Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [33]
“What is this I found in your car?” Paul Jobs asked his son. “That’s marijuana, Father.”
As a high-school senior Jobs met his first serious girl friend. The object of his attentions, Nancy Rogers, trailed him by a year because she had spent two years in second grade. With long fawn hair, green eyes, and high cheekbones, she had a bohemian edge and a compelling fragility. Rogers lived two blocks from Homestead in a house where her mother and father, an engineer in GTE Sylvania’s Electronics Systems Division, were engaged in bitter squabbles. “I was going through turmoil because my family was splitting up. Steve was kind of crazy. That’s why I was attracted to him.” Her father thought, “Nancy needed someone she could latch onto and Steve was kind to her.” The pair met while Rogers was working on an animated movie which the school authorities did not look kindly on. To escape surveillance, much of the movie work was done after midnight in the shuttered school buildings. A few students, like Jobs, dropped by with lights and stereos. Wozniak, who observed some of these activities from a distance, harbored wild (and unfounded) speculations that his younger friend was engaged in the production of pornographic epics.
Jobs and Rogers became high-school sweethearts. In Jobs’s final year of high school they played hooky, spent afternoons drinking wine, and talking. It was as bucolic an existence as suburban Santa Clara would allow. Jobs dropped his first LSD with Nancy in a wheat field. “It was great. I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful experience of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat field.”
When he graduated from high school Jobs was thin and lean. The combination of long dark hair and a sparse beard convinced his mother not to buy more than one graduation photograph. After leaving Homestead, Jobs decided to spend the summer living with Nancy. The pair rented a room in a small cabin in the hills overlooking Cupertino and Los Altos. Nancy recalled, “It wasn’t a great statement. We just did it. Steve was headstrong so we could do it and my parents were falling apart so I could do it. We were really in love.” Jobs announced the move to his parents.
“I just said one day, ‘I’m going to live with Nancy.’
“My father said, ‘What?’
“‘Yeah. We rented this cabin. We’re going to live together.’
“He said: ‘No, you’re not.’
“And I said: ‘Yes, I am.’
“And he said: ‘No, you’re not.’
“And I said: ‘Well, bye!’”
Jobs and Rogers shared a romantic teenage summer. There were strolls to peer through the gates of the Maryknoll Seminary and long walks on Baldi Hill where Rogers painted a picture of a black woman on a wooden post. Jobs tried his hand at poetry, picked at a guitar, and along with Wozniak, was attracted by the music of Bob Dylan. They found a store in Santa Cruz that specialized in Dylan esoterica and sold reprints of songbooks, magazine profiles, and bootleg tapes of recording sessions and European concerts. They took some of the Dylan songbooks to SLAC where they copied them on a Xerox machine. There was also the occasional disaster where family ties came in handy. When Jobs’s Fiat short-circuited and caught fire on Skyline Drive, his father, towed it home. To help pay for the damage to the car and keep ends together Jobs, Wozniak, and Rogers found jobs at San Jose’s Westgate Shopping Center, where they donned heavy costumes and, for three dollars an hour, paraded around a children’s fairyland in a concrete Alice in Wonderland. Though Wozniak reveled in the activity, Jobs took a more jaundiced view: “The costumes weighed a ton. After about four hours you’d want to wipe out some kids.” Nancy played Alice. Wozniak and Jobs took turns masquerading as the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter.
THE LITTLE BLUE BOX
In a litigious, Victorian English, American