Dark Star (3 page)

Marshall Leicester:
Jerry and I first met and discovered that we liked each other in grade school in Menlo Park. We were kids and I can remember us riding bikes together. I remember him as being a distinctive and sort of shaped individual from when we were nine and ten. There weren't many kids around like that. I was a young intellectual and uncomfortable with it. I was going to Catholic school at the time and there was definitely no room for that kind of thing. Garcia was a guy who liked to talk that way too even then. He'd picked it up. I don't know where.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
When I was sixteen, I was dragged out of the city to go to Menlo Park. I had nobody down there. I knew nobody except for my next-door neighbor. In the city, I was going to go to Balboa High. Now I had to start high school down there. Then it got to the point where my mom was working again. They needed the money. They had to drive Cadillacs and all this shit. Plus, Wally was a merchant marine. He'd be gone for two months at a time.

I finally got a driver's license so Jerry and I would hop in the car and go to the city and see our friends. My stepfather was working in the bar, my mom was working with him, and Jerry and I would take whatever car was there. We'd hot wire a car and I'd take him to the city and drop him off at his friend's house and I'd run around and show off whatever car I was driving to my friends and party for a while and then I'd haul him back down there. Then I went into the Marines. I enlisted because I had to get out of the house. I was seventeen and my stepfather and my mom used to argue a lot.

Laird Grant:
Jerry's dad had died. His mother was with a man by the name of Wally Matusiewicz. Wally was kind of a stevedore. A seaman. He was a real rough-and-tumble guy but she really loved him. Because even though she was a nurse, she was kind of rough-and-tumble herself. That was why she liked running that bar for seamen down at First and Harrison. She was always very nice to me. She and I got along wonderful. I was one of the kids that she really liked having around because if there was a leaky faucet or something that needed to be done, I could do that stuff. In that way, I took up Jerry's slack. It never seemed like there was a closeness there like I had with my mom. But I saw a bond. It wasn't like she was abusing him or beating him or anything like that. It was almost kind of a loving indifference. It was like, “Go ahead and do your thing. Just don't get into trouble and don't bother me.” I guess there was some conflict with the new husband. I was a kid so I didn't really look at that aspect, although I saw a certain amount of tension between Wally and Jer. But I had the same things with my stepdad so I figured that was just family stuff. The old man saying, “Oh you lazy bum, why don't you do something?” “I'm busy doing nothing right now. Thank you very much. I don't want to be busy doing something else that you want me to do.”

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
Jerry was fourteen, fifteen. He could do what he wanted in the city with all people he knew before we moved. I think the kids I associated with were more on the hoodlum level. Partying dudes in Hagars, peg pants, and one-button rolls. At that time, Jerry was like a Richie and I was a Fonzie. Everyone I knew was a Fonzie. Everyone he knew was a Richie. Once he got to know Laird? Fonzie.

 

Laird Grant:
When I was in the seventh grade, he was in the eighth. He stayed back a whole year. This was at Menlo Oaks School in Menlo Park, California. It was a semi-middle-class neighborhood. He'd moved down from San Francisco. His mom had decided to get him out of the city and they found this place. He'd already been in the seventh grade and to the eighth and he had failed to do anything for a whole year. In a way, I guess he just shut down. It was so different from the city. Jerry was a very intelligent and precocious kind of a person even at that age and the teachers knew it and he could get their goat. Because they knew that he was so damned intelligent yet he refused to do anything. So they had to fail him.

I also came from San Francisco. I grew up in the Mission District. I left when I was ten. The change from the city, the difference in the interaction … after coming from the streets of San Francisco, Menlo Park was like country bumpkins. Basically, Jerry ignored them and in doing so of course isolated himself. I met him during hazing. All of a sudden, a couple of other guys and Jerry grabbed me. I wasn't that big a kid. He was bigger than I was and here was Jerry sitting on my chest smearing me with lipstick and shaving cream while another guy was trying to get my pants off. That was how I first met Jerry. Looking up at this fat kid. He was always chubby. He had his hair in a burr cut so he was kind of pinheaded.

He and I just started hanging out together. As kids, we were always throwing spiders, frogs, and worms on each other. We'd get into a little mischief because I was kind of an outsider too. I didn't go along with the straight crowd. We knew about the beatniks and we knew about the Hell's Angels and were fascinated by both of these cultures. We'd see the bikers around, the Hell's Angels coming up from San Jose, or read about the runs that would happen in Monterey. The movie
The Wild One
with Brando came out in '53, I think, and that was incredible. At that point, all of us wanted to wear leather jackets and ride Harleys.

Even though we were in the seventh grade, Jerry and I realized that we were surrounded by straight geeks. We knew we were different. Jerry was a prankster and so was I. We both saw that sparkle in each other's eyes and said, “Ah! Kindred souls.” If we were back-to-back, better not try and fuck with us. We were bad boys. We were. We wouldn't look for trouble. But when we walked down the street a lot of times, people would just move.

At the time, he was playing saxophone. Nine-and-a-half-fingered saxophone. He was also playing piano and he was taking guitar lessons. I remember going by his place sometimes on this cul-de-sac where he lived maybe half a mile from my place. I'd go, “Hey man, let's go out and screw around,” and he'd go, “I can't. I'm taking guitar lessons, man.” I told him back then. I said, “Hey man, you know what? You're going to be a fucking rich famous rock 'n' roll star someday.” And he was going, “No, man. You're the guy who's going to be rich and famous. You're always working, you always have money. You always got these little hustles going.” When I was in high school, I had three different gigs.

I didn't see Tiff very often. I think he was in the service at the time. Tiff would show up occasionally. He had a bedroom there at the place.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
I went to San Diego for boot camp and at that time it was brutal because all the drill instructors, the DIs, were Korean War vets. Bitter. Cream of the crop bitter. And they ran us through all kinds of shit. But their job was to do that. I never wore my uniform at home except once when my mom had to take some damn pictures.

Laird Grant:
I got Jerry a job one time. We worked picking apricots in the fields down in Santa Clara. We didn't do too good at that so the guy put us on the cutting trays and of course we sliced ourselves up pretty good trying to cut apricots and put them on the trays. We also picked beans. We worked for about a week in the fields there. I liked it because I had learned a little bit of Spanish and I was somewhat interested in the Spanish culture. After a week of doing that, Jerry went back and said, “Bullshit. Enough of this stuff, man. This is too weird.”

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
When I was in the service, I'd been smoking some pot down in San Diego. I'd gone into Mexico and I had pot. I came home and Jerry was wondering if I'd ever smoked any pot. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the last time I was up there, I was in jail because I had brought some pot in my car. I'd gotten in an accident and they towed away my car and I was afraid to go into it because I had this stash under the seat. They found it and they called up the bar where Wally was working at the time and they said, “We've got your son's car. You want to come down to the station and talk about this?” He paid a thousand dollars and they let it go. It was funny because he said, “Yeah, I used to smoke pot years ago and it's better than alcohol any day.” Wally was an ex-alcoholic. “But they'll never legalize it.” He was afraid I'd get court-martialed. And he was sheltering it from my mom. If my mom found out, she would have been in total hysterics. Definitely. She would have fucking blown it. But he was real cool. If something like this happened now, I'd be in jail for like ten, fifteen years. For just possessing that big an amount.

When Jerry asked me if I'd smoked pot, I told him I did. And he said, “That's cool. Let's have some.” I remember my grandmother had this matchbook collection. She'd travel around and every time she was at a conference or something, she'd bring home these matchbooks as souvenirs. She kept them in a little place and they were steadily going down. Jerry was using the matches. I knew he'd been smoking pot all along because all these matches had gone. He was also smoking cigarettes. But you don't use too many matches with cigarettes.

Laird Grant:
Jerry and I started smoking pot in ninth grade. It was really hard to get a hold of. It was rolled in two Zig-Zag brown wheatstraw papers with a very thin liner. In those days, we bought joints. That was all we could get. We couldn't even get a matchbox. Nobody would trust us enough to sell us a matchbox. A matchbox was a lot of dope back then. If you cleaned it up, you'd probably get fifteen joints out of a matchbox. Skinny pinners. We'd pay fifty cents apiece for them. Three for a dollar.

Then Jerry went back to San Francisco. He started going to Balboa High and I continued on in Menlo Park at Menlo-Atherton High School. He and I were always going to the Russian River together up to some place his mom had. Later on when I had wheels, we'd take off for the weekend and go up there and bring girls up there to the cabin. Actually, moving back to San Francisco was a great change for him because he was able to get back into the city beat. He spent a lot more time at the California School of Fine Arts with Wally Hedrick doing his art stuff and music stuff. We'd see each other maybe a couple of times a month. He wasn't into any kind of criminal activities other than just being a general rowdy to a certain degree but not a violent guy. He and I would practice with our switchblades and our choke chains up on the roof.

We would also get pills from various street gangs and people that Jerry knew in the city. I'd show up for a weekend trip and he'd open a bag and go, “Well, man, we've got a bunch of candy.” And he'd have about fifteen different kinds of colored pills. If there were two of each kind, we'd separate them out. We didn't even know what they were. We'd just separate them out to get equal piles and then we'd drop five or six pills each. These were unknown substances. Ups and downs and sideways and tranks. We'd drop all of that and then go out and go tripping around San Francisco. We'd go out and get silly and do weird little pranks.

I remember one great Halloween Night at the California School of Fine Arts. I'd made this weird costume out of bedsheets that had been cut into strips and sewn on to a shirt collar. It went all the way to my feet. I had a weird rag thing over my head and full eyes like a bug. Jerry dressed up as Dracula in a completely immaculate suit with the black and red cape. He had on facial paint and the spike teeth. We dropped a whole bunch of different kinds of pills we'd been saving.

Jerry used to clean the bar for his mom. That was one of his gigs. He'd bus up the bar on Harrison Street during the morning before she opened. So we'd managed to save like half a bottle of vodka but there were all these other drainage things in it. Whenever there was a little bit left in the bottom of a bottle, we'd just drain it all into one bottle. There was rye and whiskey and vodka and rum and God knows what else. I was drinking on that and Jerry took a few swigs but he didn't really ever like to drink.

In those days, they still had the streetcars. We walked down to Market Street and took the streetcar and went up to Powell and then got on the cable car and rode over into North Beach to go to this party and we were goofing on people the whole time. Freaking out, jumping off the cable car, running around, acting silly. Doing kid stuff on Halloween. We were sixteen. Then this big limo pulled up in front of the California School of Fine Arts. This chick got out in this fur coat and left it there. She was totally stark naked with a raisin in her navel. She came as a cookie. She was one of the art student models who modeled in the nude all the time. To her, it was nothing at all. But in '56 or '57, it was quite unusual.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
When I came out of the Marines, I remember I spent a month trying to talk Jerry out of going into the Army. I was home to visit him and he was staying at my grandmother's, getting high with his buddies and going to Balboa High. Next time I went home, I was out of the service. All of a sudden, he was living up in Cazadero and going to another school. He was in his last year of high school. He would have graduated. He was only seventeen. I said, “Jerry, think about it. You shouldn't do it. Finish school.” I told him, “Shit, you don't have too much more school. Finish it. Just get it out of the fuckin' way.” I hated to see him that close to being out of school and not finishing. He listened to some things I said. With my mom, he wasn't totally disobedient or anything like that. But after my dad died, she was the authority figure. Definitely. She cracked down. She was heavy.

Laird Grant:
A bunch of weird stuff went down between Jerry and his family. He was seventeen going on eighteen but not really all that interested in going to school. So he moved to Redwood City to live with his girlfriend and her parents. That worked for a while. At that point, he decided to join the Army. He was down at Fort Ord so I was going down on the weekends and picking him up. I thought his joining the Army was pretty radical. He said, “Hey man, it got me out to where I could legally be away from home.” In those days, you couldn't just leave. I'd also left home when I was seventeen. I had my own apartment and was working and going to high school. I'd pick him up at the Army base and we'd cruise around. I had a '47 Cadillac convertible we partied in. In terms of playing music, he was just kind of plinking around. When he was in the Army, he met the Kingston Trio. They were in the Army at the same time and they were playing at the Officers Club so he hung out with them a little bit and got into playing with them. A little taste, I guess. This was probably before they were the Kingston Trio. They were all just in the service together.