I bike to the Mission on a brilliant day in 2018. The temperature hovers at around eighty-five—warm enough for shorts, but not so hot that I’ll sweat standing still. Situated between Twin Peaks, Mint Hill, Potrero Hill, and Bernal Heights, the Mission simmers close to sea level. The hills shoulder off wind and moisture, so this area often cooks when other parts of town are swaddled in fog.
I pause for a red light beside Dolores Park, birthplace of my hometown. It used to be a lagoon. The Ohlone peoples (as the tribal communities from this region are collectively known today) had hunted and fished by its fertile banks for several thousand years before the Spaniards showed up. Friar Francisco Palóu said mass by the lagoon in 1776, and with that, the Mission Dolores introduced the heathen public to “civilization.” They served a typical colonial cocktail: European disease, enslavement, cultural erasure, and outright slaughter. Within a century, some 90 percent of the Ohlone population had been wiped out.
Today, the only evidence of the lagoon are the puddles that gather beneath the swing sets when it rains and linger there for days. Kids swarm the play structures, Crayola-bright blurs. A paletero pushes his popsicle cart through the crowded park. The tennis courts are in use, and there’s a herd of tech bros playing Frisbee. On picnic blankets, people vape now-legal cannabis oil and gaze at their tablets. Couples grin into phones for that us-on-a-picnic selfie.
With the Bay Area serving as headquarters for today’s most powerful tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Salesforce—we’ve been walloped by gentrification. The Mission is a hotbed of dastardly evictions and suspicious building fires. Condos rise from the ashes of community institutions and rent-controlled housing. Fancy mixology bars replace rock ’n’ roll dives and LGBTQ+ hangouts. The Mission of today is mostly white, mostly moneyed. No longer a haven for recent immigrants, artists, and freaks.
My parents belonged to the classic first wave of gentrifiers: white bohemians who move into an inexpensive ethnic neighborhood and made it appear trendy. I took my first breaths walking distance from here. This is the point from which my universe expanded.
Heart of this city, heart of memory.
I pedal east, passing two Teslas and a Maserati. An Uber driver brakes in the middle of a narrow street, clogging traffic in both directions, while three white women pile out squawking on cell phones. Squeezed onto the tip of a peninsula and hemmed by water on three sides, San Francisco will never extend beyond its forty-seven square miles. When new people arrive, others must leave. Most of my friends are already gone—evicted, priced out, or simply disgusted.
I know better than to come to the Mission, but I was thinking about beginnings and wanted to visit mine. Eight blocks later, I lean my bike on a lamppost at Twentieth and Alabama streets. The warehouse. Its facade of eggnog-yellow boards with powder-blue trim looks the same except for a new row of windows at second-floor height. A brownie customer named Sian used to tell me, “Look up when you walk down the street, punkin; you see the most innnterrresting things in upstairs windows.” And he was right: a shadow is moving behind one of the new windows. I’ve come here before and left notes for the current resident but never heard back, so now I’m yelling and waving. “Excuse me! Hello!”
The window slides open. A handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair pokes his head out. “Can I help you?”
“Do you live here?”
“This isn’t a residence,” he says.
“It used to be.”
“No, there was a start-up here before us. I know that for a fact.”
“I lived here when I was little,” I say. “I’m curious to know what’s become of it.”
He comes downstairs and we introduce ourselves on the sidewalk. The warehouse, he tells me, is headquarters for the Gurdjieff Foundation of California.
It seems too esoteric for today’s Mission. George Gurdjieff was an Armenian guru whose ideas were popularized in the United States during the fifties and sixties after his death. Gurdjieff believed that humans moved through life in a daydream. He devised methods for awakening the sleepers, including ritualistic dance, music composition, and marathon meetings. There are currently forty-three Gurdjieff study centers worldwide. Some people consider it a cult.
I tell him about the magic-brownie business and the parties that used to shake the rafters.
“We can feel those vibrations. It’s a very energy-rich place.” He pauses, smiles. “You know, when we moved in, we had to replace the floors. We jackhammered through the concrete foundation, and in the dirt underneath, we found a bunch of broken china and rubble from the 1906 quake.”
Could the warehouse truly carry our imprint—and of those who came before? As my hometown becomes unrecognizable to me, is there some essence that remains forever local? A current running all the way back to the Ohlone?
I ask if there’s any chance I could peek inside the building just to see if I recognize it after all these years.
“Absolutely not.” His tone is stern. “People are meditating.”
He shakes my hand to let me know our conversation is over and slips back inside. I hear a dead bolt slide shut.
Soon after Mer returned from New Jersey, she moved into the warehouse. A narrow facade made the structure look deceptively small. You entered through a tight hallway, rounded a corner, and the space exploded into four thousand square feet. Skylights ran the length of thirty-foot ceilings. Heavy beams crossed overhead. Its barnlike quality fascinated her. It had, in fact, been a livery stable in the 1920s; the grayish wood floors bore faint horseshoe tattoos.
Near the entrance, a rustic bathroom stood on a low platform: claw-foot bathtub, mismatched toilet and sink, ten-foot walls, and no ceiling. Next, primitive stairs led up to the empty loft where Doug’s roommates had lived before moving out. The kitchen had a leaky Frigidaire, a utilitarian steel sink, rough-hewn shelving draped with Indian saris, and a Wedgewood oven from the 1950s. Cooking utensils hung from nails on a freestanding wall. This was where the brownies would be baked from now on. Beyond the kitchen was an open area where Mer piled her belongings and set up her armoire and chest of drawers. She’d never had so much room.
The back third of the warehouse was Doug’s territory, his space delineated by plywood walls and a pair of copper bank doors he’d scored dumpster diving. Passing through these, you reached his art studio and, farther back still, in the deepest recess, his bedroom.
On the wall above his bed, Doug had built a large three-dimensional wooden sculpture using driftwood from Ocean Beach, ornate table legs found on the street, wainscoting from a demolished Victorian, fence posts, and other scraps. He called it The Eye of God.
The raw nakedness of the warehouse invited transformation. Walls went up and came down. Stretches of spackled drywall alternated with murals. There were drawings, collages, mirrors, mannequins, piñatas, musical instruments, and a real taxidermied chicken.
The Mission was funky and vital, largely populated by Chicano families. Weekend nights, lowriders bumped down the main artery in gleaming American cars tricked out with hydraulics, their mufflers chugging alternative base lines to mellow Latin soul tunes. Crowds clustered along Mission Street to cheer and catcall the slow-going cars. When the cops didn’t swarm in to break up the party, it went all night.
Art collectives and communes dotted the area east of Mission Street. Three blocks from the warehouse was a multidisciplinary live-work art space and theater called Project Artaud. Last Gasp, a publisher of underground comix like Slow Death and Young Lust, was nearby. A vibrant lesbian community had taken root on nearby Valencia Street, with women’s cafés and bars and a broad range of businesses run by women for women—including typically male-dominated services like auto repair and construction. There was even a new woman-owned sex-toy shop called Good Vibrations, thought to be the first sex shop in the world tuned specifically to female pleasure.
Two of the City’s largest housing projects were also within walking distance. Muggings and street violence populated news reports. Drunks, junkies, and acid casualties camped in doorways and loading docks. Still, Doug and Mer felt safe enough to keep the front door unlocked. The real neighborhood menace was a mayonnaise plant that on windless days made the whole district stink like rotten eggs.
Soon after Mer moved in, the Sticky Fingers driver-cum-baker took a job offer in Hawaii. Before leaving, Cam introduced Doug and Mer to Carmen Vigil. Carmen looked like a jolly, disarming cross between Santa Claus and Tommy Chong. He made his own wine and worked part-time at an avant-garde film collective known as the Cinematheque.
Carmen became the official Sticky Fingers baker at twenty dollars per pan. His wife didn’t want the risk of him baking at home, so the whole operation unfolded in the warehouse. An early riser, Carmen would arrive on Friday mornings while the household was sleeping, let himself in, and begin (Doug would have already ground the pot and left it waiting). The creaky Wedgewood was a workhorse, though it only fit four pans at a time. Carmen usually churned out three batches before anyone else got up. Along the way, he’d lick spoons and nibble crumbs until he felt like a helium balloon floating in the rafters. “Never come down ’til Monday,” he’d say. He whistled while he baked.
Carmen’s wife, Susan, came on board to wrap brownies. She’d bring her toddler son and usually a girlfriend to help. The wrapping crew—nicknamed the Wrapettes—would spend the afternoon at the large kitchen table in a haze of pot smoke, snacking and drinking wine as they worked.
Saturday afternoons, Mer and Doug went out to sell.
The “green routine” became the heartbeat of warehouse life. It gave rhythm to a week that otherwise lacked structure.
Doug had abandoned his reservations about working with pot now that he and Meridy were partners. Every week, he tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and pulverized dry Humboldt shake in a food processor before running the powder through a flour sifter until it was fine. Fragrant green dust billowed around him, clinging to his arm hair and eyebrows.
He kept the Haight route and decided to try breaking in another area of his own. Noe Valley, to the immediate west of the Mission, caught his eye.
Today, Noe Valley is stroller central. It’s a posh neighborhood of high-end boutiques and the subset of jewelry store that displays diamond rings on mossy tree branches.
Back in 1977, it was a small enclave of arty types. Hip cafés and restaurants lined the main drag along Twenty-fourth Street. On his first day, Doug walked into a little coffeehouse called Acme Café and was assaulted by the most abrasive music he’d ever heard. Jarring atonal guitar noodled over a frenetic drumbeat. A guy snarled repeatedly about how repulsive his lover was. Flyers plastered the walls with images that seemed intentionally disturbing: screaming faces, rabid dogs, men wearing hazmat suits. Customers were scattered around the café. Doug tried not to stare at a woman with a shaved head and safety pins holding her tattered shirt together.
Unbeknownst to Doug, the San Francisco punk scene had recently barreled into existence. The Ramones had blown some thirty people away at the Savoy Tivoli in August 1976. A couple of months later, a local guitarist cajoled the owner of a Filipino dinner club into letting his band, the Nuns, play on a dead Monday. So many people showed up that the club soon gave itself entirely over to punk. The Mabuhay Gardens, known to denizens as the Mab, became the grimy, graffitied heart of an intense demimonde. The Acme, which had always been a little freaky, was tipping that way, too.
Doug felt like turning tail, but the discomfort intrigued him. Whatever was happening here, it was new . . . And these people certainly looked like they got high.
The guy behind the counter wore a scuffed leather motorcycle jacket covered in cryptic pinbacks. His hair was dyed an unnatural blue-black. Doug had only dealt with established customers before. Mer, he knew, would suggest making small talk before sliding into the subject of brownies almost as if it were an afterthought. But Doug hated small talk. And what were you supposed to say to a guy like this?
Doug cleared his throat. “What’s this music you’re playing?”
“Crime. It’s the B side of ‘Hot Wire My Heart.’”
“Doesn’t the negativity get you down?”
The counterman smiled with half his mouth.
“Okay.” Doug faltered. “Well, what I wanted to ask was . . . What would you say to a magic brownie?”
“I’d say, ‘Hello, beautiful.’”
“Then here’s one for you to try.” Doug pushed a cellophane-wrapped brownie across the counter. “It’s on me.”
Decades later, Kevin Kearney aka Stannous Flouride still remembers the day the lanky hippie with the leather hat came in and gave him a free pot brownie. Stannous considered himself an experienced pothead, so when my dad cautioned him to eat a quarter of the brownie, then wait at least forty-five minutes before trying more, he smirked. Yeah, whatever you say, space cowboy. He ignored the advice and regretted it. “I ate it at work,” he says, “which I shouldn’t have done. And I got really, really blitzed. Oh, these were gooood.”
Stannous fumbled through his shift, seeing tracers, his body vibrating. Too stoned to converse cogently or assemble a decent sandwich. The following Saturday, when Doug came back in, he bought a dozen.
Stannous picked up on the concept right away. If you sold to people working in businesses and left the after-market sales up to them, you’d be less likely to get busted. The cops wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the origin of your product. You’re not approaching strangers on the street or dealing out of your home. It had none of the usual trappings. It struck him as subversive and smart. Stannous began buying for the café. He saved the greasiest brownies—the ones visibly oozing green oil—for himself and kept the rest near the register. Once word got around, people knew they could talk to a certain punk at the Acme if they wanted Sticky Fingers brownies.
Doug had never run a business before and the prospect excited him. He wanted to approach it properly. Mer, he thought, was used to running things with a feminine flow, but disorganization irked him. One thing Doug knew for sure: businessmen kept ledgers. So he bought an account book, the kind with columns labeled for gross income, wages paid, expenses, etc. It would help them stay focused and organized.
Mer didn’t seem to understand. “You can’t write this stuff down. Are you crazy?”
“How else are we supposed to track our progress?”
“Why on earth would we do that?”
“This is what businessmen do!” Doug snapped, feeling dismissed.
“If we get busted, this is evidence against us.”
It escalated into a screaming fight, their first real battle. When the next weekend came around, Doug didn’t ask Mer’s opinion. He recorded his figures and stashed the ledger among his things.
Four thousand square feet was a lot of room for two people. At $400 per month, the rent was more than either of them was used to scraping together without roommates. Since the loft up front sat empty, they decided to look for a housemate. Doug posted flyers on community boards along his new route to see who might turn up.
They got Jeep.
Eugene “Jeep” Phillips was an artist, photographer, carpenter, and jeweler. He was tall and wiry, with keen blue eyes, an avian profile, and curly brown hair that frizzed around his temples and floated down his back. An Aquarius with a quick, creative mind, Jeep had a funny habit of adding “blah, blah” or “da, da, da” to most sentences, as if his brain moved too quickly for his mouth. He had been a biology major in his hometown of San Luis Obispo but got sidetracked into doing psychedelic light shows. He developed a technique for preprogramming multiple projectors with punch tape—cutting-edge back then. With that segue into the party scene, he moved to the City and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute.
“I have to ask you something,” Doug said, when Jeep came to see the warehouse. “Do you smoke marijuana?”
“Occaaaaaasionally.”
“Have you tried magic brownies? We, uh, make them here sometimes.”
“Sure,” he said. “I kind of make brownies, too, sometimes.”
That was the magic answer.
A week later, Jeep was using a spray gun to paint a seascape mural in his new loft in the warehouse when he heard a ruckus in the kitchen below. Peering over the railing, he was surprised to see Doug grinding what looked like an entire plant’s worth of marijuana leaves in a food processor, enveloped in a dust storm of pot like some desert traveler on a green Sahara. Then Carmen and the Wrapettes showed up. Jeep hadn’t realized it was a major operation.
Jeep was a birdman. He liked being up in the rafters where errant pigeons occasionally roosted. He’d watch the goings-on from his aerial vantage, feeling that if he was quiet enough people forgot he was there. He came to love the slow process of waking up on weekend mornings to the sound of banter in the kitchen below. He’d descend, half-dressed; make an espresso; and eat a brownie fresh from the oven and topped with milk or ice cream. He’d fall into lively conversation or drift into his studio to make art. Through the life of Sticky Fingers, Jeep would be the sole person to experience the full process intimately without getting sucked into the business—an inside outsider.
The most outlandish part to Jeep was how many decisions were made using the I Ching, from the life-changing to the trivial. Once, when Jeep accompanied Mer to Cala Foods for baking supplies, she amazed him by whipping out her brass coins—right in the grocery store—to determine whether to buy organic flour or the usual cheap stuff. In this big illegal business, hippie magic was calling the shots.
Doug and Meridy were not quiet roommates. They fought often and loudly. Thinking back on it, Jeep says, “There was a kind of volatility. You know, they both have strong personalities, very dramatic, and so I think it would play out in anger and a certain amount of yelling or loud interaction, etcetera, etcetera.”
Perched up in his loft, Jeep would shake his head. What month is it? Where is the moon? Them people at the other end of the building sure are making a lot of noise . . .
All three roommates had active, messy studios. The warehouse was organic, alive, ever changing. It became a fertile scene, a place for throwing parties, holding court, and spreading your wings as wide as you pleased.
Doug sought ways to make Sticky Fingers more spiritually and artistically satisfying. He realized that the lunch sacks they used to package each dozen could become a medium for communicating with the City. He started coming up with an original design each week and spent hours copying it onto hundreds of pastel-colored lunch bags. The designs were necessarily simple at first: a series of squares within squares within squares and the phrase The Space Within; a female figure and the words Green Goddess.
He also began a large painting of the warehouse crew, entitled We Are All One. We Are None the Same, featuring photo-realistic portraits of Barb, Carmen, Jeep, Mer, himself, a friend from the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and a homeless alcoholic from up the block. The symbol for each person’s astrological sign floated beside them. Behind the homeless man, the door to enlightenment stood slightly ajar.
Mer had been hearing about Doug’s spirit-child for months. One night in March 1977, Doug lay back on the bed after lovemaking, sweat shining on his nose in the dim light drifting down from the skylights. “There,” he said. “Now you’re pregnant.”
Then he draped his forearm over his eyes and slept.
Mer lay awake as Doug’s breath elongated. She felt uneasy. He was startlingly psychic, but how could he possibly know? In four months of dating Doug, she’d gone from not wanting a child to letting him talk her into it. Was she midcycle? She was. A baby would change everything. Maybe she should have stayed on the pill a little longer.
As she listened to her lover sleep that night, Meridy imagined a small flash of lightning—the beginning of new life inside her body. And as she visualized this happening, she felt it happen.
She didn’t bother with a pregnancy test.
“None of us could imagine your mom with kids,” Donald says now. He’d returned to San Francisco by April 1977—though not to the business. Having known Mer since the Milwaukee days, he was skeptical of her conversion. “She was never into children, just not a kid person. And she was this total party girl, you know. So when she announced that she was pregnant, it was like, Oh, my God, that poor kid! It was impossible to imagine.”
Mer enjoyed a variety of drugs. Alphabet-soup drugs like LSD and PCP. The naturals: weed, shrooms, mescaline, opiated hash, peyote. She’d tried heroin a couple of times and didn’t like the nausea. But quaaludes, poppers, cocaine? Sure.
When I ask her if it was difficult to sober up during her pregnancy, I’m a little nervous that she might tell me she didn’t.
“Nah, it was easy,” she says. “Hormones pretty much took care of that. Everything made me want to puke.”
Morning sickness usually hit her at two or three in the afternoon, woozy waves rising through her guts. Sometimes she’d have to stagger to the nearest bathroom right in the middle of her sales run.
She quit cigarettes, alcohol, and coke right away. And who needed psychedelics? She could feel another consciousness awakening inside of her own. Part of her yet separate. The loneliness that had often tugged her sleeve dissipated; wherever she went, she had company. This was trippier than any drug.
She’d been fasting off and on since meeting Doug. Now he encouraged her to eat, eat, eat—which would’ve been fun had the queasiness not stripped the pleasure out of it. She went from fasting to force-feeding herself. Doug made stir-fries with brown rice, great heaps of scrambled eggs, salads, and all the tofu she could stand.
Sometime during the early days of this pregnancy, my parents agreed to marry. Neither of them remembers a proposal. “I don’t know,” my mom says. “I was pregnant with you. It was the thing to do.”
So pragmatic, so conventional, so uncharacteristically dull. A love letter from her time in New Jersey gives a more colorful answer. On February 10, she wrote, “To me, first of all, [marriage] is merely another contract. One which I feel that we have already made to each other, perhaps New Year’s Eve in the cabin . . . In terms of myself alone, I love you so deeply that with or without it, I would love you the same.” Then this: “In terms of our child, it is of great importance . . . that he have his father’s name, to carry out the word, to carry on the great Volz empire.”
Somewhere under the overblown language, Mer was hiding a dreamy midwestern heart. As much as she might’ve wished herself immune, she yearned for a storybook romance. Take the matter of the wedding ring. She wanted one while Doug couldn’t fathom spending hundreds of dollars on a bourgeois tradition.
“You care about that stuff?” he said, squinting at her appraisingly. “We don’t need some status symbol to prove that we’re united on a deeper level. Anyway, I don’t have the money for fancy rings. Maybe down the road or something.”
“Forget about it,” Mer said. “Sorry I brought it up.”
Doug left the room, his boots echoing off the wood floors. She heard him pause and draw a deep nasal breath and slowly release it through his mouth, grounding himself. Then his footsteps returned. He stood in the doorway with one hip cocked in that loose way of his.
“I’ve got two hands,” he said. “I’ll make them myself.”
Doug stayed up late that night hunched over his drafting table, the white cone of light from his metal desk lamp illuminating his busy hands. When Mer edged over to see what he was doing, he shooed her away.
The next morning, he sat beside her on the bed and opened his hand to reveal two strips of bright rainbow plastic.
“Electrical wire,” he said. “From a carpentry job before we met. I knew I was saving it for something special.” He’d taken cuts of flat two-millimeter electrical cord in bright colors, aligned the strands into a rainbow, and meticulously glued them in place.
“Isn’t it neat?” he said. “You and me, baby. We got electricity.”
With a small smile, a one-sided dimple, he wrapped the rainbow around her finger.
Doug had always gotten a small thrill from shocking his mother. It wasn’t easy to do; Jan was an independent widow, an artist herself, a traveler—usually unflappable. She had bought a house in Mijas, Spain, and was in the middle of elaborate renovations. Doug phoned long distance and caught her coming in from the garden. She launched into grievances about a worker who hadn’t shown up and how difficult it was to find good help in Spain.
Doug cut her off. “I’m getting married.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait until I get a roof on the house.”
“It’s no big deal, Mom. Just a small ceremony.”
“What does Judith think about that?”
“I’m not marrying Judith.”
That got a stammer. “Wh-wh— what are you talking about?”
When his mother left California months before, Doug had been dating a different woman—Judith, one of his fellow psychics from the institute. Jan knew Judith and liked her. Doug hadn’t mentioned the break up—or his new girlfriend.
“Please tell me what you mean,” Jan said, with forced calm. “You’re not making sense.”
“I’m engaged to Meridy.”
“Mary what?”
“Meri-dee.”
“Mary B?”
And so on.
“Doug, you don’t even know this person!”
“I know she is the woman I’m supposed to be with.”
Jan tried to talk him out of it. If nothing else, she wanted him to wait until she could come to the wedding.
“There’s something else,” Doug said, going for the big kaboom. “We’re having a son.”
By then, Jan was too upset to consider planning a trip. She wouldn’t meet Mer for another year. This awkward beginning placed the two women in positions of guarded suspicion, a mutual stiffness that would take years to soften.
Mer knew her parents wouldn’t be able to come to California. Bill had lost his leg below the knee to diabetes years before. He suffered constant back pain, the result of slipping two disks while lifting a keg of beer. Her mother was deep in Alzheimer’s dementia. Bill gave his blessing over the phone. “If you’re happy, I’m happy,” he said. Mer promised that she and Doug would visit at the first opportunity. She didn’t mention the baby then, not wanting them to think she was marrying because she’d gotten knocked up.
No parents would witness the union, but there would be friends, lots of friends, and a hell of a party. They settled on Sunday, May 15, choosing the date because Mer’s favorite hexagram was “15. Ch’ien/Modesty” and because the moon would be entering Taurus, a good phase for staying grounded in a large group of people.
Doug was twenty-three, Mer was twenty-nine. Both were adults; and yet this was in some ways a marriage between children living in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along fantasy world of 1977 San Francisco.
“See?” Doug said, as they exited the 101. “It looks like a woman sleeping.”
Mer squinted at Mount Tamalpais, the triangular hill rising some 2,600 feet above Marin County. “Maybe it’s my angle . . .”
“She’s lying on her back, staring up at the clouds, waiting for her lover.”
Mer could kind of see it. The highest green peak formed the Miwok maiden’s face, her hair flowing in waves down the mountainside. A lower peak shaped her breasts. There was the small rise of her hip bones and the smooth declination of her legs stretching into the green-gold foothills.
They drove through tree-lined Fairfax and up the swooping curves of Mount Tamalpais. Doug parked the VW at a widening of the road. Taking Mer’s hand, he guided her between oak trees and through knee-high grass to an elevated clearing.
“This feels like the spot. What do you think?”
“Is this one of her boobs?”
“I don’t think so. The boobs are that way. We might be on her shoulder.”
“As long as it’s not her armpit,” Mer said.
“Or her beaver.”
They giggled. Mer turned a slow circle. Insects hummed in the grass. The wind picked up, smelling of ocean and dust. To the south, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge blazed between rolling hills. She could see stretches of Ocean Beach, its ragged lines of surf, and the downtown skyline with its construction cranes and money vibes. To the east, the silver gleam of the bay, and beyond that, smoggy Richmond. To the west, the Pacific sprawled under a sky crosshatched with clouds and contrails. A meeting of earth, sun, wind, and water.
Through a dry spring of exceptionally blue skies, Mer’s breasts swelled and ached. She felt voluptuous. Sometimes she thought her pregnancy must be obvious to everyone, not because of her body, not yet, but because of how she moved and the energy she exuded.
Doug’s handmade rings had been charming at first. But in the depths of an insomniac night, emotions churning, Mer decided she needed metal. Solid, unbreakable, permanent. It didn’t have to be lavish, but rainbow electrical wire? Too weightless and silly, too easy to unravel. She’d get her own ring if necessary.
Jeep was taking jewelry design classes at the Art Institute, so Mer nosed around his workspace.
“I’m learning this really neat Japanese wood-grain technique,” Jeep said. “You solder different colors of metal together, like silver and gold, and blah, blah, blah. Then you fuse them in a furnace and the colors kind of whorl.” He wiggled his fingers. “Then, while the metal is still hot and soft, you can carve it so it looks like wood grain. The technique goes back to ancient Japan. It was used in crafting swords for samurai warriors, and etcetera, etcetera.”
A samurai ring. Mer liked the sound of that. Tough.
Later, she and Barb sat at the kitchen table picking at chips and guac from El Faro. A joint smoldered in the ashtray, and light streamed through the skylights, illuminating rising swirls of smoke.
Barb tapped her pencil on a blank page of her sketch pad. “Are you thinking white?”
Mer snorted. “White is a mixer I use to lighten other colors of paint.”
“Give me something to start with.”
“All I know is I want to wear my shitkickers.”
Barb came back with sketches of a Renaissance-inspired coat with dramatic bell sleeves, a gored skirt, a décolleté neckline, and leather lacing up the bodice. Boots peeked below the hem of a flowy underdress. The women chose a Japanese floral batik in royal blue and burnt sienna for the jacket and soft white muslin for the underdress.
In my mom’s box of assorted papers, I find an itemized list of wedding expenses scribbled on the back of an envelope. My parents didn’t pay for the patch of grass on Mount Tamalpais or rent a tent, tables, or chairs. Doug’s BPI guru, Lewis Bostwick, and his wife, Susan, officiated the wedding free of charge. Guests brought drinks and potluck dishes. The list consisted of the fabric for Mer’s dress, a few food items, wine and beer, a cake from Tassajara Bakery, and incidentals. The grand total came to $187.
A turkey was listed among the food items. Of the things that perplex me about the wedding—and there are a few—this is the detail that boggles my mind: on the morning of her wedding, a woman who to this day cannot reliably boil water roasted a twenty-pound turkey.
“I don’t know what got into me,” she admits. “Hormones, I guess.” She doesn’t know where the recipe came from, though she says she still remembers what it was. “You just get a big turkey, slather it all over with mayonnaise, throw it in the oven at like four hundred or whatever, and bake the hell out of it.”
May 15 dawned chilly and gray, with heavy rainclouds that defied both the drought and predictions of fair weather.
“It’ll clear up,” Doug kept saying.
Fretful, Mer tossed hexagram after hexagram, repeating the same questions until the answers contradicted themselves. “It will be fine,” she agreed, even as the first raindrops splattered the skylights.
They were halfway to Mount Tamalpais when the drizzle became a deluge. Doug gritted his teeth all the way up the mountain while Mer puffed on a joint to calm her nerves. Barb, in the back seat beside the turkey, was sewing finishing touches into Mer’s coatdress. Guests were already waiting in their cars beside the road. Faces blurred through sheets of water cascading down the windows.
“This is positively biblical,” Mer said.
“We need an ark,” Barb added.
Doug twisted in his seat. “Would you two stop with the negativity pictures?”
Mer wiped mascara from her cheeks. Why were the omens turning heavy? How could the I Ching have misled them?
“Fuck a duck,” she said, putting a plastic poncho on over her muslin underdress. She charged through the rain to the nearest car. Mer scrambled from back seat to back seat, asking if anyone knew where they could go. A restaurant? A sheltered patio? A freaking cave?
Finally, a couple who owned a crystal shop near Fisherman’s Wharf offered their nearby home among the redwoods. The woman’s parents happened to be quietly celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary at the house that day, and there was no way to warn them of the impending arrival of seventy-five longhairs. But what better way to celebrate a wedding anniversary than with a wedding?
The ceremony was about to commence in the living room when sunbeams pierced the cloud cover outside. The rain let up. Everyone moved out into the backyard. Drops plinked from the redwood branches, catching sunlight so that everything sparkled.
“We are here today to witness the union of two spirits that have known each other through many lifetimes and have connected on this plane as lovers,” Lewis Bostwick began. He led the guests through a group meditation. “Grounding in matter, grounding in the body, grounding in this moment in time.” Then Susan Bostwick spoke of the importance of honoring each other through spiritual and sexual union.
They exchanged vows. Mer: “I vow to you my affinity and devotion, my queendom to complete your kingdom.” Doug: “I vow to maintain a constant space within our relationship, as yin to your yang, as yang to your yin, as man to your woman.”
The rings came out: rainbow wire for Doug, wood-grain metal for Meridy. Jeep had fashioned the ring from copper and brass with a core of nickel; the metals swirled up the band to form a yin-yang symbol at the center. No one had seen it before the ceremony.
Doug held the wood-grain ring up in a shaft of sunlight. “This ring! It’s so beautiful!”
He passed it around to guests, drawing oohs and wows, until Mer grew impatient. “All right already, give me the damn ring!”
The older couple celebrating their anniversary stood with fingers entwined throughout the service. And that seemed to Mer like the best omen of all. There would be obstacles, but love would prevail. Perhaps the I Ching had steered them right after all.
I pore over a contact sheet of photos from the wedding. It begins with the two of them clowning before leaving the warehouse. In one shot, my dad dips my mom into a movie kiss. They look fresh-faced and happy. No war between them yet. Next comes the stormy hillside, a cluster of cars, and people huddled in trench coats and blankets, shoulders hunched. The atmosphere is so dismal, you can barely see the trees. Then the rustic Marin home, the relaxed smiles, the doumbek drums and flutes. The ceremony among the glittering redwoods. My mom beams, holding court with her friends, her curls fluffy from the rain. My dad stands tall; how proud he looks before his community.
In one of his love letters, my dad wrote, “You have the bearing of a Queen, and I am proud and animated to be standing at your side. You give my Kingly game the softness it so desperately needs, at the same time that you are enlightening my softness with your strength.” I can see that in the wedding photos: they elevate each other; they feel powerful together; they believe themselves in charge of their own world—what my mom dubbed the “great Volz empire.”