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 brown briefcase containing misc papers
- 1 SFPD issue property envelope [ed: containing
at least next three items]
- $990 (16x $50, 9x $20, 1x $10)
- 3 paper bindles containing brown powder (found
in rose tin)
- 1 baggie of 6 cotton swabs
- 1 plastic container liquid
- 1 glass container liquid
- 8 pieces of foil with burnt residue
- 11 paper bindles with brown residue in a bag
found in briefcase
- 1 paper bindle of white powder found in
briefcase
- 1 Zip-Loc baggie containing 1 yellow legal paper
bindle containing white powder, labeled "1/2 gram"
- 1 paper bindle with brown rock like substance
- 1 cooking glass with prong holders
- 7 cigarette lighters
- 1 razor
- 1 4" metal tool
- 1 zipper brown pouch 6" x 4"
- 1 seven of hearts playing card
- 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, 19
85, 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.)
