“I Have a Secret. My Father Is Steve Jobs”: Lisa Brennan-Jobs Recalls Memories of Her Famous Father (2024)

T hree months before he died, I began to steal things from my father’shouse. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. Itook blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, abottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent-leather ballet slippers,and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.

After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that thiswould be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else wouldarrive again like thirst.

I tiptoed into my father’s room, careful to step over the creakyfloorboard at the entrance. This room had been his study, when he couldstill climb the stairs, but he slept here now.

He was propped up in bed, wearing shorts. His legs were bare and thin asarms, bent up like a grasshopper’s.

“Hey, Lis,” he said.

Segyu Rinpoche stood beside him. He’d been around recently when I cameto visit. A short Brazilian man with sparkling brown eyes, the Rinpochewas a Buddhist monk with a scratchy voice who wore brown robes over around belly. We called him by his title. Near us, a black canvas bag ofnutrients hummed with a motor and a pump, the tube disappearingsomewhere under my father’s sheets.

“It’s a good idea to touch his feet,” Rinpoche said, putting his handsaround my father’s foot on the bed. “Like this.”

I didn’t know if the foot touching was supposed to be for my father, orfor me, or for both of us.

“Okay,” I said, and took his other foot in its thick sock, even thoughit was strange, watching my father’s face, because when he winced inpain or anger it looked similar to when he started to smile.

“That feels good,” my father said, closing his eyes. I glanced at thechest of drawers beside him and at the shelves on the other side of theroom for objects I wanted, even though I knew I wouldn’t dare stealsomething right in front of him.

While he slept, I wandered through the house, looking for I didn’t knowwhat. The house was quiet, the sounds muffled. The terra-cotta floor wascool on my feet except in the places where the sun had warmed it to thetemperature of skin.

In the cabinet of the half bath near the kitchen, where there used to bea tattered copy of the Bhagavad Gita, I found a bottle of expensive rosefacial mist. With the door closed, the light out, sitting on the toiletseat, I sprayed it up into the air and closed my eyes. The mist fellaround me, cool and holy, as in a forest or an old stone church.

Later, I would put everything back. But now, between avoiding thehousekeeper, my brother and sisters, and my stepmother around the houseso I wouldn’t be caught stealing things or hurt when they didn’tacknowledge me or reply to my hellos, and spraying myself in thedarkened bathroom to feel less like I was disappearing—because insidethe falling mist I had a sense of having an outline again—makingefforts to see my sick father in his room began to feel like a burden, anuisance.

For the past year I’d visited for a weekend every other month or so.

I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind inthe movies, but I kept coming anyway.

Before I said good-bye, I went to the bathroom to mist one more time.The spray was natural, which meant that over the course of a few minutesit no longer smelled sharp like roses, but fetid and stinky like aswamp, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

As I came into his room, he was getting into a standing position. Iwatched him gather both his legs in one arm, twist himself 90 degrees bypushing against the headboard with the other arm, and then use both armsto hoist his own legs over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. Whenwe hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, likemedicine sweat.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said.

We detached, and I started walking away.

“Lis?”

“Yeah?”

“You smell like a toilet.”

In the spring of 1978, when my parents were 23, my mother gave birth tome on their friend Robert’s farm in Oregon, with the help of twomidwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish. Myfather arrived a few days later. “It’s not my kid,” he kept tellingeveryone at the farm, but he’d flown there to meet me anyway. I hadblack hair and a big nose, and Robert said, “She sure looks like you.”

My parents took me out into a field, laid me on a blanket, and lookedthrough the pages of a baby-name book. He wanted to name me Claire. Theywent through several names but couldn’t agree. They didn’t wantsomething derivative, a shorter version of a longer name.

“What about Lisa?” my mother finally said.

“Yes. That one,” he said happily.

He left the next day.

“Isn’t Lisa short for Elizabeth?” I asked my mother. “No. We lookedit up. It’s a separate name.” “And why did you let him help name mewhen he was pretending he wasn’t the father?” “Because he was yourfather,” she said.

During the time my mother was pregnant, my father started work on acomputer that would later be called the Lisa. It was the precursor tothe Macintosh, the first mass-market computer with an externalmouse—the mouse as large as a block of cheese. But it was tooexpensive, a commercial failure; my father began on the team working forit, but then started working against it, competing against it, on theMac team. The Lisa computer was discontinued, the 3,000 unsold computerslater buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah.

Until I was two, my mother supplemented her welfare payments by cleaninghouses and waitressing. My father didn’t help. She found babysitting ata day-care center inside a church run by the minister’s wife, and for afew months we lived in a room in a house that my mother had found on anotice board meant for women considering adoption.

Then, in 1980, the district attorney of San Mateo County, California,sued my father for child-support payments. My father responded bydenying paternity, swearing in a deposition that he was sterile andnaming another man he said was my father.

I was required to take a DNA test. The tests were new then, and when theresults came back, they gave the odds that we were related as thehighest the instruments could measure at the time: 94.4 percent. Thecourt required my father to cover welfare back payments, child-supportpayments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medicalinsurance until I was 18. The case was finalized on December 8, 1980,with my father’s lawyers insistent to close. Four days later Apple wentpublic and overnight my father was worth more than $200 million.

But before that, just after the court case was finalized, my father cameto visit me once at our house in Menlo Park, where we had rented adetached studio. It was the first time I’d seen him since I’d been anewborn in Oregon.

“You know who I am?” he asked. He flipped his hair out of his eyes.

I was three years old; I didn’t.

“I’m your father.” (“Like he was Darth Vader,” my mother said later,when she told me the story.)

“I’m one of the most important people you will ever know,” he said.

By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved 13 times. We rentedspaces informally, staying in a friend’s furnished bedroom here, atemporary sublet there. My father had started dropping by sometimes,about once a month, and he, my mother, and I would go roller-skatingaround the neighborhood. His engine shuddered into our driveway, echoingoff our house and the wooden fence on the other side, thickening the airwith excitement. He drove a black Porsche convertible. When he stopped,the sound turned into a whine and then was extinguished, leaving thequiet more quiet, the pinpoint sounds of birds.

I anticipated his arrival, wondering when it would happen, and thoughtabout him afterward—but in his presence, for the hour or so we wereall together, there was a strange blankness, like the air after hisengine switched off. He didn’t talk much. There were long pauses, thethunk and whir of roller skates on pavement.

We skated the neighborhood streets. Trees overhead made patterns of thelight. Fuchsia dangled from bushes in yards, stamens below a bell ofpetals, like women in ball gowns with purple shoes. My father and motherhad the same skates, a beige nubuck body with red laces crisscrossedover a double line of metal fasts. As we passed bushes in other people’syards, he pulled clumps of leaves off the stems, then dropped thefragments as we skated, making a line of ripped leaves behind us on thepavement like Hansel and Gretel. A few times, I felt his eyes on me;when I looked up, he looked away.

After he left, we talked about him.

“Why do his jeans have holes all over?” I asked my mother. He mighthave sewn them up. I knew he was supposed to have millions of dollars.We didn’t just say “millionaire” but “multi-millionaire” when wespoke of him, because it was accurate, and because knowing the granulardetails made us part of it.

She said my father had a lisp. “It’s something to do with his teeth,”she said. “They hit each other exactly straight on, and over the yearsthey cracked and chipped where they hit, so the top and bottom teethmeet, with no spaces. It looks like a zigzag, or a zipper.”

“And he has these strangely flat palms,” she said.

I assigned mystical qualities to his zipper teeth, his tattered jeans,his flat palms, as if these were not only different from other fathers’but better, and now that he was in my life, even if it was only once amonth, I had not waited in vain. I would be better off than childrenwho’d had fathers all along.

“I heard when it gets a scratch, he buys a new one,” I overheard mymother say to her boyfriend Ron.

“A new what?” I asked.

“Porsche.”

“Couldn’t he just paint over the scratch?” I asked.

“Car paint doesn’t work like that,” Ron said to me. “You can’t justpaint over black with black; it wouldn’t blend. There are thousands ofdifferent blacks. They’d have to repaint the whole thing.”

The next time my father came over, I wondered if it was the same carhe’d been driving the last time, or if it was a new one that just lookedthe same.

“I have a secret,” I said to my new friends at school. I whispered itso that they would see I was reluctant to mention it. The key, I felt,was to underplay. “My father is Steve Jobs.”

“Who’s that?” one asked.

“He’s famous,” I said. “He invented the personal computer. He livesin a mansion and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one everytime it gets a scratch.”

The story had a film of unreality to it as I said it, even to my ownears. I hadn’t hung out with him that much, only a few skates andvisits. I didn’t have the clothes or the bike someone with a father likethis would have.

“He even named a computer after me,” I said to them.

“What computer?” a girl asked.

“The Lisa,” I said.

“A computer called the Lisa?” she said. “I never heard of it.”

“It was ahead of its time.” I used my mother’s phrase, although Iwasn’t sure why it was ahead. I brought it up when I felt I needed to,waited as long as I could and then let it burst forth. I don’t rememberfeeling at a disadvantage with my friends who had fathers, only thatthere was at my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing thatstarted to itch and tingle when I felt small, and it was like pressurebuilding inside me, and then I had to find a way to say it.

One afternoon around this time my father brought over a Macintoshcomputer. He pulled the box out of the backseat and carried it into myroom and put it on the floor. “Let’s see,” he said. “How do we openit?” As if he didn’t know. This made me doubt he was the inventor. Hepulled the computer out of the box by a handle on the top and set it onthe floor near the outlet on the wall. “I guess we plug this in.” Heheld the cord loose like it was unfamiliar.

He sat on the floor in front of it with his legs crossed; I sat on myknees beside him. He looked for the On switch, found it, and the machinecame alive to reveal a picture of itself in the center, smiling. Heshowed me how I could draw and save my drawings on the desktop once Iwas finished with them, and then he left.

He didn’t mention the other one, the Lisa. I worried that he had notreally named a computer after me, that it was a mistake.

For a long time I hoped that if I played one role, my father would takethe corresponding role. I would be the beloved daughter; he would be theindulgent father. I decided that if I acted like other daughters did, hewould join in the lark. We’d pretend together, and in pretending we’dmake it real. If I had observed him as he was, or admitted to myselfwhat I saw, I would have known that he would not do this, and that agame of pretend would disgust him.

Later that year, I would stay overnight at my father’s house on severalWednesdays while my mother took college classes in San Francisco. Onthose nights, we ate dinner, took a hot tub outside, and watched oldmovies. During the car rides to his house, he didn’t talk.

“Can I have it when you’re done?”I asked him one night, as we took aleft at the leaning, crumbling white pillars that flanked the thin,bumpy road ending at his gate. I’d been thinking about it for a whilebut had only just built up the courage to ask.

“Can you have what?” he said.

“This car. Your Porsche.” I wondered where he put the extras. Ipictured them in a shiny black line at the back of his land.

“Absolutely not,” he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’dmade a mistake. I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth ofthe scratch: maybe he didn’t buy new ones. By that time I knew he wasnot generous with money, or food, or words; the idea of the Porsches hadseemed like one glorious exception.

I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turnedoff the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me.

“You’re not getting anything,” he said. “You understand? Nothing.You’re getting nothing.” Did he mean about the car, something else,bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.

The light was cool in the car, a white light on the roof had lit up whenthe car turned off. Around us was dark. I had made a terrible mistakeand he’d recoiled.

By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was wovenin with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used thisstory to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing. I didn’tcare about computers—they were made of fixed metal parts and chipswith glinting lines inside plastic cases—but I liked the idea that Iwas connected to him in this way. It would mean I’d been chosen and hada place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent. It meant I wasfastened to the earth and its machines. He was famous; he drove aPorsche. If the Lisa was named after me, I was a part of all that.

I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on aspectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative ofgreatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existenceruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him,the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he wouldaccelerate me into the light.

It might all have been a big misunderstanding, a missed connection: he’dsimply forgotten to mention the computer was named after me. I wasshaking with the need to set it right all at once, as if waiting for aperson to arrive for their surprise party—to switch on the lights andyell out what I’d held in.

“Hey, you know that computer, the Lisa? Was it named after me?” Iasked many years later, when I was in high school and splitting my timebetween my parents’ houses. I tried to sound like I was curious, nothingmore.

If he would just give me this one thing.

“Nope.” His voice was clipped, dismissive. Like I was fishing for acompliment. “Sorry, kid.”

When I was 27, my father invited me to join for a few days on a yachttrip that he, my stepmother, my siblings, and the babysitter were takingin the Mediterranean. He didn’t usually invite me on vacations. I wentfor a long weekend.

Off the coast of the South of France my father said we were going tomake a stop in the Alpes-Maritimes to meet a friend for lunch. Hewouldn’t say who the friend was. We took a boat to the dock, where a vanpicked us up and drove us to a lunch at a villa in Èze.

It turned out to be Bono’s villa. He met us out front wearing jeans, aT-shirt, and the same sunglasses I’d seen him wearing in pictures and onalbum covers.

He gave us an exuberant tour of his house, as if he couldn’t quitebelieve it was his. The windows faced the Mediterranean, and the roomswere cluttered with children’s things. In an empty, light-filledoctagonal room, he said, Gandhi had once slept.

We had lunch on a large covered balcony overlooking the sea. Bono askedmy father about the beginning of Apple. Did the team feel alive? Didthey sense it was something big and they were going to change the world?My father said it did feel that way as they were making the Macintosh,and Bono said it was that way for him and the band, too, and wasn’t itincredible that people in such disparate fields could have the sameexperience? Then Bono asked, “So, was the Lisa computer named afterher?”

There was a pause. I braced myself—prepared for his answer.

My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, andthen back at Bono. “Yeah, it was,” he said.

I sat up in my chair.

“I thought so,” Bono said.

“Yup,” my father said.

I studied my father’s face. What had changed? Why had he admitted itnow, after all these years? Of course it was named after me, I thoughtthen. His lie seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled mychest up.

“That’s the first time he’s said yes,” I told Bono. “Thank you forasking.” As if famous people needed other famous people around torelease their secrets.

Adapted from Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, to be published September 4, 2018, by Grove Press. © 2018 by the author.