Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (4 page)

“First of all,” Tom says, “this
is
serious. Second, don’t call me
dude.
I’ve told you before. Don’t make me tell you again.”

“Whatever, dude. But just because you woke up with sand in your crack I don’t think you need to fly in here and hassle us. But whatever. You go ahead. I need to get my harmony back.”

Then I lean back in my chair and close my eyes and pretend I’m meditating, as if to say,
Hey, asshole, wake me up when you’re done having your tantrum.
It’s what I always do when people get angry. The crazier they get, the more I go Zen. It drives them nuts.To be honest I’m about
this
close to just getting up and leaving, because the last thing I need on a Sunday morning is to be sitting here getting sprayed with spit and seeing my own boardroom—which I designed myself, as a personal homage to Walter Gropius—being polluted by the stink of Windows laptops. Moreover, everyone here knows that Sunday morning is my Ultimate Frisbee league and nothing, I mean
noth
ing,
messes with my Ultimate. It’s sacred. To show that I am here under protest, I’m wearing the uniform of the Apple Ultimate Frisbee team—black shorts, black socks, black shoes, and a black mock turtleneck T-shirt with a tiny black Apple logo silk-screened on the shirt, a half shade darker than the shirt itself, so that you can barely see it. In other words,
classy.

Also here under protest is Lars Aki, our head of design, who is wearing a wet suit and little rubber booties to remind everyone that he’s supposed to be kite-boarding right now. He’s sitting in an Eames chair with his leather-bound sketch pad, looking out the window at the trees bending in the wind and no doubt thinking how awesome the chop is up on the bay today and getting more and more bummed out.

Will MacKenzie, who’s on the board because he’s my pal, jumps in and says he agrees with me that we shouldn’t let this options business become too big a distraction to our product development. Some other guy who’s on the board and whose name I can never remember—he’s about ninety years old, and runs a clothing company, or a chain of clothing stores, something like that—says he agrees with Will MacKenzie.

Al Gore, who’s joining by videoconference using our incredible iChat AV software, pipes up and says in his stupid drawl, “Say, if you folks don’t mind, I’d like to talk a little bit about what Apple can do regarding this climate change crisis that we’re facing.”

“Request denied,” Tom says.

“What’s that?” Gore says. “I’m sorry, I missed that.”

Tom mutes the computer with Gore’s face on it and turns his attention to Zack Johnson, the only member of the board who hasn’t spoken yet. Zack was our CFO when this accounting stuff took place. He left last year to run a hedge fund, but I kept him on our board because he always does whatever I tell him.

“Zack,” Tom says, “I expect you’ll get involved here, and work with Paul Doezen and help him find any information that’s needed. And Sonya, I’d like you to make sure that Charlie and his team get all the support they need.”

That’s when Sonya drops the bombshell. “Actually,” she says, standing up, “since the company has gone against my recommendation and decided to retain outside counsel, I’m going to resign. Effective immediately.”

She slides a letter across the table. Tom looks at the letter.

“You can’t quit in the middle of an SEC investigation,” he says.

Sonya doesn’t bother to respond. She looks at Sampson and says, “If you need anything from me you can call my lawyer.”

“You’ve hired a fucking lawyer?” Tom says. He looks like smoke is going to start pouring out of his ears. “Where do you think you’re going? Sit back down, lady. Did you hear me?”

Sonya walks out. After that the meeting breaks up. I’m halfway out the door, hoping to catch the end of the Ultimate game, when Tom grabs my arm, tight enough that it hurts, and says, “Hold on. I need to talk to you.”

“Kid,” he says,
in a low voice, “it’s just you and me here now, okay? So I need you to tell me the truth. People get greedy. It happens. It’s human nature. These guys, Charlie Sampson and his guys, they’re good. If there’s a problem, they’re going to find it. So tell me. Are they going to find something?”

We’re in the conference room, alone, with the door shut. He’s leaning close to me. I can smell his Old Spice, which makes me queasy.

“This company,” I say, “operates under the highest standards of integrity and honesty and transparency. These have been our principles from day one.”

“Jesus. It’s worse than I thought. Fuck.” He slugs down the end of his coffee. “Kid, you do understand what it means when your general counsel quits and hires her own lawyer, right?”

I inform Tom that earlier in the week I instructed Sonya to fire herself, so it could be that she was just following my orders.

He makes this sound that’s halfway between a groan and a sigh. He tells me he’s done some asking around and discovered that the guys who are really running this investigation are way above Doyle; it’s all coming out of Washington. “This goes right to the top,” he says. “These people want your head on a platter.”

I ask him what people he’s talking about. He says he’ll answer my question with a couple of questions of his own, which are: (a) which political party do I make a big deal of supporting every four years during the presidential elections? and (b) which political party actually won the last two elections?

Fair enough. The fascists in Washington hate me because I’m a super liberal lefty Democrat. It drives them nuts because, unlike the big oil companies, out here in Silicon Valley guys like me manage to make a lot of money without resorting to being evil and exploiting people.

“The problem,” Tom says, “is that you gave them an opening. You see? These guys hate you, and you gave them something to attack you with. It’s like when Clinton got the blowjobs.”

“I didn’t get any friggin blowjobs. Jesus. I wish.”

“I’m speaking metaphorically,” he says.

Tom says that when you know you’re in the public eye you’ve got to be a total friggin Boy Scout. This applies not only to blowjobs but to compensation and accounting. He says it’s one thing to be a really highly paid executive, and another to be the kind of creep who cooks the books in order to get a little bit more than he’s supposed to.

“There’s an old expression where I grew up,” he says. “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Ever heard that?”

“Dude, I grew up in California, okay? Not on some friggin pig farm.”

He makes that groaning sound again, and heads for the door.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says.

On the bright side, I arrive in time to catch the end of the Ultimate game, and we totally beat the snot out of some chiptards from AMD.

People often ask me
how I feel about drugs. My stance on this is a little bit controversial. I like drugs. I think they’re good. Fair enough, not heroin. And not cocaine or crack or crystal meth. But soft drugs, like marijuana and hashish, and the psychedelics, like LSD and peyote, I think are really beneficial both on an individual level and a cultural level. Frankly, I think marijuana is what got us out of Vietnam. In my own life, drugs have played a huge role not only in helping me relax and unwind and have a good time, but also in being able to open up my creativity and see things in a new way. Without marijuana, I can almost guarantee you, there would have been no Apple Computer. Certainly there would have been no Macintosh.

As I see it the problem began with Nancy Reagan and her “Just Say No” campaign. Yes, it was stupid. But it worked. They’ve succeeded in scaring an entire generation away from drugs. You should see the kids who come through Apple for interviews. Ask them if they’ve ever done acid and they give you this look like you just asked them how many times they’ve been abducted by aliens. This shunning of drugs has produced a generation of conformists. Look at all these new companies in the Bay Area, all these supposed “tech” companies. God knows what they do, but it’s all some variation on the same theme and they all have names like Zizzl and Drizzl and Dazzl, so you can’t tell them apart. Can’t these kids think of anything original? Apparently not. My theory is it’s because they’ve never used psychedelics.

Thank you, Nancy Reagan. Thank you, Christian Right zealots. You’ve ruined an entire generation. These kids grew up with parents who were terrified to let them go outside and play without being supervised. Then they got to school and got hit with the AIDS education stuff, and I know it’s important to teach kids to fuck safely, but come on. Let’s be honest. They’re really using this to scare kids about sex itself. And it’s worked wonders. It’s very effective. These kids are terrified—of drugs, of sex, of each other.

Kids, I’m sorry, but the truth is, a few evenings spent sleeping with strangers and tripping your brains out on peyote or some really clean blotter acid would be the best thing that could ever happen to you. Forget trying to get a job at Google or trying to raise venture funding for some startup. Go down to the Mission and score some weed. Buy yourself a bong, and fire it up.
Then
go think of an idea for a company.

Which is all a long way of saying that the first thing I do when I get home from the Ultimate Frisbee game is go upstairs to my office, put on some Leonard Cohen and fire up a bowl of some fine reddish buds. It’s mellow stuff, seventies-style weed, not this whacked out paranoia-inducing hydroponic stuff that they grow today, this stuff that makes you want to crawl under your bed and hide. I have my weed grown specially for me by a guy up in Oregon who knows how to keep the THC content low. Really, really nice stuff.

I’m just feeling a glow when the phone rings and it’s Larry Ellison telling me to turn on the TV, which in my case is an incredibly huge super-high-resolution plasma display which won’t hit the market for another two years.

There on CNN is Jeff Hernandez, a friend of ours, being perp-walked out of his house in Woodside by federal agents. The whole thing is being filmed from a helicopter. I can’t believe it.

Jeff is the CEO of Braid Networks. He has a wife and four kids. He goes to church.

The dick from Fox says Jeff is being charged with twelve counts of fraud.

“They’re rounding up some others too,” Larry says. “His CFO, his general counsel, couple of board members. All this over some paperwork. Couple of accounting mistakes. Buddy, this is worse than I realized. This is some bad shit, brother.”

After we hang up I turn off the TV and go out to the backyard. I try to do some T’ai Chi, but my legs are shaking so badly that I can’t hold a position.

Okay, so I’m scared. I know what you’re thinking, but no, it’s not the butt rape. Not because I’m a huge fan of being butt-raped. But the butt rape, I am pretty sure, takes place mostly in your more hardcore Oz-type penitentiaries where you get the truly criminal gang-type people. Not to be biased against any certain ethnic or socioeconomic groups, because I am a very serious Buddhist and not at all a racist or a bigot of any kind, and as you know if you’ve seen our ads we are all about using people of color to sell products, so it’s not at all that I think white people are better or anything. But let’s face it, if you put a bunch of rich white businessmen on some minimum security prison farm, they’re not going to butt-rape each other. They’ll wait till they get out and do it to each other metaphorically, like they always have.

What really scares me is being tossed out of my company. This happened to me once before, back in the eighties. Apple hit a rough patch, and they blamed all the problems on me. Getting fired nearly killed me. I literally thought I was going to die.

My shrink says it’s because I’m an orphan. He says that being rejected by my birth mother inflicted damage on my soul.

“It carved this pit into you,” he says, “this giant hole that you can never fill, no matter how much you accomplish. You need to prove to your birth mother that she made a mistake when she gave you away. So you work and you work and you work. You never stop. But no matter what you achieve, it’s never enough to fill that hole. And yet you can’t stop, either. Because if you do, you die. That’s how it feels. You’ll cease to exist. You’ll be nothing. Nobody. You’ll be that little boy, hiding under the bed, the day you learned you were adopted and you wished you could become invisible. If you lose your job, your birth mother wins, and you lose. She was right, and you were wrong. She was right to give you away.”