Dark Star (47 page)

Cassidy Law:
We were in Soldier Field and I think that place holds about fifty or sixty thousand. We'd sold it out and it was packed. Besides the band playing, the light show definitely helped make it easier to get into being at a stadium. But it was a concrete jail. After the show on the last night, I was in the van with Jerry and he was happy as could be. He was saying, “Hey, this is great. Let's keep going. Let's go for it.” He knew it was the last show of the tour but he was saying what a great time he'd had at those two shows. We were watching the fireworks we did over the lake after the show and that just topped it for him. He was like, “All right. This is perfect.” He was in a very good mood that night.

Bob Barsotti:
We had a big Jerry Garcia Band tour scheduled for November '95. It was this perfectly routed tour of all the big buildings in the Midwest. It was going to be a huge tour and I did it early enough so I got all the right dates lined up. I kept telling all the promoters, “You've got to hold the date.” They kept asking, “Is it confirmed?” “No. It's not confirmed but you've got to hold it.” Finally, they were all saying, “Look, man, I moved hockey and basketball teams off these dates,” and I leveled with them. “You saw Jerry on the last tour, right? After the summer tour, if he's in the shape to do it, we're going to have it and if not, we're not and I can't give you anything more than that.” Every place said, “No problem. We'll wait.” Because they all wanted Jerry, they held off everybody to hang on to those dates. Then as we got about halfway through the summer tour, Steve Parish said, “No, you got to cancel the dates. He can't do it.” That was when Steve finally said we couldn't be taking him away anywhere.

Robert Greenfield:
On January 19, 1995, Jerry Garcia lost control of the red BMW loaner he was driving while his own BMW was in the shop being serviced. After slamming several times into a retaining wall alongside the northbound lanes of Highway 101 between the affluent suburban towns of Mill Valley and Corte Madera in Marin County, the car spun around and finally came to a stop facing oncoming traffic. Although no one was injured and the accident itself received only minimal coverage in the press, it was not a good sign. Those who knew what was going on in Jerry Garcia's life could only wonder what would happen next.

Cassidy Law:
The accident Jerry was in on Highway 101 really put a scare into everyone. He smashed his car into the divider. He was very lucky. It had come to the point with him where so many little things kept happening that we got numb and irritated and kind of went, “Ah, man. What next?” Then all of a sudden you realize, “God, that's horrible. Is this how we feel about him now?” It had more to do with that we loved him so much that we didn't know what to do anymore.

 

See here how everything lead up to this day and it's just like any other day that's ever been Sun goin' up and then the sun it goin' down Shine through my window and my friends they come around.

—
Robert Hunter, “Black Peter”

Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.

—
Robert Hunter, “Box of Rain”

 

Dr. Randy Baker:
I visited Jerry right after he got back from the summer tour before he went down to the Betty Ford Clinic. I made a house call to check in with him and give him support and encouragement. He looked very clear and he was very positive and he had a great attitude. He really wanted to do this. He was ready.

Len Dell'amico:
Normally, Jerry was a guy who really hated to talk on the phone. The phone was just to set up dates. I called wanting to ask him when could we get together but he wanted to talk and we ended up talking for half an hour covering not work but emotional stuff. He told me that he'd really enjoyed working with me and that we were going to be working together again soon and how much fun we'd had. When the conversation was over, I said, “So when are we going to get together?” and he said, “Not soon. I'm going to Betty Ford.” I was struck by that because he had never admitted that others could help him but I was fast on the rebound. “That's great,” I said. “Go for it. There's so much we can do and so much in life to look forward to and you've got all these possibilities.”

Jon Mcintire:
Why would he check into Betty Ford? Let's say you had a straight line and that was reality. At a certain point with using drugs, you can't get high anymore. You are below the line of what it was like to just be alive with your old natural feelings. When you clean up, you can start getting high again. There was that reality of the chemical interaction in his body. And then there was the desire to grow and do better—salvation is one word for it—and then there was the desire to trip himself up, the lure of failure. All these things were going on. But if he was not honest with himself, if he was not really looking at what was happening, if he was hiding from his own interior pain and confusion, then he was not going to be able to tell the truth about himself. He was not going to really know
why
he was going into Betty Ford. Because he just didn't know himself that well.

Vince Dibiase:
One of our friends, a Deadhead, told us that their friends shared a room with him at Betty Ford and he kept on getting sick and they were feeding him phenobarbital, which from what I understand is not the drug of choice when someone's addicted to heroin. It doesn't mix with heroin. Randy, or whoever his doctor was, should have been forceful enough to stop him from going there. They knew how Jerry was—Jerry wasn't going to be locked up anywhere on his birthday. He wasn't going to let that happen. He was going to go out and party.

Dr. Randy Baker:
The Betty Ford Clinic itself was Deborah's suggestion. She had known people who had gone there and they were very impressed with the program. I really didn't see Jerry at Betty Ford and I advised against it. I proposed that he try to detoxify himself by using acupuncture, nutritional therapy, homeopathy, and brain wave training, which is a form of biofeedback. Then after detoxifying, he could have gone to Betty Ford for counseling. However, Jerry chose to go there directly after the tour. It is a good program and I supported his decision.

So he went down to Betty Ford, which is normally a four-week program. At the end of a couple weeks, he called Deborah with a request to leave. She asked me what I thought about him leaving and I agreed that it was appropriate. The reason that Jerry wanted to leave after two weeks had very little to do with the drug treatment program they have there. It had everything to do with the fact that now that Jerry was off heroin, he was really in touch with how bad his own physical health was. He was in a lot of difficult discomfort and he was unsatisfied with the medical treatment that he was receiving. He was having aches and pains and just feeling bad and they sent him to the local emergency room and the doctors there gave him prescription drugs that he was wary of. He was actually concerned for his life so he had to get out of there.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I heard Jerry had been in Betty Ford and we were elated. We thought this was wonderful news. It was a very hopeful moment. “Oh, he's at Betty Ford. Great. Maybe he's really going to take this thing by the horns now. At Betty Ford, he's got a chance of winning it.” Then we heard he'd bailed out of there and I was going, “Oh, heck.” It was good of him to try. It really was. But it was too late. His time to go do that was years previous. He waited until he was out of energy.

Chesley Millikin:
He was not a disciplined man and Betty Ford is the ultimate in discipline. I spoke to Deborah and she and Parish were going down to see him and he did not like it and he didn't like the food. It was too hot and humid for him down there and he wanted out. By the time that came about, he was clean. He had been there for two weeks.

Dr. Randy Baker:
Steve Parish and Deborah went to get him and I saw him that very night. Once more, I did a house call. I came up and checked him over. Emotionally, he was in a very good space and he had a lot of good things to say about the program and the people that he'd met there. He had done a lot of emotional work and he seemed to be basically happy in general with that aspect of the treatment. But he was not feeling very well physically. Unfortunately, this happened at a bad time for me in that I was scheduled to get married the following weekend and go off on my honeymoon. I said to Jerry, “I want to delay my honeymoon so I can stay and help take care of you and work on your health.” In true character, Jerry insisted, “No no no, don't postpone your honeymoon on account of me. I'll be fine.”

Gloria Dibiase:
When he came home from the Betty Ford Clinic, a friend of ours saw him in Whole Foods in Mill Valley on Sunday morning. He went straight over to the juice counter. I used to make him fresh carrot juice, fresh apple juice, fresh lemonade with maple syrup rather than regular sugar. So there he was at Whole Foods buying juice. Right next to the juice counter was the bakery counter. My friend said Jerry was very spacey and confused and that's a symptom of low blood sugar. He was buying baklava and all other kinds of sugared desert treats. My friend said, “Oh, I'm feeling a little spacey and confused myself. So welcome to the club.” He said, “Yeah but I don't want to be in that club.”

Dr. Randy Baker:
I set Jerry up with one of the finest physicians in the entire country who works in San Rafael so he could get good holistic medical care during the time that I was away. I was using nutritional supplements, herbs, and homeopathy on Jerry. I could have given him some medicine for the pain but the problem was that we didn't want to use narcotics, and many of the other pain medicines might tear up his intestines or stomach.

Chesley Millikin:
As soon as he got out of there, he went straight to one of his connections or so-called friends and did it. I can see that because I think that he could say, “I've got it whipped now but I'll do it anyway.”

Dr. Randy Baker:
My understanding is that during the next weekend, Jerry did do a little bit of heroin. He used it not because he was jones-ing in the traditional sense but because he was in so much physical pain that he was trying to self-medicate. He was trying to heal his pain. But he wasn't comfortable with that. He definitely did not want to go back to his addiction. That was why he wanted to go into another treatment program to make sure that he didn't relapse.

Sue Stephens:
He spent a good hour and a half in this office with me the day before he checked into Serenity Knolls. In his own words, he was in the frame of mind that he was “definitely taking a big bite out of this apple this time.” He had come out of the Betty Ford place because he had gotten as much out of there as he felt he could. He had been between the two places for almost a week but he said that he still felt a little shaky and his willpower wasn't up to par yet. He wasn't strong enough to be out on his own. So that was why he felt that he needed to go back into some place close.

Dr. Randy Baker:
What Deborah told me was that during that weekend, Jerry said to her, “My body's shot.” I think his body had been shot for a while. He just hadn't been in touch with it because of his addiction.

Sue Stephens:
He looked thinner and a little pale but he wasn't dragging his feet by any means. He was in real good spirits but he did say that he could tell how his body had aged because I guess that was something you didn't notice when you were medicated. It was really nice sitting here visiting with him. I had this new Deadbase book that had just come out and he was sitting here leafing through it and coming up with comments like, “Oh, I remember this gig and this and this happened.” He was reminiscing. A couple days before then, he'd called me to get people's phone numbers. He asked me for Hunter's number, he asked me for the number up at the new studio because I don't think he'd ever been there yet, and for John Cutler because he was handling the studio, and for Steve Parish's home number. Not that he didn't have it. But he seemed to be busy. He may have been calling people to say goodbye. More or less in a parallel-reality way.

Justin Kreutzmann:
I don't think Jerry felt he was done. Not from what I've heard talking to people who were hanging out with him the day before he checked into Serenity Knolls. He didn't strike me as that kind of guy. If he didn't hear it when he went into the coma the first time or when he got saved the second time, I don't see why he'd have been hearing it then. Someone I know talked to Jerry about four days before and he spent an hour and a half on the phone just laughing. Jerry wasn't ever one of those kind of guys who would say, “I'm going to die tomorrow.” He wasn't a doom-and-gloom kind of person.