Dark Star (43 page)

So we went back to the hotel room that night and ordered some hot chocolate and he was actually very sweet. I said, “Jerry. I've got to tell you something. I want you to know that I love you. I'll always love you. I'll never leave you. I want you to know that you can do whatever you want. You can do whatever you want and I'll be here with you but you can't exclude me and you can't keep secrets from me. I need for you to know that I know that you're using and that's okay. I love you. Just don't hide it from me 'cause I'll go crazy. I grew up with alcoholics. I can't do that.”

He said, “What the fuck are you talking about. Who told you that? Did Randy tell you that shit? Fucking Randy.” He was up and pacing and freaking out and this corrugated steel door, a psychic door, came down between us. He said, “I think you'd better leave now.” I said, “What do you mean? I'll never leave.” He said, “No. I think it's time for you to leave.” I said, “I thought we were getting married?” He said, “Yeah, well. I meant it at the time.” I said, “You have to talk to me. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I'm made of? It's not going to work like that. I'm
Barbara
. I'm not a groupie.”

We stayed up all night, until six in the morning. I kept saying, “Is this about Deborah?” “No. It has nothing to do with Deborah. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.” Finally, he looked at me and he said, “All right. I'm in love with another woman.” I said, “Deborah?” and he said, “Yeah. I can't shake her.” Part of me was remembering that this was what I'd wanted him to say to Manasha! But here he was saying it to me and I was thinking to myself, “No, no!” But I was also thinking, “Yes.
Fantastic!
” He'd finally taken a fucking stand. He'd made a decision. I was devastated and I was on his team all at once. It was really quite a multi-dimensional experience.

I said, “Okay, man. If you've got more love with her than you've got with me, then I want you to have it. If that's what you've got, then go for it.” The bottom line was that I said, “Okay. I'll go but we've got twenty-four hours to be together and I want them to be as exquisite as they can be and I want to use this time for as much psychic reclamation and closure as we can do.”

We spent another day and evening together and slept together and made love. He said, “I never thought anything would happen to blow the best thing that ever happened to me out of the water. You saved my ass. No one else could have done it.” Meaning, “You got me out of the thing with Manasha.” He said, “I really want to help you. I'd like to help you put your daughter through college and I'd like to help you with your art.” I said, “Okay. That would work for me 'cause that's what I'm going to need to do now.” He said, “Let's figure out what that's going to be and set it up and we'll do that.” I said, “I'd like to do this three-year program.” Two weeks later in New York, he said, “What do you need?” I gave him an amount and he said, “How 'bout twice that?” I said, “That's great,” and that was it. That was April '93. I never saw him again.

 

Barbara Meier:
I played it all wrong. My way was to just appreciate and love him unconditionally and give him unconditional space. I realize now that the nature of his wound was that he needed to be in a situation with very strict boundaries. Even though he despised them, he couldn't live without them, and the way it worked was that he couldn't do that for himself. He had to be with a woman who played out his shadow for him. He had to be with someone so he could say to people, “Oh I can't do that. Manasha won't let me. Oh I can't do that. Deborah won't let me. I can't do that.” I now feel tremendous empathy for Manasha, and for that matter Deborah, or any woman who ever loved Jerry.

Vince Dibiase:
Barbara came back and packed up and split. Jerry came back from that tour and he lived in that Tiburon apartment for about a year.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I got a notice in the mail from Jerry's attorney saying that we had to leave the house in thirty days. That broke my heart. Years prior to this in '90 when he moved in, he'd asked me to marry him and I'd said yes. We were supposed to be married on Easter when he was free. I called him up Palm Sunday and he asked me if we could all get together, Keelin, Jerry and me, and I said, “I'm really disappointed in you and I'm disappointed in the way you left and I feel really bad and I have made other plans for Easter so I don't know if that's appropriate right now.” I said, “Maybe sometime in the future. Maybe in May.” He said, “I want to keep trying so whenever we can get together, let's get together.”

I put him off at that point and then the next time I called him, the woman he was with answered the phone and she said, “Don't ever call here again. You're not to call here ever again.” Those were her exact words and then I let it go. But in the meantime I was real worried about Jerry so I called Cameron Sears and I asked him to hire Randy Baker for the Grateful Dead. I felt like Jerry loved us. He seemed to suffer a lot after he left us. He seemed to have suffered from a broken heart.

Cassidy Law:
We went to the White House in 1993. Bill Clinton wasn't there that day so we went and saw Al Gore. I think Al knew a little bit about us but Tipper was definitely into it. Actually, we hung out with her the most. It was so funny walking into the White House. All of a sudden, we heard, “There's Jerry Garcia! There's Jerry Garcia!” People were flying out of their offices and flocking to him. That guy had so many photos taken that day, it was incredible.

I was really feeling out of place and Jerry picked up on that right away. He said, “Don't you worry about that. You're with me today.” Any time someone went to introduce us, he was right there with me and I thought, “What a gentleman.” That night, I went with Jerry and all the band members and their wives to Al Gore's house for dinner.

It was a private intimate dinner so we were being the nicest that we could be. Al and Tipper were running around shooting the breeze with everyone. I was also there in Washington a year later when Strom Thurmond came running up and said, “Jerry Garcia!” The whole place fell silent. Jerry loved it. That was his kind of humor. Very absurd.

Chesley Millikin:
Jerry called me up and he said, “I'm going to Ireland and I don't want to go without you. Can you come along?” So we flew to Shannon in July '93 and we did all kinds of things like tourists. Deborah set it up and it couldn't have been done any better. We had a great time. Matt Malloy, who's one of the Chieftains, we went to his pub in the County Mayo. Then we went to a pub up in Donegal where there was a bluegrass band playing whom Jerry had seen, I believe he said, in 1974 at a festival in Philadelphia.

The girls would stop off at all these old places where there were buried monuments to death. Jerry wasn't interested in any of that but one time we pulled up at the base of this famous mountain in Ireland and he was sitting there. The girls had gone off to look at one of these tombs. The tinkers, who are the Gypsies, a traveling people, had made a camp across the road so there was a horse tied up to this lightpost. The horse was going apeshit and all of a sudden, Jerry took out his banjo and he started playing. These very stern tall German women were walking by and they looked into the van and of course they had no idea who the hell it was. He was playing and the horse settled down. It was like the horse understood.

We also went as far west in Ireland as you can get before you step in the ocean. We were driving around in this van and we drove down this very narrow road only wide enough for the van and a bike. Out of nowhere, a little motor scooter flew past us. Jerry turned around and said, “There's a leprechaun!” So he saw a leprechaun in Ireland.

When we were in Ireland, he asked me if I knew a good jewelry store and I told him which one. He was going to take Deborah and himself there and I said, “Jewelry store?” He said, “Yes,” and I looked at Deborah and she said, “Jerry likes to spend money.” No matter where he went, he tipped fifty percent and that was because he felt that he had come by it so easily and these people were just making a living.

He didn't really know much about his Irish ancestors but he loved Ireland. He felt very peaceful, very quiet. Also what was great to him was that nobody bothered him. Most of the people didn't even know who the hell he was. Any that did stood their distance. We ate well and we traveled well and he had a great time and he really loved it. I don't believe he was too happy about going back. The only thing that he had been looking forward to was that he was going to Japan.

Vince Dibiase:
We were in Hawaii on our way to Tokyo for his art shows. We'd had high-ranking government officials working for us to help set this up. We'd had people in the State Department over here getting his working visa. The head Buddhist monk in all Japan was going to be with us. Kitaro, the great Japanese New Age musician, was to be our personal host. He was the one setting up this spiritual quest with Jerry Garcia from the West, the head monk from the East, and himself. In the equivalent of
The New York Times
in Tokyo, there was a full-page ad on the back of the front section. Part of Jerry's face with the words, “Your Great Uncle Jerry Is Coming.”

He was on national TV ten times a day. They'd sent a film crew over from Japan and he'd done an interview and they'd cut it into fifteen and thirty second spots. They aired them nationally ten times a day starting October I and the art exhibition was scheduled to open on the twentieth of October. Three weeks of seven days a week on national TV. Billboards in downtown Tokyo. “You Know Your Great Uncle Jerry Is Coming.” This huge conglomerate over there sponsored the whole thing. They were inventing Jerry fever over there.

Two days before we were to land in Tokyo, Jerry canceled. It was like, “You don't do that to Japanese. They don't understand that.” He was afraid on a lot of different levels and he wasn't doing all that well physically. He was really tired and I didn't think going would have been the right thing to do. I saw millions of dollars go right out the window plus a potential huge lawsuit because they'd spent a lot of money hyping him over there.

But the minute he said that he didn't think he could carry Japan, I said, “Okay. Let's not go there.” I didn't hesitate because what was important to me was him surviving. A day and a half after we were due back on the mainland, he was going off on this sixteen-city tour with the Garcia Band. If he was tired before he went to Tokyo, he was going to be exhausted when he got back and then a day and a half later, he was going to go on this tour.

The shows of his art went on but without Jerry. My family over there was literally disgraced. But it gave me a chance to sit down with Jerry friend-to-friend and talk about my life and his life. At one point, he looked at me and said, “Man, I love you.” He got up and gave me this bear hug. In the big picture, it was more important for him not to go.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
When Jerry came out of the hospital after the coma, his hair had gone pretty white and he was really gimping around. He had trouble making it up stairs for a long time after that and so he really had the appearance of an old man. But he did come back. He got into diving and he was walking on the treadmill and doing the McDougal diet and all these things that were so uncharacteristic for him but actually, they were life-oriented activities. At the end of '93, I felt he was really doing well and then it all fell apart for him again.

Gloria Dibiase:
Jerry didn't go to bed like most people did. For the last two and a half years of his life, it was like one long day where the sun would rise and it would be light and then the sun would go down and it would be dark again. He didn't take off his clothes, get into pajamas, and get underneath the covers. He slept on top of his bed in his clothing.

Vince Dibiase:
He'd doze. It was not like he'd go to bed at two in the morning and get up at six. He would work through the night and he would doze. This was twenty-four hours a day. He was absolutely on his own time.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
It would have been nice if Jerry had walked around the block now and then and gotten some normal exercise without putting himself in a machine. He had all this equipment in his place. Never used it. He loved to be that way. He would always explain to me how healthy he was. “I'm in good shape,” he'd say. “I'm getting muscles.” And I'd be thinking, “Wonderful.” I'd look down and he'd have a cigarette in his hand. But he was doing good. He had a good creative period with lots of things going on and then all of a sudden, it started to get flat again. I could see him coming down again. He was losing interest.

Gloria Dibiase:
Jerry still loved Keelin very much. She was the apple of his eye. He would send me out to buy Christmas and birthday presents for her. He just didn't have physical contact with her. But she was always in his thoughts and in his heart.

Vince Dibiase:
He'd really tried to be a good daddy to Keelin. I'd go in the house when he and Manasha were still together and he'd have Keelin on his lap at the computer with some kid's programs, teaching her things. Or they would play the piano together. Go out feeding the goats and watching the sunset. Gloria used to dress Keelin up in her belly dance costume and Keelin would dance and Gloria would sing and Jerry would play for them on the guitar.