Return to the Little Kingdom (13 page)

Portland’s natural setting provided enough distractions to give some sense of life’s sensations. The weather was more melancholy than along the southern reaches of the San Francisco Peninsula but there were other consolations. There was the remote splendor of Mount Hood for backpacking, the thunderous vigor of the Columbia River Gorge for hitchhiking, and desolate beaches along the Oregon coastline where redwoods perched on the edge of cliffs. For students contemplating their new surroundings Reed College presented a deceptive face. Its Victorian Gothic buildings—complete with slate roofs, ivy, copper gutters, and window boxes—had bay windows that overlooked spacious gardens. It seemed like a drizzly home for Portland’s cafe society, a movable stage for poets, filmmakers, artists, and free spirits.

Some former Reed students had started The Rainbow Farm, which became one of the regional keystones of the hippie movement, and ripples from the psychedelic tone of the late sixties flowed through the campus. Reed was a regular stopping point for a caravan of lecturers like author Ken Kesey, poet Allen Ginsberg and the very guru of “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” Timothy Leary. But behind the graceful air and dreamy throwback to Parisian life in the twenties was an ironclad curriculum with long, compulsory reading lists. The three hundred or so students who enrolled in each class found the large flock of professors kept a close watch on their progress and the college tolerated their quirks only if they coped with strenuous academic standards. During the early seventies about a third of each class failed to return for their junior or senior years after discovering that, at Reed, liberal was spelled with a capital L.

Jobs found an eclectic collection of students and, for the first time in his life, started to bump into people from other parts of the country. Since Reed gave scholarships to a goodly sprinkling of minorities, Jobs had his first taste of cosmopolitan flavors. One of his classmates, Elizabeth Holmes, commented, “In the early seventies Reed was a campus of loners and freaks.” Even against that colorful backdrop Jobs managed to stand out and his picture was missing from the booklet of freshman profiles distributed to the new arrivals. Among the other members of the freshman class was Daniel Kottke. A bony, bearded teenager with a gentle way of speaking and soft brown hair, Kottke had grown up in an affluent New York suburb, won a National Merit Scholarship and turned to Reed after being rejected by Harvard. He was quiet, slightly lethargic, had a disdain for material possessions, and liked to play the piano. Within a few months he began to consider Jobs his closest male companion. “It didn’t seem like he had too many other friends.”

Another of Jobs’s friends was one of the most visible students on campus. Robert Friedland, who was several years older than Jobs, paraded about the campus dressed in Indian robes while campaigning for the student presidency. His campaign theme was blunt. He was running for the post to help erase the stigma of a two-year jail sentence for what was, at the time, the largest LSD bust east of the Mississippi. Friedland, a slight smooth talker, had rubbed up against the Nixon administration’s determination to clean LSD off the tongue of America and made the mistake of informing the judge at his trial that he shouldn’t pass sentence without trying the drug. The judge decided he didn’t need to enhance his mind to settle on a punishment and gave Friedland a two-year sentence for manufacturing and distributing thirty thousand tablets of LSD. Eventually Friedland was paroled and enrolled at Reed.

Jobs, who was trying to raise some money by selling his IBM electric typewriter, first met Friedland in potentially embarrassing circumstances. He arrived with his typewriter in Friedland’s room to discover that the chief occupant was busy making love to his girl friend. Friedland wasn’t flustered and invited Jobs to sit down and wait. Jobs sat and watched. “He wasn’t intimidated at all. I thought, ‘This is kind of far out. My mother and father would never do this.’”

For Jobs, Friedland quickly became an important figure, a mentor and surrogate elder brother. “Robert was the first person I met who was really very firmly convinced that the phenomenon of enlightenment existed. I was very impressed by that and very curious about it.” For his part Friedland recalled that Jobs was one of the youngest students at Reed. “He was always walking about barefoot. He was one of the freaks on the campus. The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme. He wasn’t a rapper. One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.”

Jobs’s sense of the romantic prompted him to enroll in a dance class where he hoped, like so many college students, that he would find true love. Instead, he began to discover that despite the attractions of ballet, his ideas about education certainly didn’t coincide with a curriculum that for the first semester prescribed heavy doses of
The Iliad
and
The Peloponnesian Wars
. By the end of 1972, Jobs had discovered plenty of other diversions. There were the emotional calls of college life such as the time he rushed a pal who tried to commit suicide to the local hospital, the startling, unpredictable tastes of women, and pressure from his parents who were upset at the idea they were underwriting a bohemian life. Jobs’s academic work suffered and at the end of his first semester he dropped out in spirit if not in body. For the following six months he stayed in the dormitory, shuffling among the rooms deserted by other malcontents.

At Reed the interest in political activism that was typical of the late sixties had been softened into a spiritual activism slightly reminiscent of movements that had flourished around Aldous Huxley in the 1920s. Some of the students were interested in pure philosophy and the disconcerting questions that are unanswerable—about the meaning of life and the truth of existence: What are we? Why are we here? What are we doing? What are the real values of human life? The appeals to a higher consciousness, to “working on yourself,” struck a chord. There was talk of karma and trips and the intellectual excursions fueled experiments with diets and drugs. Jack Dudman, Reed’s dean of students, spent hours talking with Jobs. “He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive. You wouldn’t get away with bland statements. He refused to accept automatically received truths and he wanted to examine everything himself.”

Jobs and Kottke suggested books to one another and gradually read their way through the standard works of the time:
Autobiography of a Yogi, Cosmic Consciousness, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Meditation in Action
. The most influential, however, was
Zen Mind,Beginner’s Mind
. Jobs took to spending time in the college library reading Buddhist literature and became attracted by Zen Buddhism. “It placed value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn’t seem to lead too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.” He also started to believe that intuition formed a higher state of intellect and meditated in a crawl space above Kottke’s bedroom, which was furnished with incense and a dhurrie rug.

 

The pair also hitchhiked to the Hare Krishna temple in Portland for free Sunday night vegetable-curry dinners. On one occasion Kottke and Jobs decided to stay overnight at the Krishna house and were awakened in the early morning and sent out into a suburban Portland neighborhood to pick flowers from private gardens to decorate the shrine of Lord Krishna.

After moving out of the dorms at the end of his first year, Jobs rented an upgraded coachhouse for twenty-five dollars a month in a well-upholstered Portland suburb that rubbed up against Reed. He was secretive about aspects of his life, and even his closest college friends had no idea that Wozniak, who made occasional visits, sold blue boxes to a couple of Reed students who were caught using the device in a telephone booth.

Strapped for cash, Jobs borrowed some money from a fund the college kept for just such contingencies and found a job maintaining electronic equipment used by the psychology department for animal-behavior experiments. Ron Fial, an assistant professor who looked after the lab and tinkered with electronics, was impressed by Jobs and the knowledge he brought from California. “He was very good. He often didn’t want to just fix something. He often ended up bringing in something that was completely redesigned.”

Though he fixed fish tanks and helped design better mousetraps, Jobs was still pressed for money. His rented room was unheated and when he sat there throwing I Ching he was always dressed in a thick down jacket. For several weeks he lived on a thrice-daily diet of a porridge made from Roman Meal cereal and milk that he lifted from the college cafeteria. Jobs reckoned that one box of the cereal would sustain him for a week. “After three months of Roman Meal I was just going out of my gourd.”

To keep some flesh on his friend, Kottke and his girl friend provided Jobs with his only substantial meals. The trio jointly labeled cafeteria food Meat by Monsanto and became vegetarians. They paraded through the infinite varieties of brown rice, banana bread, and oatmeal bread suggested by vegetarian and macrobiotic cookbooks. Through a combination of circumstance and curiosity, Jobs and his friends linked their intellectual wandering and interests in mysticism with physical experiments. They were interested in stimulating fresh areas of the mind and rejuvenating the body and experimented with different drugs and diets. Drugs were used more for metaphysical reasons than for recreational purposes and they linked diets with other aspects of life.

Jobs became interested in the writings of Arnold Ehret, a nineteenth-century Prussian who attached his name to such books as
The Mucusless Diet Healing System
and
Rational Fasting
. Jobs was intrigued by Ehret’s assertion that diet was the cornerstone of physical, mental, and spiritual rejuvenation and that an accumulation of mucus and other body wastes were sure to be ruinous. Ehret asserted, with all the confidence of an Archimedes, that
V = P
-
O
, which in layman’s language meant
vitality
equals
power minus obstruction
. He taught that mental illness was caused by “gas pressure on the brain,” which could be cured by fasting, and that meat, alcohol, fat, bread, potatoes, rice, and milk were to be avoided at all costs. He even prescribed special “mucus eliminators” like combinations of figs, nuts and green onions, or grated horseradish and honey.

Jobs started to examine the diets of the higher primates and even investigated their bone structure. Years afterward he still clung to his convictions. “I believe that man is a fruitarian. I got into it in my typically nutso way.” For a time Jobs lectured his friends on the dangers of bagels, insisting they were filled with mucus, and started to lunch on carrot salads. Friedland recalled, “The whole world revolved around the elimination of mucus.” Like Ehret, who boasted that he once lived off a fruit diet for two years, Jobs experimented with fasts. He carefully worked his way from fasts that lasted a couple of days to ones that stretched for a couple of weeks. He watched his skin turn different colors as a result of the fasting, learned how to break fasts with plenty of roughage and water, became convinced that man was a fruitarian and was enthusiastic about the results of these experiments: “After a few days you start to feel great. After a week you start to feel fantastic. You get a ton of vitality from not having to digest all this food. I was in great shape. I felt I could get up and walk to San Francisco anytime I wanted.” His friend Elizabeth Holmes noticed the extent of Jobs’s devotion. “When he started crusading about something he could be overbearing.”

Others led their own crusades, and Robert Friedland became the disciple of one that tied diet, drugs, and philosophy together. When he and Jobs meditated they were accompanied by the customary sitar music, surrounded by incense, and overlooked by a photograph of a tubby man with jug ears and gray bristles who was wrapped in a plaid blanket. The pudgy figure was Neem Karolie Baba, an Indian guru, celebrated in
Be Here Now,
Richard Alpert’s popular account of the changes he encountered while he journeyed from an American academic life to quiet contemplation in a remote part of India. Friedland found the lure irresistible and spent the summer of 1973 in India listening to Neem Karolie Baba, and returned with a chattering knapsack of tales for his younger friends. He regaled them with tales of meditation sessions inside rings of fires and baths in ice-cold rivers, and described “an electric charged atmosphere of love.”

 

At the beginning of 1974 Jobs decided that an electronics company might supply the means to reach the electric-charged atmosphere of love. He broke away from the fringes of Reed College, returned to his parents’ home in Los Altos, and began to look for a job. He wasn’t seeking anything grand or permanent but just something that would allow him to stash away enough money for a trip to India. One morning, browsing through the classified advertisements in the
San Jose Mercury,
he spotted an opening for a video-game designer at Atari. He knew nothing about the young company but had spent many quarters on Pong, the monotonic simulation of table tennis that Atari was operating in pool halls, bars, pinball arcades, and bowling alleys.

Jobs’s arrival in Atari’s Sunnyvale lobby was monitored by an observant receptionist. According to Al Alcorn, the chief engineer, “The receptionist said, ‘We’ve got this kid in the lobby. He’s either a crackpot or he’s got something.’ He looked pretty grubby. He was talking a mile a minute and claimed to be working on the HP thirty-five calculator. He said he could turn the HP forty-five into a stopwatch. He implied he was working for HP. I was impressed, said ‘Hey, fine,’ and didn’t bother to check.” Alcorn, a jovial, rotund man, offered Jobs a position as a technician for five dollars an hour. Jobs, for whom stock options and some of the other benefits offered by Silicon Valley companies were mysteries, accepted. Some of his friends were surprised that he managed to get on the payroll. Bill Fernandez, for one, thought Jobs lacked the qualifications. “He must have been a good salesman. I didn’t really think that Jobs was that hot.”