Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [45]
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