Chapter One It was autumn in San Francisco, the season of the witch, 1964. Somebody in the Haight was giving a party for jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, and Hank Harrison was invited. Hank believed himself to have a standing invitation to any party in San Francisco, whether anyone had actually invited him or not; his music connections got him in everywhere.
Hank was going places. His old college buddy Phil Lesh played bass with a hot band called the Warlocks, and Hank was always bragging that Phil could get him a gig in the music business anytime. He would later claim to have managed the Warlocks, who in 1965 would change their name to the Grateful Dead.
Heavy-set and round-faced, with a humped nose, a scruffy black mustache, and a hairline that was beginning to recede, Hank was nobody's pretty boy. But he was a loquacious charmer. His gift of gab and his music connections got him plenty of girls, and that night at Dizzy Gillespie's party, they got him Linda Risi.
Linda was a naive rich girl on her own for the first time. A San Francisco native, she had grown up on ritzy Nob Hill and gone to Catholic school. Now she was nineteen and adrift in the city, swayed by the burgeoning vibes of the sixties. Blonde and slender, neat and WASPish, she didn't blend into the Haight-Ashbury crowd. That was why she caught Hank's attention.
The adopted daughter of an optician (and an heiress to the Bausch optical fortune), raised in the Catholic church, Linda had come to San Francisco upon reaching her majority. Like so many other young people in that city, in that year, she was looking for something she couldn't identify or explain. She didn't find it in Hank Harrison, but for a while she thought she had. They left the party together that night, and staggered up and down the steep sidewalks of the magically lit, carnival-like Haight until they reached Hank's dingy apartment.
Linda was already pregnant when she married Hank in Reno a few months after they met. Hank kept feeding her a line about how the combination of their genes -- his brains and her looks -- would produce the perfect child. Linda had no way of knowing that half of Hank's genes came from a violently alcoholic father, and, being adopted, she knew nothing about her own genes. (Linda would later allegedly discover that her biological father had been a psychiatrist from New York, and his father had been a Jewish psychoanalyst from Vienna, but since she was a well known therapist herself by the time of this "discovery," it must be taken with a grain of salt.)
Hank has since claimed that Linda refused to use birth control because of her religious beliefs. Whatever the case, Linda could not have given up the baby even if Hank had wanted her to. Her own adoptive father had been an abusive drunk, and Linda considered herself an outcast, a person with no family at all. This baby would be the first blood relative she had ever known.
Linda Harrison nurtured her fetus in a heady broth of fear and sugar: she constantly craved candy, cookies, any kind of sweets. She gained weight, vomited all the time, felt that pregnancy had made her hideously ugly. Hank, already getting bored with the relationship, did nothing to allay her fears.
At 9:15 A.M. on July 9, 1965, at St. Francis Memorial Hospital, Linda gave birth to a daughter whose birth certificate read Love Michelle Harrison. The labor had been long and wrenchingly painful. Linda tried to imagine what her baby must have felt, expelled from the cradling womb, constricted for hours in the tight tube of muscle. She imagined that the child had been frightened and furious, and had taken out every ounce of it on her.
Hank was not in attendance at the birth. Sleeping late after a Warlocks gig, possibly. Who knew? But Linda and the other freaks made an occasion of the birth anyway: Courtney would later claim that they had stewed Linda's placenta with onions and eaten it.
Linda, now twenty, adored her daughter helplessly. She had no idea how to care for a baby, though she was sure she had the good "instincts" of every hippie mama. That hungry pink mouth tugging on her heavy breasts, those fierce eyes staring up at her with disquieting awareness -- these quickly became the most important things in Linda's life. No child ever had a needier mother, and the baby must have sensed the chasm of Linda's emotional dependence.
Even then, though, Linda's feelings toward her daughter were ambivalent. Love Michelle didn't always act like a normal baby. She did frightening things: stiffened and screamed upon being cuddled; cried until she all but passed out from lack of oxygen. A photograph taken of the Harrison family at Christmas 1965 shows Linda sitting stiffly with a strained smile on her pretty face, legs crossed at the knee, ignoring the arm Hank has draped around her shoulders; she is distinctly looking away from the baby and does not appear to be touching her. The baby has a lost look, and her hands are reaching toward Linda.
The Harrisons lived in a big Victorian house that Linda's parents had paid for. As well as supporting Hank, Linda often cooked for a ragtag assortment of musicians, groupies, and street urchins. The baby grew up in a fantasy world partly of her own design, partly sketched in by the freaks and artists around her. None of these happy hippie dreamers, though, suspected how dark the child's own inner world was. The earliest dreams she remembered were nightmares of skeletal wraiths, deformed internal organs, poisoned milk (the latter a motif that would recur in her poetry and her later songwriting).
Meanwhile, the people around her wanted her to "act like a flower," to "dance like springtime." She was encouraged to stretch her imagination, and occasionally was helped along with a bit too much zeal. When she was four years old, she has said, her father gave her LSD. (She has no memory of this, but later, during the Harrisons' divorce, Linda and one of Hank's girlfriends would testify that it was so in child-custody court.)
The effects of LSD on a four-year-old are difficult to speculate upon. LSD is best known for causing hallucinations, which may have been especially frightening to an already disturbed child. But LSD also causes introspection and heady flights of imagination. How different would the experience have seemed from her usual highly subjective reality? Did she have a bad trip, and what would a four-year-old's bad trip be like? Did she tap into some well of preconsciousness that adults could never hope to access? Did she even notice?
She has said that her father was involved in the manufacture and sale of LSD in those days, and that he may have supplied the Dead. If so, his acid was probably clean and pure. Though the experience can be psychologically damaging, LSD itself causes no physical harm to the brain or body. Perhaps she just saw colors and pretty lights; perhaps it was even a temporary escape from the confusion of her everyday life.
Although everything was supposed to be peace and love, her parents fought all the time and her father scared her. She was glad when Linda told her that Hank would be moving out for good.
Linda and Hank divorced in 1970, and both sued for custody of their daughter. In the ensuing trial, the charges of Hank's having dosed the child were brought out, and custody was awarded to Linda, who promptly changed her five-year-old daughter's first name to Courtney after a woman she'd known during her pregnancy. "Love" apparently no longer applied to the product of her union with Hank.
Soon after the divorce, Hank disappeared with a Deadhead girl and Linda married again. Love's father had been horrible, but it looked as if Courtney's stepfather might be a nice man.
Frank Rodriguez was a schoolteacher from Portland, and the organizer of that city's Kite Day. He talked to Courtney like a real adult talking to a re