Steve Jobs, As Remembered By His First Girlfriend

Rolling Stone has a great cover story on Steve Jobs that included an essay from Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’s first girlfriend and the mother of Lisa. It reveals a side of Jobs before Apple — the Bob Dylan-loving romantic poet madly in love.

Most of the stuff Brennan writes, we’ve already known. How he loved Dylan, and re-enacted Alice in Wonderland for money, and how they were in love. But it’s that rawness of Jobs that she captures, his early spirit that was motivated by something else other than typical limitations like worrying or expectations. Brennan writes:

We had very little money and no foreseeable prospects. One evening after we had splurged on dinner and a movie, we walked back to our car to discover a $US25 parking ticket. I just turned inside out with despair, but Steve did not seem to care. He had a deep well of patience when it came to discouragements. We drove to the ocean near Crissy Field in San Francisco and walked out onto the beach to see the sunset, where I began talking about money worries. He gave me a long, exasperated look, reached into his pockets and took the few last coins and dollars we had and threw them into the ocean. All of them.

It’s funny how he could not care about the big stuff but could comb through all the details on the small stuff. The entire Rolling Stone article is worth a read. [Rolling Stone]