Dark Star (31 page)

 

Rock Scully:
Heroin was a great drug and it had worked very well for Garcia in the studio because he could really concentrate with it, but once it became a real habit, this wasn't like cocaine. He wouldn't shower and he wouldn't shave. He didn't shave anyway because he had that beard but he wouldn't look after himself and he started burning up the bedroom and the hotel rooms and so on. His nods got to be very scary. Being his road manager for the Garcia band, it got to be very very harsh.

I knew I was strung out and obviously Garcia was strung out and I was very frightened about his physical condition. In an effort to clean myself up, I told him I was going to quit and I told him the reason I was going to quit was that I couldn't be scared anymore. It was too scary. I didn't know if I was going to wake up in the morning and find him dead, dying, or swollen. Because his ankles were swelling up. This was when the diabetes started kicking in. All he was eating was hot dogs and steaks and Hâagen-Dazs.

We had to have all our band meetings up in my living room because Jerry wouldn't leave the house. Even then, coming upstairs was a big deal. It just got to be too hard on me so I called a doctor and I had him come over to the house to take a look at Jerry. From then on, me and Jerry were at odds. He did not like acknowledging the fact that he was sick but we'd had to buy him new shoes because his ankles were so swollen. He had a whole new size foot and he'd never lie down. He'd never put his feet up. He'd sit there on the edge of his bed, play his guitar, smoke his Persian, nod off, and drop his cigarette in his moccasin. That would wake him up, yelling and screaming.

This stuff was starting to happen in hotel rooms and it was too scary and I was afraid that he was getting sick. I knew he was strung out. I was. I understood that part of it. But I couldn't understand why he was getting all swollen and pasty and wouldn't take a shower and wouldn't change his clothes. I couldn't understand why he was getting all feisty and would not talk to the band and did not understand that there were real-time things going on.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
Back then, I saw Jerry once a month. If he was at his worst, he would avoid me because he'd be ashamed. Before he would see me, I was one of the people he would always try to put himself together for. He had all these burn holes on his shirts and on his carpets and we were all terrified about that. We talked to Rock and Nicki about putting a smoke alarm downstairs.

Nicki Scully:
Fire hazard was certainly a definite concern. We tried to keep an eye on things without being intrusive. Rock and Jerry were in it together but Rock always looked after Jerry. He really cared about Jerry. There certainly were some distortions in the relationship because of their unhealthful habits and because of who they were but I never for a minute questioned Rock's love for Jerry. When I began to understand the nature of the habit, I felt Rock didn't have love for much of anything but heroin. That superseded everything and that was true for Jerry as well.

David Nelson:
I didn't want to believe it but when the New Riders were on the road, one of my roadies told me about Jerry. I kept saying, “No, no! Couldn't possibly be, man.” He laughed and said, “You haven't seen one of their shows yet.” I said, “Jerry's nodding?” And he said, “Yup. Sorry.” I went and talked to Jerry but you don't go to your old friend like a big brother or a priest or someone with that counselor kind of attitude. What did he say about it when I talked to him? “It's my medicine.”

Jon Mcintire:
For him, I think accepting the opiates was the desire for the feeling of no-feeling. I remember one time saying to Garcia, “Look, I'm a tremendously independent person yet I depend on you and if I depend on you along with so many others, what's the effect of this on you?” He said, “Don't worry about it. I'm so hard on myself, you could never be as hard on me as I am.” For him, the opiates put a veil over things and softened the edges.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
I was pretty close to Nora Sage. She was the person taking care of Jerry. At that time, he was totally asexual. The opium wiped out his sexual drive. He just wasn't there.

Nicki Scully:
I used to find these little gardens planted around the house. Nora was being this little elf who came and beautified the place by planting flowers. I said, “Jer, that isn't me. Do you know what's goin' on?” He said, “Oh, that's Nora. She works down at the health food store.” The next time I went down there, I got Nora pointed out to me and I thanked her because I did think it was really sweet. She became my babysitter and I became dependent on her. She was fabulous with the kids and they adored her.

Laird Grant:
He kept drinking liquids but it didn't do him any good. He just bloated. On top of everything else, he was so fat. His shit was hanging. It was coming over the top of his socks. You could sit there and see the fat bulging out over the top of his shoes. He looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. His skin was pasty, pale white. He looked like he could hardly move. I said, “Hey, man. Packing all that weight around, you're going to fucking cack off from a massive heart attack. You ought to get rid of it.” He said, “Oh, I puts it on and I takes it off.” I said, “Yeah, well, you ought to start fucking taking some of it off, man.” And then I didn't see him for a while.

Rock Scully:
Finally, my wife and kids moved out and went up to Oregon and that left me as a bachelor upstairs and Jerry as a bachelor downstairs. This was trouble. We were this mutual denial society.

Nicki Scully:
When I left Hepburn Heights at the end of January '81, Rock's brother Dicken moved in. Rock and Dicken and Jerry were hopeless. And helpless.

Rock Scully:
The doctor came. Jerry didn't want to see him but I forced him down his throat. Because I felt that I needed some backup on it, I told Phil, Bill, Bobby, and Mickey that I was doing it and when I was doing it. Mickey and Phil and Bill came over to the house. They were upstairs. I went downstairs, knocked on Jerry's door, and said, “Look, the doctor's here and wants to take a look at you. I've told you that I can't go out on the road with you anymore until you get looked at because you could be getting very very ill.” He was there with his swollen ankles and discoloration and all kinds of scary stuff. Garcia said, “Okay.”

Garcia was staring daggers at me because he was very pissed off about having his personal life looked into like this. Because this guy might stick a finger up his ass or something. The doctor went down there and spent about twenty minutes with Garcia. He came back up, he was ashen gray. He said, “Rock, it's a good thing you called me. This man is about to die.” That was what he told me. Then I had to go back downstairs and tell Garcia. I said, “Garcia, now you're going to have to get some blood work done because the doctor is really freaked.” He went, “Okay, I'll go in next week. Set up an appointment.” I said, “No, the nurse is upstairs. She's coming down now.” He went livid. I said, “No, we have to do this. The doctor says you are in desperate shape and it has to be checked out. It has to be. You might die.”

He didn't want to hear about it. He said, “Scully, that's it.” He was so pissed off at me. The nurse went down and drew his blood. They took it away and did a workup on it immediately. While the nurse was downstairs doing this number on him, the doctor was upstairs talking to the band about his condition because I'd said, “Look, you ought to explain this to them.”

I wanted him to tell them that this was not my doing. I knew I was going to get the blame for this, no matter what. Certainly from Garcia. But I was already getting the blame from the rest of the band because I was doing the same drug. I wasn't the only one. God, it was obvious. It was very obvious because they'd used it themselves. They knew exactly what was going on so I was not going to lie about that. I had to be the stand-up junkie, which was not a cool role to be in. I was going to be the fall guy no matter what and I knew it. So I figured I might as well be the fall guy with some fucking effect. That was when I brought the doctor in.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
There was a period of time when there was a struggle within the band about Rock. I came from the outside and tried to help push Rock out. It wasn't because I disliked Rock as a person. It was because I thought he was so strung out and that was why Jerry was in that situation.

Nicki Scully:
Many people saw Rock as the root of the problem and tried to oust him. But I think in the end, when they were in that position, they became enablers, too. Just like everyone who loved Jerry.

Rock Scully:
The band never went down and talked to him. Garcia was so livid, he didn't want to talk to them. No way was he going to talk to somebody. For this, I got fired. About a month later, I was out of there. Because of Jerry's lack of support for me but also because I had to go into rehab. I went off to rehab and I was supposed to come back. I was going to do a month in rehab and a couple of months readjusting to a life without drugs and that was what I did. Jerry and I, we actually had a truce and he said I could come back. It wasn't true, though, because Jerry didn't want to quit.

Nicki Scully:
Few people choose to leave the Grateful Dead scene. If you became a big enough drain for long enough, you'd get ostracized. At a certain point, they'd had enough of Rock and sent him off to rehab at their expense. Billy Kreutzmann came in the limo, we went to the airport and put him on the plane, and Rock was history. I'm sure it saved his life. But when you're history, you're history. No one in the scene supported his recovery after he came out of rehab. Hardly anyone ever talked to him or acknowledged him again. As soon as Rock was fired, I lost many of my privileges as well.

Owsley Stanley:
They drove him out of the scene because he was Garcia's supplier. He wasn't allowed to come to the shows for years. They couldn't control it all but Rock was too close. He was one target they could get a handle on.

Jon Mcintire:
During that period away from the Grateful Dead, I had been a domestic violence and rape crisis counselor in St. Louis. I'd had chemical dependency training. When they hired me back as manager, they knew what I'd been doing. So I came back under the mantle of, “We now want to reform ourselves.” I felt it was important to do an intervention about chemical dependency or the things that were keeping people from being really conscious about how they were living. I felt it was pernicious and it wasn't just Jerry. There were the Jerry things and there were the other things and I brought in a counselor to deal with everyone.

Rock Scully:
For me and heroin, that was it. That was eleven years ago. One of the things I learned in rehab and then in the three years I spent in AA and NA is that drugs and drinking, no matter what they are, have a tendency to isolate. Being in the limelight all the damn time, Jerry wanted to go away into his privacy, into his own private scene, his own private life, with his own private drug. That was what he did. I hate to say it but that was what he did.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
That place you come to between sleeping and waking was where Jerry got his inspiration and his energy and his life lessons. The stuff that was important to him happened during that time and I think that with these drugs he was able to spend a lot of time there. It was a waking dream state. To my way of thinking, this was his shamanic quest and I felt somehow very respectful of his desire to pursue that state and could never really call him all the names that some people might think I ought to have called him. For him, that in-between state was the crack between the worlds that Castaneda talks about in the Don Juan books.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I never tried this drug so I don't know what it does but I know he always avoided emotional pain and he had a lot to avoid. Isn't it supposed to make you feel good? I think he was a very wounded soul and wanted to escape. You can see the pattern with his escaping women. Whoever he was connected with in his primary relationship, he was always sneaking around to take drugs or be with another woman. I don't know why. I couldn't read his mind. He didn't talk about his internal crises or his emotional process. Really, I don't think anyone could have stayed married to this person.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
The major issue for me which had to do with his addiction was that he didn't feel he was worthy. He told me on several occasions that all the fame and adulation he had embarrassed him. It was amazing that he was so successful because what most people do in his situation is that they feel they're unworthy and then they do things to prove that. His situation with women was to me clearly that. If they gave him affection, there was something wrong with them.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry was a mystic from the beginning. He really wasn't that interested in our small little human world that much. Even though he was not in good condition and seemingly disconnected, to my way of thinking this was intimately connected with everything that we'd been trying to do up to that point. I couldn't live with seeing him go down like that but frankly, I was a little envious of his ability to just sit there and trip out. In retrospect, I don't think it was a great position to take. I should have been more interfering. Because he went so far, it was scary. He and I had a real communications problem about it. Like I said, I didn't want to challenge him about it. Frankly, I didn't think it was any of my business. My business was different. It involved living things and my kids and family and keeping it together.