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

else didn’t know it. I went to school; I just didn’t do any work. It’s not that I had anything against school or even learning. The point was I was reading things and I had my owneducation, my own program going, and I was really, really bored with school. I already had things decided for myself. I had things I wanted to do, I had plans, and I had my own interests and my own rate of learning and I couldn’t see slowing down or stopping and wasting my time for schoolwork.”
    Alienated though he was from the day-to-day of school life, “I had incredible luck with teachers,” he said. “I had a couple of teachers that really opened up the world for me. I was a reader, luckily, because I was sickly as a kid. I spent so much time in bed because I was sick, so I read; that was my entertainment. That separated me a lot from everybody else. Then when I got down to the Peninsula, I had a couple of teachers that were very, very radical, absolutely far-out. I was lucky.”
    In interviews, Jerry often cited a teacher at Menlo-Oaks Middle School named Dwight Johnson for broadening his outlook on life and learning. “He’s the guy who turned me into a freak,” he said. “He was my seventh-grade teacher and he was a wild guy. He had an old MG TC, and he had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time. And he was
out there.
He opened lots and lots of doors for me. He’s the guy that got me reading deeper than science fiction [Ray Bradbury was Jerry’s favorite writer]. He taught me that ideas are fun.”
    It was through the influence of teachers like Dwight Johnson, too, that Jerry was admitted to what he called “a fast-learner program” in school, sponsored by Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. “So I had the advantage of this elaborate accelerated program at school and a couple of far-out teachers who were willing to answer any questions and turn me on to where to go—‘If you want to find more, this is what you read.’”
    When he wasn’t devouring George Orwell’s
1984
(a favorite of his) or more complex tomes by European philosophers, Jerry was engaged in typical adolescent stuff. Through Wally he developed what would become a lifelong interest in comic books; in those days he collected the ghoulish, “ultra-horrible” EC comics—
Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror
and such—as well as
Mad Comics
(a forerunner of
Mad
magazine). Tiff was still a major influence in Jerry’s life, although he was nearing the end of his days at Sequoia High in Redwood City, and before he graduated he joined the marine reserves.
    “I had a driver’s license so whenever we could we’d go up to the city and visit our friends,” Tiff says. “I remember Jerry and I hot-wired a car that was in my stepfather’s charge; a little MG roadster. We drove it up to the city from Menlo Park. My car [Tillie Clifford’s green ’42 Chevy coupe] wasn’t working so we used this one. I didn’t even know how I was going to do it—I undid a couple of bolts under the dash and I grabbed a bunch of tin foil and I zapped it up there, and it worked, although I singed my hands. We were mischievous in that way.”
    On those weekends in the city, Jerry spent much of his time palling around with his cousin Daniel, who recalls, “We spent a lot of time at the movies; that was something we both loved. We used to go down and see everymovie that came out about a musician. I remember going down and seeing
The Glenn Miller Story
on a Sunday afternoon with Jerry. We always had no money, so we’d go through Tillie’s pocketbooks to try to scrounge enough money to go down to the Golden Gate Theater, which was a movie theater in those days.
    “I also remember going down to the Fox Theater on Market Street and Eleventh when they had the debut of
Rock Around the Clock
[in 1956] and that place was jumpin’! Jerry and I and two girls went to see it together. We came out of that movie with the burning desire to