Dark Star (33 page)

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
The doctor came out and he said, “We don't think he's going to make it. We've rarely ever seen anybody this sick in here.” They thought the blood sugar was going to cause so many problems that Jerry wouldn't walk again. They were giving us all the bad news. Peripheral nerve damage, possible heart complications, and then Jerry went into total kidney failure. That took a long time to resolve. So it was one thing after another in there.

David Nelson:
After he got out of the hospital, Jerry told me about his fever dream. About what he saw while he was in the coma. He saw these bugs running in tubes. He saw these big beetles rushing into tubes. The vibe was not pleasant. It wasn't good. But it was the one thing about it that he did remember.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
The coma was really tough. Because he was asleep and dreaming and he was kicking at the same time.

Jon Mcintire:
I don't think Jerry had that pivotal moment when he saw the line between life and death very clearly. In some people's cases, they actually choose to come back. I don't know that Jerry had that. I think also that at this point, Garcia's inability or unwillingness to make critical hierarchical decisions and his acceptance of what was worked against him.

David Nelson:
After the hospital, I remember talking to him about the smack and he was saying, “It gets to be a drag to have to take care of your monkey before everything. It's a drag. A little chore.” So I thought, “With that kind of attitude, it can't get the best of him. He'll always see it that way and just think, ‘Ahh. I've had enough of this shit.'” When he got out of the hospital, he said, “God, I was so glad to get off of that.”

Justin Kreutzmann:
I didn't understand his take on it till after he'd gotten clean in '86 after the coma. He came out and he said that because of how much money he made, he didn't have to be that guy on the corner who steals to cop dope. But he said he would have been if he had to. It was like, “Whoa. Shit.” He said, “The only difference between me and that guy on the corner is that I play in a successful rock band and I could maintain my habit.” Everyone else in the band had their own little things, too. It was just that his was the most apparent and I think everyone thrust their own paranoia on that. Because he was the only one really into heroin and since he was the main guy and everyone was looking to him, to have him looking so bad and being just sort of day-to-day brought everybody's anxiety up and made things a lot less comfortable. Because sometimes you never really knew. Sometimes he'd look so bad that you didn't know what the hell was going to happen.

Laird Grant:
I wasn't there when Jerry came to but I heard what he said. “I'm not Beethoven.” When I heard that, I said, “He'll be okay. The guy comes out of a coma and he's making jokes.” Like, “Why are you looking at me? I'm not Beethoven. I'm not dead.”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
He said, “I'm not Beethoven.” As in, “I'm not deaf. I can hear what you're saying.” I'm sure that was what that was.

Len Dell'amico:
I got back there as soon as I could and I saw him in the hospital a bunch of times. The first time, he was barely awake. Jerry was talking to his brother, Tiff. They were reminiscing. Basically, Tiff was reconstructing memories. The next time I saw Jerry, he was with Annabelle and he was walking around.

Sue Stephens:
It was terrifying for me to see him fail like that and know that he was not indestructible. I was there when he was conscious but he still had the tubes down his throat and all that. What was terrifying was that vision of him as no longer being the zooming-through-the-airport, indestructible kind of guy.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Luckily, my girlfriend, secretary, confidante, and baby-sitter lived three blocks away in Kentfield and so I was able to borrow her rickety old Schwinn—the wheels went
blubl-blubl-blubl
—and ride over to the hospital in the morning and go in there and hang out all day until they made me leave at night.

Laird Grant:
When I called MG, she said, “Get down here right now. We need you.” The Angels had been handling security for Jerry there real nice. Which freaked the hospital out. The Hell's Angels had taken over one of the top floors. It was like, “What's going on up there?” I spent a week there and took care of whatever business I could for the man.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry was in the hospital for almost four weeks and they tried to kill him so many times in there, I can't tell you. He had total kidney failure but he still had to eat. But there were all sorts of things that he couldn't eat because his kidneys were shut down. If you can't process this stuff, you die of all the poisons built up in the body. They would bring him food and it would have all the food groups and two thirds of them would be things that he was absolutely not supposed to eat. There it would be on his tray, salt, tomatoes, all those things. There were a thousand things like that in there. The hospital is a terrible place to be sick.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Jerry was no longer in the coma when we got to the hospital. He recognized Heather and he cried when he saw her and Annabelle together. These girls had never met before and the two of them looked so much alike.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Annabelle and Heather were there at the hospital. They had never met. Sara was there. Her husband came over. Tiff was there with his wife and kids. Nelson. Hunter. A lot of the time, Jerry was too sick to see people so I would have to go see them outside. Basically, we had our own waiting room. Just for us. John Cutler, the truck drivers, the stage manager, they all came by. So did Ramrod, who's not much for hospital scenes. Big Steve Parish would come by. They would all come by for some period of the day and then I could go get a sandwich. But the staff would wake Jerry up four times during the night to take blood. It was ridiculous. It was insane what they were doing in the hospital that was policy.

Jon Mcintire:
In some very important ways, he was not emotionally up front. When he was in the hospital with the diabetic coma, he asked me to go and have the woman with whom he had been living leave the house. So I went and divorced him from his prior caregiver. He had me go deal with her.

 

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
When Jerry came out of the hospital, he was really, really, really weak. So weak that we had to help him everywhere and he hated that. He was trying so hard to be a good patient but his patience was really wearing thin. Plus, he wouldn't pick up a guitar. The last week Jerry was in the hospital, Steve Parish brought over his guitar and stood it in the corner of the room. I had to put it in the closet because it was really upsetting Jerry. Because he couldn't play. His hands were too weak. It was sort of a macho challenge thing. “Come on, asshole. Get better or your guitar's not going to love you anymore.”

David Nelson:
When Jerry got out of the hospital, the doctors said that anybody who'd been in a coma, it was good for them to see old things. So I brought old tapes to his house of the stuff we had listened to in the Wildwood Boys. His hand muscles were a little shaky but that was all. He was totally there and totally back. I'm sure he was grateful to be alive. For him, it was the second time. The first was that car accident in Palo Alto.

Sue Stephens:
When he came off that one, that was like—this is not your average bear.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
All I wanted was to just get our little family scene back together for a while and that did come to pass during that period of his recovery. He spent a lot of time just walking around the house. We were still at Hepburn Heights. Rock was gone. Nora was gone. Nicki was gone and the place was insane.

Laird Grant:
I helped take apart the whole place where they were staying. I had to go through everything and see if there were any stashes. I found stuff in places you wouldn't believe. In books. Album covers. Underneath the rug. Tucked in the heater vents. It was the nature of the beast. It started out as an incredible seductress and ended up being the bitch from hell.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We were cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, and throwing stuff in the Dumpster. I was frantically looking for another place for us to live and we had no money. I had saved up five thousand dollars from the sale of my cows in Oregon and we were living on that for the first couple of months. There were folks coming to the door twenty-four hours a day. “Ding dong” and I'd get up and say, “I'm really sorry. Jerry can't see anybody right now.” I absolutely exhausted myself with this. Plus, we were trying to feed him really well to try to get him to rebuild his blood supply because he'd had all this emergency dialysis in the hospital, which just racked up his blood cells like crazy. So he was just super weak.

The kids started to deal with the mail. We got two Dumpsters full of mail. After Jerry got out of the hospital, it was great fun to go through the mail. He'd take all the Hallmark cards and line them up. “These are the ones that sing this little song and this is the Snoopy card and this is the Little LuLu card …” and we'd have twenty-four of these and eighteen of those and we saved all the ones that were hand-drawn.

Len Dell'amico:
I happen to believe that the thousands and thousands of prayers that were going on, and they were deep and heartfelt prayers from all over, had a lot to do with his recovery.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
After about three weeks, Jerry felt able to really start seeing some people and we got Merl Saunders to come over to the house. John Kahn came over to the house and they started talking about music and getting him interested and it went from there. But that first three weeks back at the house was really exhausting.

Len Dell'amico:
I visited Jer at Hepburn Heights. Mountain Girl had come back into the picture. At the hospital was the first time I had seen her since 1980. Those two, they were made for each other. Jerry was a Leo and she's a Taurus. It was like you do not want to fuck with this woman. She was the kind of woman you wanted on your side when you were in trouble. Watching that come back together was a beautiful thing.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I went to the hospital to see Jerry and I saw Bob Hunter and Bob said, “He has tubes in him and you wouldn't want to see him this way.” So I sent some books up on holistic health.

Merl Saunders:
I went in to see Jerry in the hospital every day. When he got out the hospital, I would go see him at the house. I never did mention the guitar. I would sit at the piano though, noodling. I knew I could get him that way because he loved me to play. I'd be playing and talking. “Here's this new song I learned. When you back playing, this is the song I'm going to teach you.”

When he finally picked up the guitar, I'd say, “This chord just goes like this.” He'd spend four or five minutes just getting the chord. Then he'd set the guitar back down. It was so bad. He couldn't form chords. He couldn't do nothing and he'd set it back down. I would never say nothing. I'd just keep on playing. We'd talk and I'd say, “Let's go for a walk.” We'd go outside, take no more than four or five steps, and he'd say, “I'm tired.” I'd say, “Let's go back.” Back inside, I'd say, “Okay, let's do the chord again.” It would take maybe two hours for him to do two or three chords. We'd do it and process it until he felt he could do it. This went on every day. Every day I would be there.

Len Dell'amico:
I visited up there in August and Merl Saunders was teaching Jerry how to play. It was really something for me to come into that room and see one of the greatest players who had ever lived stumbling around with the guitar with this hangdog, lost puppy look on his face while Merl was very brightly sitting at the piano saying, “This is what we got to do.” It was all I could do to keep my emotions in order and say, “This is great. Everything's going to be great. It's going to all come back together again.” Because at that point, it was not at all apparent that it was.

Merl Saunders:
He had forgot how to do it. I couldn't help him on the mental part. I would just make him do it so much that he would say, “Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” Then I would say, “That's it. That's it. Look at your hand, Jerry. Look at it. That's it.” It was either the chord or a new way he formed it.

The one thing that I'm very good at, and I knock on wood about this, I'm good with children. He was a child again. It was like teaching my kid to go potty. I thank the man upstairs that gave me the courage and the things to tell Jerry because I didn't know what I was doing. But I kept coming. Nothing was going to stop me because this was my friend that I loved. I'd come there, kiss him on the forehead, and kiss him when I left every day. I let him know that I loved him. I wasn't there because he was Jerry Garcia. When first I met him, I never did know he was Jerry Garcia till about a year later. So he knew I wasn't around him just because of that.

We started very slowly. It was like the baby crawling. It was just like teaching a baby. Crawling, then he wants to stand up and hold on, and then he wants to take the first step. It was just like that. Then, “Hey, I'm jogging!”
“I'm back, I think.”
That was what he said. And then he went out and played.