Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [43]
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