So Many Roads Read online

  By ghoulish coincidence, a recently completed federal government study revealed that Palo Alto could accommodate 37,818 fallout shelters if needed. But if the world were to end, Garcia and Meier were going to be alone, together, in a radiant spot they could call their own for eternity. “If this was the end of the world, a very real probability in our teenage minds,” says Meier, “we wanted to be together, awake, and face it head on.” They didn’t bring camping gear or food, just themselves and their fears.

  The two had met the previous year in Menlo Park. Meier, then a fifteen-year-old high school student, had been invited for a hike with a friend, who first stopped by an art supply store; on the porch outside was a mysterious man in a goatee, holding a banjo. Initially he seemed reluctant to join them, but their mutual friend later told Meier that the guy, whose name was Jerry Garcia, was instantly smitten: “Oh, tell her I love her,” he’d told their friend. Eventually he climbed into the backseat of the car and sang the traditional murder ballad “Silver Dagger,” which Joan Baez had popularized on her first album two years before. Meier didn’t know who he was, but she couldn’t deny his magnetism. “Jerry was singing just to me, and it was so seductive,” she says. “There was this incredible promise in his eyes of ‘I know about worlds you’ve never dreamed of, and I’ll bet you’re dying to try them.’”

  Although he was just another twentysomething bumming around the area and trying to figure out his next move, Garcia already exuded more than a patina of magnetism. Not long before this October night another transplant, a Seattle kid named David Nelson who was himself mastering guitar, spotted Garcia in a bookstore. Cradling a twelve-string guitar, Garcia was strumming quietly, almost to himself, but at least to Nelson he was the focus of the room. In his open-buttoned shirt, Garcia seemed “incredibly hairy,” Nelson later recalled, and he struck Nelson as “kind of dark and surly,” complete with a stare that zeroed in on his target. Nelson couldn’t take his eyes off the guy, and Garcia also seemed preternaturally mature. “Jerry was this guy who to all of us looked like an adult, like a grownup, where we kind of looked like kids,” he told writer David Hajdu. “There’s this man here, you know. He was very advanced at the time compared to everybody else.”

  After being casual pals for six months, Garcia and Meier had inevitably become a couple in the fall of 1961. The relationship was merely one aspect of the new life Garcia had built for himself in the Peninsula. (He’d also followed Meier to San Francisco in the summer of 1961 when she attended art school there, then returned to the Peninsula with her.) By now Garcia had distanced himself from his family and his often painful past. When he wasn’t teaching he’d be killing time at Kepler’s or a nearby coffeehouse, St. Michael’s Alley, or playing in an ever-evolving group of bluegrass and string bands. No longer the chubby, short-haired kid, Garcia had reinvented himself.

  Nearly from the moment she found herself in the same car as Garcia, Meier had been swept up in his universe, a largely male world of folk music, poetry, coffee, cigarettes, and spontaneous car-fueled adventures. When her high school let out for the day she’d see a familiar old black heap in the parking lot; unlike the Corvettes and Lincolns owned by the wealthier students, this one had doors that were held together, in Meier’s memory, by rope. Waiting for her would be Garcia and another of his new friends, Robert Hunter. (Later it would be Hunter who took each of them aside and told them their feelings were mutual.) Another friend on the scene was Alan Trist, an eighteen-year-old Brit who’d arrived in the States with his father, who was then in the midst of a fellowship at Stanford. The car was most likely Hunter’s 1940 Chrysler, purchased for all of $50, and the gaggle of friends would start it up and go in search of one party or another. They were living the relatively carefree life of Kennedy-era kids who sought nothing more than to reject the draining daily jobs and lives of their parents: too young to be beatniks, too early in history to be called anything close to “hippies.” As Meier says, “We got together because we didn’t fit in anywhere else.”

  The Chateau was a world unto itself. Once the owner began renting out rooms, the house, which overlooked Los Alamos Highway, became a gathering place for seemingly every outlier in the area. “The owner liked us better than the students,” says Laird Grant, a friend of Garcia’s who joined him in crashing there. “We brought young girls around.” All sorts of oddball characters wandered in and out, jazz often blasting from its rooms and weekly poker games on the schedule. Although the place had an illicit air, the police mostly stayed away.

  Based on all the reports in and around Cuba, Garcia and Meier realized those carefree days could be numbered. From what they’d heard, that Saturday in October could be the moment tensions would either simmer down or erupt in nuclear catastrophe. For Meier the feeling was overwhelming, but Garcia had almost grown accustomed to sudden, unexpected loss. It had already haunted the first twenty years of his life, and each episode had left irrevocable scars on his body or his psyche.

  The first tragedy was so painful he couldn’t talk about it. In August 1947 Joe Garcia, the son of a Spanish immigrant and owner of a bar in downtown San Francisco, was fishing in the Trinity River in northwest California. (The first Garcias had come to America from Spain less than thirty years before Jerry’s birth.) With Joe on the trip were his wife, Ruth Marie (nicknamed Bobbie, possibly to avoid confusion with her sister-in-law, Ruth), and his five-year-old son, Jerry. Whether his son was watching or not—and his older brother, Clifford, or Tiff, would long believe he wasn’t—Joe slipped, fell in the water, and drowned after being trapped underwater. Tiff had been staying with grandparents in the Santa Cruz Mountains when the horrific accident happened. When Tiff saw his younger brother at the funeral, all Jerry could talk about was the fish hatchery they’d seen on the trip. “I’m thinking, ‘Your dad dies and all you can remember is the fish hatchery wherever they were?’” Tiff says. “He had something good to tell me, and it was about the fish hatchery.”

  It may have been the only way for the youngest Garcia in the family to process the ways in which the life he’d once known was effectively over. He’d been born John Jerome Garcia on August 1, 1942—his middle name a salute to composer Jerome Kern. Born José, Jerry’s father, Joe, was a musician himself, playing the clarinet and saxophone in several local bands, even once touring the country. After marrying his second wife, Ruth, he opened a bar, Joe Garcia’s, in 1937. Although Joe was no longer a full-time musician (Jerry would later say Joe had been “blackballed by the [musicians] union” over an infraction), music was still in the air in other forms: one of Jerry’s grandmothers would listen to Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on the radio, introducing him to country music, and both Jerry and Tiff, born in 1937, took piano lessons at home, albeit briefly. Tiff (whose nickname derived from the way his younger brother would unintentionally mangle his name) remembers Jerry as more of a voracious reader, devouring comic books twice as fast as he did.

  Although it wasn’t as psychically scarring as his father’s death, young Jerry dealt with another loss mere months before Joe’s drowning. At the family’s summer home in Santa Cruz County in the spring of 1947 the two Garcia boys were tending to one of their regular chores, chopping the wood: Jerry would put the splinters down, and Tiff would hack. But one time Jerry didn’t pull his finger back fast enough, and Tiff’s ax bit into the middle finger of his brother’s right hand. Jerry was rushed to a hospital, where part of his finger was amputated, and Tiff remembers the bandages becoming smaller and smaller until all that was left was a stub with a tiny bandage. “It was an accident,” Tiff says. “I knew I’d done something wrong, but when you’re kids, you just go, ‘Sorry it happened.’” (Many years later, on a trip in Hawaii, a diving instructor’s son would see Garcia’s missing finger and ask what had happened. Garcia relayed the story of the accident simply and sweetly, as if it were a storybook tale, and the kid asked whether it would grow back. “Jerry just laughed and said, ‘Nah, I don’t think so,’” recalls his friend Debbie Go
ld, who was aboard the boat. “He wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about it.”)

  As scarring as that incident was, it would seem trivial compared to what happened in the Trinity River. At Joe Garcia’s open-casket funeral neither son could bring himself to look at their father’s body; it was too painful and too disturbing. For at least a year after Joe’s death Ruth would put Jerry and Tiff to bed at night and say, “God bless Daddy in heaven.” The words became a standard nightly prayer and routine, along with Jerry and Tiff’s regimen of hopping a streetcar, bringing flowers to the cemetery, and heading back home.

  After Joe died and Ruth took over running the bar, Tiff and Jerry moved in with their maternal grandparents. (In a foreshadowing of Jerry’s later, rock-star life, his grandfather, who owned a laundry, would take the boys’ clothes and wash and return them to the boys.) Ruth remarried twice, and the second marriage, to Wally Matusiewicz, was especially difficult on Jerry, as Wally was a seaman who, as Dead biographer Dennis McNally wrote, “expected his stepsons to work alongside him on home projects.” Already artistically inclined, Jerry had little interest in that type of labor. After Union Oil bought out Joe Garcia’s, the company built a new bar for Ruth across the street, and soon the family left the city and moved to Menlo Park in the Peninsula area south of San Francisco.

  From the moment Laird Grant transferred into the Menlo Oaks Middle School in the fall of 1955, the prematurely hardened kid, who’d grown up in San Francisco before his family relocated south, heard about that Garcia kid and his “stay-away reputation.” Garcia was neither hood nor greaser, neither school-level criminal nor oily haired biker. In Grant’s memory he was a chubby kid with hair so short it made his head seemed like it came to a point. In spite of his last name, Garcia didn’t strike Grant or any of their friends as Hispanic; he didn’t, for instance, speak with an accent. The rumors of Garcia as a bad boy were confirmed the day Grant walked across a field to school and was jumped by a couple of kids, including Garcia, who was a year older than Grant. As Garcia sat on Grant’s chest and smeared his face with lipstick, another of the kids tried to pull Grant’s pants off. “That was a big thing in those days,” Grant says. “Run back to school and you’d have to show up in your tighty-whities, lipstick all over your face.” It was a harmless initiation prank, and luckily Grant lived close enough to the park to be able to race back home, change, and return to school. Later he saw Garcia again, but instead of feeling angry, he sensed a bond with the kid who’d just roughed him up. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Ha, I know you!’” Grant recalls. Even at that age Garcia could get away with almost anything.

  The accident that cost Jerry his finger would haunt his older brother for years after: “It’s one of those things you don’t ever get over,” Tiff says. “It never goes away.” But Tiff’s little brother loved nothing better than to devise ways of having fun with his abnormality and messing with people’s heads along the way—like poking his truncated digit into the ears of fellow classmates and watching their scared reaction. “He’d go up to kids and grab ’em and stick that knobby bony piece of weirdness in ’em,” Grant says. “Made them freak.” Garcia might also jam that finger into his nostril to make it look as if he was sticking his finger all the way up his nose. The missing finger only added to his image, especially when he would boast, wrongly, that the absent part of his finger was in a jar of alcohol at home and accepting visitors. That Garcia kid surely had a twisted sense of humor.

  Although Menlo Park was a placid suburb seemingly ideal for raising a family, Garcia’s life was again destined to be unsettled. In 1957 the family returned to San Francisco, where Jerry attended a much rougher school and had to, in his later words, become “a hoodlum . . . otherwise you walked down the street and somebody beats you up.” The Garcias relocated once more to Cazadero, several hours northwest of the city in Sonoma County. (Once a week Garcia, whose artwork was beginning to blossom as well, also attended the California School of Fine Arts.) By then Tiff was gone; an army recruiter who’d popped into Ruth’s bar convinced her that her oldest would be better off if he signed up, which led Tiff into the Marine Corps.

  Starting in the middle school where they met, Garcia and Grant increasingly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable. Jumping the fence at the Golden State Dairy and purloining chocolate milk and ice cream from the trucks in the early morning hours was one thing—“no fingerprints, no breaking locks, no damage,” Grant still boasts—but their adventures soon turned more mind expanding. Garcia began bringing around pills. “He would say, ‘Look at this, man!’” Grant says. “He’d have ten or twelve different-colored pills in his hand. We’d take ’em and drop ’em.” Garcia never said where the pills came from, although other kids were known to sneak into their family’s bathrooms and grab their parents’ prescriptions. After the Garcia bar would close for the night the two boys had one job to attend to: pouring whatever was left in all the bottles into one jug, which they would then guzzle down. (Garcia later developed an aversion to alcohol, and it’s easy to imagine it starting with those concoctions.) Later the two friends also shared their first joint—to Garcia, a far more immediately appealing high.

  An enticing high of a different sort was beckoning. In eighth grade Garcia had taken a stab at playing saxophone, perhaps as a way to continue his father’s legacy, but his partially missing middle finger made it tricky to play. Another instrument, and another genre, was beckoning. Garcia would long boast that for his fifteenth birthday his mother had given him an accordion, which he almost immediately traded in at a pawn shop for his first electric guitar, spending the following months figuring out how to play it. The timing was profound. Rock ’n’ roll was now a few years old and clearly wasn’t fading away: in 1957 Garcia could turn on a radio at any moment and hear the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up, Little Susie,” Elvis’s “All Shook Up,” Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin’,” and Chuck Berry’s “School Day.”

  Garcia was discovering his type of friends and his type of musical expression, but in one area at least, he didn’t feel especially comfortable. Every so often a bunch of the kids would head to Playland, the waterfront amusement park in the Richmond district of San Francisco. They’d play arcade games and eat pie, but Garcia’s mood would change slightly when they approached the water. “He’d get little twitches about it,” Grant says. “He was always kind of weird when we went out to the beach.” Garcia never said why, but friends assumed the water triggered memories of his father’s death and the hole it left in him.

  Around 5 p.m. Garcia and Meier arrived at their possibly final destination. The field before them was one of gently waving golden grass, black oak trees, and nothing in sight: not the Chateau, not the roads, not the thriving Stanford campus sprawled out below them. There was no sign of Menlo Park, a town only thirty-five years old, nor of Palo Alto, which had arisen even earlier as a village for Stanford faculty. Before World War II Palo Alto had been home to only about seventeen thousand people; that number had now more than tripled, to fifty-five thousand, and the area had made way for a shopping center, an industrial park, and two thousand mass-produced homes. Subdivisions began taking over empty fields, and roughly seventy thousand cars entered and left the town every day. Yet Palo Alto also retained its only-in-California lure. When Garcia’s future partner Mountain Girl arrived the following summer, her earliest memories would be riding her bike and seeing oranges, apples, walnuts, and peaches lying on the sidewalks after falling off trees. Palm trees loomed over other houses. It felt like paradise, especially because it barely seemed to rain.

  Settling onto the grass, Garcia and Meier talked and cried a bit, then began singing. The song was “Go Down, Old Hannah,” an African American prison work song recorded by Lead Belly, among others. (During this time Garcia had discovered the Folkways label, and one of its collections included a version of the song sung by actual Texas inmates.) In its original form the song was the inmates’ way of ending the day; “H
annah” was the sun. But tonight, on this hill and in this situation, the lyric—“if you rise in the morning, well, well, well / Bring judgment for sure”—took on a far more fraught context. “We were trying to hasten the sun setting so the day would come to an end,” Meier says. “We thought that if we got through the day, things would be okay—it wouldn’t be the end of the world. If we got through this particular twenty-four hours of saber rattling with the Soviet Union, we would all survive.” So they sang to Hannah, over and over.

  Garcia had arrived in the Peninsula early the previous year after tackling the unlikeliest of jobs. After dropping out of high school, he told Tiff he was planning to follow him into the service. Tiff tried to talk his brother out of it, feeling it wouldn’t be a good match, but it didn’t work: “He wanted to get away from his mom and stepfather, I think,” Tiff says. (According to Blair Jackson’s Garcia: An American Life, Jerry also stole his mother’s car, paving the way for his stint in the army.) Other friends think it may have been a way for Garcia to drum up some money, and Garcia himself later said it was simply an alternative to college or staying with his family. Whatever the motivation, Garcia found himself at Fort Ord in Monterey in the spring of 1960. “If you were rich, you went to West Point,” says Grant. “If you were poor, you went to Monterey.” Visiting him at Fort Ord, Grant was struck by Garcia’s shaved head and khakis, but the sight didn’t last long. Garcia’s stint, which also included an assignment at a fort in the Presidio area, lasted all of eight months. After spending too much time with a friend who was considering suicide in San Francisco, Garcia was declared AWOL (one of several times this occurred) and was drummed out of the service at year’s end.