The rain continued into 1978, the two-year drought lost to a slushy winter. Mer’s birth wounds slowly healed. She signed up for dance classes: Bob Fosse–style jazz with lots of body rolls, splayed fingers, and aggressive snapping. Doug joined a modern dance group, all geometric shapes and tumbling.
On January 9, Harvey Milk walked the two miles from Castro Camera to his swearing-in ceremony at city hall in a drizzle, arm around his lover, brownie regular Jack Lira. A spontaneous procession of about 150 celebrants followed them. Anita Bryant, who’d told People magazine that God had personally summoned her, claimed that California’s two-year water shortage was heavenly retribution for the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill—the bill coauthored by George Moscone to decriminalize sodomy and oral sex. As he was sworn in under an umbrella, Harvey smiled up at the sky. “Anita Bryant said gay people brought the drought to California. Looks to me like it’s finally started raining.”
Dan White also joined the board of supervisors that morning, though to less fanfare. The Bay Area Reporter had recently described White as “somewhat to the political right of Attila the Hun,” but no one could have imagined how profoundly the handsome young supervisor would change San Francisco by the end of the year.
Early 1978 had the attitude of a tequila sunrise and a joint. The recession was fading into memory. There were no immediate international threats. Carter had begun advocating for decriminalization of possession of up to an ounce of weed—the first US president to openly discuss easing up since the beginning of cannabis prohibition. His drug czar and close friend, a psychiatrist named Dr. Peter Bourne, had volunteered at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco in 1967. Bourne believed that treatment was a more effective response to drug use than criminal punishment. Yet, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, better known as NORML, 457,000 people had been arrested on marijuana charges in the United States in 1977—the greatest number of arrests in a single year to that point. Bourne argued that jailing pot users for simple possession was a waste of resources; civil penalties (fines) would be more appropriate and much less expensive. Carter agreed. “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to the individual than the use of the drug itself,” he told Congress in August 1977. “And where they are, they should be changed.”
John Travolta was king; the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” topped charts throughout February. People dressed like Travolta, danced like Travolta, strutted like Travolta.
Mer resumed her Castro run on February 24, now with a wiggling, crying, pooping little person hanging from her neck in a rebozo-style sling.
She’d designed a brownie bag, her first, in honor of the I Ching hexagram “61. Chung Fu/Inner Truth.” It’s a graceful, subtle design: Chinese characters rendered in calligraphy before a background of woven bamboo bordered in cherry blossoms. The hexagram spoke to influencing others through internal balance and clarity—although schlepping two army duffels full of brownies, a ten-pound baby, and a satchel of cloth diapers and extra clothes hardly suggests an image of balance.
“Of course, you were always with me,” she says. “First through pregnancy. Then once you were born, I carried you in a front carrier—with all the fucking brownies. Then in a Gerry carrier on my back, which was nice because it freed my arms, and you were cooing in my ear; I loved that. Eventually, a stroller worked because I could put some of the brownies in the stroller.”
“Seriously?” I say, vaguely disturbed by the idea of my mom dealing out of my pram.
“Not in,” she says. “But, you know, hanging off the back. They were heavy, so if you were out of the stroller, it would tip backward. Here I was with a beautiful baby and brownies and all dressed up. People loved us.”
There it is: they loved us. My mom wasn’t the type of druggie who neglected her child; she was the type who took her child on deals. If I was her “karmic contract”—as she’s still fond of saying all these years later—that meant she was also mine. At two and a half months old, I became her accomplice. Cruising along with her from business to business loaded with contraband. Getting my diaper changed in supply closets and break rooms. Being greeted with squeals of delight and having my little piggy toes wiggled by customers while my mom dished out the goods. Smelling, I’m quite sure, like a Rastafarian in a chocolate shop with notes of sour milk and pee.
Here’s another thing I know: I liked it.
True, I was too young for specific memories. My prelinguistic brain had no way of cataloging my experiences or the people we encountered. But something from these early forays into the City stays with me like an aftertaste.
It’s a peculiar type of nostalgia, undiluted, raw, separate from my remembrances of later years. A feeling more than a narrative. A sense of belonging. I somehow understood, even then, that my mom and I loved San Francisco and that San Francisco loved us back.
Cheryl experienced her first months in California like a trip down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. “San Francisco was the most fabulous city you could ever go to,” she says, looking back. “I mean, what compares? It really is like a carnival.” Her plan had been to return to Wisconsin once Mer got back on her feet, but she was having too much fun. Rather than become superfluous, Cheryl proposed breaking in new turf, beginning with Polk Gulch.
The area was frothy. It bordered the Tenderloin, a vice district since the early 1900s. An abundance of cheap residential hotels and containment policing made it both a ghetto and a haven for the City’s more marginalized residents: recent immigrants, transgender women, hustlers and prostitutes, drug addicts and alcoholics, and the elderly and impoverished. In 1966, as historian Susan Stryker points out, the management of an all-night Tenderloin diner called Gene Compton’s Cafeteria called the police to roust a group of noisy queens who were hanging around without spending much money. When a cop grabbed one by the arm, she threw hot coffee in his face. Others joined the fray, smashing windows and overturning tables. The ensuing riot consumed several blocks and lasted two days—three years before Stonewall.
A short walk from the heart of the Tenderloin was the mile-long strip of bars, restaurants, and boutiques locals affectionately called Polk Strasse. It had been a “gayborhood” back when Eureka Valley was still working-class and Catholic. Both the annual Halloween street party and the Gay Freedom Day parade (now Pride) had started on Polk. And it didn’t have that upwardly mobile, same-sameness of streets thronged with Castro clones. Sex workers of all genders turned tricks in doorways and alleys. Historian Josh Sides quotes a transgender woman named Regina McQueen: “One side would be men standing out there posing, luscious little creatures—oh! And on the other side of the street would be women dressed in evening gowns with feather boas and big hair and lots of makeup. And the next night, some of the boys would be over there on the other side of the street in femme drag and vice versa.” If the Castro was gay uptown, this was gay downtown. Cheryl got a kick out of the funkiness and the sexually charged air. Even the name, Polk Gulch, sounded like the title of a porno flick.
Until then, Cheryl had followed Mer’s established routes. Now she had to walk into rooms cold and sell drugs to strangers. It helped that Sticky Fingers had a wide reputation.
She’d open with “Hey, ever heard of Sticky Fingers Brownies?”
Often, the response would be “Oh, are you the Brownie Lady?”
Why, yes, she was.
It could be that easy, though not everyone went for it. When Cheryl got turned down, she’d smile sweetly, and say, “I won’t bother you again,” on her way out the door.
Cheryl dressed to party; it helped her get in the mood. Sequined blouses, tight satin pants, high heels or strappy platforms, 1940s hats, and Jackie O. glasses. Sometimes she teased her hair into a giant triangle like a hot version of Roseanne Roseannadanna from Saturday Night Live. One day, she dressed up in a real Girl Scout Brownie uniform that fit her like a micromini—complete with activity patches, pigtails, and knee socks. Clicking down Polk, Cheryl felt sexy and subversive. Customers greeted her with flirtation, laughter, and cash.
Once, when she was covering Mer’s run in the Castro, she wore a sparkling gold trench coat and high heels and nothing underneath, and when she walked into Hot Flash of America, everyone stopped what they were doing to applaud her entrance.
At six feet one (six feet five in certain shoes), Cheryl got noticed walking into a room. She had yards of skinny limbs, a rawness in the visible tendons and joints. When sitting, she tended to fold herself so her elbows and knees formed isosceles triangles like an origami crane. When she wore blouses unbuttoned to her waist (in fashion then), her upper ribs rippled beneath her cleavage, looking both sexy and savage. Not pretty in a girlish way but gorgeous and strange.
People had been telling Cheryl since high school that she should model, but she’d lacked the confidence. She thought that her nose was too wide, her face too long. She’d never felt especially graceful in her movements. But here she was, cutting a high profile in San Francisco and relishing it. She enrolled in modeling classes at the Barbizon school downtown. Most of the other students were too young to drink in bars; Cheryl was twenty-seven and the mother of a toddler. She thought of the classes less in terms of starting a new career than cranking up the volume of her natural assets.
At Barbizon, she learned how to vary her hairstyles—permanents, updos, disco puffs, Farah Fawcett flips. How to use bronzer to slenderize her nose and accentuate her intense cheekbones. How to work the camera with slinky, provocative poses and geometric shapes. How to high step into a room and own it.
Cheryl.
She got everyone at the warehouse involved. Before each sales run, she’d yell, “PHOTOSHOOT!” in a brassy Wisconsin yowl. Mer, Cheryl, and Doug took turns posing using the warehouse’s ample props and patchwork spaces, and drawing inspiration from fashion magazines, dance classes, and one another. Cheryl challenged herself to never repeat a look on her brownie run, a game all three salespeople started playing. They shopped while they dealt. You could trade almost anything for brownies: taxi rides, meals, other drugs, massages, concert and theater tickets, and clothes and jewelry from shops on your route. Anything traded was fair game.
The crew prodded one another, conjuring increasingly dramatic versions of themselves for the camera, exploring themes. Furs, hats, feathers, signs and statement pieces, face and body paint. Doug—always striving for order (a Sisyphean task in the Sticky Fingers world)—began a chronological photo archive of their weekly looks that he housed in five oversize photo albums decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs—what we in the family call the Brownie Books.
The clothing wasn’t merely about looking good; it became an art form. Sometimes they dressed in theme: one day, all three went for a 1930s picnic look; another time, they all wore head-to-toe orange. Often, the outfits reflected the brownie bag designs. Distributing the product was their exhibition; the City was their gallery.
Customers loved it. “It was like an explosion of color and glitter coming down the street,” says Patricia Rodriguez, aka “Sunshine,” a punk photographer who day-jobbed as a cook at the Neon Chicken, a diner on Mer’s route. “I remember, very distinctly, there always being a baby. I remember the stroller and ribbons and balloons and glitter and wild outfits . . . I thought to myself, Man, not only are they here selling brownies, but they’re, like, making a big deal out of it. Not on the down-low or anything.”
It was gutsy to draw attention to oneself while committing a felony. But my folks had another way of looking at it: They wanted to be so obvious that cops wouldn’t suspect them. They’d hide in plain sight.
If you saw a woman dressed to the nines on a weekend afternoon trundling a happy blonde baby down the street in a stroller with balloons streaming off the back, would your first thought be drug dealer?
Part of the weekly fun was hearing about the mischief customers had gotten into.
Eating a whole Sticky Fingers brownie wasn’t usually a great idea; the recommended dose was a quarter. But people didn’t always listen. Hence, many a story started with I ate the whole thing and . . . ended up in Las Vegas or passed out at my brother’s wedding or let my boss take me to an orgy.
Bette Herscowitz from Mendel’s in the Haight, now Doug’s route, liked to keep extra brownies in her freezer. Once, while Bette was vacationing in Thailand, her mother happened upon the stash. She noticed that the brownie tasted funny but ate it anyway. An hour later, her lips became rubbery and numb, and she couldn’t think coherently. Bette’s mother was in her late sixties and thought she was having a stroke. She went to the hospital. The doctors kept her overnight, running tests. By the time they pronounced her healthy, she was feeling fine again. Overdoses—though not physically dangerous—were common.
Sunshine still remembers figuring out her ideal amount. “I never ate a whole one,” she says. “They were too strong. And if I ate a half, I would feel like I wanted to pass out. And a quarter was a little bit too small. But a third was a perfect dose. I could function and still do things. It was a lot of bang for your buck.”
Even if you were careful, the high could be unpredictable. Today, California cannabis products are precisely labeled with THC and CBD proportions as clear as nutritional information on packaged foods. Not so in the 1970s. Plus, since Sticky Fingers sourced their shake from multiple sinsemilla growers, the intensity of the active ingredient varied from week to week. Their best gauge of the product were the anecdotes that came back.
The warehouse was a playground for the Sticky Fingers kids. Children’s toys accumulated: a wooden rocking horse, handmade stuffed animals, wagons and dolls and dump trucks. Two-year-old Noel stomped around in his first cowboy boots. Fridays, when Carmen and Susan Vigil came to bake and wrap, their toddler got into the mix; Marcus and Noel had epic indoor tricycle races.
In a vast, booming space where none of the rooms had ceilings, it got loud. Jeep moved out to live with bachelor friends in the Haight; it was one thing to be kept awake by roommates arguing or having sex, and another to be kept awake by squalling babies. So Cheryl and Noel moved into Jeep’s old loft overlooking the kitchen. Cheryl could walk out onto the rafters, high above the floor, and look down into different areas. She sometimes “visited” Mer in her middle room and talked to her from above.
“It was nuts to be in that place with a baby,” my mom says. The mulchy wood floors were full of splinters. There were exposed wires and carpentry tools, jars of turpentine and palettes of wet oil paint. The rickety stairs up to the loft lacked a guardrail. Cockroaches scuttled in the corners. No heat or insulation from the Pacific chill. With one door and no windows, it was a fire trap.
And why not address the brontosaurus in the room? Weed was everywhere: green clouds engulfed my dad when he prepared the ghee, coating dishes and utensils; dank buds lolled on rolling trays and in unlocked stash boxes; joints smoldered between our parents’ fingers, then shriveled in ashtrays already heaped with roaches; brownie crumbs blanketed the floor where we played. Between second-hand smoke, secret finger swipes of batter, and stolen crumbs, we tots consumed a significant amount of cannabis. It is, I suppose, a testament to the drug’s natural mildness that all three of us have developed into capable, healthy adults.
Meridy swore she wouldn’t be like her mother—domineering, critical, resentful, and depressed over suppressing her own desires to tend a family. She knew what she didn’t want to do, but what did the alternative look like?
In the 1970s, a lot of parents were asking themselves this question. Mer joined a group of new mothers that met every week to share ideas and discuss quandaries in improvised parenting. They were artists and writers and activists exploring new concepts in child-rearing, determined to raise kids without sacrificing their own dreams—a revolutionary notion for women who’d grown up in 1950s households.
A series of photos documents a wind-whipped afternoon at Fort Funston. My folks and a bunch of other adults sit in a circle amid sand dunes and ice plants for some sort of ritual led by a woman swathed in billowing pink plastic and wearing an Egyptian-style headdress. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, but it involves people shouting into abandoned bunkers while the woman in the headdress dances in the wind. My dad has painted the Eye of Horus on his face. I’m there, too: a pudgy pink baby, looking like a figment of someone’s acid reverie.
My parents didn’t let me slow them down. They simply carried me along through the tornado of their lives.
Doug still believed in his duty to carry out the Berkeley Psychic Institute word. He gave readings and shared off-the-cuff observations with friends, brownie clients, and sometimes strangers. His famous phrase was “I just have to tell you . . .” followed by whatever he thought you ought to confront about yourself, your blind spots and weaknesses. He’d call people out on pessimism, denial, hypocrisy, addiction. In Mer’s case, her fluctuating weight. He was everyone’s self-appointed magic mirror.
The reactions were mixed. Maybe Doug’s impromptu readings stung because they hit home. He was perceptive, but he lacked social grace. Instead of waiting for a private moment, he’d dress people down in the middle of a party, in front of friends and lovers, or while trying to sell them brownies—confident that he was doing them a favor by being honest.
Some people found Doug’s candor refreshing. Like Stannous Flouride, the punk counterman at Acme Café in Noe Valley. Stannous had come to San Francisco to be a hippie in the late sixties but found the flower children mealy. Punk culture had all the hedonism and playfulness of the era minus the cheery mood. It offered Stannous a delicious outlet for his manic energy and the internal fuck you he’d been nursing since childhood.
Doug couldn’t wrap his head around punk. The music made him cringe, and the poster art disturbed him. But despite their opposing aesthetics, Doug and Stannous found common ground. They were both intellectual, artistic, and iconoclastic. Both got a buzz from freaking people out. Doug would ask one of his confrontational questions like “What do you get out of projecting hostility into the world?” and instead of taking offense, Stannous would challenge him back. They indulged in long debates about discordance as an art form, the role of violence in social change, and, of course, the Nuns vs. the Bee Gees.
A friendship bloomed. Stannous started hanging out at the warehouse. “I had been buying brownies for a long time before I was ever around during production,” he says, “because production was such a serious operation and the guys who were cooking and stuff wanted to keep it low-key. When I realized the extent of what they were doing, it was like whoa.” Stannous eventually designed two brownie bags, one of which depicts a champagne bottle with the cork popping off, and says, If all the world’s a stage, San Francisco is the cast party!
Stannous had thought the business model was smart from the beginning, but he hadn’t pictured the high volume. “The nature of the distribution made it so that people think, Oh, yeah, the bakery was in Noe Valley, because we were in Noe Valley and we thought it was local,” he says. “I don’t think most people realized that it was citywide, that it was as large as it was.”
By spring of 1978, the brownies were all over town, though few people knew where they came from. Even today, many former customers are surprised to learn the size of the operation. If you were on Polk Street, Cheryl was the Brownie Lady. If you were on the wharf, it was Mer. Why would you expect multiple salespeople working different routes simultaneously?
Doug carefully measured out a thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot square on the warehouse floor. He’d borrowed a power sander from a friend who worked in construction and spent the afternoon shaving away layers of splintery wood. Mer was in Milwaukee introducing her parents to their granddaughter—leaving Doug with much-needed time alone.
It felt good to work with his hands. The roar of the sander, sawdust kicking into the air as he erased old hoofmarks and gouges. He finished the edges meticulously by hand, making clean right angles in the corners. He didn’t have to think, and no one was talking. Beautiful wordless time.
Cheryl and Noel came and went, and he ignored them, deep in his work, eyes on the lines. Later, he suggested they leave again so he could apply thick layers of toxic varnish to seal in the splinters that plagued the rest of the warehouse. Then he installed a ballet barre that he’d found dumpster diving and hung large mirrors. Their own home dance studio.
The dance floor was a gift for Mer. She was bigger than ever after the pregnancy. She took dance classes three days a week but didn’t exercise on the off days. And if Doug didn’t stay on her case, she reverted to eating unhealthy foods. Doug couldn’t figure it out: Why did she choose to be fat?
As the I Ching hexagram “43. Kuai/Break-through (Resoluteness)” said, “The best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.” So here he was, focusing on a positive outcome.
The dance floor would be the centerpiece for amazing parties. And with this in the house, Mer would have no excuse not to exercise daily. It would be a superb surface for the kids, a no-splinter zone for crawling and sliding. A boon to the whole Sticky Fingers family.
With the project finished and Mer still in Milwaukee, Doug allowed himself one small indulgence—an experiment he’d wanted to try for a long while.
“After we became friends,” Stannous Flouride tells me, “your dad took me to see Women in Love at the Castro Theatre. He wanted me to see it because of the wrestling scene. Have you ever seen Women in Love? It should be called Men in Love because it’s actually about the relationship between these two men. And there’s a scene in it where they wrestle. Your dad wanted to see that because he wanted to do that. I was a little taller, but we were both about the same weight. And it was nothing. Get the person down until they say ‘Give’ and then let them up. And then, you know, do it again. And I mean for several hours.”
I ask Stannous if he and my dad were lovers. He gives me a wry, one-sided smile that I’ve noticed is prominent in his facial repertoire. Very punk.
“He and I were probably both . . . I don’t know about bi . . . but sluts at that time in our lives. But this was physical, and it was romantic without being sexual. It was, you know, a chance to be physically intimate with somebody in a nonsexual manner. Wrestling puts you so tightly and so closely into contact.”
Women in Love, a 1969 British melodrama directed by Ken Russell and based on the D. H. Lawrence novel, follows two male friends—Gerald and Rupert—who fall in love with each other and try to make sense of their feelings while surrounded by women. The Castro screened it on March 16, 1978, along with a gay coming-of-age comedy from France, a double bill the theater called “The Search for Sexual Identity.”
I imagine my dad taking Stannous to that resplendent old film house with its gilded statues, velvet curtains, and imposing deco chandelier. Sneaking glances at his companion’s face in the darkened theater, trying to gauge his reactions.
The wrestling scene takes place in a lavish drawing room in front of a crackling fire. “I have a feeling,” Gerald says, eyeing his friend, “that if I don’t watch myself I might do something silly.”
“Why not do it?” Rupert says.
They flirt for another beat. Rupert mentions that he used to do a little “Japanese-style wrestling.”
“How do you start?” Gerald asks.
“Well, you can’t do much in a stuffed shirt.”
Cut to a lock being turned in an ornate door. Cut to the men, now buck naked, circling each other in front of the fire: sculpted abs and biceps, swinging dicks, hairy balls.
The men box lightly. Then one bear-hugs the other and slams him to the ground. They rise and fall again. Grabbing and twisting and rolling. Muscles flex; sweat glistens. There’s the slap of flesh on flesh, the groans and grunts. Dramatic, dark music swells to a fearsome crescendo.
Afterward, resting on a polar bear rug, Rupert pants, “We ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, perfectly, finally, without any possibility of ever going back on it. Shall we swear to each other one day?”
They nearly kiss. Then Gerald squeezes his friend’s shoulder instead—a restrained, fraternal gesture—and says, “Wait until I understand it better.”
The scene is both erotic and poignant. One feels Gerald’s tumult, the struggle between passion and intellect, his war against his instincts. How he doesn’t want to want what he wants.
The bag Doug designed that week depicts the grinning face of Satan—pointy Vulcan ears, reptilian eyes, sharp tongue protruding from a seductive smile. Text beside his face reads, The Devil’s Playground. From the Devil’s left eye pours a river of naked, writhing bodies copulating in every imaginable combination and forming the words Sticky Fingers Brownies.
Doug had an affinity for cycles of sin and expiation, dissolution and rebirth. His next bag—for his wife’s return the following week—was a portrait of a haloed Jesus Christ along with a quote from John 3:3: And JESUS said; Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.
Mer was delighted by the dance floor. She stepped into the center and tried out a few moves on the slick surface. She loved to dance, and Doug’s idea of bringing that into the home filled her with optimism. They would groove together, to their own music, melding their styles.
Doug twirled her into a dip.
They began planning a summer bash.
At first, Mer didn’t see that the dance floor might be a boobytrap. That she would be goaded to exercise constantly whether she had the time and energy or not, that she’d be shamed if she skipped a day. She didn’t immediately notice something backhanded in the gift.
Nor did she know about Doug’s wrestling date with Stannous or his occasional erotic adventures in the men’s sauna at Finnila’s Finnish Baths. She sometimes got jealous when she caught him eyeing thinner women, but she failed to notice his attraction to men.
For the last weekend of March, Mer designed a bag based on an image from her tarot deck: a sweet-faced young man wandering over a grassy hill.
The Fool.