options the secret life of steve jobs phần 5

whether we could hold the news until after the developers confer-ence. He figures I want to stall. He’s trying to force our hands.” “We told him we’d put it out now.” “Maybe he wants to make sure. Maybe he’s trying to send us a message.” “I don’t know.” “Lawyers are the worst leakers in the world. Look at any merger talks that get leaked, it’s always the lawyers.” “There’s at least two dozen people who know there was a meeting,” Paul says. He’s got a yellow legal pad and is making a list. “Figure everyone on the board, plus whoever keeps their schedules for them. Plus all the chauffeurs and pilots and travel agents. Sampson and his three guys, plus their admins and assis-tants. The people in my office. The people in your office. Anyone in PR who’s been brought in to work on the release.” “We could pull the phone logs,” Ross says. “And search the email system. Steve?” I don’t answer. I’m looking out the window, out over the rooftops of Cupertino, toward Homestead High, where I went to school, and, past that, the neighborhood in Los Altos where I grew up. I’m thinking about the day when we first moved the company out of my parents’ house and into a real office building on Stevens Creek Boulevard. I was twenty-two years old. Our de-livery system was a ten-year-old Plymouth station wagon. Our biggest concern was keeping the car running. I miss those days. 92 PART TWO Dark Night of the Steve This page intentionally left blank 24 My parents did not hide the fact of my adoption from me. I always knew. So did our neighbors. So did their kids. When I was seven years old the taunting began. In the schoolyard, in the street. Until then I had not given any thought to what it meant to be adopted. But now, stung by teasing, it hit me. My birth par-ents, a pair of snooty intellectual graduate students, had taken one look at me and said, “No thanks.” They gave me up. They abandoned me. You do not need to be a trained psychologist to understand what this does to a person. Shame? You have no idea. That word does not begin to describe it. I would hide under my bed. I would cry and refuse to come out. I would lie on my back, with my eyes closed, trying to will myself into becoming invisible. I prayed—in those days I believed in God—that I could fall asleep and wake up a different person. I became obsessed with adoption narratives. Especially those in which an orphan grows up to accomplish great deeds. Jane Eyre. Cinderella. Oedipus. Romulus and Remus. Pip in Great Expectations. Siegfried in Norse mythology. Krishna. Little Or-phan Annie—I followed her adventures every day in the San Jose Mercury News. My favorite was Superman. Born on another planet, raised by humble parents, secretly possessing superhuman abilities. I devoured the comic books. I sat transfixed on the floor watching 95 the old black-and-white TV show with George Reeves. I became convinced that I, too, was a kind of Superman. I suppose this was my way of coping with the shame, compensating for the loss. I saw myself as a hero. As different. Better than the people around me. A savior, destined to do great things. Was I also bitter? Yes. Am I still? Very much so. But I have learned to transform my bitterness into fuel. I have harnessed my anger, the way a hydroelectric plant harnesses the force of a river. Every day I tell myself that somewhere out in the Midwest there are two snobby academics who gave birth to the greatest figure of our age, but they were so self-absorbed and short-sighted that they could not recognize their son’s inherent coolness. These two fools could have had a son who’s worth five billion dollars. They could be zooming around in the world in a private jet, zipping from their ski house in Aspen to their island in Tahiti. That’s right, you jerks. You’re the Pete Best of parents. I hope you enjoy living out your days in some cut-rate assisted-living facility, eating creamed chip beef on toast. Yum. 25 Twice a year I get to play messiah, arriving in an auditorium filled with people who worship me like a living god and hang on every word I say. These people spend huge amounts of money and travel from all around the world to see me in person. Some of them camp out overnight, sleeping on the sidewalk, so they can be first to get into the auditorium when the doors open in the morning. The first event where I do this is Macworld, which is a con- 96 ... - tailieumienphi.vn