A friend gives my mom a sack of Puerto Rican pasteles to bring to a dinner party. Pasteles are made from stewed meat enveloped in masa paste and wrapped in a banana leaf, similar to Mexican tamales. The heating directions couldn’t be simpler: drop the pastel into boiling water, then fish it out after five minutes. I find my mom in the kitchen, looking small and lost, dangling a pastel over a pot of still water.
“Isn’t that supposed to be boiling?” I say.
“It is boiling,” she answers, her tone mildly defensive. “Look, bubbles.”
The water is tepid at best, the tiniest of bubbles swirling to the surface. That’s right: my mom is sixty-nine years old and has never learned how to boil water. Through much of my childhood, we subsisted on Lean Cuisine, Cup O’ Noodles, and takeout, which we habitually ate on the barge while watching TV. She struggled with her weight, undergoing “miracle” diets and medical fasts, none of which involved cooking whole foods. I never went hungry as a kid, but the kitchen was like uncharted territory on a medieval map.
My mom lives alone in Desert Hot Springs. How she keeps herself alive is something of a mystery, though I know it involves Safeway rotisserie chicken and a nearby strip-mall burrito shop. Faced with a refrigerator of raw ingredients, she might very well starve.
I help her get the water going and hang around, intending only to supervise, but I end up heating the pasteles myself. Sucking people into her projects without their noticing is one of my mom’s superpowers.
I exact my revenge by telling our friends at dinner that my mom can’t boil water. She laughs, her face reddening and bunching like a Christmas apple doll. “It was boiling!” she yells. “It was, I tell you, it was!”
This same woman took the reins of a do-it-yourself bakery on July 4, 1976.
She lay in bed the next morning, working out the tendrils of her acid trip. What had sounded like a righteous plan on 150 micrograms seemed impossible hungover. The idea of assembling the Rainbow Lady’s zucchini bread made the bed spin. She would have to call Shari back and tell her no thank you.
But the hexagram had been unequivocally positive; for a business venture, you couldn’t top “Possession in Great Measure” with no changing lines. If her belief in the I Ching was genuine, she had to follow through. Sipping coffee in bed, Mer realized that the only way she’d be able to do this was to get someone to do it for her.
When she heard her roommate Donald puttering in the kitchen, she shuffled out to make her pitch. “How about you bake?” she said, after explaining the Rainbow Lady’s offer. “I’ll handle sales. We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.”
“Do I look like Betty Crocker to you?”
“You made those chocolate chip cookies that one time,” Mer said. “They were good!”
Donald cocked one eyebrow. “Darling, a chimpanzee can make chocolate chip cookies.”
“But can a chimp make pot brownies?”
This was something Mer counted on: Donald loved drugs. He particularly enjoyed heroin, so much so that he wound up on people’s shit lists for minor thefts and other dishonesties when he got strung out. A problematic friend—and a questionable choice for a business associate—but one who was usually up for an adventure.
Later, when the Rainbow Lady dropped off a box of recipes written on index cards, Mer feigned confidence. “Don’t forget to write from Findhorn!” Back inside, she placed the box on Donald’s pillow.
Though by no means an expert in the kitchen, Donald knew these recipes weren’t written in unbreakable code. He agreed to try, beginning with modest goals: bran muffins, regular chocolate brownies, and magic brownies.
While Donald was dusting himself from ringlet to toe ring in flour, Mer made a general nuisance of herself. She chattered at his back, rolled joints on the cutting board, filed her long fingernails, and tossed I Ching hexagrams at the kitchen table. No question was too grand or too trivial for the oracle. What are the effects of adding ginger to the bran muffins? Jingle, jingle, jingle.
When Mer quipped that Donald’s bran muffins looked like “mini cow pies,” he frisbeed the mixing bowl into the sink and stomped down the hall to his room. Mer frowned at the wreckage—eggshells overflowing from the compost bucket, chocolate caked to the double boiler, an epic heap of pans and bowls and utensils in the sink—and lay her head on the table.
A bakery. What was she thinking?
She cleaned the mess slowly, hoping that Donald would come back to take over again.
He didn’t.
A couple of days later, a semimiracle happened. Another transplant from Milwaukee, a costumer named Barbara Hartman, quit her job on a production of The Wiz over a tiff with the wardrobe mistress. She was freshly unemployed. And she was a monster baker.
The girls: Barb and Mer.
Barb was tall and Germanic, with wheat-blonde hair and an apple-cheeked smile. She had grown up on the east side of Milwaukee, near the lakefront. Her mother, who’d borne nine children, saw baking as an inexpensive way to feed her brood. On icy winter afternoons, Barb would slog home from school to find fresh strudel cooling on the counter. She’d learned to bake in the most natural way; it was something she did from the heart.
Barb’s ubiquitous companion in those days was a shaggy gray long-legged mutt named Boogie, a canine genius and literal party animal. (He once disappeared for a week, then reappeared on Barb’s doorstep wearing a birthday hat and tie.) In 1976, Barb and Boogie were living with another costumer in the Glen Park neighborhood. Their apartment had a spacious kitchen with a sweet view of the sunny side of town. A carpenter friend had recently built her a bread table near the window with cooling racks overhead.
Barb joined the mobile bakery and flourished in her new role. Each Friday, she flipped through her recipe books to choose a special for the weekend. She made cranberry-banana bread, carrot cake with raisins and nuts, cinnamon buns, and, of course, magic brownies. An early riser, she relished mornings spent mixing dough as sunrise splashed across the City or relaxing on her sofa enveloped by the aromas of childhood with Boogie’s muzzle on her lap.
Donald was relieved to get out of baking, but he liked handling the pot. Mer was buying bricks of Mexican gold from the same wharf hippie who’d supplied the Rainbow Lady. The bricks came riddled with tiny brown seeds that exploded under heat, exuding a foul odor. Donald would do a little cocaine or Benzedrine and sit at the kitchen table for hours picking apart the bricks to hunt for seeds. It was slow, obsessive work, a project he could lose himself in. He’d then crumble the pot into smaller pieces, run it through a blender, and pass the powder through a sifter before handing it off to Barb to work her kitchen-goddess magic.
Barb melted butter in a double boiler, added the powdered weed, and simmered the mixture for half an hour, periodically skimming foam. She added the cannabis ghee to melted chocolate, eggs, sugar, baking powder, and flour. Voilà: magic brownies.
Saturday mornings, Meridy and either Barb or Donald would set up the coffee and baked goods on a card table at Aquatic Park on Fisherman’s Wharf. Hundreds of craftspeople gathered on the concrete bleachers to mill and gossip while waiting for booth assignments. The park descended from there to a narrow beach and a semicircular pier with a postcard view of the Golden Gate Bridge ablaze in international orange.
Fisherman’s Wharf had been a bustling working-class waterfront since shortly after the Gold Rush. From 1895 on, the briny stench clashed with rich aromas from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory. In the mid-1960s, the Ghirardellis sold their San Francisco factory to a real estate developer who restored the redbrick buildings around landscaped courtyards and converted the space into a shopping plaza. A second mall—the Cannery—opened catty-corner in a dormant fruit packing plant.
Shoppers didn’t rush to the new malls all at once; the area still reeked of fish oil. But a path had been cut and more entrepreneurs followed. A young Cantonese immigrant named Thomas Fong turned a nearby grain mill into a wax museum with more than two hundred celebrities and a chamber of horrors. In the early seventies—after a nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island by a group of American Indian activists asserting their right to disused federal land—the US government decided to rebrand the former maximum-security prison as a tourist attraction. The Red and White Fleet offered the first Alcatraz cruise in 1973. Souvenir shops specializing in ESCAPED INMATE T-shirts mushroomed throughout the area followed by upscale boutiques and art galleries. The blue-collar seaport morphed into one of the most visited tourist traps in the world.
Hippies began selling crafts on the waterfront around 1970; they were not welcome. Merchants fretted that the peddlers’ shaggy outfits would mar the district’s new image. Police cracked down, making arrests, so the craftspeople pooled their funds to hire a lawyer and founded the San Francisco Street Artists Guild. There were protests, press conferences, more arrests. Eventually, the street artists unearthed an obscure law enacted after half of San Francisco’s merchants lost their places of business to the 1906 earthquake and fire. This statute entitled anyone the right to a peddler’s permit provided they’d made their goods by hand.
The artisans had an effect on Fisherman’s Wharf that neither the merchants nor the politicians nor even the street artists seem to have anticipated: tourists loved it. People visiting San Francisco in the decade following the Summer of Love media circus wanted to see, smell, and even touch real hippies. Now they could take home a souvenir crystal necklace or hand-crocheted shawl that still smelled of Nag Champa incense.
To avoid jockeying over coveted spaces, the vendors came up with a lottery system. From then on, names were drawn from a diaper pail—which, rumor has it, got tossed into the bay more than once by grumpy street artists. The lottery was a slow process and mornings could be miserably cold especially in summer when massive fogbanks clung to the bay. Mer’s mobile bakery had a captive audience.
When the lottery wrapped up at nine in the morning, Mer would head home to take advantage of the morning light. She’d lose herself in drawing or painting; her style evolved, becoming looser and more colorful.
In the afternoon, she’d meet Barb to restock before heading back to the wharf for a second round of sales, now strolling with a basket of baked goods and a Guatemalan pouch of magic brownies. Mer favored jeans or harem pants tucked into shitkickers with heavy wooden heels that made a satisfying whock with every step. She wore a men’s bomber jacket, soft and scuffed, with a sterling silver housefly pinned to the lapel. While traveling in Morocco, she’d learned to tie elaborate turbans and lined her eyes with Egyptian kohl. Mer had never been girly like the Rainbow Lady with her flowing dresses and sweet giggle; Mer’s laugh was a guffaw.
The wharf crafts market had become enormous by 1976, now circling several blocks. Folks sold hand-painted silk scarves, buckskin moccasins, stained glass with flowers pressed between panes, perfumes, and carved wooden toys. Working alongside urban hippies were back-to-the-landers who drove in from the rugged parts of California Mer had yet to see, people whose eyes reflected the forest.
On street corners and stages set up in the outdoor malls, buskers gathered crowds. Among them were the up-and-coming comedians Penn & Teller, A. Whitney Brown, and Robin Williams. A classical pianist wearing a white tuxedo and tails played a white baby grand on a truck bed. A scraggly-haired hippie calling himself the Automatic Human Jukebox sang tunelessly and played a horn through a hole cut into a painted refrigerator box. Busking historian Patricia Campbell describes San Francisco as the “very best of the good places.” Magician Harry Anderson tells me that his Fisherman’s Wharf period was a “band of time when the street was really a spectacular place.” There were ventriloquists and mimes and puppeteers and jugglers and magicians. “Not a square peg among them,” Mer says of the performers. “All of those guys bought. All of them.”
Occasionally, tourists might buy the breads and muffins that Mer carried in her basket, but she kept the magic brownies in a separate pouch and sold them only to the craftspeople and buskers who became her regulars.
While Shari Mueller had called herself the Rainbow Lady, Mer’s handle seemed to find her organically. People started calling her the Brownie Lady and it stuck.
Busking has a deep history; it’s nearly as old as money. It came to the New World with the colonists and found early expression in political ballads sung on street corners with printed broadsides for sale. Circuses roamed the country, and lightning-tongued illusionists hawked elixirs from traveling medicine shows. With the rise of radio and moving pictures in the early twentieth century, street performing fell out of vogue, becoming a pitiful last resort for the blind or maimed who might saw away at a violin or saggy accordion—on a social par with begging. Hippies resuscitated the art of busking in California. Fisherman’s Wharf became the epicenter and cradle of a renaissance that spread to major cities throughout the country. It came to be known as New Vaudeville.
The buskers were a closely knit, supportive community. They worked on routines together, traded tricks and influences, shared drugs and lovers, and bailed one another out of jail. Harry Lovecraft did a magic act in the guise of an Old West snake-oil salesman. He’d pull up in Francis Vancisco, a 1938 bread truck painted with DR. H. P. LOVECRAFT AND HIS MAGICAL MEDICINE SHOW in fanciful calligraphy, and step out wearing a top hat and vintage waistcoat. “Looky, looky, looky!” he’d bark. “I’ve got something here and I’m gonna show it to ya!” Lovecraft sold glass vials that he claimed held “billions of dehydrated time-release voids; just add water and, abracadabra, you have a universal solvent!” He’d lure a trained dove into a paper bag, add a drop of liquid, and the dove would turn into an egg—a product demonstration for his “youth serum.”
Patty Lovecraft, Harry’s wife, performed as Sister San Andreas the Tap-Dancing Nun and specialized in hot-tub christenings. A Brownie Lady devotee, Patty would run giddily around the wharf looking for Mer between acts. “Have you seen the Brownie Lady?” she’d ask friends. “I have to find her right now!”
On the stages at the Cannery and Ghirardelli malls, busking was not only tolerated, it was encouraged; free performances lured shoppers and buskers enjoyed freedom from police interference. Out on the streets, it was a different story. Business owners—worried that performers were literally and figuratively stealing the show—filed complaints with the city.
“Whenever somebody who’s paying for a business license and paying taxes on his property sees a crowd of people facing away from him, they immediately assume that business is being lost,” says tap dancer Rosie Radiator. “Now, art being the glue of all of us, it was, of course, the street performers who were drawing the people to the location. They weren’t coming for the trinkets in the shops as much as they were coming for the artisans on the sidewalks and the street performers who gave it ambiance and personality and the fun aspects of a destination.”
Rosie had jump-started her career on Labor Day 1976 when she tap-danced across the 1.7-mile-long Golden Gate Bridge accompanied by her terrier, Lulu. In her backpack, she carried an American flag that had been presented to her grandmother when she was Miss Liberty of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The press swooned, so Rosie repeated the stunt the following year, adding distance—and more dancers. The Guinness Book of World Records created the “longest distance tap-danced” category for Rosie and her troupe in 1978, a surprisingly competitive title they would defend for decades.
Marijuana, according to Rosie, was crucial in developing her long-distance tap technique. “What we do is based on a THC-inspired release,” she says. “You can’t have tension in your feet, and you can’t be fighting your natural movement.” She credits the Brownie Lady with helping performers like her get through long Saturdays. “Working on the streets is not easy,” she says. “It’s physically demanding. It’s hard on your voice, it’s hard on your feet, it’s hard on your psyche. It’s the best theater training on the planet because no show is a problem after working the streets of San Francisco! Every stage is like Club Med in comparison. So, you know, your mom actually made it possible for us to weather those difficulties and continue moving forward as artists. She validated us because she was an element of the scene that represented the sweet, heartfelt relationship with marijuana that we had, and she also helped us continue to get through some of the tough times and rise to a higher level of consciousness while we were struggling.”
As demand grew, the bakers had to find new sources for their bricks of Mexican gold. Quality varied. One week, Donald peeled open a brick of pot and noticed something amiss. Somewhere on its journey up from Mexico, it must have gotten wet. It smelled faintly of mildew. No way this damp pot would break down to the floury consistency they needed for baking. After picking out the seeds, Donald arrayed the damp weed on cookie sheets and heated it slowly to sap the moisture. The unmistakable dusky scent of marijuana bloomed through the flat. Donald closed the windows to trap it inside, worried about neighbors.
The improvisation worked, and Donald was able to grind it in the blender like usual. As he ran it through the hand sifter, pot powder billowed into the room, dusting the cooking utensils with green ash. Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions was blasting from the living-room stereo loud enough to groove in the kitchen, and he cranked the sifter’s handle to the beat with a satisfying chk-ah, chk-ah. He didn’t hear Sharon, one of the other roommates, come in.
“My house is some kind of drug den now?” Sharon snapped. Of the five Bush Street residents, hers was the name on the lease. “This is what’s going on?”
Donald glanced over his shoulder, gave a queenly roll of the eyes, and continued sifting.
Always high-strung, Sharon laid into Donald for a good twenty minutes before he slammed and locked his bedroom door. They reached a truce later, but the atmosphere remained tense.
Mer phoned Milwaukee to talk to Bill as she did every Sunday. She’d already told her dad about the cookies and muffins, though not about the illegal brownies. But the secret had been weighing on her, so she took the plunge. “You know what magic brownies are, right, Daddy?” she said. “We handle some of those.”
Bill was quiet for a beat. “Be careful, honey,” he said. “Make sure you’re with good people.”
“I’ll be smart, I promise.”
After hanging up, Mer got out her I Ching coins to think things over. Donald had told her about the fight with Sharon. Maybe it was time to relocate.
That week, she and Donald rolled around town, copying numbers from for rent signs taped in windows. They found a cheap upstairs apartment in an Edwardian building on Shrader and Waller streets in the Haight. It was small and had no living room, but one bedroom got southern light—good for painting—and the landlord was willing to rent for $300 per month and a handshake.
The Haight of 1976 was scummy and a little dangerous, crowded with droopy heroin burnouts, jittery speed burnouts, and goggle-eyed tourists. But it served their needs. In nearby Golden Gate Park, mist drifted between graceful stands of eucalyptus and the gnarled cypress groves where strangers sometimes met for outdoor sex. There were enough cheap restaurants within walking distance that Mer could avoid the kitchen. And the aroma of Donald’s ghee could waft out the window into air already thick with marijuana smoke.
Barb sometimes pulled all-nighters to keep up with baking, and occasionally lubricated her gears with Jack Daniel’s or a bottle of sweet wine. During the blue hours of one such night-come-morning, she omitted a crucial ingredient from a batch of magic brownie batter: flour.
After twenty-five minutes in the oven, her batter had transformed into chocolaty tar. Barb pulled out the pans with a sinking feeling. Eight ounces of pot gone to waste. Stacking the pans of ruined brownies on the counter, she rushed to prepare a new batch.
Barb’s roommate, Annie, was leaving for Hawaii later that morning to join the Chinese Acrobats of Taiwan as a wardrobe tech on their world tour. She was hanging out in the kitchen with Barb while waiting for her ride to the airport. Though Annie rarely smoked weed, she absent-mindedly swiped the goop from a pan of ruined brownies and licked it off her finger. It was chocolate, after all. Barb joined in.
By the time Annie caught her flight, Barb was so high that vivid colors seemed to rain from the sky. When Mer came to pick up the goods for her afternoon run, Barb met her at the door.
“Get in here. You’ve got to try this.”
Mer squinted at the pans on the counter. “That doesn’t look right to me.”
“Eat some.” Barb waved her hand through the air and followed it with her eyes. “This stuff is like acid!”
“Want a spoon or something?”
“Who, me?” Mer ran her pointer finger through the goop and brought it to her lips. It tasted the same as a brownie, maybe a tad sweeter and more concentrated. The texture was like slightly gritty melted fudge.
Twenty minutes later, Mer had her bare feet kicked up on Barb’s coffee table and was giggling like a little girl. Customers were going to have to wait because she was in no condition to sell.
Barb had stepped in something extraordinary. And its dark brown color and mushy texture brought one thing to mind.
“We’ll call it Dynamic Diarrhea!”
“Funny Fairy Feces!”
“Cannabis Crap!”
That night, while Barb was scarfing everything in her fridge, her roommate phoned from Hawaii.
“Oh, my God, Barbara, I am so stoned I don’t know what to do with myself. When I got here, the acrobats were all speaking Chinese—and I could understand them!”
Barb experimented over the next week, trying to figure out what made the goop so potent and how she might harness that strength. The high was giddy and electric, with sugar and caffeine complementing the marijuana. The absence of flour allowed the body to process it much faster. If a magic brownie was a cup of instant Folgers, this was a double espresso. Barb named the new product Fantasy Fudge.
Undercooking turned out to be key. She learned to heat the matter long enough to release the THC without beginning to kill it off. Once she figured that out, Barb not only applied it to Fantasy Fudge but also to her brownies. Leaving them slightly undercooked—a little gooey in the center—increased potency.
Today’s cannabis chefs draw from decades of culinary refinement and horticultural advancement to create everything from peanut-butter cups and lollipops to sodas and potato chips. Modern edibles utilize extractions and infusions, so there’s none of the grassy texture the old-school brownies had. Save for a slightly herbal taste, easily blended into many flavor profiles, weed food has become virtually indistinguishable from straight food. Netflix even launched a competitive reality show called Cooking on High, where chefs compete for glory with marijuana mole and ganja soufflés.
Dosages are now precise to the milligram, and most California pot products come labeled with the ratio of THC, known to eggheads as delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, and CBD, or cannabidiol. These are the two most famous of marijuana’s one hundred or so chemical compounds called cannabinoids.
Beginning in the late eighties, scientists studying the chemistry of marijuana stumbled upon an amazing discovery: the largest signaling network found in the human body. This system of receptors, ligands, and enzymes has since been identified at work in the brain, organs, connective tissues, glands, and immune cells. Because the receptors seem ideally shaped to interact with marijuana’s chemicals, scientists named this network the endocannabinoid system.
Our understanding of how this system responds to THC and CBD—and what potential the other cannabinoids might hold—is young and rapidly evolving. We know that THC stimulates receptors in the peripheral organs, immune system, and central nervous system—including the brain’s pleasure center, which releases dopamine; that’s why you feel “high.” CBD is different. Rather than binding to specific receptors, it enhances endocannabinoid responses overall. CBD has been shown to act as an antianxiety, antiepileptic, antispasmodic, and anti-inflammatory agent—but it doesn’t tickle the pleasure center and has no psychoactive effects.
None of this was on the horizon in 1976. Until recently, the US cannabis food industry was all about experimentation. Or, to quote my mom, “For a while there, every batch was a crapshoot. You never knew what you were gonna get.”
The first day the fudge hit the wharf, Mer and Barb split the afternoon run. They were both curious to gauge reactions to the new product. Mer started down by the longshoremen’s lot and worked her way west; Barb began at Polk and Beach streets and moved east.
When Barb sold on the wharf, she liked to dress up as a milkmaid in a long calico skirt, high-collared blouse, and straw hat. She carried her goods in a picnic basket she’d named Harriet. Boogie, her shaggy companion, strolled by her side. Barb looked so wholesome and cute that tourists kept asking her to pose for pictures, which she found hilarious. To think that the woman in the picnic outfit was selling drugs.
The big picnic basket got heavy, so Barb decided to leave Harriet with a street artist she trusted and carry a more diminutive load in a smaller basket over her arm. If she ran out of anything, she could trek back to Harriet to restock.
Throughout the day, Barb warned customers, “This stuff is very, very strong. Just nibble a corner and wait half an hour before eating more. You do not want to eat too much.”
Not everyone listened. Two of the craftspeople on Barb’s side of the wharf had to close their booths early because they couldn’t communicate with the public or keep track of cash. Barb felt guilty. She loaded their wares into the back of her pickup and drove the vendors to their respective homes.
Not until she got back to her apartment in the evening did Barb realize that she’d forgotten to collect Harriet from the street vendor. She drove back across town in a panic. Most of the artisans had gone home for the day, but tourists still clotted the wharf, rubbing goose pimples from their arms.
There, sitting innocently on the sidewalk, was the basket full of chocolaty dope.
Fantasy Fudge was difficult to package. You’d use the spatula to scoop it onto a square of cellophane, just like a regular brownie, but once wrapped, it dissolved into a formless packet of goop. It had to be kept in a cooler or the fudge would slowly liquify. Even handling wrapped fudge turned your hands greenish black with sticky residue.
One warm Saturday after a sales run, Barb stopped by the Shrader apartment, exhausted. Boogie drooped at her heels. Donald was in the kitchen reading a novel. Barb sank into a chair with a sigh. “Where’s Mer?” she asked.
“I think she’s still on the wharf.”
Barb wiggled her tarred fingers. “It looks like I’ve been working on cars,” she said. Then she broke into a dazzling grin. “I’ve got it! We’ll call them Sticky Fingers brownies.”
Donald rubbed his jeans as if he were wiping off goop. He trotted into his room, returning with the Sticky Fingers album, which he slid onto the turntable. With the Rolling Stones rocking on the record player and a fresh fog greasing the Haight like Crisco, Barb and Donald twisted up a celebratory joint.