it just seems so unfair that I have to go endure that sort of thing.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he says. “It takes great strength on your part.”

“It does,” I say. “It saps my energy. It drains me. Then I have to come back here and sit down and try to be creative again. It never lets up. I don’t need to be doing this. I could go sit on a beach for the rest of my life. I could be out racing sailboats, like Larry Ellison. I could be running some bogus philanthropy like Bill Gates. But am I? No. Like a fool, I’m still coming in to work every day. I’m still putting in eighteen-hour days. I’m working my ass off. Battling with engineers. Yelling at idiots. Firing people. Getting hassled by everyone. Traveling too much. Never getting enough sleep. Why? Why am I doing this?”

“We’ve talked about this,” Linghpra says. “It’s the hole. The hole in your soul, remember?”

“What are you, Doctor fucking Seuss? What’s with the rhyming?”

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” He pauses. He gathers his thoughts. “There’s an emptiness,” he says. “A vacuum. You try to fill it with work.”

“I never should have gone to China. That kid. I can’t stop thinking about him. All I want to do is make the world a better place. I have a gift. I want to share it. But it hurts. It physically hurts me. And then I get back here and my own government is attacking me. They’re making me out to be a criminal. For what? Because I got paid for my work. Paid well, fair enough. Paid a lot. But look at the value I delivered. Apple’s market value has grown sixty billion dollars since I took over. Sixty. Billion. Dollars. I go in every day, I’m doing a thousand things at once, and somehow, okay, maybe somehow, along the way, I made a mistake.
Maybe.
For this they want to put me in jail? After all I’ve done for the world? Because of a typo? I should be getting the Nobel Prize. Instead they’re measuring my neck.”

“You’re right. It’s not fair.”

“And do you know what’s going to happen? Nobody’s going to want to run a public company anymore. Because you can’t do the job. Nobody can. You make one slip, you interpret one thing the wrong way, and boom—you’re a swindler. You’re running a scam. You’re lying to shareholders. You’re perpetrating a fraud on the American public.”

I stop. I take a deep breath and let it out. I roll my neck, trying to release the tension.

“This is good,” Linghpra says. “This is good work.”

I can’t help it. I start to cry.

“Let it out,” Linghpra says. “The tears are cleansing.”

He leans forward and takes my forearms in his hands. It’s an energy flow exercise that we do. You form a circuit and let energy move back and forth between two people, using a form of emotional osmosis. My anger seeps away into him, and his calmness flows into me. He’s acting like a radiator, taking the heat from my soul and dissipating it out into the room, returning my energy back to me in a cooler state.

Soon I’m letting go. I begin to sob. Big, heavy, gulping sobs. Linghpra guides me down onto a yoga mat. I lie on my side, with my legs curled up. He lies behind me, cradling me.

“You’re a good person,” he says.

He pulls himself against me. He holds me tight in his arms and we stay like that for a long time, while he tells me how good I am, and how whatever bad that’s happened, it’s not my fault.

After therapy
I go out driving. For hours I roll up and down Route 280 between San Jose and San Francisco, listening to Bob Dylan and trying to clear my head. At about two in the morning I’m heading north in this fantastic section of sweeping turns between Sand Hill Road and Woodside when police lights appear in my rearview mirror and I get pulled over.

It’s this total CHPs guy. He’s even got the mustache.

“Sir,” he says, “do know why I’m standing here?”

“Um, because you couldn’t get into college?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Oh,
thank you,
officer. I’m so
grateful.
I’m going to recommend that you get a
medal
for your outstanding police work.”

I hate cops. Always have. This one informs me that I was going ninety miles per hour. I explain to him that the Mercedes I’m driving has a six-hundred-horsepower engine and can go two hundred miles per hour.

“It’s not like I’m in some Volkswagen Golf and I’m gonna blow a gasket or something,” I say. “Ninety miles an hour in this car is like standing still. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s nobody else out here. The freeway’s completely empty.”

The guy gets all pissy and wants to see my license. I don’t have my license with me. “Do you really not know who I am?”

He tells me to step out of the car.

“Look, sugar tits,” I say, “I’m Steve Jobs. I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?”

Bit of advice here: Do not under any circumstances ever refer to a male highway patrolman as “sugar tits.” Next thing I know I’m flat on the pavement, face down, hands cuffed behind my back. Then I’m in the back of a cruiser and deposited in a lockup in Redwood City.

Also in the cell is some drunk kid who appears to be about seventeen years old and says he works at Kleiner Perkins. He got picked up in his Ferrari on a DUI and has vomited into the sink in the cell. The fascist pigs say they can’t clean the sink until tomorrow.

I demand my one phone call. The cop who’s running the lockup says the phones aren’t working. I tell him I’ll use my cell phone. He claims they can’t give me my cell phone, for safety reasons.

“You’re afraid I’m going to beat myself to death with a cell phone?”

“You’ll just have to wait,” he says. “Maybe you can spend a little time thinking about what you did wrong.”

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Believe what you want.”

“You’re going to wish you didn’t do this to me.”

The cop just laughs.

The cell has cement walls, painted gray, with one small window with bars and wire mesh over it. I pop onto the cot in the lotus position and start meditating and humming my syllable. Pretty soon I can barely hear the Kleiner guy moaning. Even the smell of the puke isn’t bothering me so much.

At dawn a different cop comes in and asks if we want any breakfast. He says they’re making a run to McDonald’s. Kleiner Boy orders two Sausage McMuffins, two hash browns, orange juice, and a coffee.

“Is there any chance you could get me a fruit cup?” I say. “Or a smoothie?”

“I’m not a waiter,” the cop says. “I’m going to McDonald’s. Do you want anything?”

I shake my head. But when the McDonald’s food arrives— I’m appalled to say this—the smell of it makes me crazy. Kleiner Boy sees me staring. “You want a bite?” he says.

I shake my head, but I’m still staring. My mouth starts watering. The next time he offers I say okay and he hands me one of the hash brown things. It looks like a scab that came off the back of a horse’s balls. But I have to admit, the taste of it— wow. The grease, the cooking fat, the salt. My God. Next thing I know I’m tearing into one of his Sausage McMuffins.

This is the first time I’ve tasted meat in more than thirty years. In five bites the sandwich is gone. A few seconds later my head is reeling. I lie back on the cot feeling like I’m going to slip into a coma.

I’m lying there fighting to remain conscious when the Apple lawyers arrive, along with Ja’Red. Our lawyers got a call from the captain of the barracks after he came in for his shift and found out who they were holding, and realized he was in deep shit. The lawyers see the McDonald’s wrappers on my cot and start freaking out.

“Who did this to you?” one of them says. “Who did this?”

All I can say is, “Ermmm, unnnhhh, oh, I, uh, ermmmm.”

One of my guys starts calling for a paramedic. Another starts screaming about Gitmo and the Geneva Convention. Ja’Red, who I’m starting to realize is probably the smartest of the bunch, has the presence of mind to call the Governator. Arnold tells the cops to get me out of the cell immediately, and to go to the captain’s office for a conference call.

“I’m ashamed of our state right now,” Arnold says. “And you all should be ashamed of yourselves. I hope you are.”

“We are,” the captain says.

“This person sitting there with you, this is not a regular person,” Arnold says. “This guy is a guy that is like a Buddhist monk, do you understand? Like the guy who used to be on the TV show, the Kung Fu man. You know? A Shaolin priest. This is not a normal human being. This is an enlightened being. Don’t the California police get training in how to deal with enlightened beings?”

“We do,” the captain says.

“And yet you give him meat? For God’s sake!”

“It was a mistake,” the captain says. “We’re looking into how it happened.”

“You must know that you can’t do this! A person like this, if you give him meat you could kill him! My God, you could have a dead corpse in that cell right now. There in your lockup. Then how would you be?”

“It was just a Sausage McMuffin,” the overnight cop says.

“That’s all, eh? Just a Sausage McMuffin? For your information, for this person, for this enlightened being, a Sausage McMuffin is like having a dead rat to be put into his mouth, with the germs and all that. Would you like it if I come up there and put a dead rat in your mouth?”

“No, sir, I wouldn’t like that.”

“Well that’s what you did to this guy, okay? You put a dead rat into his mouth. My God! Steve, I apologize again. If you want to sue the state, I understand, and I’ll support you in this.”

I tell him no, it’s okay, I’d just like to go home.

Arnold tells the pigs that he will be collecting their names and they should stay by their posts and await their new assignments, which will involve things like directing traffic and working construction details. He says if anyone breathes a word of this to the press, he’ll have them hung by their nuts.

“Namaste,” I tell him. “I bow to your inner Buddha.”

“Yeah, same to you and all that,” Arnold says.

Outside the sunlight
almost knocks me over. The lawyers say I’m barely out of a coma and I should let Ja’Red drive me home. Fair enough. We hop into my car, and I send the lawyers back to headquarters. “Go back to the office and do some work,” I say. “Destroy some evidence or something. Find somebody we can sue.”

At first I’m glad to be out in the fresh air and looking up at yet another gorgeous California day. But then we get on the 101 and it’s a parking lot. We’re poking along, starting and stopping, people veering in and out of lanes and beeping their horns, trucks spewing diesel exhaust, Asian kids in their ridiculously souped-up Hondas, this big ugly river of frigtards all going through the motions in their frigtarded lives.

“I can’t believe this. This is awful,” I say.

“This actually isn’t too bad,” Ja’Red says. “Most days it’s a lot worse than this.”

“You’re kidding. You sit in traffic like this every day?”

“Most days. Sure.”

“Why?”

“To get to work.”

“No,” I say, “but I mean, why do we do this? What is the point of putting ourselves through this? Not just me and you. But all of mankind. Why do we live this way?”

“Dude,” he says, “that’s a good question. Seriously. I don’t know why.”

Mrs. Jobs is waiting in the driveway when we pull up. Ja’Red drops me off and takes my Mercedes to the office.

I try to hug Mrs. Jobs, but she pulls away. “I heard about the meat,” she says.

Mrs. Jobs is even stricter about food than I am. It’s not just meat. We don’t eat candy, or any sugar, or any dairy products. We’re completely organic and unprocessed, gluten-free, holistic, macrobiotic. Mostly it’s a health thing, but there’s also a religious element. It’s all about having respect for the planet, and being able to feel a little bit superior to other people. We’ve even given up fish. Happened to me during the making of
Nemo.
One night I was screening some dailies and it occurred to me that, wow, these are real creatures with real lives. That was it. No way. I couldn’t do it anymore. And trust me, I used to
love
sushi.