A Long Strange Trip Read Online Free PDF Page A

it, too . . . the bar world established that kind of feeling; it engulfed me like a little community.” He joined the conversational mix with pleasure, listening to tales of the 1934 general strike, Harry Bridges, and other local legends. The founder of the Longshoremen’s Union, Bridges was an Australian and former Communist Party member who was a hero in San Francisco, but only there, and only in San Francisco were the latest rebels, the members of the Beat Generation, a source of civic pride.
    In fact, San Francisco had an institution that served as a direct channel into this alternative world, the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). It was the only school Garcia would ever be proud of attending. On Saturdays the school had an extension program, Pre-College Art, taught by its regular faculty. Garcia’s teacher was the well-known funk (assemblage) artist Wally Hedrick, who would serve Jerry as a model not only as a painter but as an expositor of a way of life. He taught the boy, remembered Garcia, that “art is not only something you do, but something you are as well.” A working-class military veteran who’d once, on the strength of his beard, gotten a job sitting in the front window of the Beat North Beach bar Vesuvio’s, Hedrick had found his first conventional job as a teacher at the School of Fine Arts. It was he who had asked poet Michael McClure to organize the 1955 Six Gallery reading that introduced Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to the world. Struck by Garcia’s native intelligence and sense of hipness, Hedrick told Jerry that he and his friends were the real Beat Generation, and sent them down the hill to North Beach and its coffeehouses to, as Garcia said later, “pick up my basic beatnik chops,” listening to Lawrence Ferlinghetti read at the Coexistence Bagel Shop, along with other poets at other clubs.
    And on the way, Hedrick sent Garcia over to City Lights Bookstore to pick up Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road,
a book that changed his life forever. Kerouac’s hymn to the world as an explorational odyssey, an adventure outside conventional boundaries, would serve as a blueprint for the rest of Garcia’s life. And it plugged him consciously into a continuous line of alternative American culture going back to Thoreau and Walt Whitman and up through the current eminence of Bay Area bohemia, Kenneth Rexroth, the master of ceremonies of that seminal Six Gallery reading. As McClure, one of the other Six readers, put it, Rexroth promoted “serious Buddhism, Eskimo poetry, radical social movements, physics, and even esoteric Christianity. He was a mountain climber, a hiker, and he knew how to fix his own car.” It was a very different vision of life and culture than one might find in the heavily intellectualized New York City of the same period.
    As one of Garcia’s classmates in Pre-College Art, Ann Besig, would later recognize, he was more mature and “comfortable” in the bohemian environment than most of the other students. Hedrick described Garcia’s work as “figurative but with freewheeling brushwork . . . strongly painted, heavily textured . . . not talented, but [he had] understanding.” To Laird Grant, Jerry’s best painting was of a man sitting destitute in the gutter, a jug in his hand. Aside from introducing the exalted mysteries of art, the school was a direct connection to fun, like the costume party they attended, Jerry as a vampire and Laird as a monster. They arrived in time to see a young woman, nude under a fur coat, step out of a limo to enter the gathering. The raisin in her navel identified her as a cookie.
    Despite the stimulation of art school, Garcia continued to get into trouble. Many of his friends from before Menlo Park were now hoodlums, and though he probably wasn’t all that involved in violence or crime, he was certainly diverging from the straight and narrow. More often than not, his journey to Balboa High School concluded instead