At sixty-eight, my mom got initiated into the Santeria religion. After having her street clothes cut from her body with scissors, she kneeled naked in a shower stall, eyes closed, while the priestess, (called a madrina, or “godmother”) bathed her in holy water and chanted in Yoruba. More kneeling followed, sometimes with arms extended crucifix-style to hold burning candles. My mom, who has bad knees, nearly fainted. At the end, she received her elekes, beaded necklaces in the colors and patterns associated with the five primary orishas. She left the botánica clothed entirely in white, hair sheathed in a white turban with hunks of coconut tucked into the folds. Since then, she has put on her elekes every morning with a prayer and wrapped them in a blessed cloth before bed every night. She makes offerings to the orishas on an altar in her home. But she’s casual, forgoing animal sacrifice and the abstentions more serious initiates sometimes undertake.
My mom also uses the I Ching, a Chinese divination method nearly four thousand years old. She’s handy with tarot cards and astrology, too. Occasionally, she observes aspects of the Judaism she grew up with. And she adores Christmas—mostly for the paganlike adoration of evergreen trees, the dreamy lights, the exchange of gifts. Some might call this dabbling, but I think of her more like a witch at a cauldron using a pinch of this, a dash of that.
When I ask my mom what triggered her fascination with the occult, her answer is circular. “That’s easy. It’s because of my Pisces moon in the fourth house of my astrological chart.” For her, the interest feels so natural that it might be written in the stars. She has always been unusually sensitive to tacit signals and subtle shifts in energy (a helpful quality for an outlaw). But sensitivity comes with a price; she is thin-skinned and easily hurt. Believing in magic gives her a taste of control and methods for harnessing her natural vulnerability as a tool.
I don’t live in a magical world, not like my mom and her friends. But I have to respect that this is her way of operating. The magic has changed flavor over the years, but it’s always been there—part of my mom’s every major decision. This is as true today as it was back in 1975 when she arrived in California and soon found herself at the helm of a mobile bakery that would grow into a massive underground operation.
But it started small. And it started with magic.
Meridy landed in San Francisco on the day Patty Hearst was arrested.
Nineteen months before, the heiress had been dragged out of her apartment in Berkeley by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a bizarre terrorist group operating under the slogan, “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” Two months later, Hearst reappeared as an SLA convert, robbing a bank with a sawed-off shotgun. On September 18, 1975, the day Mer arrived, FBI agents swarmed two safe houses, including the one where Patty was hiding. Four days after the arrests, another female radical fired two shots at President Gerald Ford as he exited the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, missing his head by inches. The would-be assassin later said she’d been inspired in part by Patty and the SLA. The astonishing case of the heiress turned kidnapping victim, self-proclaimed revolutionary, terrorist, fugitive, and frail penitent would keep the press enthralled for many moons.
Mer felt bewitched by the sheer physical beauty of San Francisco, its geographic undulations and tumbling fog banks and improbably frilly Victorians. She settled in a tiny garden apartment on a steep block of Potrero Hill, which she shared with a former roommate from Milwaukee. Having grown up in a flat, muted stretch of the Midwest—among its endless gray winters and icy lakes—Mer had rarely seen the ocean. Now that she lived on a roughly seven-by-seven-mile peninsula surrounded on three sides by fragrant, churning seawater, she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave.
Still, it wasn’t easy. A peculiar darkness seemed to well up from within San Francisco, reminding Mer of a graceful image painted over an ugly one. In what was historically known as a “wide-open town,” excess could become poisonous and often did. Mer, now twenty-eight years old, had always carried her own darkness: a penchant for melodrama, obsessiveness, and periods of depression; a singularity of vision that left her blind spots exposed; a vulnerability that no amount of magic could shield; and an unquenchable yearning—for a grand romance, artistic greatness, her Yellow Brick Road.
The people she met in her first weeks all came from somewhere else. But if Mer idly wondered where the locals were, it didn’t hold her attention for long. In that way, she was like most everyone who traveled west hoping to reinvent themselves and ended up reinventing the West. She had spent time on Brady Street in Milwaukee (sort of a midwestern Haight-Ashbury minus the fame), so she wasn’t shocked by the grittiness. But nothing prepared her for her first Halloween on Polk Street.
In Milwaukee, Halloween was a children’s holiday. Not here.
Cross-dressing had been illegal in San Francisco since the Barbary Coast days. Cops routinely rousted transgender folks, drag queens, and other nonconformists. Halloween had offered a night of reprieve from arrests and police harassment—that is until paddy wagons showed up at the stroke of midnight to clear the streets. The antiquated law against wearing “dress not belonging to his or her sex” had just been stricken from the books in 1974, the year before Mer’s arrival, allowing the gender-bending Halloween party of 1975 to carry on past the witching hour. Newspapers would later estimate the crowd on Polk Street at fifty thousand.
This was decades before initialisms like LGBTQ+ helped draw awareness to a spectrum of gender and sexuality. Mer, who’d never even seen anyone do drag, was awestruck by the expressiveness. There were glamorous queens, bearded “genderfuck” queens, cartoonish queens, queens on roller skates, and queens from outer space. Drag kings, too: debonair women in tuxedos and top hats or wearing facial hair and leathers. People flashed breasts and cocks and bare asses. Everything seemed so much more here. Not just a robot, but a multigendered sex-slave robot with blinking lights and sound effects. Not just Little Bo Peep, but Little Bo Peep on stilts trailed by a herd of half-naked sheep. Party buses nosed through the throng delivering revelers from one barroom costume contest to the next. People seemed limited only by their imaginations. It was unbridled, sexy, glittering, challenging, free.
Meridy soon reconnected with people from the old Milwaukee crowd who’d preceded her to California. She had met Donald Palmer on a summer day in Milwaukee shortly before her bust. They’d cruised around the Eastside in her dad’s Malibu convertible, filling the back seat with lilacs plucked from strangers’ gardens and delivering fresh bouquets to friends all over town. Donald was a foxy hippie with brunette curls, eyelashes a yard long, and a rich, sonorous laugh. He was the first gay person with whom Mer became close. At first, she nursed a crush and, in her ignorance of homosexuality, hoped Donald might learn to love her. He eventually disabused her of the notion in a heart-to-heart talk. After that, Mer marched with him in some of the first appearances of the Gay Liberation Front in Milwaukee antiwar protests. In spring 1976, after a falling-out with her first roommate, Mer moved in with Donald and three other people in San Francisco’s Western Addition.
The neighborhood teetered between wreckage and construction. Weed-choked lots alternated with half-constructed buildings. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had targeted this primarily black area for mandatory demolition, tearing into it with wrecking balls and bulldozers. By the agency’s own reckoning, it displaced nearly five thousand families and nine hundred businesses, and razed some 2,500 Victorians in that neighborhood. Thousands of new housing units rose during the seventies and eighties, most to be rented at high market value while displaced families languished on low-income waiting lists.
In this atmosphere of frustration and disenfranchisement, a white pastor named Jim Jones preached to some eight thousand worshippers, mostly from local black families. Emphasizing sobriety, racial equality, communal living, and elder care, the Peoples Temple thrived in the ruins of this once-vibrant jazz district known as the Harlem of the West. Liberal politicians courted Jones for his remarkable ability to mobilize his congregation—though not without consequences.
In the 1975 mayoral election, George Moscone had squeaked into power by a narrow margin. His rival, John Barbagelata, was antiunion, antihippie, and antigay. The New York Times described him as “nervous, driven and crochety.” But Barbagelata struck a chord with voters who thought their city was being overtaken by radicals. The race ended with a runoff that Moscone won by 4,315 votes. Barbagelata demanded a recount, which he financed with his own money. When that didn’t change the results, he accused Moscone and other liberals of election fraud—via the Peoples Temple.
Barbagelata believed that Jim Jones and his congregation had stolen the election for the liberals by casting multiple votes under dead people’s names. He vowed to expose the defrauders.
Mer watched the election scandal with half an eye. She liked the dashing new mayor with his Italian good looks. Moscone had grown up poor in San Francisco, raised by a single mother. He had street smarts and true-blue populist appeal, a mayor for the people—and he was rumored to smoke the occasional joint. He had been the California state senate majority leader before moving back to what he called the “greatest city in the world” to run for mayor, a post he said he’d wanted since childhood. During his senate years, Moscone had coauthored a bill decriminalizing sodomy and oral sex between consenting adults in California—a felony before then—earning the undying appreciation of the gay community. He’d also ushered in the Moscone Act, which knocked possession of less than one ounce of marijuana down from a felony to a misdemeanor, earning the undying appreciation of stoners like Meridy.
Late spring 1976, one of Mer’s new roommates introduced her to a petite strawberry blonde from St. Louis named Shari Mueller. It was Shari who would soon get Mer and the other Wisconsinites involved in dealing marijuana brownies.
Shari was into her own kind of magic. In her version of the story, it was the Universe that inspired her to start selling pot brownies in the first place, and it was the Universe that eventually told her to give the business to my mom.
When she and Mer met, Shari was saving up to move to the Findhorn Ecovillage—a New Age commune in Scotland that worshipped nature spirits and grew abnormally large produce, including forty-pound cabbages that made international news. Looking back, Shari says, “I’d set my intention with the Universe at earning $10,000. Once you set an intention, you’re supposed to let it go but keep your eyes open for what comes along.”
Shari had started selling homemade breads and muffins out of a picnic basket on Fisherman’s Wharf. Her best customers were the street artists who sold crafts to passersby; they couldn’t leave their wares unattended to get breakfast so the baked goods were welcome. Shari had been at this for a few weeks when a jeweler asked if she’d consider adding some magic to her basket.
Shari tried to brush him off. “I kind of gave up drugs years ago,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to get the stuff anymore.”
“Don’t worry about that part,” he said. “There’s no back-alley kind of stuff to go through here.”
Shari, who was nowhere near her savings goal, said she’d think it over. That night, she went into a meditative state.
“Look,” she said to the Universe. “I need your advice here. If you want me to make marijuana brownies, let all the doors open. And if I’m not supposed to do this, whup me upside the head and make it real clear.”
The following weekend, the jeweler handed Shari a paper bag of fragrant pot. “This is a gift,” he said. “You can mess around with it in your kitchen. If you decide you don’t want to do it, give whatever’s left back. No strings attached.”
Free marijuana seemed like a clear-enough sign to Shari, so she came up with a recipe. To distinguish the magic brownies from the regular ones, she put a cashew nut on top and carried them in a pouch over her shoulder rather than in the basket with everything else. The concept of selling drugs made her uncomfortable, so she invented a persona to handle the sales: the Rainbow Lady. Where Shari was a little shy, the Rainbow Lady was bold. She wore long gauze dresses in royal purple or kelly green beneath a hooded indigo-velvet cape, and placed a large rainbow pin over her heart.
Shari priced the regular brownies at a quarter apiece and sold the magic brownies for a dollar each. Her income shot to around $300 per weekend, a tidy sum in 1976.
One afternoon, a patrol cop asked to buy a brownie.
“Oh, sure,” Shari said, handing him one from the basket. “That’s twenty-five cents.”
“Don’t you have some with nuts?”
Okay, Shari thought, this is a test. She closed her eyes and quickly asked the Universe, What am I supposed to do? She sensed that it was all right. The best course of action would be to give him what he asked for without making a fuss. Maybe, she thought, he just wants to make his job more fun.
She extracted a marijuana brownie from her pouch. The policeman paid and went on his way.
After that, the cop became a regular, sometimes buying several at a time. Shari wondered if he might be sharing them with other policemen so they could all get high without putting themselves in jeopardy.
Then there were the cabbies. Shari sometimes took taxis to the wharf and began tipping the drivers with magic brownies. After the first couple of weeks, she’d call dispatch and have multiple cars show up at her door.
Meanwhile, Mer was living on illustration work. Between the children’s books and side gigs designing posters for rock concerts, protests, and a catalogue for a company that made glass bongs, she could usually get by. Occasionally, she rolled out a rug and gave tarot readings on Fisherman’s Wharf. But she hit a slow patch and was falling short of rent. Since Shari seemed to know a lot of people through her mobile bakery, Mer called to ask if she might have a lead on a way to generate fast cash. Shari said she would meditate on it.
Ten minutes later, Mer’s phone rang.
“A cup of coffee,” Shari said.
“Huh?”
“I have to admit, I’m a bit befuddled myself. I asked the Universe, How is Meridy going to pay her rent? And the next thing I know, I’m seeing this giant hand coming out of a puffy white cloud holding a cup of steaming coffee. I thought maybe you’d know what it meant.”
Both women fell quiet.
“Oh, I know!” Shari said. “You can come out with me on Saturday and sell coffee to the street vendors. I know everyone will love it.”
It struck Mer as an odd idea, but she happened to know where to get supplies. Her roommate Donald worked at a coffeehouse called the Haven. Mer knocked on his bedroom door and explained Shari’s proposal. All they needed, she said, were basic coffee supplies. It took a little wheedling, but late that night, Donald let Mer raid the Haven’s stockroom.
On Saturday, while Shari peddled her baked goods, Mer trailed behind, tugging coffee urns in a red wagon. Back then, you couldn’t walk to the end of any given block and buy an upside-down iced soy macchiato and a low-fat coffee cake in a waxed baggie. It would take Starbucks another two decades to spread like chicken pox throughout San Francisco.
Meridy peddling tarot readings.
Mer cobbled together rent that month, so she began dragging herself out of bed before dawn every Saturday to follow the Rainbow Lady.
Nineteen seventy-six was the bicentennial, not only of the United States as an autonomous nation, but also of San Francisco as a colonial conquest. In 1776, the Spanish military claimed the peninsula’s tip for its northernmost outpost. Almost simultaneously, Franciscan missionaries agreed that a lush lagoon six miles inland was a primo site for proselytizing the Ramaytush Ohlone people who’d fished its contributing creek for millennia. The ensuing two hundred years were violent, convoluted, and famously sordid. The name San Francisco didn’t take until 1847; for a stretch, the settlement was called Yerba Buena, after the “good herb” that blanketed the bayside hills. The moniker refers to a species of feral mint, but it’s bound to make stoners smile.
San Francisco has had dozens of colorful names and nicknames. But the most enduring one is simple, dating to the Gold Rush and the following half century, when this was the only urban metropolis on an otherwise rural and unruly frontier. Even today, to locals, San Francisco is the “City,” capitalized.
July 4, 1976, was planned as a traditional two hundredth birthday party in the City: a flag-flapping parade through Golden Gate Park, a viewing of naval vessels and pleasure boats in the bay, a railroad and steam engine display, an Americana arts and crafts show, and a fireworks to-do at Candlestick Park. The Emporium advertised a patriotic blowout, featuring discounts on Crock-Pots and leisure suits. There would be antiestablishment rallies and the usual toots and bangs of fireworks, church bells, whistles, air horns, gun salutes, and drunks.
For her part, Meridy planned to stay in, take 150 micrograms of blotter acid, and draw. Her roommates were out so she had the flat to herself. She dropped her LSD at noon and the day expanded delightfully. The walls disintegrated into cheese curds, revealing the inside of white, where all colors shivered as one. Mer recorded the images in her sketch pad.
An hour or several hours into her trip, an alarm clock sounded. Time to wake up? The telephone? Mer eyed the phone. It stopped ringing. She turned back to her drawing and the ringing resumed. When she focused on the phone, it stopped. Was this a game? Was the telephone company pranking her for not paying the bill?
She picked up the receiver. “Stop it.”
“Mer, it’s Shari.”
“Oh, hey, man, what’s happening? I thought you were the telephone.”
Shari giggled, an elfish twitter. “Look, I’m calling because I have a proposition for you.” She explained that she had reached a crossroads. The magic brownies were generating more income than she’d ever made. And she was having fun. Despite not doing drugs herself, Shari found selling them intoxicating; the risk gave her a rush. She had met her goal of $10,000, then exceeded it—and still didn’t want to leave; she was toying with the idea of staying. Then the Universe spoke to her again: You made a commitment to yourself and to the Universe that you were going to Findhorn. Now you want to go back on your word? Things are not going to work out for you if you do that. “The time has come for me to go,” Shari said. “I’d like you to take over the business. I want you to have it.”
“All?”
“Whole.”
Meridy saw herself balancing on a brink. Below yawned an abyss; above gaped the blind sky. If she jumped, would she sprout feathers or would she plummet? “I’ll ring you back, Shari,” she said. “Let me think about that.”
Mer hung up and set aside her drawing materials. The air throbbed in an ecstatic LSD warble. Practically speaking, the timing was good for marijuana brownies. In the wake of Watergate, Nixon’s War on Drugs had lost favor in the polls. His successor, Gerald Ford, took a less strident approach toward cannabis, and that attitude filtered down to the state level. When the Moscone Act took effect in January 1976, California became the fifth state to decriminalize possession of small quantities of marijuana for personal use. Of course, selling marijuana remained a felony, as did possession of the multiple ounces needed to make brownies. Still, it was a move away from prohibition.
Did Mer consider this factor? Did she carefully weigh potential prison time against the stress of her unstable income? Not at all. Her decision would come down to three brass coins jingling in her palm; the I Ching would guide her actions.
Mer had been introduced to the I Ching in Madison by the same cousin who got her stoned the first time. Also known as the Book of Changes, the I Ching described a world in an unending state of flux. Rather than a rigid moral code, it offered guidance in riding life’s ever-changing currents. To use the book for divination, you meditated on a question while rolling three specialized brass coins in one hand. Then you dropped them and recorded how they landed. The result of six throws, called a hexagram, corresponded to one of sixty-four passages—each composed of the Image (a metaphor for the present situation), the Judgment (how one should act in that situation), and the Lines (short passages predicting how the situation would evolve into its next phase). Mer loved the mutability and flow. Although the whole smorgasbord of hippie oracles appealed to her, the I Ching became her enduring favorite. She’d consulted it so frequently in the first years that she knew most of the thick book by heart.
Mer focused on grounding herself, imagining tree roots reaching from her body through the floor into the earth below. Her brass I Ching coins were greasy and smooth from use. Jingling them in one hand, she repeated a question in her mind: What are the effects of running this bakery?
Mer cast her coins onto the table six times. The progression led her to a passage titled, “14. Ta Yu/Possession in Great Measure.” It was one of the I Ching’s most fortuitous hexagrams, promising “supreme success” and “possession on a grand scale.” The hexagram was too clear to second-guess.
“Wonderful!” Shari said when Mer called her back. “I know you’ll have fun with it. I’ll write out all of my recipes, and we can get together and go over them.”
Mer felt power sparking through her fingertips. She spent the evening scheming, her acid-charged brain chasing possible futures. She wanted to invent a street persona; the Rainbow Lady was taken, and besides, Mer saw herself with more of a rock ’n’ roll edge. If she was going to run a bakery, she’d do it her way.