Excerpt
Here Beside the Rising Tide
Chapter 1“Utter Loss”Jerry Garcia grew up in working-class San Francisco, and he grew up hard. The San Francisco of the 1940s is difficult to imagine today, viewed backward through the gauze of wealth and technology, but in those days, it was roughhewn, a city of labor and immigrants, of fishermen and shopkeepers. The city—no good San Franciscan would ever call it Frisco—radiated from its docks, where Fisherman’s Wharf teemed with actual fishermen, streaming out into the Pacific in the morning dark, trawling the abundant seas, and jostling for position as they returned to sell their day’s catch. The waterfront smelled of fish and salt air, rattled with the clatter of cleats and the thrumming of diesel engines, muffled by fog in the mornings, sharp and jangly in the clear afternoons.
The city was bracketed by bridges. Gray and functional, the Bay Bridge connected San Francisco to Oakland and to the vast American landscape to the east. The Golden Gate, meanwhile, decoratively presented the city to the west. Built as much for beauty as for any transportation purpose, the Golden Gate was grace and aperture, an opening to all that lay beyond. Within the city, cable cars cut across town, turned by hand at each end. They ran from the elegant stores on Market Street to the rougher environs of the waterfront, picking up passengers as the cars climbed through the hilly neighborhoods of Victorians—“painted ladies,” as the locals called them—and humble townhouses.
Nearly a quarter of San Franciscans came from someplace else. Its neighborhoods included émigré enclaves from England, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Ireland. Italians were a cultural force in the city, and they clustered in North Beach—the DiMaggio family lived there and ran a fishing boat, though the boys sneaked off to play baseball and proved pretty good at it. The city’s many Chinese residents lived and labored in Chinatown, thought to be the largest Chinese community outside Asia. Tourists came from across the world for a peek into the Orient. The China Clipper restaurant offered eleven varieties of chop suey, most for under a dollar. A “preserved Dragon Egg” for dessert cost forty cents.
Garcia spent his early years in the Excelsior District, a tidy but tough Italian and Irish neighborhood south of the city’s more picturesque environs, well off the path of tourists. The Garcia family lived in a tiny Mediterranean Revival home, living room above the garage, on Amazon Avenue, as nondescript as a San Francisco house could be. Jerry’s father, Jose, a native of Spain who emigrated to the United States as a teenager and completed just two years of high school, was a musician—clarinet and saxophone. He owned Joe Garcia’s, a bar on First Street in Rincon Hill at the base of the Bay Bridge, not far from the scene of the city’s epic clash between labor and power in 1934, when the General Strike shut down the port. The echoes of that day haunted San Francisco for a generation, well into the lives of Jose and Ruth Garcia’s burgeoning family.
Joe Garcia’s catered to seamen. The bar had the hum of travel, the raucous energy of men eager to tie one on before setting out to sea. Ruth, who went by “Bobbie” and worked the bar, was eight years younger than her husband and had been a nurse prior to her marriage. Once married, she adapted her life to that of her husband. He was dexterous, a bit disorganized, handy with tools, and sporting. He was called Joe and made his living as a barkeep and proprietor of the family establishment. Long days and nights piled up into long years. A census taker in 1940 recorded that Joe had worked every one of the fifty-two weeks in the prior year, and that he had spent eighty-four hours at Joe Garcia’s the week prior to the collection of the census data.
The Garcias’ marriage was filled with work and family and was, by surviving accounts, pleasant. Their first son, Clifford, was born in 1937, soon after the bar opened. Cliff would pick up the nickname Tiff from his younger brother, who struggled to pronounce “Cliff” as a baby. When Cliff was four, he got that younger brother, Jerome John Garcia, named for the composer Jerome Kern and known, first to his friends and then to a growing legion of admirers and fans, as Jerry. He was born on August 1, 1942, at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco.
Although the bar supported the young family, it was not the life either of the Garcia parents had set out to make for themselves. Joe’s real love was music. He entertained at clubs and music halls in San Francisco in the 1930s, making a decent living as a musician and band leader. He fell back on the bar in 1937 after running afoul of the musicians’ union—he’d allowed members of his band to play for free, an infraction for which the union fined him. And in San Francisco, to have been censured by the union was a mark of ostracism. The experience soured Joe on professional music, and he instead used his savings, along with help from his in-laws and a business partner, to open Joe Garcia’s. Music remained as a family pastime but no longer as a living.
The family was culturally Catholic, but hardly religious, “loose Catholics rather than devout Catholics,” as Jerry later put it. Tiff and Jerry attended mass weekly, toddling off to nearby Corpus Christi Church, Jerry a little overwhelmed by the solemnity of the ceremony and more impressed by the sound of Latin than by any theological insight. The brothers usually went on their own, shuttled off to church while their parents enjoyed the morning to themselves. Music made a deeper impression. Family dinners brought together the Garcias and Ruth’s family, the Cliffords, in boisterous, loud, sometimes fractious gatherings. The adults would shout and disagree and then retire to sing, often accompanied by Joe on clarinet or sax. Dinners typically concluded with children and adults gathered around the dining room table singing for hours before heading back to their respective homes.
As a young boy, Jerry Garcia was quiet, a little impish. He smiles in early photos, diffident but engaging, with a distinctive sparkle in his eyes. He carried few memories of his very young life, though he did recall wearing out a record at his grandmother’s, almost compelled to keep playing it on her wind-up Victrola. And he remembered being tossed into a pool by a drunk man and rescued by his father, who then knocked the drunk out cold. Though fragments more than memories, they hint at the residue of Garcia’s childhood—his early obsessive behavior and his vulnerability, the relief of protection, though by a man who would not be there long to provide it.
When Jerry was four, the Garcias were vacationing in Lompico, a remote section of redwood forest north of Santa Cruz, where they escaped the city to a primitive house without electricity or running water, jointly built and owned by the Garcias and Cliffords. One morning, Jerry and Cliff, who was eight, were chopping wood, Cliff handling the hatchet and little Jerry placing the wood to be chopped.
“He was putting little pieces of twigs on the sawhorse,” Cliff recalled, “and I was chopping them in half, making kindling. . . . He’d put his finger in and take it away, put it in and take it away. That happened a dozen times. Finally, I nailed him.”
The ax drove a deep cut into the middle finger of little Jerry’s right hand. Bobbie, the former nurse, jumped to the rescue, wrapping Jerry’s hand in a towel as they rushed to the hospital. But it was a long drive, and Jerry’s finger was badly injured. Efforts to reconnect it failed, and Jerry went home that night missing the end of his middle finger, severed just above the middle knuckle.
The loss of a middle finger—and the surrounding pain and anxiety—would affect any young boy, and it did Jerry, who forgave his brother but forever bore the scar of their game gone wrong. And yet the loss of Jerry’s finger was dwarfed by the greater tragedy of his young life that took place the following summer. This time, the occasion was a fishing trip. Cliff was off with relatives in Lompico while Joe and Ruth took Jerry, who had just turned five, on a camping trip along the Trinity River in Six Rivers National Forest, a few hours north of San Francisco.
The couple and their little boy arrived on Sunday, August 24, 1947. The next day, Joe went off to fish the Trinity River near where Willow Creek flowed into the larger stream. Ruth and Jerry set up camp nearby. As Joe fished the cool water on a cloudy afternoon, he slipped on a rock. He was sucked under by a strong current, perhaps dragged down by his waders as they filled with water. Witnesses saw him fall, but it took them fifteen minutes to extricate him from the Trinity. By then, Joe Garcia, forty-five years old, was dead.
