That was the slingshot for the rest of my life.” Before then I was always living at less than capacity. “It was cosmic… It was where my life began. His best friend, Paul Speegle, the driver, was killed instantly Jerry, at shotgun, had miraculously survived with only a broken collarbone. The tragedy had occurred twenty-five years before. The first was the car accident in Palo Alto.” “He was grateful to be alive,” said David Nelson, his bandmate in the New Riders of the Purple Sage. “Why are you looking at me?” he whispered to his speechless wife, Mountain Girl. “My main experience,” the 44-year-old Jerry Garcia would later reveal, “was one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic spaceship vehicle with insectoid presences… big beetles rushing into tubes.”Īt last his eyes opened to see the breathless crowd at his bedside. While the doctors administered more Demerol, she watched in horror as his leviathan frame convulsed on the gurney. They had to resuscitate him.”Įven if her husband survived, she’d been told he might be brain-damaged and unable to walk again. The hospital didn’t want anyone to know this, but he died. “His heart stopped,” she would later say. And the Hell’s Angels. Only the patient’s wife was permitted inside. Outside the ICU, the corridor was packed with family, friends, managers, reporters. He was running a 105 degree fever from a systemic infection. His blood sugar was the second highest the doctors at Marin General had ever seen. The head of California’s thirty-ninth largest corporation was in full diabetic shock.
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