Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson Read Free Book Online

circle bar. It was classy, a nice place considering the other one she had. So my mom had the daytime bar business there with a little restaurant. At the time, she had the biggest day business of any bar in the city. They were selling beer at six in the morning. You had to peel some of these guys out of the bar at night. They’d go up to a hotel room upstairs. People would rent these rooms for months at a time.
    “When I was in the service [in the late ’50s], my mom turned the top floor into this real flashy apartment—three bedrooms with a total view of downtown and the Bay Bridge. She had a doberman pinscher named Rusty and you could see him running around the roof as you drove over the bridge into the city.”
    With the 400 Club booming, the family made the same radical move as hundreds of thousands of other middle-class American families in the early ’50s—they bought a ranch-style home in the suburbs; in this case in the town of Menlo Park, about thirty miles south of the city in San Mateo County.
    “We moved to the Peninsula [as the area is known] in that furious rushto get kids out of the city—sort of a half-hearted attempt by my mom,” Jerry recalled. “I was being a kid in San Francisco. I later became a hoodlum [there]. . . . The thrust of her thinking was to get out of the city, so we went to Menlo Park, a real nice place which was just bursting out of the ground at that point. Everything was new there.”
    The Matusiewiczes’ nice, if nondescript, home was on a quiet cul-de-sac off Santa Monica Avenue, half a block east of Middlefield Road, one of the main arteries that cuts through the Peninsula. Across the street were the sprawling grounds of St. Patrick’s Seminary, and close by was the Golden State Dairy. Santa Monica Avenue has no sidewalks, so the overall feeling of the neighborhood is sort of rural-suburban. Certainly it was a much different world than the Excelsior district of San Francisco, which was the point, of course.
    “The house was right out of
Sunset
magazine,” Tiff says. “We moved down there and none of us knew anybody. Still, we were pretty excited. We got all new clothes, new furniture. We had a new beige Cadillac. My mom really set this guy Wally up! He’d been a first mate in the merchant marine, but when he married my mom he became a bartender.
    “But it was a culture shock, big time. There was nothing familiar. My mom was on this fetish about getting her family back together. She had a new husband, she had her kids back, she had a successful bar business. She wanted to be a housewife, really. My mom even started making some of our clothes, not because she had to, but because she wanted to. She did all this drudgery and loved it.
    “My father’s side of the family was really crushed when we moved down there. We still went up to visit my grandparents on weekends, and as soon as I got my driver’s license I’d go up almost every weekend.
    “Before my mom took me to the Peninsula, I was raised, if I can call it that, by my grandparents, who left me largely unsupervised,” Jerry said. “I think that probably ruined me for everything—or made me what I am today. They were both people who worked and they were grandparently. They didn’t have much stomach for discipline, so I was pretty much unsupervised and I was used to having things exactly like I wanted them. I was used to getting up and doing things, doing what I wanted, coming in when I wanted and going where I wanted and not asking anybody if they cared. I was much too much that person by the time my mom tried to get us down to the suburbs. It was really too late. But the change did me a lot of good for other reasons.”
    Jerry moved to Menlo Park when he was ten and was there through early adolescence, from part of sixth grade through eighth grade, which he had to repeat because of poor grades. “I was too smart for school,” he said in 1984, a chuckle in his voice. “I knew it; I don’t know why anyone