So Many Roads (6 page)

After being casual pals for six months, Garcia and Meier had inevitably become a couple in the fall of 1961. The relationship was merely one aspect of the new life Garcia had built for himself in the Peninsula. (He'd also followed Meier to San Francisco in the summer of 1961 when she attended art school there, then returned to the Peninsula with her.) By now Garcia had distanced himself from his family and his often painful past. When he wasn't teaching he'd be killing time at Kepler's or a nearby coffeehouse, St. Michael's Alley, or playing in
an ever-evolving group of bluegrass and string bands. No longer the chubby, short-haired kid, Garcia had reinvented himself.

Nearly from the moment she found herself in the same car as Garcia, Meier had been swept up in his universe, a largely male world of folk music, poetry, coffee, cigarettes, and spontaneous car-fueled adventures. When her high school let out for the day she'd see a familiar old black heap in the parking lot; unlike the Corvettes and Lincolns owned by the wealthier students, this one had doors that were held together, in Meier's memory, by rope. Waiting for her would be Garcia and another of his new friends, Robert Hunter. (Later it would be Hunter who took each of them aside and told them their feelings were mutual.) Another friend on the scene was Alan Trist, an eighteen-year-old Brit who'd arrived in the States with his father, who was then in the midst of a fellowship at Stanford. The car was most likely Hunter's 1940 Chrysler, purchased for all of $50, and the gaggle of friends would start it up and go in search of one party or another. They were living the relatively carefree life of Kennedy-era kids who sought nothing more than to reject the draining daily jobs and lives of their parents: too young to be beatniks, too early in history to be called anything close to “hippies.” As Meier says, “We got together because we didn't fit in anywhere else.”

The Chateau was a world unto itself. Once the owner began renting out rooms, the house, which overlooked Los Alamos Highway, became a gathering place for seemingly every outlier in the area. “The owner liked us better than the students,” says Laird Grant, a friend of Garcia's who joined him in crashing there. “We brought young girls around.” All sorts of oddball characters wandered in and out, jazz often blasting from its rooms and weekly poker games on the schedule. Although the place had an illicit air, the police mostly stayed away.

Based on all the reports in and around Cuba, Garcia and Meier realized those carefree days could be numbered. From what they'd heard, that Saturday in October could be the moment tensions would either
simmer down or erupt in nuclear catastrophe. For Meier the feeling was overwhelming, but Garcia had almost grown accustomed to sudden, unexpected loss. It had already haunted the first twenty years of his life, and each episode had left irrevocable scars on his body or his psyche.

The first tragedy was so painful he couldn't talk about it. In August 1947 Joe Garcia, the son of a Spanish immigrant and owner of a bar in downtown San Francisco, was fishing in the Trinity River in northwest California. (The first Garcias had come to America from Spain less than thirty years before Jerry's birth.) With Joe on the trip were his wife, Ruth Marie (nicknamed Bobbie, possibly to avoid confusion with her sister-in-law, Ruth), and his five-year-old son, Jerry. Whether his son was watching or not—and his older brother, Clifford, or Tiff, would long believe he wasn't—Joe slipped, fell in the water, and drowned after being trapped underwater. Tiff had been staying with grandparents in the Santa Cruz Mountains when the horrific accident happened. When Tiff saw his younger brother at the funeral, all Jerry could talk about was the fish hatchery they'd seen on the trip. “I'm thinking, ‘Your dad dies and all you can remember is the fish hatchery wherever they were?'” Tiff says. “He had something good to tell me, and it was about the fish hatchery.”

It may have been the only way for the youngest Garcia in the family to process the ways in which the life he'd once known was effectively over. He'd been born John Jerome Garcia on August 1, 1942—his middle name a salute to composer Jerome Kern. Born José, Jerry's father, Joe, was a musician himself, playing the clarinet and saxophone in several local bands, even once touring the country. After marrying his second wife, Ruth, he opened a bar, Joe Garcia's, in 1937. Although Joe was no longer a full-time musician (Jerry would later say Joe had been “blackballed by the [musicians] union” over an infraction), music was
still in the air in other forms: one of Jerry's grandmothers would listen to Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on the radio, introducing him to country music, and both Jerry and Tiff, born in 1937, took piano lessons at home, albeit briefly. Tiff (whose nickname derived from the way his younger brother would unintentionally mangle his name) remembers Jerry as more of a voracious reader, devouring comic books twice as fast as he did.

Although it wasn't as psychically scarring as his father's death, young Jerry dealt with another loss mere months before Joe's drowning. At the family's summer home in Santa Cruz County in the spring of 1947 the two Garcia boys were tending to one of their regular chores, chopping the wood: Jerry would put the splinters down, and Tiff would hack. But one time Jerry didn't pull his finger back fast enough, and Tiff's ax bit into the middle finger of his brother's right hand. Jerry was rushed to a hospital, where part of his finger was amputated, and Tiff remembers the bandages becoming smaller and smaller until all that was left was a stub with a tiny bandage. “It was an accident,” Tiff says. “I knew I'd done something wrong, but when you're kids, you just go, ‘Sorry it happened.'” (Many years later, on a trip in Hawaii, a diving instructor's son would see Garcia's missing finger and ask what had happened. Garcia relayed the story of the accident simply and sweetly, as if it were a storybook tale, and the kid asked whether it would grow back. “Jerry just laughed and said, ‘Nah, I don't think so,'” recalls his friend Debbie Gold, who was aboard the boat. “He wasn't the least bit self-conscious about it.”)

As scarring as that incident was, it would seem trivial compared to what happened in the Trinity River. At Joe Garcia's open-casket funeral neither son could bring himself to look at their father's body; it was too painful and too disturbing. For at least a year after Joe's death Ruth would put Jerry and Tiff to bed at night and say, “God bless Daddy in heaven.” The words became a standard nightly prayer
and routine, along with Jerry and Tiff's regimen of hopping a streetcar, bringing flowers to the cemetery, and heading back home.

After Joe died and Ruth took over running the bar, Tiff and Jerry moved in with their maternal grandparents. (In a foreshadowing of Jerry's later, rock-star life, his grandfather, who owned a laundry, would take the boys' clothes and wash and return them to the boys.) Ruth remarried twice, and the second marriage, to Wally Matusiewicz, was especially difficult on Jerry, as Wally was a seaman who, as Dead biographer Dennis McNally wrote, “expected his stepsons to work alongside him on home projects.” Already artistically inclined, Jerry had little interest in that type of labor. After Union Oil bought out Joe Garcia's, the company built a new bar for Ruth across the street, and soon the family left the city and moved to Menlo Park in the Peninsula area south of San Francisco.

From the moment Laird Grant transferred into the Menlo Oaks Middle School in the fall of 1955, the prematurely hardened kid, who'd grown up in San Francisco before his family relocated south, heard about that Garcia kid and his “stay-away reputation.” Garcia was neither hood nor greaser, neither school-level criminal nor oily haired biker. In Grant's memory he was a chubby kid with hair so short it made his head seemed like it came to a point. In spite of his last name, Garcia didn't strike Grant or any of their friends as Hispanic; he didn't, for instance, speak with an accent. The rumors of Garcia as a bad boy were confirmed the day Grant walked across a field to school and was jumped by a couple of kids, including Garcia, who was a year older than Grant. As Garcia sat on Grant's chest and smeared his face with lipstick, another of the kids tried to pull Grant's pants off. “That was a big thing in those days,” Grant says. “Run back to school and you'd have to show up in your tighty-whities, lipstick all over your face.” It was a harmless initiation prank, and luckily Grant lived close enough to the park to be able to race back home, change, and return to school.
Later he saw Garcia again, but instead of feeling angry, he sensed a bond with the kid who'd just roughed him up. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Ha, I know you!'” Grant recalls. Even at that age Garcia could get away with almost anything.

The accident that cost Jerry his finger would haunt his older brother for years after: “It's one of those things you don't ever get over,” Tiff says. “It never goes away.” But Tiff's little brother loved nothing better than to devise ways of having fun with his abnormality and messing with people's heads along the way—like poking his truncated digit into the ears of fellow classmates and watching their scared reaction. “He'd go up to kids and grab 'em and stick that knobby bony piece of weirdness in 'em,” Grant says. “Made them freak.” Garcia might also jam that finger into his nostril to make it look as if he was sticking his finger all the way up his nose. The missing finger only added to his image, especially when he would boast, wrongly, that the absent part of his finger was in a jar of alcohol at home and accepting visitors. That Garcia kid surely had a twisted sense of humor.

Although Menlo Park was a placid suburb seemingly ideal for raising a family, Garcia's life was again destined to be unsettled. In 1957 the family returned to San Francisco, where Jerry attended a much rougher school and had to, in his later words, become “a hoodlum . . . otherwise you walked down the street and somebody beats you up.” The Garcias relocated once more to Cazadero, several hours northwest of the city in Sonoma County. (Once a week Garcia, whose artwork was beginning to blossom as well, also attended the California School of Fine Arts.) By then Tiff was gone; an army recruiter who'd popped into Ruth's bar convinced her that her oldest would be better off if he signed up, which led Tiff into the Marine Corps.

Starting in the middle school where they met, Garcia and Grant increasingly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable. Jumping the fence at the Golden State Dairy and purloining chocolate milk and ice
cream from the trucks in the early morning hours was one thing—“no fingerprints, no breaking locks, no damage,” Grant still boasts—but their adventures soon turned more mind expanding. Garcia began bringing around pills. “He would say, ‘Look at this, man!'” Grant says. “He'd have ten or twelve different-colored pills in his hand. We'd take 'em and drop 'em.” Garcia never said where the pills came from, although other kids were known to sneak into their family's bathrooms and grab their parents' prescriptions. After the Garcia bar would close for the night the two boys had one job to attend to: pouring whatever was left in all the bottles into one jug, which they would then guzzle down. (Garcia later developed an aversion to alcohol, and it's easy to imagine it starting with those concoctions.) Later the two friends also shared their first joint—to Garcia, a far more immediately appealing high.

An enticing high of a different sort was beckoning. In eighth grade Garcia had taken a stab at playing saxophone, perhaps as a way to continue his father's legacy, but his partially missing middle finger made it tricky to play. Another instrument, and another genre, was beckoning. Garcia would long boast that for his fifteenth birthday his mother had given him an accordion, which he almost immediately traded in at a pawn shop for his first electric guitar, spending the following months figuring out how to play it. The timing was profound. Rock 'n' roll was now a few years old and clearly wasn't fading away: in 1957 Garcia could turn on a radio at any moment and hear the Everly Brothers' “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up, Little Susie,” Elvis's “All Shook Up,” Fats Domino's “I'm Walkin',” and Chuck Berry's “School Day.”

Garcia was discovering his type of friends and his type of musical expression, but in one area at least, he didn't feel especially comfortable. Every so often a bunch of the kids would head to Playland, the waterfront amusement park in the Richmond district of San Francisco. They'd play arcade games and eat pie, but Garcia's mood would change
slightly when they approached the water. “He'd get little twitches about it,” Grant says. “He was always kind of weird when we went out to the beach.” Garcia never said why, but friends assumed the water triggered memories of his father's death and the hole it left in him.