Life After Dead Jerry Garcia’s Widow Follows Through On Musician’s Memoirs

Deborah Koons Garcia laughed nervously when asked what part of Ohio she came from. “This isn’t supposed to be about me,” the young widow said.

Dressed in pearls and basic black, the dark-haired Garcia, who was married to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia for the last years of his life, sat for an interview in the living room of the Mill Valley house that she calls her office, a few days ago to discuss the publication this month of “Harrington Street,” a book of drawings and reminiscences her husband finished just before his death in August.

“I thought it was important that people know about this work,” she said.

As co-executor of Garcia’s multimillion-dollar estate - the will was filed for probate in Marin County in late August - the independent film maker has endured far less pleasant responsibilities since his sudden death in a Forest Knolls drug treatment center. Garcia had checked in to deal with his heroin addiction, an addiction he apparently had kept from his wife.

“I wasn’t aware of anything until just a few months before he died,” she said of her husband of two years. “He was struggling with it. He never had any treatment for his heroin addiction. So that is why I think it resurfaced.”

She met the guitarist when she reluctantly accompanied a friend to a Grateful Dead concert in the late ‘70s. “I never particularly liked the Grateful Dead,” she said. “I have liked them better now in the past couple of years than I ever have.”

A backstage meeting led to the pair’s exchanging letters, and a romance bloomed. Koons moved in with Garcia and went with him on tour, although she soon cooled to the strenuous lifestyle and split with Garcia. “When you expect someone to give up everything and go on that life,” she said, “well, I just didn’t want to do it.”

She hadn’t seen Garcia in 15 years when they chanced across each other one Sunday morning in a Mill Valley health food store after Koons’ exercise class. They were married on Valentine’s Day in 1993. “I didn’t know Jerry the years he had a serious drug problem,” she said, “when he was a drug animal.”

Her own life, she said, is only now beginning to return to an even keel. She is thinking about traveling to India next spring and wants to go ahead and build the mountaintop Mill Valley home she and Jerry planned before his death. She has begun writing screenplays again. “I’m just starting to get interested in getting back to work,” she said.

Garcia himself described “Harrington Street” as “auto-apochrypha” and “anecdoubts,” a collection of stories remembered from a childhood that was less than idyllic but that somehow he managed to transform into a darkly humorous memoir, filled with vividly colored drawings and wry recollections of small but crucial events.

The title comes from the San Francisco home of his grandparents, where Garcia went to live after his father drowned during a family vacation when Jerry was 5 years old. His mother lived across the street, but grief, and the need to earn a living by running a seamen’s bar across the street from the Maritime Hall at the foot of the Bay Bridge, caused her to turn over her two young sons, Jerry and his older brother, Tiff, to her parents.

“Jerry always said, ‘She wasn’t my mother - she was the woman who lived across the street,”’ said his widow.

In the book, Garcia has even drawn a picture of his father’s death, alongside other childhood memories such as coaxing out of the bushes a neighborhood cat that turns out to be a rat, or the mean girls up the street who forced him to stand on a box with his pants down while they laughed at him. He recalls his grandfather’s parrot, Loretta, who could mimic noises such as cars passing by and faucets running; and the neighborhood Catholic church with angels in the stained glass windows. And all these years later, he still puzzles over the relationship between his grandparents.

He writes that their marriage was “odd” - “an enormous mismatch of personality types … enormous differences in personality, style and energy, differences so vast that I, at any rate, am totally unable to imagine what could have attracted them to each other in the first place.”

“To my mind, it was a difficult childhood, but not to him,” said Deborah Garcia. “It’s true that he had asthma and didn’t get to play sports. He spent a lot of time in bed, which is where he developed his taste for drawing.”

Only two stories remained to be completed at the time of Garcia’s death, and his widow and editors pieced together the text from the tales he told them. The finished book combines Garcia’s handwritten text with typeset versions, illustrated by bold, colorful drawings, - striking images that manage to reflect the artist’s generous, sweeping personality.