So Many Roads (19 page)

As Snitch went about his rolling business, Mountain Girl paid only perfunctory notice. She had other things on her mind. That afternoon she and Garcia were planning to take a day trip to a clothing store in Sausalito to buy ribbons; she'd use them to decorate a black velvet shirt for her boyfriend.

In what felt like destiny, Garcia and Mountain Girl had hooked up in the fall of 1966. When Kesey had fled to Mexico earlier that year to avoid jail time for his pot busts, Mountain Girl and other Pranksters followed him down, and they all lived on the beach at Manzanillo Bay for a few months. (During that time Mountain Girl became pregnant with Kesey's daughter, whom they named Sunshine; according to Mountain Girl, Kesey's wife, Faye, who was also in Mexico, was accepting of the situation: “She was a kind and forgiving person.”) Everyone but Kesey had to return when their visas ran out, and with that, says Mountain Girl, came “the end of the whole Pranksters trip.” Taking Sunshine with her, she moved back in with her brother in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter she and Garcia became inseparable. By then Garcia's marriage to Sara Ruppenthal was on its last legs, and Sara's one visit to 710 didn't portend a future for them: as she told Garcia biographer Blair Jackson, “It didn't exactly feel ‘family friendly' to me.”

Garcia had another short-lived girlfriend when he moved into 710; as McGee recalls, “Jerry went through women until Mountain Girl showed up.” But he and Mountain Girl did seem destined to be a couple. For their first date the couple went Christmas shopping. From a love of pot and psychedelics to the fact that both were young parents, Garcia and Mountain Girl shared many traits. “He had determination and willingness to jump into anything at any time,” she says. “He had extra aliveness. He was not disconnected, ever. The young Jerry was such a
character.” To Grant, the ties between his old friend and Mountain Girl was obvious. She liked to be in charge. (During the Trips Festival Stewart Brand watched as Mountain Girl, trying to organize workers who were getting high on nitrous, put her hand on the valve and shut it off.) And at that point in his life Garcia didn't mind women overseeing him. “Jerry was always one of those guys who drew women to him because he seemed needy,” Grant says. “He never took care of his own shit, and he needed someone else to do that, like, ‘Help me, be my old lady.'”

As free as he wanted his relationship with Mountain Girl to be, though, Garcia still flashed a deeply jealous streak. During one New Jersey trip Barlow had driven them to a Guild guitar factory, Garcia and Mountain Girl in the backseat of his Chevy. At one point Barlow looked in the rearview mirror and had a moment of eye contact with his female passenger. Garcia caught it and subtly made his displeasure known to Barlow. “He was very territorial,” says Barlow. “He didn't want anyone looking at his woman that way.” Mountain Girl noticed that Garcia would get angry if he saw her talking with other men, even those in the Dead, which to her reflected his roots as a “street guy” from outside San Francisco.

For Mountain Girl life in the Dead household at 710 meant a degree of readjustment. When she was part of the Kesey posse she was not just a free spirit but someone who worked on recording and editing tapes; she didn't just have gumption but a job. She longed to have a similar role with the Dead, but it wasn't to be. The house was filled with female friends, including Pigpen's beloved African American girlfriend, Veronica Barnard, who hailed from nearby Vallejo. Their jobs were to clean the house, including its one and a half bathrooms, and cook the meals, such as Grant's mouth-watering rice and beans. Mountain Girl and the other women tried to organize a 710-wide cleaning day on Saturdays, but the concept didn't go over well with the men. She also had to take care of Sunshine because she couldn't afford a babysitter
and was tasked with collecting $15 a week from everyone in the house to take down to Haight Street for food.

The scenario was oddly retro—the bread winners and the stay-at-home moms and girlfriends—but no one seemed to object. “We just hung out together and cracked jokes and watched TV,” Lesh said to David Hajdu. “The women did the cooking and cleaning. All we had to do was get high and play music. It was like paradise.” Mountain Girl accepted her newfound role as, in her words, “a solid citizen” to keep the house running. “It was
very
traditional,” says Swanson. “We were right on the cusp of [women's lib]. Me personally, I always thought, ‘Whatever I could do to help was good.'”

Of the men Weir was the only one who didn't need help with the meals. After giving up LSD the year before (he'd had his mind blown one too many times), he went macrobiotic. Regularly preparing brown paste out of rice, he cooked for what seemed like endless hours and then ate it very slowly, chewing each bite dozens of times. Fellow 710 residents would walk into the kitchen and find him cooking seaweed on the stove. For years afterward the other Dead members would kid Weir about that part of his life. But at least Weir worked hard on healthy habits at that point. Orange juice was a staple of the refrigerator at 710; with all the smoke in the house and trips to equally smoky clubs, everyone was getting sick faster than ever before.

Having finished rolling his joints, Snitch paused. On the way out he turned and asked whether Mountain Girl and Garcia would be around later, and Mountain Girl mentioned they had planned a trip out of town, to Sausalito. Snitch asked when they were leaving, and she told him in a few hours, around 1 p.m. When she later thought back to his questions, she had to wonder why he asked for all those details. Maybe he was being thoughtful, or maybe he was simply afraid of her and Garcia. Given what was about to happen, she later wondered whether he was actually being considerate.

Pigpen was in the john and Weir was upstairs practicing yoga when the pounding at the door began around 3 p.m. In the living room Bob Matthews, who'd become the band's electronics expert (hence his nickname “Knobs”), had just cracked open a box of new speakers when he looked up and saw them: five agents from the California State Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, along with two city inspectors, barging into 710. “Well, what do we have
here?
” one of them said to Matthews, peering into his cardboard box. Rifkin was returning to the house from an errand when he saw a man in a suit who growled, “So, you're Rifkin.”

Leading the charge was Matthew O'Connor, head of the Northern Californian division of the state's narcotics bureau, a fervent antipot crusader who two months before had told a group at the Hibernian Newman Club that pot was a “dangerous, unpredictable substance” and that he wanted possession to remain a felony, not a misdemeanor. Right behind him at 710 was Jerry (short for Gerrit) Van Raam, a seven-year veteran of the department who'd resigned as a cop after being charged with beating a boy outside a deli. (Van Raam claimed the kid was trying to steal change from him.) Two days after turning in his badge Van Raam was sworn in as a member of the narcotics bureau. On a mission to rid the Haight of illicit drugs, they first hit houses on Haight and Divisadero Streets, but according to O'Connor, 710 kept coming up as what he called “a supply source.”

Sue Swanson was next. Earlier that day she'd been at 710 and had walked down to Haight Street—everyone pounded the pavement because no one at the building had a car—to buy a carton of ice cream. Walking up the stairs of 710 she noticed the door was uncharacteristically locked; on the other side stood an older man in a suit and tie, who opened the door and asked, “Do you live here?” Later Swanson realized she should have said no and walked back down the steps.
Instead, in a moment of bravado, she snapped, “And who are
you?
” The man pulled her inside and escorted her into the kitchen, where she saw Rifkin, Weir, Pigpen, and Matthews, among others, all sitting silently. Around them everyone could hear men clomping up and down the stairs, pulling open file cabinet drawers, and talking.

Next up the front steps was Scully, equally confounded by the sight of a locked front door. At first he thought it meant the band was doing an interview; such requests were coming in more frequently now that they had made an album. But when he saw the same suited officer, Scully realized something more ominous was taking place. When he told them his name, the police recognized it—it was on the lease—and gruffly informed him of the reason for their visit. “What—is someone smoking marijuana?” Scully replied faux innocently, but no one bought it, and he too was hauled into the kitchen.

The cops thought they had them all until they saw McGee coming toward the entrance. Lesh and McGee had only briefly lived at 710 in the same room as Garcia and a girlfriend. The two couples (and Garcia's waking-the-dead snoring) were separated only by a thin Chinese screen, which McGee says was “not acceptable.” Within a few weeks she, Lesh, and Kreutzmann had found a place together a few blocks away on Belvedere Street. “I just wanted a change of scene,” says Lesh. “It wasn't like in '66 when we were all living together. It just changed in some unidentifiable way that made me think, ‘This part of it is over.' Everybody had girlfriends, and there were too many people in the house and not enough room for your own personal space.”

Because her mail was still being sent to 710, McGee was stopping by the house that day to grab it. On her way up the front steps she saw Swanson, frantically waving to her to go back, but before McGee knew what was happening, she too was asked whether she lived there and then found herself in the kitchen.

As police stood guard, everyone in the pantry was eerily quiet, either silently stewing or simply stunned. McGee was possibly the most
anxious: leaning over to Swanson, she whispered that she had a ball of hash in her purse, tucked under her poncho. Swanson said nothing, and they continued listening to the police trample through the building, until Swanson finally said, “Let's get some ice cream.” Because the cop in the room had his back to them, Swanson and McGee cracked open the freezer, pulled out the dessert, and quickly crumbled McGee's hash into bowls with the ice cream. They were careful not to open the nearby pantry with the gnarly brick of pot. McGee decided to eat the evidence and dug into the ice cream, which tasted like it was sprinkled with grains of dirt.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, it was time to head to police headquarters. In boy-girl pairs, the busted—Weir, Pigpen, Scully, Rifkin, McGee, Barnard, Matthews, Swanson, and Christine Bennett, girlfriend of the band's new sound man, Dan Healy—were handcuffed and marched down the steps of 710 as photographers, alerted to the raid by police, snapped away. From Weir's long, girlish mane to Rifkin's mushroom head of hair to Pigpen's untucked shirt and headband, they looked more like scraggly bohos than menaces to society, and Weir, cuffed to McGee, waved flamboyantly to the crowd. (“As they say, just spell the name right,” Weir has joked of the bust.) As Scully and Swanson made their way out, Swanson's small hand kept sliding in and out of the cuffs, and Scully scolded her, “Just keep your hand in there! Don't get me in trouble!” Before long they were all sitting crammed into a paddy wagon and were on their way to the police headquarters in the Market District. (For unexplained reasons, five other people in the house—a girl of thirteen and what were later described as “a young man and three other girls”—were set free; Bennett, who was underage, was sent to juvenile hall.)

The shopping trip to Sausalito over, Garcia and Mountain Girl were walking up Ashbury when they heard Marilyn Harris, a neighbor living across the street, summoning them up to her apartment. From the vantage point of her window they watched as their friends were
marched down the front steps of 710 and into the wagon. Having been busted before, Mountain Girl wasn't overly rattled, but it was still disturbing to see their friends, especially dope-averse Pigpen, in the hands of the law. “Oh shit, oh shit,” was all she and Garcia could say to one another. They didn't have to say much more.