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Fondseed” (i.e., being tapped upon the third eye). Lesh had gone down the coast to Partington Ridge in Big Sur to look for Henry Miller, but the master proved not at home. In a ritualistic way, Phil decided to pay homage to the act Miller described in
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,
and pissed off the ridge. Standing in Miller’s metaphorical shoes, he experienced an epiphany, one that he was able to replicate aurally in a four-bar exercise for the largest orchestra he’d ever get to write for. After writing out the parts on tiny exercise pages, he brought it to the band, which, after protesting, “Fuck you, Lesh, we need a magnifying glass on this stuff,” fought through it, produced an obscene chord, and received his thanks. He’d been able to hear what he’d written, and that was a singularly fulfilling experience.
    His jazz composing career peaked in May 1959, when the annual CSM jazz band “Expressions in Jazz” concert at San Mateo High School featured his lead on the Bill Holman chart of “I Remember April” and “Jeff’s Jam,” and the band’s performance of his own tune “Wail Frail.” Shortly before this time he’d encountered a diminutive ex-convict blues poet named Bobby Petersen, who turned him toward poetry and Allen Ginsberg–style illuminated (spiritual) politics, essentially inducting him into the Beat Generation. Petersen was an experienced hipster who wrote poems about Billie Holiday and the “high sad song of spade queens / in pershing square / hipsters of melrose fade / into wallpaper.” They became roommates, and their first sharing came when Bobby stole a volume of Henry Miller from City Lights Bookstore, and they went home and read it aloud to each other. Petersen introduced Phil to pot, and to the broad sweep of avant-garde and Beat literature. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” so consumed Lesh that he began to set it to music. They also studied James Joyce, which gave Phil the title for his last tune at CSM.
    In spring 1960, Lesh at least mentally completed his stay at CSM when the band performed his tune “Finnegan’s Awake.” He had moved up to the first chair by then, but would later admit with his typically brutal self-honesty that he never played as well as Powers, and consequently quit playing the trumpet after his graduation in June. He celebrated his graduation in the tradition of another of those City Lights authors, taking a Kerouacian journey to Calgary in search of work in the oil fields. Though he made it only as far as Spokane before riding the rails back to Seattle and then taking a bus home, the experience confirmed for him his place outside the conventional American life. He was a part of the Beat Generation, too.
    Back at the Presidio in December of that year, Garcia’s multiple absences caught up with him. An army psychiatrist decided that his priorities were neurotic, and a superior officer asked him if he’d like to leave the army with a general discharge. “I’d like that just fine, sir.” It marked his last attempt to fit in.

3
    Roots
    (1961–2/62)
    Discharged from the army in January 1961, Garcia moved down to East Palo Alto, the African American side of Palo Alto, where his friend since junior high school, Laird Grant, was staying. Jerry had acquired a 1950 Cadillac with one of his last army paychecks, and the heap made it to Laird’s place just before it died, there being no money left for gas. In between couches and garages and other donated beds, the car became Garcia’s apartment. Getting by in Palo Alto was easy. The weather was warmer than in foggy San Francisco, and people were kind to a charming minstrel, especially the (female) residents of Stanford’s Roble Hall, who could frequently be counted upon to smuggle minstrels into the dining commons. His first new friend was Dave McQueen, a black man who was a neighbor and friend of Laird Grant’s, and for a little while they hustled odd jobs together, becoming what Garcia later