Dark Star (42 page)

Vince Dibiase:
I had to deliver the “Dear John” letter. Manasha knew something was up because Jerry had left in the morning and was due home at five or six o'clock and it was now seven-thirty or eight at night and she had been trying to track him down. Jerry called me so I went up to Hunter's house. Phil and Jill Lesh were there and Maureen and Bob Hunter and Jerry and Barbara. Jerry had written a very short little note. He said, “I just can't do it.” Then he asked me if I'd deliver it. I said, “Sure.” Barbara said, “Good thing it's today because if it was the good old days, you know what they did with the messengers.”

Barbara Meier:
They walked up to Jerry and handed him plane tickets and said, “You have reservations in Hawaii. Get on the plane.” Leon was there with the limo and he took us to the airport. We spent the night at the airport, got on the plane, and we were gone. We went to Maui for three weeks and then we went to the Big Island.

Vince Dibiase:
I had to go up to Nicasio, which was a long lonely ride. Manasha wasn't home when I got there. One of her friends was there. He let me in and I waited. She came by within half an hour, furious and frantic, and I said, “Manasha, if there's anything I can do, I want to help.” And I handed her this letter. She left very upset and I stayed for a few minutes and then I left. I'd done my job. It was very hard for her. Gloria and I stayed in the middle of things with her. She held it against me for doing that but she also told me a couple of months ago that she forgave me for it because she knew I was doing my job. But Gloria and I stayed friendly and supportive with her because we wanted to be helpful to Jerry and we wanted to be nice to her.

Barbara Meier:
We had this idyllic month together scuba diving, lolling around, and it was just exquisite. People who didn't know him, people who had no idea who he was, like old Hawaiian men, would stop us on the street and say, “My God, I have never seen a man and woman so in love together.” It was like an extended Ecstasy trip. A week later, the Hunters came over. Bob and Jerry wrote six songs together. They hadn't written for years and I believe they didn't write any songs afterwards. They wrote six songs in three weeks and the energy was incredible.

Jerry and I wrote a collaborative poem together called “Gaspar's Parrot.” Gaspar De Lago is his alter ego's name and it was a fabulous sestina, absolutely hilarious. We were having so much fun that we were literally peeing in our pants. He was not using at all and everyone said this was the longest time he was off drugs. It was great and he asked me to marry him. I said yes. At the time, he was still married to MG. Actually, I was still married to someone, too. It was like, “As soon as we get our divorces, we'll get married.” There was this wonderful scene of diving and raving and hanging out and we were watching movies and writing poetry and I was painting the whole time and bonding with Maureen Hunter and Jerry was writing all these songs and composing.

Gloria Dibiase:
The day before Jerry and Barbara were coming back, Jerry gave me twenty-four-hour notice to find him a temporary rental. He said, “Get us a place with a nice view in Sausalito or Tiburon. We'll only be there for a month.” Famous last words. He ended up living there for a year.

Barbara Meier:
Because he had nowhere to go back to, they got us this furnished condo in Tiburon. Immediately, everybody just jumped on the scene and said, “Oh, this is so great. Now he's with you, he can quit smoking.”

Dr. Randy Baker:
There was even a period in early '93 when Jerry totally stopped smoking cigarettes for a while. However, then he went into the Grateful Dead spring tour and he eventually started smoking again.

Barbara Meier:
We started walking an hour together every day. We would go to the chiropractor one day, the acupuncturist the next. He was working with a hypnotherapist and a personal trainer three times a week. We were drinking carrot juice, we were doing Chinese herbs. His snoring was so appalling that the first three nights we were together, I didn't sleep. Then I just said, “Okay. I am going to learn to sleep through this.” I said, “I'm definitely going to sleep with my husband” and I did. I managed to do it. I'm very proud of that. It was something I created very deliberately with my intention.

Gloria Dibiase:
We were so optimistic for Jerry when he got together with Barbara because we thought it was romantic for him to be reunited with his first love. Jerry and Bob Hunter started writing music again. Jerry was looking good. He was healthy. He was strong. He was happy.

Barbara Meier:
Then I made a huge mistake. I didn't realize it at the time but I felt I needed to go back to Boulder and bring back some stuff. I just had the suitcase I'd used to go to Hawaii and I needed a house sitter. I needed to check on Esme, my daughter, and I was gone literally four days. I called him several times every day. I came back. He hadn't slept in the bed. He had slept on the couch when he'd slept and there was this huge ring of cigarette ashes around where he had been and open food containers. This man was absolutely and totally incapable of being on his own. Completely incapable. He'd been freaked out about me leaving and I'd kept saying, “Oh sweetie, don't worry. I'll be right back.” I was so naive. I had no idea that he would lose it so badly.

A week or so after I got back, he said, “I ran into this woman I used to be with. Deborah.” This was someone that he'd told me about when we were in Hawaii. I was still thinking that Manasha was a problem. Meanwhile, here was this other woman coming in the room and I wasn't paying any attention. I wasn't relating to her presence seriously. So I just said, “Oh, sweetheart. No problem. We're solid. Don't worry about it. Baby, we can work anything out. We're together. That's all that matters and we'll work anything out.” I believed it. I totally believed it.

Gloria Dibiase:
Jerry was always hopelessly in love with whatever woman he was with at the time. But when a woman wants a man, she can get him. Think about it. When a woman wants a man, she can get him.

Barbara Meier:
In the interim, I had met Sara, MG, Heather, Annabelle, and Trixie, and totally, totally fallen in love with all of these people. Jerry was saying, “We're a family now. It doesn't matter. Your kid, my kids. We're all one family and this is it. We're here together for the rest of our lives and this is all I've ever wanted and this is it. This is perfect.” And I believed him. We were a family. I totally fell in love with these people and I wanted them in my life. I did everything I could to get them to come over to the house or for us all to get together. All the boundaries were down. Everything was open.

Vince Dibiase:
Jerry played a chess game in life that kept everybody scratching their heads. He took pleasure in that. Everybody was always trying to figure out what Jerry was talking about and doing and nobody could ever do it and that was part of his game in life because he was bored with everything else.

Barbara Meier:
One of the most fun things we did was to play games with the
OED
, the
Oxford English Dictionary
. We would find words that we'd never heard of and then we'd start incorporating them into our conversations and then we'd mix them up together and it was constant running hilarity. But then some creaky stuff started to happen. I had my own music and I was into some fairly avant garde stuff and he hated it. Another thing that started to be a problem was that I had a lot of men friends and he started getting extremely upset about that. I was very close with my ex-husband and Jerry had a hard time with the phone ringing all the time and he would say, “It's another one of your bozos.” It was very unlike him. But it was a part of him in the sense that he had a very jealous and possessive streak.

As far as I could tell, everything was wide open and happening. He was writing with Hunter, he was doing his work with Grisman, he was doing work with Heather and the Redwood City Symphony. We were ecstatically happy together. He was getting healthier. He had quit smoking. What I didn't realize was that he had started using again. I didn't know that. I was so stupid, I had no clue. He was being a bastard and I thought that was just because he was quitting smoking. I thought he was just being a bear. Oh, he was vile. He was cold and he was withholding.

By then, the shows had started and I don't want to name names but there were certain people in that world who used and they thought a little chipping here and a little chipping there was no problem. I thought that Jerry was nodding off during dinner because he hadn't slept well the night before. I thought he was shooting the nasal dilation thing up his nose because he had a cold. I thought the sweat on his forehead was because maybe he was coming down with a fever. I was an idiot. I'd never been around hard drugs before so I never had a clue.

The kicker was that I had created this very interesting lifestyle for myself before I left to be with him. He'd asked me to drop all that because it was in Colorado and New Mexico and I said, “Okay. But I've made a commitment to teach one last course here in the Bay Area.” It turned out to be a ten-day course and I was gone from nine in the morning until seven at night. He hated it. He despised the whole premise of it. He would sit and rant at me about it and challenge me and I would just lovingly tease him.

Because the basic premise of this belief management course was that you create the world that you live in by the beliefs that you hold. If you hold the belief that you're unlovable, you will constantly create situations that will confirm that. He'd say, “Take this scene. No way did I create this.” And I said, “Who did?” “Oh, man. Shit just happens.” “Oh, really?” What was so odd was that he could completely and one hundred percent take total responsibility in the realm of his music. He would get to the sound check at two in the afternoon and be there until the show started working out the bugs. But that was the only realm in which he would do that—take responsibility. In every other realm, he just let everything skid.

He'd been seeing a hypnotherapist to help him stop smoking. One night he came back and said, “She said I need to tell you that I'm having thoughts about Deborah and I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm very scared. I love you. I want to be with you but I feel like she has a hold on me.” I said, “I guess you're going to have to choose 'cause if you're with her then you won't be with me and if you're with me, then you won't be with her. You need to decide what you want to do.” He said, “I love you and I want to be with you.” I said, “Then that's your decision and there's no problem.”

The Grateful Dead tour started in March '93. We went on tour and he was cold and withdrawn. He was being a real bastard and it was awful. We were in Chicago, which was really cold, and this went on for three days. I was in tears the entire time, feeling shut out and wondering why. The last night, I was wondering what the hell I was doing there. I was sitting alone backstage at the show on the black equipment boxes and I was writing the whole time, trying to take notes.

Randy Baker came up to me and he said, “Barbara, is Jerry using?” I said, “No.” He said, “What makes you think so?” I said, “He says he's not.” He said, “Do you know what the symptoms are?” I said, “Like what?” Then he started enumerating the symptoms and they all started vectoring. I went, “Oh shit. Oh shit.” I thought that he was just quitting smoking. And then immediately this other part of me kicked in and said, “Oh God, that's what it is. Thank God that's what it is.” Because I have the belief that you can work with anything. I believe that anything is workable. That was one thing I learned from Trungpa Rinpoche. You never give up on anybody.

That was during the break. I went up to Steve Parish and I said, “Listen, man, you tell me the truth 'cause I'm losing it. I'm in real pain here. You have to tell me if this is true or not.” He said, “The first thing you need to know about Jerry is that he can handle it, okay? Yes, it's true. We didn't want to tell you 'cause we didn't want you to be freaked out. We didn't want you to leave. Everything is coming together now that you're here and this is the best he's ever been and the time you've been together is the longest he's ever been off it. As soon as he quits smoking, he'll be able to do this and it's all going to work out. Just hang in there with it. We don't want to lose you. You're the best thing that's ever happened.” I said, “I'm not going to leave but you can't leave me out.”

He said, “Yeah, he was chipping and he got hooked and he's been on these pills. He's been off it for the last three days, that's why he's such a bastard but he's got these pills from the doctor and so he's kicking but he can do this. He can do this. He can go and kick.” He said, “The main thing is just act like you don't know about it and hang in there with it 'cause it's all going to be fine. I promise you. It's all going to be fine. We're going to be fine. Hang in there for a week. Don't worry about it.”

Then he went back to whatever he was doing and I was sitting on this black box thinking, “I've just been told that the man I love is using heroin. I've been asked to go into denial about that and pretend that I don't know and enable him.” I thought about Trungpa at that moment and realized I was having a profound Vajrayana experience. I had gone from the god-realm of being with Jerry in Hawaii to being on the black box backstage in this cold hall in Chicago and now I was in a hell-realm. I couldn't believe it but there it was.