Dark Star (32 page)

When I would get with Jerry, I would feel like I was just spinning my wheels. I'd talk about the kids in school and he'd say, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” I realized that I just didn't have a lot of clout with those kind of talks. I couldn't get him with any of that stuff anymore so I just let it go.

Jon Mcintire:
I started back with the band and I was taking them on the road. I would go around at night to their hotel rooms to give them road money, talk with them about the scheduling, whatever. This was the darkest period in Garcia's life that I witnessed. He just looked horrid and when I'd go to the door to give him something, he'd barely open the door and I'd slip the money through and ask him quickly whatever I could before he'd slam the door and go back into his hibernation. Back into his stupor.

This one time, he opened the door completely with this grand gesture and his pant legs were up above his knees and his legs were all open sores. And he stood there looking at me. Now, he could have rolled his pant legs down. He could have kept me waiting at the door while he did that or he could have just barely opened the door and grabbed the money and slammed the door. But this time, he flung the door open and he was standing there and I saw these open sores all over his legs and that was when I made the decision to do the intervention. I came back off the road and I thought, “This has got to stop. I gotta do something.” Because I thought it was a plea for help. That was what it was.

Robert Greenfield:
In September 1984, Jerry Garcia stepped out on stage in the Veterans Memorial Auditorium at Marin Civic Center to perform at a tribute for Bill Graham being put on by the Mill Valley Film Festival. Because Bill put me there, I was sitting in the second row, far closer to the action than I needed to be. God but Jerry looked awful that night. Not just dead but like a creature who'd returned from beyond the grave. His skin was so pale that in the lights, it seemed to glow a dull gray-green. Had he brushed his hand across his clammy forehead to wipe off the sweat and come away instead with spots of festering mold and sticky cobwebs, no one would have been surprised.

Jon Mcintire:
When I did that intervention with Garcia, I wanted Hunter to take part in it and he said, “I support you in what you're doing. I cannot take part in it.” I was talking to Hunter later on and he said, “One thing we need to realize is we're dealing with a character flaw here that's been there from the beginning. It's not something that just came on with the heroin.”

Robert Greenfield:
Unlike other musicians from the Fillmore's golden days, Jerry was not there for the meal preceding the show. He did not come to the dance party that followed. He just played and he left. Once he was gone, it did not seem possible he could keep going like this for very much longer. While freebasing in his BMW in Golden Gate Park four months later, Jerry was busted for possession of twenty-three packets of heroin and cocaine.

Laird Grant:
He had just gone and copped. It was enough for an army, man. But that was his score for the week.

Len Dell'amico:
This was after an attempted intervention. He just could not deal with what they were saying or doing. His way of dealing with it was to go and behave in such a way as to get busted and that wasn't good for him. Look at the circumstances of what happened. To park in a no-parking zone in a big rich car? Why not just put out a sign and ask for it?

Jon Mcintire:
He was on his way from Marin County to a treatment program in Oakland and he was in Golden Gate Park and he chose to stop and turn on in plain view. Essentially, he was saying, “Stop me from doing what I'm doing.” Which was going to treatment. Or it may have been a last hurrah. I can't know what was really going on inside his mind. We only know the circumstances.

 

Richard Loren:
Garcia said, “God yeah. I'd love to make a movie. I really love this Kurt Vonnegut book,
Sirens of Titan
.” One thing led to another and we bought the rights to
Sirens of Titan
. Then we renewed it and renewed it and we renewed it. Tom Davis, of
Saturday Night Live
and Franken and Davis, and Jerry were working on the script.

Tom Davis:
He and I actually spent about a month and a half writing the screenplay. It was not in the right form to be done professionally but at the time, Jerry was going, “Fuck it. Write the scenes and don't worry about it.” When we worked, Jerry was always in the recliner. Then he would doze in front of the set. I was telling him, “If you keep consuming all this stuff, you're going to get sick in the middle of something.”

Richard Loren:
We couldn't get it sold because they didn't like the script and Jerry didn't want to change it to suit the way Hollywood wanted to make it. Jerry wanted to direct it so it was very difficult to make that deal. We got Bill Murray to read the book. He loved it and he wanted to make the movie. We got Tom Davis, Bill Murray, and Michael Ovitz in a room. We signed a development deal with Universal to make this movie.

Gary Gutierrez:
It was Tom Davis and Bill Murray, Jerry and me, and a bunch of attorneys and this guy from Universal sitting around this huge table. The only memorable thing to me about it was that Bill Murray and Tom were at opposite sides of the table and during this very serious discussion about the deal, there was Bill Murray making his mouth like a billiard pocket at the edge of the table and Tom Davis was rolling gumballs across the table trying to get them into Bill Murray's mouth. We did a bunch of storyboards and they were really beautiful.

Richard Loren:
Then it fell apart because Bill Murray had that unsuccessful movie of
The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham. It flopped and he disappeared for two years. During those two years, the project became orphaned at Universal. After that, Jerry fell apart. He was being pummeled by the drug dealers, his own weaknesses, and the demands and needs of the band prior to “Touch of Grey.”

Len Dell'amico:
It was an expensive script. Garcia hung on to the rights to
Sirens
for I don't know how many years, paying that option money over and over and Vonnegut would keep saying, “When are you going to make the movie?” Jerry loved that story and I just wish to hell that it could have happened. It may happen someday based on one of those screenplays.

Gary Gutierrez:
It would have been a great movie and it ought to get made and I thought Tom's script was pretty good. Its only flaw may have been that it was very close to the book and the structure of the book is a very non-film structure. It's a kind of chaotic, rambling story. But it was always Jerry's dream to do it and I was sad that it never came about.

Tom Davis:
If I ever become rich and powerful, I'll do the fucker. I want it to get done and if I don't do it, I hope someone else does it. But it's my fantasy to be able to get it done before I fold.

Len Dell'amico:
Happily, to everybody's delight, by the spring of '86, Garcia was his old self. I remember everybody more or less just beaming about it. He'd done it completely by himself and he was proud of himself and everything was going great. On their tour with Dylan in '86, Jerry was supposed to come to my house in Buffalo, New York, where I was raised, to have lunch with my mom. The appointed hour came and he couldn't do it. He said, “I've got a toothache and I feel terrible.” I said, “Have you seen a dentist?” and he said, “Yeah. I saw somebody in Chicago.” He didn't sound good. I was concerned but I went off to do a mixdown on a Fats Domino and Ray Charles show I was doing in Texas and that was where I heard he was in the hospital. It was one of those things where you find out how much you care about somebody because your body tells you. I felt like I'd been kicked in the guts.

Sue Stephens:
He broke down in Washington, D.C. At this point, his freezer was full of Häagen Dazs ice cream. Smoking and weighing as much as he did—he was definitely no lightweight as far as his consumptive habits went. Everything to excess. Everybody was really concerned about him but when you would try to approach him about things, he would snarl and lash out. Nobody could be the lion tamer.

David Nelson:
It had to do with being overweight and totally dehydrated and having an impacted wisdom tooth infection that got into his bloodstream. I was in the van as we were going out of the parking lot at RFK Stadium in Washington and Jerry said, “Anybody got anything to drink? I got dry mouth like you wouldn't believe, man.” All I had was a beer. I said, “Anybody have water?” Nobody had water. Everybody was drinking bottled water then but for some weird reason, nobody had water. So I gave him some beer and he was drinking it and that helped wet his whistle a little bit. But because beer dries you out even more, he was going, “Gaaah. Is that all you got?”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
The summer tour in '86 was grueling. I got a phone call in the middle of the night from Jahanarah Romney, Hugh Romney's wife. She was calling me from Camp Winnarainbow because Trixie was there. She said, “We heard about Jerry. Is he going to be all right?” I said, “What?” I knew nothing. Jerry was in the hospital in Marin. Nora, his housekeeper, had found him in the bathroom lying on the floor moaning and had called 911 and gotten him out of there and then the hospital had been unable to diagnose his problem.

What they did was get him in there and decide maybe he had a brain tumor or an aneurysm in the brain or a stroke and so they decided they better give him a CAT scan. It was eleven o'clock at night when I got the call and I thought about driving and I thought, “No, fuck it.” I called the airlines and there was a plane at six
A.M.
so I got on that. But I didn't make it to the hospital until almost ten-thirty because the plane was late and I had to take the airporter and then get a cab. Because he'd been thrashing around pretty good in the hospital, they shot him up with Valium to get him to lie still for the CAT scan. Jerry was allergic to Valium. They killed him. His heart stopped. He died. The hospital didn't want anyone to know this but he died. They had to resuscitate him, put him on a respirator, give him a bunch of zap, zap, zap. Code Blue. They shocked him back. They had to do it twice to get him to come back and then they had to keep him on the respirator for over forty-eight hours before he could breathe on his own again.

I got there and the doctor came out and he said, “I'm really sorry. We don't expect him to live past the hour.” I was going, “What the fuck is the matter with him?” He said, “We just figured out that he's in a diabetic coma.” I said, “A diabetic coma? It took you twenty-four hours to diagnose that?” Because the first thing you'd check if you were an emergency medical technician was blood sugar. How hard was that? It was a piece of cake. Somehow, they managed to miss the most obvious thing. Meanwhile, Nora had been telling the hospital all this stuff about Jerry's drug use and what a mess he was. I doubt she knew he was allergic to Valium.

Basically, he went into full shock, respiratory arrest, and renal failure. They brought him back and they patched him back together and kept him on the breathing machine long enough that he started coming out of the diabetic thing and they got his blood sugar down with a bunch of insulin. His blood sugar had been fifteen hundred. Apparently, it was the second highest blood sugar they'd ever seen at Marin General.

I knew he was tough. I knew he had the constitution of a horse. Nobody could bounce back from flu as fast as Jerry. Just bingo, he could come back. So I had complete confidence in his ability to recover from this. About one o'clock, I finally got them to let me in and see him. He was lying in bed with the tubes down his throat and up his nose and in his arm and everywhere and he opened his eyes and looked at me. He was
so
glad to see me. He pulled me right down and gave me sort of a little cheeky-cheeky. It was as close as we could get to a kiss. Then he went for a pad of the paper and he wrote on it, “Be tactful.” I said, “Okay, I'll be nice to everybody. I promise.”

When I went out, I didn't land all over the doctors. I didn't say anything about it to anybody. About a week later, I read his chart. That was how I found out what had happened. They'd given him thirty milligrams of Valium, IV, and it just put him out. They also wanted to do a tracheotomy right then and there because he was having so much trouble breathing. I told them they absolutely couldn't do that. Because of his voice. He would never have forgiven me. I knew he would have been furious about it if he woke up and he'd had a trache. Can you imagine?

I figured he'd pull through anyhow. That was my bet. Because I'd looked at him when they'd let me in to see him and he didn't look so bad to me. They'd already cleaned up a bunch of the stuff and gotten his blood sugar down and he was getting enough oxygen on the respirator. He was fighting the respirator. That was why they wanted to do the trache. Because he was fighting it and was physically pretty active and they were having trouble controlling him.

Jon Mcintire:
I was the go-between between Jerry and his doctors and the press. In terms of the Valium and his heart stopping, there was a time in the hospital where that happened, yes. The coma also went on longer than the press reported. He was out for days. I know people were saying it was like thirty-six hours. It was much longer than that.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
At the hospital, some people were thinking about canceling the Ventura shows and all of a sudden, it was business. I expected that. You have to expect that. They didn't say, “You know, there's a guy almost dying in there.” They didn't think that way. It was also part of business. But everybody was concerned. Everybody was genuinely concerned.