Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (22 page)

“Could I get you something?
Water? Coffee? Juice? Something to eat? We’ve got bagels. And muffins.”

This is Francis X. Doyle, working very hard to seem like the world’s all-around most friendly and nonthreatening guy. He’s wearing a navy blue suit that looks like he bought it at Sears, and I’m sure underneath his white shirt his little man-nipples are totally erect just thinking about how today is the most important day of his life and this deposition is going to send him soaring into the governor’s office.

So I ask for water and he actually fetches a bottle of Dasani and brings it to me himself, which is a trick I’ve seen Jeffrey Katzenberg use and which on one level conveys that he’s a super humble and down-to-earth guy, but at the same time also establishes up front that he’s in control, because you asked him for water and if you want the water you have to reach up and take it from his hand, blah blah.

It’s ten in the morning and we’re in the San Francisco U.S. Attorney’s office, a suite of rooms on the eleventh floor of a horrifically ugly office building on Golden Gate. The place has all the charm of a Soviet parking garage, and all I could think when we were walking in was, “Who creates buildings like this? Who sits down with the blueprints and says, Wow, yes, this is
fantas
tic,
we
must
build this?”

It’s all very relaxed and comfortable, lots of dark wood, a brown leather sofa, two leather armchairs, nice lamps on the side tables, sort of old-boy Harvard Club shabby chic. Doyle talks about the weather, and his kids, and the traffic he hit coming in from Marin this morning. He tells me he’s been using Macs since his undergraduate days at Dartmouth in the eighties. He loves the iPod too, and so does his son, who wants him to get my autograph, ha ha ha, isn’t that something. He says he’s really sorry to drag me up here, but it’s his job to talk to everybody.

I know what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to get me to relax and let my guard down. I smile, and say as little as possible. I’ve been fasting and meditating for three days, and I’m totally Zen focused.

A door opens, and in walks William Poon carrying a Sony laptop and making a big deal of letting me see him slipping his Microsoft Zune music player into the pocket of his suit jacket.

Poon is short and slim and bristling with nervous energy, rocking up on the balls of his feet and rolling his shoulders like a boxer. His hair is wet, as if he’s just come from lifting weights at the gym. He’s eager and edgy and wound super tight, in the way that only Asian dudes can be.

Doyle seems weird around him, almost subservient, as if he were working for Poon rather than the other way around. Certainly it’s weird that Poon came in after Doyle did; at Apple I’d never let that happen.

“I’d like to introduce Assistant U.S. Attorney William Poon,” Doyle says.

We shake hands, and I can’t resist. “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”

“William Poon.” He tries to make it sound like “pone.”

“Poon?”

“Don’t start.” He gives me a tight smile.

“Excuse me?”

“You can just call me William.”

“What are you, touchy about your name or something?”

“Look, I’ve heard all the jokes already. How about we keep this professional.”

“Sure thing, Poon. By the way, did you know Bobby D. and I were in Nam together?”

Bobby gives me this look, as if to say,
What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking mental?

Poon says, “That’s very nice for you.”

“I just thought you might be interested.”

“Why, because I’m Asian? My parents are from Singapore.”

“Same thing, right?”

He laughs, but I can tell he’s getting pissed. “You must be pretty ignorant if you think Singapore is the same thing as Vietnam,” he says.

I put up my hands and say, “Hey, back off, Bruce Lee.”

“I don’t believe this.” Poon’s face is getting red, and his left eye has begun to twitch.

Doyle puts his hand on Poon’s arm and says, “William, it’s okay. Calm down.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Do what the white man tells you, Kato.”

“Oh you did
not
just say that.” Poon looks like he is working very hard to keep his head from exploding.

“Are you serious? That’s just fucking racist.”

“I think
you’re
a racist,” I say.

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“You know,” I say, “your hostility is upsetting me. And your bias is very evident. I think you should recuse yourself.”

He starts sputtering. Doyle takes him off to another room to cool down.

While they’re gone Bobby pulls me aside and tells me to cut the shit. “I’m serious,” he says. “Don’t fuck around with this guy.”

“I’m just trying to rattle him.”

“Well, don’t, okay? Do us both a favor.”

The deposition takes place in a room with a conference table, big leather chairs, a microphone on the table and a videocamera pointed at me. This is what we expected. I’ve been rehearsing in a studio that looks almost exactly like this. A court stenographer sits at the end of the table, along with three of Doyle’s associates, two guys and a woman, who sit with folders and stacks of paper and again those heinous Windows laptops—in this case, Dells, which are the worst of all. I try not to look at them. But there is no avoiding the sound of their fans, whirring and droning.

The assistant lawyers introduce themselves. They can barely conceal the fact that they are psyched to be meeting me. But I also know what they’re thinking:
Wow, I am so going to make a fortune in the private sector after I put this asshole in prison.

“Nice to meet you too,” I say to each of them. “A real pleasure.”

On my side I’ve got Bobby D and fifteen lawyers from Apple who are each being paid four hundred bucks an hour to sit here and look formidable.

Doyle and Poon sit directly across from me. Doyle does the talking. Poon just sits there glaring at me and sliding questions to Doyle. They start out with easy questions, like my name, my date of birth, and my title at Apple. For each question, no matter what he asks, I pause for three minutes, with my hands pressed together. Then I ask Doyle to repeat the question. On questions that are more complicated than name, rank, and serial number, I look for tiny discrepancies between the way he asks the first time and the way he asks the second time, and then I ask him which question he’d like me to answer.

It’s a strategy called “Zen Crazy,” which I learned in the seventies when I was studying at the Los Altos Zen Center. The concept comes from Zen monasteries. Certain monks go bonkers from the isolation and turn into these super annoying assholes who go around bugging the shit out of the other monks. In Buddhism these guys are tolerated, and even revered, because it’s believed that their craziness is actually a way of channeling the divine. And even though what they’re saying may appear to be random or senseless, it often contains some higher truth.

Of course in the West if you do this you’re considered a mental case, and they throw you out of your own company. Which is why at certain periods of my life I’ve come very close to chucking everything and disappearing into a monastery, where I could be a complete dick and get worshipped for it. But then I realized— that’s pretty much the deal I have at Apple.

Eventually Francis X. Doyle starts getting exhausted.

“Would you like to take a break?” he says.

I tell him no, I’d rather push on. Through meditation I’ve managed to lower my pulse rate into the thirties, while Doyle is starting to sweat, and his aura has gone from a white-blue when we began to an orange-red. Poon’s aura has been glowing like the center of the sun the whole time.

We take a break anyway, because Doyle apparently has some bladder control issues, and when we reconvene he starts trying to trick me, asking the same questions multiple times but from different angles and in slightly different ways, seeing if I’ll trip up. I’m concentrating as hard as I can. No matter what he asks, I pause, wait, and ask for the question again. Then I pause again, and instead of answering, I’ll say, “Yeah, I don’t know.” Or, “Yeah, I don’t remember.” Or, “Pass. Next category.”

After six hours they let me go. Poon makes a big deal of letting me see him put on his Zune headphones. He won’t shake my hand.

Outside I’m totally pumped. Bobby, however, looks suicidal.

“What do you think you were doing in there?”

“Are you kidding? I friggin
owned
that guy. We should go have a drink and celebrate.”

“Some other time.”

He walks off, looking grim. Whatever. I was there, and I know how it went: I nailed it. I’m so psyched that I race straight home and drink a tiny bowl of miso soup, the first thing I’ve eaten in three days, and then run upstairs to the Home Pod and take off all my clothes and stand in front of the mirrors going, “You talking me? You talking to
me?
Well then who are you talking to? ’Cause I’m the only one here.”

Seriously, I am the coolest person I’ve ever met.

Next morning
I arrive at work to find Tom Bowditch parked outside in his Maybach. I pull into my usual handicapped space and get out to see what he’s doing here.

“Get in,” he says. He’s wearing his navy blue business suit, and he’s not yelling and spitting. He just sits there saying nothing at all. The driver heads south on Route 85 and then up Route 17 into the Santa Cruz Mountains.

“I talked to Bobby D,” Tom says. “He says you screwed the pooch pretty badly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Literally it means you had sex with a dog. But I’m speaking figuratively. Apparently things didn’t go well with Doyle.”

“No way. They got nothing out of me.”

“Bobby says you provoked them. You told that Poon kid that you cut off his mother’s ears or something? Jesus.
Before
they were pissed. Now they want your head on a platter.”

“What’s Bobby DiMarco doing telling you about my interview? What about attorney-client privilege?”

“No such thing. Anyway, kid, here’s the thing. Sampson and his guys have found some more problems.”

“You know what? I want Sampson fired.”

“Well I wanted to diddle Angie Dickinson, kid, but you know what? It didn’t happen. Here’s the thing. This isn’t about you anymore. It’s about the company. And the shareholders. It’s about my investment. My money. You understand? Kid, I’ve made a lot of money thanks to you. I’ve got a five-x return on my investment in ten years. You’ve done right by me, and I appreciate that. Nevertheless, if it were up to me I’d be in favor of firing you right now, or having you killed and making it look like an accident. But luckily for you, we ran some computer modeling scenarios and found out that if you were fired, or killed in a plane crash, the stock takes a thirty percent hit, day one. I hope you take comfort in that.”

“Sure,” I say. “I’m feeling real comfortable right now.”

I reach for the door handle. I figure we’re going about forty miles per hour, and if I jump out and roll just right I could survive with a couple of broken bones or maybe a concussion. But Tom’s a step ahead of me. He clicks the door locks shut. I grab the handle anyway.

“Don’t bother,” he says. “Now listen, Rain Man. Did you not hear what I just told you? You’re not going to get hurt. We need you. We’ve got to protect you. As personally distasteful as this may be to me, it’s what we have to do. So. This means we need to sacrifice some others. You familiar with the Aztecs?”

“Yeah, they built this huge system of highways in Peru, and it’s totally amazing.”

“That was the Incas. The Aztecs were in Mexico. They practiced human sacrifice. The idea was, to appease the gods, they would sacrifice some captives. Same thing now for us. We need to figure out who’s going to get killed. I figure the first victim is Sonya Bourne. She’s already lawyered up, and she walked out in the middle of all this, so what the hell. She’s dead to us, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “No problem.”

Maybe this sounds cruel. I’ve known Sonya for twenty years. She worked with me at NeXT, and came to Apple with me when I returned. She’s one of my oldest quasi-friend type people, and I happen to know that her husband has recently been diagnosed with some weird Stephen Hawking–type wasting-away type disease. In other words, she’s a perfect candidate. Because if she’s actually convicted of anything, her husband’s illness will be something she can use at sentencing to get her some leniency.

“Okay, so we’ve got Sonya. But one scalp isn’t gonna do it. Who else?”

“Jeez,” I say, “I don’t know. Jim Bell maybe?”

“Good one. Seriously.”

We’re driving along Skyline Boulevard, close to Neil Young’s ranch, and I’m thinking maybe we should pull in and see if he’s home. We could go in and talk politics for a while and smoke some weed and Neil can give me shit about how music sounds better on vinyl than on an iPod.

“Listen,” Tom says. “How much do you like Zack? You’re pretty close with him, right?”

“When I had cancer, he visited me every day in the hospital. And his wife brought food over to our house.”

“So you’re pretty close.”