A Long Strange Trip (2 page)

2

Children of the American Decades

(1940–1960)

Out on the edge of the Western world, the Golden Gate channel cuts through the coastal range to link the Pacific Ocean and a bay, creating a haven called San Francisco. In 1492, the greater region was the fertile home to the most populous place in what would become the United States. When it was colonized and named for St. Francis of Assisi in 1776, some ineffable but authentic connection linked the name source to the spirit of the land and kept it a place that wasn’t quite like the rest of the continent. The gold rush that began in 1848 filled it with marginalized seekers from the rest of the United States and the world, and ever after, it was a sanctuary for the odd and eccentric. As Robinson Jeffers put it, “For our country here at the west of things / Is pregnant of dreams.”

Near the end of World War I, it welcomed Manuel Garcia, an electrician from La Coruña, Spain, who bought a home in the outer Mission District and settled there with his wife and four children. In 1935 his second son—baptized Jose, but commonly called Joe—a swing-band leader and reedman, married for the second time, to Ruth Marie “Bobbie” Clifford, a nurse. Their first child, Clifford (“Tiff”), was born in 1937, and their second and last child was born on August 1, 1942, at Children’s Hospital in the city. They named him Jerome John Garcia, after Jerome Kern, Bobbie’s favorite composer. From all accounts, Joe and Bobbie were both easygoing and benevolent, and it was a happy home. By now, Joe had leased a building on the corner of 1st and Harrison Streets near the waterfront, with a tavern, Joe Garcia’s, downstairs and rooms for rent above, and they were financially comfortable. Their house on Amazon Street was filled with music, as Joe kept up with his clarinet and Bobbie played the piano. At the age of four or five, Jerry dug into a box in the attic of his maternal grandparents’ country place and discovered a windup Victrola phonograph, some steel needles, and the first recorded music he would be able to recall, a handful of dusty, one-sided old records of folk songs like “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” No one showed him how, but he played them over and over, “a compulsion almost,” as he later put it.

It was a miserable irony that the Garcia family was irremediably shattered while on vacation. In the summer of 1947, they were enjoying themselves near Arcata, in Northern California. Joe went fishing, and drowned. Jerry later claimed to have witnessed his father’s death, though it seems more likely that this was a memory formed from repeated tellings. A bit paradoxically, he also recalled being unable to listen to stories about his father until he was ten or eleven. In any event, their wounds were grievous.

In the absence of his father, Jerry naturally depended on his mother for support. But Bobbie had never been a particularly domestic woman. Artistic and a student of opera, she was also a follower of Velikovsky, astrology, and palm reading. More pressingly, she had a living to earn, and as she came to spend the bulk of her time down at Joe Garcia’s at 1st and Harrison, the care of her children fell more and more to her parents, Tillie and Bill Clifford, “Nan” and “Pop.” Jerry in particular felt deprived and deserted, especially when he and Tiff moved in with Nan and Pop at 87 Harrington Street, in the Excelsior neighborhood of the outer Mission District, while Bobbie lived in a cottage across the street. In later years he would relate a specific traumatic memory of being left behind on the street one day by his mother, of frantically searching for her until he was finally found by his grandmother. He was bereft, and he would always carry a feeling that he was not loved or cared for, that he was not worthy. These scars would never fade.

Jerry’s relationship with his mother would sour further when Bobbie, as Tiff put it, “started getting married a lot.” There was a brief marriage to one Ben Brown in 1949, seemingly because Ben was a construction foreman whose labors Bobbie employed to improve her cottage. The extended Garcia family did not approve of the marriage, and any support they might have given the boys fell away. Years later, as a teenager, Jerry even made nasty remarks about his mother’s morals. Fair or not, the damage was done. His self-esteem and capacity for trust in women had been permanently damaged.

A few months before his father’s death, Jerry suffered another loss. He and Tiff were at Nan and Pop’s country house in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco. Tiff was chopping wood, and Jerry was being his little helper when his right hand got in the way of the descending ax. His enduring memory was of a buzzing sound he would come to associate with shock, then jumping around not looking at his wound, then a long drive to the doctor’s, the world vibrating in his ears. It was only when the last bandage fell off in the bathtub one night that he discovered to his surprise that he had lost the top two joints of his middle finger.

Harrington Street was only a block long, connecting Mission Street at one end and a major thoroughfare, Alemany Boulevard, at the other. In the 1940s, the center of the block was not yet developed, and there was a small open field, with a barn, trees, and an informal playground. Mission Street was lined with stores, including a hobby and model train shop. It was an Italian and Irish working-class neighborhood, with the Jewish Home for the Aged just a block or two down Mission. Despite their Latin last name and Tillie’s own Swedish heritage, the Garcia boys thought of their ethnicity as deriving largely from Pop and saw themselves as Mission (District) Irish, a standard San Francisco ethnic classification. Around the corner on Alemany was Corpus Christi Church, which they attended regularly. The Church’s theater of hell served as usual to tinge Jerry’s later sexuality with guilt, but even more important, he realized later, it gave him a sense of the mysterious spiritual world beyond the material one.

Life with Nan and Pop had its rewards. For Tiff, who at ten was supposed to be the man of the family (at least as this applied to his mother and brother), there was a good role model in Pop, a taciturn man who liked his beer, the fights, and puttering with a wide array of hobbies. His independent laundry delivery business brought him home early, in time to keep an eye on the boys. Jerry, by contrast, thought of Pop as a “bump on a log,” and instead turned to Nan, whom he resembled in charm and gregariousness. Tillie Clifford was a fascinating and formidable woman. A founder and the secretary/treasurer of the local Laundry Workers’ Union, she was an expert politician who always dressed well and seemingly knew everyone in San Francisco. She was not to be trifled with. In 1916, she had filed charges against her husband for assault. He was contrite, and the judge had taken his side. “You will run for office again,” she warned the court. “I shall see to it that you don’t get some votes.” Her threat did not seem to have any effect, but she remained unabashed. Jerry would recall her as a beautiful woman with a spiritual quality, an authentic socialist who was either “a fabulous liar or she just genuinely loved everybody.” She was also a second-generation San Franciscan, independent of conventional mores as she openly attended out-of-town union meetings with her extramarital boyfriend.

Periodically bedridden by asthma attacks as a young boy, Jerry passed his time reading and watching television. Their nearly first-on-the-block set—the people with the first one had a child with polio, so no one could visit and watch it—confirmed him as a child of the fifties. He also loved drawing, for which he showed an early talent. Perhaps it was true, as his palm-reading mother had told him, that he had “the hands to be an artist.” In the third grade he had the good fortune to have a young bohemian teacher, Miss Simon, who encouraged him to be involved in every possible art project. Soon he felt not only a blossoming identity as an artist, but also a general sense of being different from most other people. His favorite reading became the comics which Tiff swiped on Mission Street, especially E.C. (“Entertaining Comics”) comic books, like the classic
Tales From the Crypt.
Though the gory Old Testament tales of retribution revolted parents across the nation, their German expressionistic silent-movie graphic style introduced young Jerry unconsciously to fundamental lessons in art and form.

Whatever needs the horror genre satisfied for Jerry, and it would appeal to him all his life, he soon found a new medium in which to explore them. He went to the Granada Theater at Ocean and Mission to see
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,
and both horror movies and film in general permanently captured his attention. On his first visit, he was so frightened that he couldn’t look at the screen, and instead found the pattern of the fabric on the back of the seats engraved in his memory. Striving to master his fear with knowledge, he began to study the classic film monsters—Frankenstein’s, Dracula, and the Wolf Man. When his reading graduated to novels, his first selection was Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
Horror also influenced his artwork, and his favorite subject for years was Boris Karloff in the Jack Pearce Frankenstein’s monster makeup. It was his first taste of the weird, and he loved it. Always.

In 1953 Bobbie remarried, the boys moved back in with her, and for Jerry, life went straight to hell. Wally Matusiewicz was a stocky blond sailor, a hardworking man who expected his stepsons to work alongside him on home projects; but physical labor was never going to be Jerry’s idea of a good time. His relationship with Wally went swiftly downhill, for a variety of deeply emotional reasons. In a confused, never-understood way, Jerry had never entirely forgiven his mother for the death of his father, nor for remarrying. Now hormones swept over him in the usual tidal wave, crashing into the retaining wall of his Roman Catholicism and creating a jumbled mess. As an adult he would concede that sex and women were never his primary concern, “except for when it really runs you around crazy, when you’re around fourteen or so.” Add to puberty his alienation from his mother and you had a recipe for torment. Twenty years later he would read an underground comic book called
Binky Brown Meets the
Holy Virgin Mary
and grasp profoundly that it described exactly the hell of his early teens, as captured in the rays of light, lust, guilt, that emanated from Binky’s crotch, up toward the Virgin, down to hell, and out toward the entire world. Coping with sexuality is tough; dealing with the guilt of the Roman Catholic Church regarding sex is tougher; doing both when confused by an absent father and a mother perceived as disloyal—this for Jerry was impossible. He would love and be loved, but he would stay painfully confused about himself and women for all his days.

That year Union Oil bought the property on which Joe Garcia’s was located, and while Bobbie waited for the company to build her a new bar on the opposite corner, she decided to move her family twenty-five miles south of the city to Menlo Park. The Garcias were part of a social tidal wave. In the aftermath of World War II, millions of veterans had used the G.I. Bill to move from working-class to middle-class lives, and from renting city apartments to owning suburban homes. Their prosperity was one consequence of the permanent war economy that the Cold War demanded. Another result was suburban conformity. Jerry would first become conscious of racism and anti-Semitism in Menlo Park, and he didn’t like them. His new friends were determinedly diverse, ranging from a classmate and early sweetheart, Mary Brydges, to Will Oda, the son of a Nisei gardener at Stanford, to his best friend, Laird Grant, a working-class borderline hoodlum. One of the other ways that he countered the suburban blahs was with music. As the predominant culture of the fifties grew ever more bland, the discerning ear could find escape in the riches of African American music.

In the Bay Area, that meant the rhythm and blues station KWBR, to which Tiff introduced him. An obscure street-corner tune by the Crows called “Gee” set him to listening to the cream of American popular music, and Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters kept him company all day and half the night long. Initially a solo acoustic form from the Mississippi Delta, the blues evolved through boogie-woogie piano and Kansas City big-band vocal shouting to Chicago, where Muddy Waters found acoustic guitar inaudible in forties clubs. His transition to electric guitar defined a new urban blues, which evolved yet again into the R&B of the late forties and the fifties. Each mode contained a high realism that knew life as a solitary confinement sometimes comforted by sexuality or even love but inevitably succeeded by a death sentence. In all of American popular music, only the blues spoke truthfully of love and death. Enthralled, Jerry absorbed not only chords and rhythms but a certain vision. It was not the psychopathology of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” that he acquired, but hipness, the authentic wisdom eternally found at the edges and bottom of the social pyramid.

In 1955, rock and roll—rhythm and blues with a backbeat—emerged to enliven a torpid America. First came Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” a no. 1 hit a year after its release when it served as the theme song of a classic film of youthful rebellion,
Blackboard Jungle.
The producers of the film displayed their understanding of the music’s importance and violated film custom by mixing the song at high volume. The audience grasped that decision perfectly. The resistance to adult authority depicted in the film and in the contemporary career of James Dean attracted Jerry, though not the song itself. Most of the early rock tunes were the product of small regional labels, like Little Richard Penniman’s bizarre, manic “Tutti Frutti” on Specialty. Inevitably, the larger companies moved to co-opt the rock and roll fad, releasing Pat Boone’s acceptably bland cover version of “Tutti Frutti” among many other covers to even greater commercial success. It was a critical moment for Jerry, who swiftly came to understand that there was frequently an authentic black version, and then “there’s the lame white version.” Two unquestionably genuine tunes from Chicago’s small Chess Records caught his ear. Bo Diddley’s self-named tune established the fundamental shave-and-a-haircut beat, and Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” melded country guitar riffs with the backbeat and melody of rhythm and blues and defined rock’s fundamental structure and attitude. To Jerry it seemed like a cowboy song, “only nastier,” and to a thirteen-year-old with surging hormones, nasty was very, very good. For the first time in history, large masses of young white Americans were listening and dancing to black musicians.