Ed crested Pacific Heights and glimpsed a tongue of fog licking Alcatraz. He descended into Cow Hollow and parked by the Octagon House, the odd eight-sided museum open just three days a month. He’d written about it, the sole survivor of five octagonal mansions built during the 1860s in the belief that eight-sided homes enhanced virility. In the 1950s, when the house was turned into a museum of colonial Americana, a letter from 1861 was discovered sealed in a wall. In it, the original owner, William C. McElroy, railed against Chinese immigration, marveled at the speed of the Pony Express, and dismissed talk of a transcontinental railroad as ridiculous.
Flower Child was located around the corner on Union Street. The facade was framed in white Christmas lights that blinked day and night. A sign over the door said: OLIVIA AND DAVE KIRSCH, PROPRIETORS. On the sidewalk, a rack of bouquets burst with color. The window was filled with dazzling orchids growing hydroponically.
Ed stepped inside. A refrigerator case was stuffed with cut flowers. A gravel walk snaked through a rainforest of plants, some in pots on the floor, others hanging from the ceiling. The rest of the space was devoted to hydroponics: reservoirs, nutrients, pumps, fans, lights, reflectors, digital ballast, and books—including Grow It Indoors! by the owner’s late husband.
Olivia emerged from the back and removed a glove. Shaking Ed’s hand, she tried to smile but failed. She ushered him into the back room, where she was in the middle of creating two enormous bouquets.
“A wedding,” she said, sounding funereal.
She was back at work, but not really there. Her shoulders were rounded, her expression vacant, her eyes dark and puffy. Deep creases extended from her nose to her jaw, making her mouth look like a marionette’s. And perfume and lifesavers could not mask an odor of alcohol—at eleven in the morning.
Olivia pointed Ed to a stool next to the worktable. On a cabinet was a Kirsch for Mayor bumper sticker. As Ed produced his recorder, she snipped the stems of showy flowers he didn’t recognize and arranged them in the vases.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Ed said. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Dave was an original, a true San Franciscan. This must be a horrible time.”
“Yes, it is, especially for the girls—” She clamped her eyes shut. When they opened, they glistened.
“If you don’t feel ready to—”
“No, I want to help.” Her voice was soft but resolute. “Dave always hated the little corner the museum devoted to—” Her fingers flexed air quotes, “—the hippies. Pathetic. He would have loved what you’re doing and wanted me to tell our story.”
“I didn’t realize how much of the store is devoted to hydroponics,” Ed said.
“Flowers and houseplants pay the bills. The profit’s in grow gear.”
“For growing weed, right?”
She pursed her lips. “I grow orchids. What other people grow, that’s their business.”
“As I mentioned,” Ed said, “you’ll have the opportunity to review anything attributed to you before it goes into the exhibit.”
She waved a hand. “I don’t care. I have nothing to hide. Dave stopped dealing thirty years ago. And now—” Her voice cracked and she wiped her eyes. “I just hope your exhibit mentions his legalization efforts. He would have wanted that.”
She fussed with fern fronds and slipped them into the vases.
“I thought you might remember this.” He produced the Oracle photo of the young newlyweds at the Human Be-In.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, not that picture. I was thin then.”
“How’d you guys wind up in the paper?”
“We were friends with the publisher—”
“Allen Cohen?”
“Yes. Dave wrote articles advocating legalization.” She gazed out the window and back to a time when she was young and anything seemed possible. “The Be-In was really something. Allen billed it as a ‘gathering of the tribes.’ When I first heard that, I had no idea what he was talking about. Tribes? What tribes? But when we got there, we were blown away by the size of the crowd and how freaky everyone looked, and we thought, yes, we’re a huge tribe. Then we ran into Allen and he told what’s-his-name—the artist—to take our picture.”
“The art director? Michael Bowen?”
“Yes, Mike. God, I haven’t thought about him in a million years. Dave loved the Oracles wild graphics, all the color. Peter Max got rich off psychedelic art, but Mike invented it. And Dave’s articles for the paper were his first steps toward writing Grow It!”
She picked some wilted petals off a huge purple flower and arranged it in the bouquet.
“And you? What did you think of the Oracle?”
“That it was hard to read.”
“Tell me about it,” Ed chuckled, “especially with these middle-aged eyes.”
“But it was all so exciting. We were young and it felt like we were on the threshold of something big, something new and important. The Oracle, the bands, expanding consciousness—it was a whole new world.” A hint of color returned to her cheeks.
“The Age of Aquarius,” Ed said.
Olivia almost smiled. “Yes, though we didn’t say any of that till later.”
“Did you consider yourself a hippie?”
“Not at first. That was Time and Newsweek. We were ‘freaks.’ But after a while, the freaks became hippies.”
“I understand that Dave dealt to several bands.”
“Yes. The Dead, Moby Grape, Janis, the Airplane—they all lived in the neighborhood. The Dead had a house on Ashbury The Charlatans were around the corner on Cole. Janis lived a few blocks away on Page. Dave was like the mailman making deliveries. And everyone came to our place, too. Somewhere I have a Polaroid of Jerry and Grace Slick and Dave and me in our living room sharing a doobie.” The corners of her lips curled upward, then fell.
“In your big Victorian by the park?”
“That’s right, the corner of Waller and Stanyan. It’s not there anymore. It got knocked down for the McDonald’s parking lot.”
“Dave told Rolling Stone he dealt for only two years, ‘67 and ‘68. But other people have said he and Owen Pendleton and Doug Connelly were in business until ten years later, ‘78.”
Olivia turned and looked Ed up and down, as if seeing him for the first time. “Who said that?”
“Paul Nightingale and Ken Kelly.”
Her eyes widened. “I’ve seen Ken at Chester’s, but Paul! What’s he up to? I haven’t seen him since...must have been his coming-out party from prison eons ago.”
Ed caught her up on the dealer-turned-property-owner and then repeated his question. Why did Dave say he’d dealt for only two years when he was in business much longer?
Olivia smirked. “Because of Owen. Great businessman, but a strange guy.”
“Yes, I know. I tried to interview him. He kicked me out of his office.”
“I’m not surprised.” She took a long look at the Oracle photo, at the young couple, happy and high, their lives unfolding like roses blooming. “Owen was with us at the Be-In, but he refused to be photographed. Owen never wanted any of them in the public eye—ever. He insisted that Dave deny dealing, especially after he started writing about legalization and growing. Dave was always security-conscious, but Owen was off the charts. He tried to convince Dave to write Grow It! using his Oracle pseudonym, Johnny Appleweed, but he refused. Then a few years ago, Rolling Stone showed up with statements from a dozen musicians swearing that when they lived in the Haight, Dave was their go-to guy for weed. He wasn’t about to call Marty Balin and Bob Weir liars, so he admitted to dealing for two years. And you know what? Owen got pissed—thirty years after the fact.”
“So how long did he deal, really?”
“From senior year, so ‘65, to ‘78. What’s that? Fourteen years.”
“What happened in ‘78?”
“Things got ugly and the boys decided to stop.”
“Ugly?”
“Yes.” Her tone said she had no intention of elaborating.
The young man who worked the register leaned his head through the door and asked if the bride’s father could pick up the bouquets around three. Olivia said no problem.
“If you don’t mind,” Ed asked, “can we back up a bit? How did you and Dave meet?”
“In a class at State, Introduction to Horticulture. I didn’t even want to take it, but it was the only thing that fit my schedule. And growing up on a ranch, I knew gardening. I figured it was an easy A. I noticed him right away—the cutest, smartest, funniest guy I’d ever seen. But he didn’t notice me until we both got jobs at the bookstore. That’s when we clicked. Owen worked there, too. I stayed till we graduated, but after a while, the boys quit and started dealing.”
“Nightingale said he got them started.”
“That’s right. Paul was the original stoner. He used to brag that he smoked reefer with John Coltrane.”
Ed chuckled. “Now he brags that he introduced Dave to weed.”
Olivia snaked wide white ribbons around the vases and tied large perfect bows. Then she fluffed the bouquets, made final adjustments, and set them aside.
Removing her gloves, she pressed some keys on the worktable computer. “Fourteen corsages,” she mumbled to herself. “Pins, not bracelets.” She pulled white orchids from a small refrigerator and rummaged around the room for materials. “Where’s the stem wire?” Then she found it and set to work, threading wire through the blossoms and around ivy leaves and strands of grass, then wrapping them in tape, and piercing the result with pearl-headed pins.
“Dave was all for dealing,” she explained, “but Owen wasn’t so sure. Great money, but risky. I remember one night the four of us were sitting around the boys’ apartment near State, listening to music and getting high as Owen grilled Paul. Eventually, Owen said he’d go for it—on the condition that he run the business and set the ground rules for security. That was fine with Dave. He was the salesman, and later the author and poster boy for legalization. They bought from Paul for a while, then Doug showed up—”
“Doug Connelly.”
“Yes.”
“Was he at State?”
“Oh no, Doug didn’t go to college. He and Owen were childhood friends, neighbors growing up in El Cajon. Doug was back from Vietnam. Said he never could have survived it without dope. He spoke some Spanish. Got into buying in Mexico and running it across the border.”
Olivia recalled that Doug started with a single pound hidden under the back seat of a VW bug. But he had no head for business. Owen offered to buy everything he could haul to San Francisco. When Doug arrived with a load, Owen cleaned, packaged, and hid it, and kept accounts while Dave handled distribution. They started selling ounces to friends. By graduation, they were dealing several pounds a month. Many of their customers lived in the Haight, so they moved there.
“And you? I heard you worked at Magnolia Thunderpussy.”
Her head snapped in his direction and ivy leaves scattered on the floor. Retrieving them, she asked. “Who told you that?”
“Carol Covington.”
Olivia struggled to smile. “You spoke to Carol? God, what’s she been up to the past...what, forty years?”
Ed told her, then asked, “Wasn’t the café owned by some stripper?”
“Ex-stripper. Magnolia Thunderpussy was her stage name. Her real name was...oh, Lord, I’m getting old. Really nice woman. What was her name? Patty! Patty Mallon. I started out as a waitress. Wound up managing the place.”
“Did you ever deal dope?”
“A little, but not much. An ounce or two here and there to friends as a favor. But I wasn’t part of the business. That was the boys’ thing.”
“Didn’t you worry? I mean your husband was a dope dealer. The cops hated hippies. The courts hated dealers. They could have sent Dave to prison and thrown away the key.”
Olivia shrugged. “This might sound strange, but we weren’t all that concerned. We were young and stupid. Everyone we knew got high. Pot was all over the Haight, and as far as we could tell, very few people got busted. Paul didn’t go prison till much later. Smoking was a protest—against Vietnam, Jim Crow, and Lawrence Welk. The boys were careful. They only dealt to good friends and we never kept much at the house. Owen stashed it.”
“Where?”
“Different places. Storage lockers and eventually a warehouse in Hunters Point.” She paused, then added, “We never got along that well, Owen and me. But the one time our house got raided, he saved our asses. The police tore the place apart, but found less than an ounce. Meanwhile, the boys had ten pounds at Self-Storage.”
“When were they busted?”
“After the Be-In, so ‘67, maybe ‘68.”
“Nightingale said they got off by bribing the cops.”
She looked up from her workbench, then returned to wrapping wire around an orchid stem. “All I know is they got off. Illegal search. It helped that they found next to nothing.”
Olivia recounted that by the end of 1966, Doug was running a dozen pounds a month and Dave and Owen started accompanying him to the hills outside Ensenada. They bought a VW van and fitted it with dual mufflers, only one was an empty shell that they filled with weed. The business took off and money started rolling in—but Owen got nervous and carped about tax evasion.
“I’d never heard of money laundering,” Olivia said, “until Owen became obsessed with it. Dave and Doug never thought about the IRS but Owen kept saying, ‘We need a story for the taxman.’ One night, I’ll never forget, Owen came home carrying an armful of library books about Prohibition. He lectured us on how the rum runners got put away—some for possession or selling, but most for tax evasion. Owen kept saying, ‘We need to run our dirty cash through a legitimate business, report all of our income, issue W-2s, and pay taxes.’ Dave and Doug mocked him, but I thought he was right, and I said so. Eventually Dave and Doug came around.”
“So that’s when they started importing houseplants.” Ed saw the odd look in her eye. “Nightingale told me.”
“Yes. Tropical Plants Direct, that was the name. Dave and I were into houseplants before they became popular. We had them all over the house—philodendrons, dracaenas, prayer plants. It was Dave’s idea to sell them. He told Owen they could import houseplants along with dope. That’s when Owen bought the truck and rented the warehouse. They kept the houseplants up front and stashed the weed behind a false wall in back.”
“How long did Owen and Doug live with you?”
“For a while. But after the business took off, they got their own places.”
“I know Owen’s gay—”
“Yes, the first openly gay person I ever knew.”
“What about Doug? Did he have any girlfriends?” “Some....”
“Anybody special?”
“Not that I recall.”
Ed placed another photo on the worktable: Doug and Jackie at the Be-In. “Do you remember Jackie Zarella?”
“Jackie!” Olivia pricked her finger with wire and a spot of blood appeared. She shook it and pressed the wound with her thumb. “Now there’s a blast from the past.”