Read Garcia: An American Life for Free Online Page B

out from all over the place and rounded us up. I don’t remember them having weapons—Jerry liked to say they did, but I don’t know—but they scared the shit out of us. So my parents had to pay for some of the damage and we were in
big
trouble at home. It was a big deal to me at the time. I was very impressionable. You know—first run-in with the law, twelve years old.”
    Daniel Garcia remembers another run-in with the SFPD around the same time: “Right around the corner from Harrington Street, on Mission, there was a barbershop that had one of those turning barber poles out front. It had some kind of keyhole or something at the bottom and Jerry, Tiff and I put a cherry bomb in it. Obviously we didn’t realize the power of it because it blew this thing off the wall. Glass came down; it was a mess. Of course the barber came out and he chased us down the street and then the cops came by and picked us up and put us in the back seat of the car. Then, while the cop was talking to Tiff, Jerry opened the door and jumped out and ran away, and I did, too. [In Tiff’s version of the story Jerry even kicks the policeman before running away.] We went down to Tillie’s house and Jerry was wheezing like crazy from his asthma; he even turned a little blue. It was scary. He couldn’t run for more than half a block without wheezing. I remember that well because we used to run away from stuff that we did.”
    Jerry’s asthma flare-ups were infrequent, but fairly debilitating when they occurred. The typical treatment in those days consisted of getting a shot of the bronchial muscle relaxant epinephrine and then staying in bed for a few days. “He liked to say he had a sickly childhood, but that’s bullshit,” Tiff says. “He had asthma once every couple of years, and it would last for maybe a week or two. And every time he got sick, he
got
something. I remember he got his first 45 record player and some records when he got sick.”
    But Sara Ruppenthal, Jerry’s first wife, says that Jerry once “told me a story of being sick in bed with asthma. His mother came to visit and then left before he was ready for her to leave. There’s this image of him looking out the window as she leaves, and having a massive asthma attack—making that connection between the abandonment and the illness.”
    Though by all accounts Ruth Garcia tried to be a good mother to her children, the fact is she was not around much during these formative years; the bar took up most of her time. Then, in 1949, Ruth married a carpenter-piledriver named Ben Brown, who’d been working on the Sailors Union construction project, and she saw the kids even less for a while. “It only lasted a year or two,” Tiff says. “But they were friends for a long time after that. He was a drunk, but he was an okay guy.”
    In 1953 Ruth married her third husband, a merchant seaman named Wadislof “Wally” Matusiewicz, in a modest ceremony in Reno, Nevada, that was attended by both Jerry and Tiff. (In fact, the two kids got stuck in a hotel elevator during this trip and had to be rescued by the fire department.) Wally had grown up in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Polish immigrants (which didn’t stop seamen from dubbing him “Russian Wally”). He was seven years younger than Ruth and had never been married before. When they got married, Ruth and Wally jointly decided that Ruth should take a greater role in the lives of her children, so Wally took over most of the day-to-day operations of the bar.
    “Then Union Oil decided they wanted to put their office building where the bar was,” Tiff says, “so the business moved across the street again, to another corner. There was a seamen’s hotel there, too, and on the ground floor there was the 400 Club. The original 400 Club had been a bawdy seaman’s bar, but my mom turned that into a typical ’50s nightclubish-type place with the emphasis on the little restaurant. It had red Naugahyde stools and a solid mahogany