An exclusive look at Mountain Girl's heartbreaking memoir: Jerry Garcia's widow opens up about the Grateful Dead, the Merry Pranksters, and the dark side of the Sixties
It's a bright, crisp morning on a leafy street in Eugene, Oregon. Inside her plant-filled home lined with scientific books on psilocybin and posters of the Grateful Dead, Carolyn"Mountain Girl" Garcia, legendary godmother of the hippie counterculture, Jerry's ex-wife, and mother of their two daughters, sits on a red leather couch dressed in a red shirt and purple pants.
But there was one glaring problem. The mythology of the time, and the dynamic young woman at the heart of it, was written mostly by men — Wolfe, Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady — all of whom fashioned themselves as the hypermasculine heroes of their own stories.
She arrived in California, like many at the time, eager to bloom. Palo Alto in the early 1960s was a dynamic crucible of the radical changes to come. At Stanford University, researchers were exploring the potential of psychedelic drugs. Nearby, the CIA was conducting early experiments with LSD under the MK-Ultra program. . Adams was offered a job in the Stanford cafeteria, but drawing on her knowledge of science she hustled one in the organic-chemistry lab instead..
The car is lurching and leaping up the mountain road with its hairpins and overhanging trees, shrieking around the blind curves and cliffs. Neal is oblivious to any obstacles of destruction, and hogs the middle of the road, rocketing from one side to the other as the demands of the road dictate. Bradley clutches my arm, massaging my knee and rubbing my ankle and chuckling to himself. The middle is a lousy place to sit. One must brace against the turns to avoid sliding into the driver.
Cassady roused the owner of the bus and the ranch, the man he called the Chief: Ken Kesey. With bright blue eyes, blond curly hair, and a wrestler's build, the famous young novelist glowed with authority and mischief. Adams felt, as she puts it,"in a juvenile state of admiration for a good writer, for a famous person who is now taking me into his scene."Bob Campbell/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty ImagesKesey with Neal Cassady, who introduced him to Mountain Girl when she was 19.
When I ask her how she felt about the name, she tells me she didn't like it because she didn't choose it. But she embraced it nonetheless. After so many years of struggling to fit in back in New York, she had finally found a place where she could be whoever she wanted."It worked for me to have a different identity," she says."I could play with that."
Her affair with Kesey happened fast. Mountain Girl found the celebrated writer, who was 29, to be dynamic, intelligent, and playful. Kesey dug how she spoke her mind, made him laugh, and dazzled him with beauty. In a loosely autobiographical screenplay he wrote called"Over the Border," he rhapsodizes about"her big brown eyes made even bigger by the electricity of the warm autumn night with the stars above and her man beside her.
One night in San Francisco, four months after the Beatles show, Kesey and Mountain Girl were up on the roof of a home in Telegraph Hill, smoking a joint. By then she was five months pregnant. Kesey had just been sentenced to six months on a work farm for marijuana possession, and the Pranksters were two days away from staging their biggest Acid Test yet.
As most suspected, it was yet another prank. Kesey wasn't dead. A friend had smuggled him across the border to an undisclosed location in Mexico. But his antic exit was no joke to the broke, homeless, pregnant teenager he had unceremoniously left behind. The father of Mountain Girl's baby was now a fugitive.upset. I was floored. I couldn't believe it."
One day, when she was up in San Francisco, her attorney got a call. The Pranksters were gassing up the bus to head to Mexico. They were going to look for Kesey. If Mountain Girl wanted to come, she better hitchhike down to LA fast, before they split.she writes. She gave birth in the charity ward of a Mexican hospital in May 1966. Kesey didn't show up, even after the birth."I was glad he wasn't there," she says,"but I was a little hurt he didn't come to see me." She named her baby girl Sunshine Kesey. Mountain Girl had to"marry" her fellow Prankster George Walker to get the birth certificate.
The moment she hugged him, she felt a flash."I was like, whoa, that was a really electric moment!" she recalls with a laugh."That was just a zap! What the hell just happened? He put the mojo on me. I got a huge jolt, and I had a very vivid image of us being together."His eyes smiled."You could come stay with me," he said.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo Archive
The closer she grew to Jerry, the further she drifted from Kesey. Since coming back to the States, he'd been embroiled in legal battles over his marijuana charges. And he hadn't been supporting her and their child. Despite their open relationship, he was jealous. Throughout his adventures, he had always come back to Mountain Girl. But now that she'd fallen in love with Garcia, Kesey seemed to realize what he'd lost."Ken was upset that I hooked up with Jerry," she says.
Mountain Girl and Jerry moved into an apartment of their own, and she got pregnant again. But they wanted to do something to make things better, to restore new life to the countercultural movement to which they had helped give birth. The Altamont festival, meant to be a sort of"Woodstock West," was organized in their apartment. The free concert, scheduled for December 6, 1969, would include performances by the Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones.
But Mountain Girl and Jerry remained intertwined through it all. In 1980, on New Year's Eve, they got married by a Buddhist monk backstage at a Dead concert. But as Jerry's addiction worsened, MG took the girls and moved to a farm in Oregon, where some of the other Pranksters had moved. Kesey was just down the road, but to Mountain Girl he still felt miles away."I would go over from time to time and hang out," she says.
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