January 18, 1985: Strung Out and Busted

January 18, 1985 has got to be Rock Bottom for Jerry Garcia: strung out and busted.

But let me step back. Six days earlier, Garcia gave an interview to Jas Obrecht and Jon Sievert (Obrecht 1985, 2010). Obrecht reports that the interview took place at the home of Nora Sage, said to be a fan in whose basement Garcia was crashing. Jackson (1999, 337-338) says instead that this is the Hepburn Heights house (12 Hepburn Heights, San Rafael, CA, 94901), that Rock Scully had moved/been kicked out in 1983, and that Nora is keeping house and tending to Garcia between her law classes. After the events to be narrated, Ms. Sage helps Garcia kick by rationing his drugs in progressively smaller doses, gets him painting for the first time in twenty-five years, has him making model cars and guns, toys for Jerry denying the Devil of his. Brother Tiff appreciates it: "If it wasn't for Nora Sage, Jerry probably would have been dead a lot earlier" (Jackson 1999, 338).

It cannot have been easy. Obrecht (2010) sets the stage, January 12, 1985:

Garcia, unwashed and disheveled, shuffled slowly into the living room, his black T-shirt sprinkled with white powder. His fingertips were blackened in a manner consistent with “chasing the dragon,” as smoking heroin was commonly referred to in the Bay Area. Ten minutes into our interview, Garcia nonchalantly chopped a large rock of cocaine into about twenty lines and consumed all of it during the next hour.

Hyperbole? Check out our googly hero in the fish-eye lens. Look at all the blow and dandruff on that t-shirt, the tarred fingers! For want of Smell-O-Vision we can't truly appreciate the "prodigious body odor which preceded him by the room’s length" (http://malfalfa1.tripod.com/garciainterview.htm).

Jerry Garcia, 1/12/85 - Frets, July 1985, photograph by Jon Sievert.

Less than a week later, in response to an intervention staged at band and family's request by new Dead manager (and old friend) John McIntire, Garcia drops Nora off at class and sets off for rehab. But he detours a little bit, a consequential little twist, planned or unplanned. Since I know neither wither he was coming nor whence he was going, I don't know if it's an actual detour. Corry suggests below that it could rather have formed a destination. Regardless, he "stopped in Golden Gate Park, where he sat in his car meditating on his life, and, not coincidentally, finishing off his drug supply. Unfortunately, his BMW, a gift from a disreputable source, was not registered" (McNally 2002, 552).

On Friday, January 18, 1985, around 12:30 in the afternoon, SFPD Officer Mark Gamble steers his Honda police motorcycle toward a black BMW with expired September 1984 tags parked on the north side of Middle Drive in Golden Gate Park (north of Metson Lake). Approaching the driver's side window, he finds the vehicle's sole occupant "looking down at his hands in which he held a piece of tin foil paper which had a brown, sticky appearing substance on it. He looked up at me and quickly shoved the tin foil out of view to the right side of the driver's seat. He started reaching all over the base of his seat acting very nervous."

Officer Gamble:

I told him to open his window more and he started the engine and opened the power window. I asked him for his driver's license and the vehicle registration. He said he did not have his driver's license and he gave the registration to me. He verbally identified himself as "Jerry Garcia, born 8/1/42". ... I looked into the car and saw an open briefcase open on the front passenter seat. Inside the briefcase I saw several other pieces of tin foil with brown residue and burn marks. Also, I saw the baggie of paper bindles, the glass cooker and [?pro?] and the cigarette lighters. I also smelled a slight smell of something burned coming from inside the car.

Officer Gamble arrested "Jerry Garcia, born 8/1/42" on charges of possession of narcotics for sale, based on multiple, separately labeled bindles of drugs and a sizeable wad of cash. The man, 42, 6'0 and 250 (ish), long greying hair, a plaid red shirt and a black t-shirt -- perhaps the same getup from six days earlier, "knocked-out-loaded" (James Booker), flat-out busted (something Booker also understood).

His stash duly inscribes itself into his official (hence "permanent") record, as in modernity it must. The numberings are mine, so I can refer to them (another thoroughly modern move, in terms of the quantification and the agency I feel in imposing it).

1. 1 brown briefcase containing misc papers
2. 1 SFPD issue property envelope [ed: containing at least next three items]
3. $990 (16x $50, 9x $20, 1x $10)
4. 3 paper bindles containing brown powder (found in rose tin)
5. 1 baggie of 6 cotton swabs
6. 1 plastic container liquid
7. 1 glass container liquid
8. 8 pieces of foil with burnt residue
9. 11 paper bindles with brown residue in a bag found in briefcase
10. 1 paper bindle of white powder found in briefcase
11. 1 Zip-Loc baggie containing 1 yellow legal paper bindle containing white powder, labeled "1/2 gram"
12. 1 paper bindle with brown rock like substance
13. 1 cooking glass with prong holders
14. 7 cigarette lighters
15. 1 razor
16. 1 4" metal tool
17. 1 zipper brown pouch 6" x 4"
18. 1 seven of hearts playing card
19. 1 rose metal box 4" x 2"

Let's consider this.

Least commonly, we find the opiate "Persian", item #4, the brown powder found in the rose tin. I don't exactly understand the preparation and use of this. Was it mixed with one of the liquids (#6, #7) to create a paste or rock, this on or perhaps then placed on tin foil (item #7). This is placed on a cooking glass (#12) held via tongs (#12) in one hand, heated with lighter (#14) and inhaled from above? Perhaps he could place the fin foil with the drugs over the tongs and the tin foil heated directly, while the glass cooker is for freebasing the cocaine (see below). I just don't know (thank goodness). The cotton swabs (#5) and I guess the other fluid are for cleaning the paraphernalia, I figure, as possibly is metal tool #16.

I need to educate myself about this substance and its use, specifically by Garcia. I suspect the Greenfield oral history Dark Star might have some information?

Cocaine was commonly encountered among Bay Area affluenti (drivers of late-model black BMWs, for example) of the mid-1980s, as it probably is today. But Garcia was a man of copious tastes and appetites (and lots of money), and he impresses with his all-around hoovering versatility. If I understand things correctly, the bindle from the brief case (#10) and the ½ gram in the yellow paper bindle (#11) are powder cocaine, easily consumable on the bottom of the rose tin (#19) using the razor blade (#15) or the playing card (#18) for refinement and alignment and either the tool (#14) or probably the bills (#3) to snort it. The brown rock-like substance (#12) is apparently heroin, according to a commenter.

Was he freebasing cocaine by washing it in ether (#6 and/or #7; volatile stuff!), and smoking it in a pipe (#13?) as a pure whack to the brain and blood? That'd complete the trifecta (powder, rock and base) I guess. Croz (Crosby and Gottlieb 1988, 294-295) gives a taste for the paraphernalia involved in that:

You collect junk for it. You have a million little pieces of glass. You have little tubes and bottles and stoppers and screens and pipes and pieces of rubber. You have all kinds of little metal tools to scrape the pipes. You have a zillion little containers to keep liquids and powders. We carried around bags full of stuff. I carried little pH papers to check the acidity and alkalinity. I carried bottles of water, little containers of ammonia. I carried bags of baking soda. … [295] I'd have a pipe and a spare pipe and then parts to fix the pipe and all kinds of strange shit. The torch became a part of the things I carried with me, the way people carry car keys or a wallet.

I don't think Garcia was freebasing cocaine, but I am not sure about that. But Croz's narrative gives a sense of the thing, and the Croz-Garcia comparison is one I'll try to say at least a little bit about at some point.

I notice they list no cigarettes- I wonder if they let him keep his unfiltered Camels with him in stir? Because as a characterization of Garcia's material environment and possessions –as a proper inventory-- it can hardly be complete without smokes. Either they were so trivial the clerk never wrote it, or the perp was allowed this little comfort (in which case, look out lungs!), or Jerry was actually out. If he was not holding smokes when he was arrested, then he really was finishing up and about to leave again -- man's gotta breathe. This is need #1 in Garcia's life at this point, always ready-to-hand -- take my drugs, but please leave me my Camels!

Whatever his nicotine circumstances, he was almost out of Persian. There were eleven used brown-paper bindles (#9) and eight pieces of used tin foil (#8)! Dude had been chuffing like a madman in his driver's seat. My expectation is that he was going to do up a bunch of blow, too, though perhaps not all of it. Gotta get your concentration on for driving. It's possible that he was going to stop off somewhere to a friend, lover, coworker, associate, middleperson, codependent, dealer, or someone else's and drop off at least some of the coke (could he really have done that half-gram sitting there in his car?), maybe some money if he's going away for a few days so they can have some stuff ready for when he gets out – a Scout being always prepared.

The total drugs left comprise the three bindles of brown powder (#4), the white powder briefcase bindle (#10), the ½ gram of blow (#11), and the rock (#12). The cop was being a hardass in busting him on intent-to-sell based on the multiple packaging, but that's really just Jerry's stuff.

The Sources do a great job with the fallout of The Bust, including the relative slap on the wrist for the criminal matter and Garcia's long, slow recovery out of opiate addiction over a sixteen month period (Jackson 1999, 337). McNally says that what drove him to clean up his act was not the Bust, but that.

Early in the summer the consequences of almost total physical passivity caught up with him, and he began to experience massive edema, a swelling in his ankles and lower legs that was so bad his trousers needed to be cut. The appearance of his legs was so shocking that Garcia finally had undeniable proof of the damage. Bit by bit, as the year 1985 passed, he began to clean up and exercise at least a little (McNally 2002, 552). 

I have delved at least a little into some Garcia shows from the following period: March 2, 1985, May 31, 1985, June 1, 1985, and June 3, 1985. I don't want to say much more right now. Instead, I want to use Corry's beautiful knowledge and words to put a little bow on the Bust. Discussing why Garcia might have been in Golden Gate Park, he notes that

It's a giant tourist attraction in a city where there are far too many cars. GGP has been made intentionally unfriendly to through-traffic--the roads have never been widened, the intersections are full of stop signs and roundabouts. Even on a weekday in January (Jan 18, 1985 was a Friday), there are tourists trying to back into parking spaces, roads blocked because there is an international Frisbee championship, and so on. So if you have any experience driving in San Francisco, you go out of your way to avoid any trip through Golden Gate Park, with the exception of 19th Avenue (Highway 1), which is a through street and isn't a convenient entrance to the park by design. Two fast one-way Avenues bracket the park (Lincoln to the ocean, Fulton towards downtown) to provide further inducement not to enter the park unless you are planning to stop there.

Middle Drive north of Metson Lake is a dead-end street, rather difficult to get to. However, if Jerry was looking for a quiet place ... From a symbolic point of view, Middle Drive north of Metson Lake was probably within sight of the Polo Fields. So if Garcia was taking stock of his life, he was doing it right next to where the Human Be-In was held nearly 17 years earlier (within 4 days). Although Park geography has not changed since the 1950s, it is symbolic as well that when Garcia wanted to find a lonely place to get high in the car, he knew how to find a dead-end street close to the Polo Fields.

Very cinematic.

~~~

"I don't ... like ... confrontation!" says Toy Story Rex, the tremulous Tyrannosaur, and neither did Garcia. Who does? Yet he had been directly confronted by everyone closest to him, and exceptionally, had overcome his own probable embarrassment and allowed himself to accede to their request that he clean up his act ("mannnn"). He wouldn't be the first or last addict to try to finish his stash before cleaning up, with potentially dangerous and certainly problematic consequences. But, re-reading Corry's context, maybe he was also taking time to re-evaluate; remember how it was, imagine how it might be.

I'll assert that Garcia's was a life well-lived - too short by any standard, with some down deep and dirty low points, but way out in the far-right tail of the distribution in terms of average quality, with maxima probably hitting few-in-trillionths level rarity. So I don't think that August 8, 1995, Garcia's last day on Earth, was Rock Bottom. Far from it. By that time, at only 53 and only ten years after the events narrated here, he had, I hate to be crude about it, shot his wad. He had burned through more experience in 53 than most do in 80, the cliché would have it, and I think that's probably right.

On the afternoon of January 18, 1985, by contrast, dude was probably thinking he still had a lot to live for, some unfinished business. That's certainly how he narrated his own thinking after the coma a year and a half later. While he and his Dead associates had already begun ascending a long arc of success, within two and a half years they'd have a hit record and would become one of the heaviest and most reliable earners in rock and roll (see my snapshot of 1991). Garcia's unfinished business was, quite literally, to make himself an American success story, to reach the top of the mountain. Maybe he spied it, just a glimpse of it, jonesing for a smoke in a San Francisco lockup, up over the horizon of recovery, through patching up some personal stuff, working his ass off - a few more years, maybe some good times, a few laughs, more music, and a little greatness along the way.

(Acknowledgement: Thanks to Walter Keenan for the report and Corry Arnold for context and analysis.)