Dark Star (2 page)

Was he an American original? He was a world original. One of a kind. Although I distrust pride and take a dim view of it, America can be proud of him. He had such an American childhood. And he was self-created. He created the culture as he was a part of it. Because the man was an artist, and nothing but. Jerry was my dearest friend. He was also my big brother.

Bob Weir 

July, 2008

 

 

 

It's the same story the crow told me It's the only one he know—Like the morning sun you come And like the wind you go....

—
Robert Hunter, “Uncle John's Band”

History had kicked him between the eyes. You could see it all the way back there.

—
Ken Kesey, interview with author, 1989

 

Well, the first days are the hardest days don't you worry anymore When life looks like Easy Street There's danger at your door....

—
Robert Hunter, “Uncle John's Band”

I personally feel my heart is in San Francisco. I left my heart in San Francisco. I'm from there. I still feel like a city person.... I don't really relate to Marin County consciousness. I'm locked in my old world.

—
Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988

 

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
Our mom was a registered nurse. She wasn't a practicing nurse. Maybe she practiced for one year and then she got married. In the thirties, she was a housewife. Her family was working-class Irish. Her mother, Tillie Clifford, organized the laundry workers union. She was elected secretary-treasurer and she kept the post for like twenty-five years. I was named after her. Which I guess was traditional. It might have been at my father's insistence. I don't know. My father used to play in speakeasies. He also had big bands that used to play out in the park and various places. A big orchestra. Twenty-piece, at least. I've seen pictures of them in their formal stuff. He had these pictures taken for promotion and in one of them, he was all spruced up. Really looking sharp. Tux, tie, everything. He had kind of fair skin and he worked under his own name. Jose Garcia. Or Joe Garcia. Depending on the particular gathering he was with.

When they got married, he went into the bar business because he got blackballed from the union and his band had a breakup. It was a job he had to take to survive. Back then, you had to take any damn thing. You couldn't be really picky. So he got into the bar business with a partner. He took a day job because he couldn't make money being a musician. He was lucky to even have a job back then. This was right after the Depression. Things were pretty slim. Usually, he was at home at night because he worked in the daytime. He was perfect for the bar scene. Maybe a little bit too suave. Shirt open. Sleeves rolled up. Apron. It was his place but he served.

The first of his bars was located on First Street and Harrison in San Francisco right where the Sailors Union of the Pacific is now. It's an industrial neighborhood about two blocks from the waterfront with a lot of seamen. In fact, a seamen's hotel was on top of the corner businesses. There was a bar on one corner, a Curtis Baby Ruth candy factory on the other corner, and right behind that was Union Oil. Running bars, my mom went from one corner to the next. She was on three or four corners.

Two blocks away was the poorest area in town. Third and Howard. Down there was really scumbag city. Skid row, totally. Jerry and I used to go down there. We'd take the bus from my grandmother's house or the streetcar down to First Street and then all the way to Mission from the Excelsior District where we lived. Then we'd wait for the bus at First where the terminal is and then ride it up. We could see the transients and sailors. A lot of drunken sailors and it was rowdy. That was the worst part of town we could go to. We were street kids but in our neighborhood. We knew when we got in another neighborhood, we didn't know who anybody was. We were living on the other side of town in the Excelsior or the Crocker-Amazon District. My grandmother lived three blocks away. Within a five-mile radius lived all the family members that I was aware of. All in different neighborhoods but we'd see each other weekly.

The Cliffords and the Garcias bought a summer house in Santa Cruz. In Lompico near Felton. In the wintertime, you could never get out of there. In the summertime, they had a nice dam, a lodge, a bar, and a little grocery store. Sometimes we'd go there all summer. We'd ride down there with my grandfather and my grandmother would stop at the store and load up on groceries and we'd go into the canyon. The first stuff they brought down there was tools. Between the half-dozen adults down there at the time, my father and my uncle and my grandfather Clifford put all the kids to work, raking leaves or unloading the car so they could fix up this cabin. The different family members would go down there and have a picnic and they started gradually staying longer because the place was fixed up. But there was no electricity or nothing.

A year before my father died, I chopped off Jerry's finger. That was where it happened. I'm not sure how long we'd had the place by then but we'd been there for a while. Long enough to put what I thought was my name across the driveway.
CLIFFORD GARCIA
. Actually, we'd been given a chore to do but we were fucking around. Jerry had the ax for a while, too. I wasn't the only one that had the ax. We both had axes. He would hold the wood and I'd chop it and we were chopping these branches. My dad was constantly cutting parts of this redwood tree down and Jerry just kept fucking around. He was putting his finger there and pulling it away.

He was fucking around and I was just constantly chopping. I was going to tease him. But I would stop the hatchet before getting to the wood. He'd put the wood there and I'd go “SWEEEEE” and stop. And he'd pull it away thinking it was chopped. I'd say, “Hey, I forgot to chop,” and I'd pick it up again and I'd do that. We were playing little games like that and then I nailed him. He screamed. I screamed. We both screamed. It was an accident. I didn't do it maliciously. I was a kid. I was eight and Jerry was four. We were little guys.

They took him to the hospital in Santa Cruz. Back then it could have taken two hours. I remember I was in the car. It was traumatizing. Jerry was home that night but they couldn't get him to the right surgeon to save the finger. They could have saved it. I didn't cut it off. It was just a wound.

All of a sudden, my aunt came down from the city and I ended up going up there. They took me away. I was always the first one to get moved away because I was more portable. I was older and I could walk on my own and I knew directions.

No one hard-timed me about it. I think they all realized it was an accident. But there are these things you feel. I felt guilty. I can still feel it. My mom would bring it up now and then. When she was on my case for something else. She would bring up the incident. Like, “Remember what you did.”

 

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
I was not there when my dad drowned. I was in Santa Cruz, near Lompico. The drowning was in Arcata. They were up there fishing. My dad didn't want to take me along because he knew he'd have to take me out there with him and that was probably why I didn't go. That was the only reason. I was ten but I had fished with my dad before. Whereas Jerry was too small to go out there with him. Not that I could have saved him. We probably both would have gone.

Jerry and my mom were sitting on the beach and my dad was out in waders in the ocean. He was a good to very good swimmer. I guess he got pulled down by an undertow and cracked his head. The body was lost for like six hours. Jerry didn't witness his father's death. When it happened, he was five years old. All he knew was what the adults were telling him. It was not as though he sat and watched. That would have been a horrible thing to watch. But that was not what happened.

For the whole family, this was the first death in this particular generation. So there was a lot of grief and I felt that hard. I got dragged to the funeral parlor and it was my first real encounter with death. It was very intense. All of a sudden, as a little kid, I saw all these adults I'd never seen before. Besides all the aunts and uncles who were in one place at one time. Everybody was there. It was traumatizing. I remember that. The thing that I think had the biggest effect on me and that probably got me into nine-to-five-type jobs for the rest of my life was that all of a sudden my mom said, “You're the man in the family.” I hated that. Soon as she said that, I said, “Why me? What am I supposed to do? Can I drive a car? Can I have a job?” I was ten years old. And I'd had absolutely no responsibilities up until that point. I didn't even know how to comb my own hair till I was eleven. My childhood ended right there. Definitely. But not Jerry. Jerry was coddled totally and he got everything he wanted from my mom until he left home and went into the Army.

After my dad drowned, my mom started trying to be mom and dad. That was laid on her. She wasn't trying to do it but it was automatically laid on her. But I had an aunt and uncle that lived up the street. I had two aunts and uncles who lived within half a mile of our house. My grandmother was half a mile away in the other direction. So we went from one aunt and uncle to the other. Then we went back to my grandmother's house to live while my mother maintained the bar business. After my dad died, things all happened.

Laird Grant:
Where Grandma lived was Eighty-seven Harrington Street. Where Jerry had lived was First and Harrison. It was not the same neighborhood. One of them was way down on the docks and the other one was in the middle of the Mission District. In the Excelsior District was where his grandmother was. Between Mission and Alemany. Jerry lived with his grandmom for a lot of the time. Later on, I actually ended up moving into the house and I lived there for a while as well. A bunch of us did. Tillie was great. Tillie really liked Jerry a whole bunch. She was a typical grandmother. A very stern kind of a lady but with a twinkle in her eye. God, she must have been a mischievous woman when she was younger. She was really a character. She helped organize the laundry workers union and she was kind of a radical for her time. For a woman back then, this was not a heard-of thing. Harrington Street was kind of Jerry's psychic home and his stomping grounds, too. Balboa High was just across the way and all of his old running partners were over in that area.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
My mom wanted to move a lot so we moved a lot. Four or five times in three or four years. One of the reasons was the bar business. She kept wanting to get another house in the country. She wanted to go to the Russian River. Most of the time, she would get home in time to make us dinner. When we were living with my grandmother, my mom didn't cook at all. My mom went down and she worked from six in the morning to one at night. Late, long hours. At night when we were staying at my grandmother's before we got the TV, we'd sit around the kitchen table and listen to the radio. My grandfather would sit there with the paper and listen to fights with his beer and we'd draw on these laundry sheets that had all this stuff written on them. On the other side, there was nothing and they were pretty thick. We'd both draw. Sometimes, Jerry would take mine and start drawing on it and I'd take his and start drawing on it. He had more of a knack for it than I did or he was at least as good as me even though he was four years younger. He did come out with some good stuff. He was creative. He always had that creative passion.

He was pretty social. If there were kids to play with, he'd be out playing rather than sit at home. If there was activity in the street, he was in it. He wouldn't sit around or get into his own stuff. He wasn't like that. He never got into fights. He had a pretty normal childhood. Definitely middle-class. Definitely normal. The Little Rascals were no different than us except they looked a little more tattered than we did. Any of those pictures I have of us from the fifties compare with the Little Rascals.

When we moved down to Menlo Park, my mom had to work until six
P.M.
At first she stayed home to be a housewife and didn't work at all. My stepfather, Wally Matusiewicz, took care of the bar business, and my mom did nothing but be a homemaker. She even made her own clothes. Everything new. She went down to Montgomery Ward and bought everything new for the brand new house and brand new neighborhood. Everything brand new. We almost went down there naked. We didn't bring anything from my grandmother's house. She just wanted to start over. A new life. Her dream then was the housewife dream. And she did it.