In Barb’s dream, three men stood in the warehouse facing away from her. Single file, like they were waiting in line for tickets at a movie theater. She didn’t know who they were or why they were there, couldn’t see their faces. The man at the rear raised his arm. In his hand, a glint of metal: a gun. Before Barb could react, he shot the person ahead of him point-blank in the back of the head. With the jerky movement of an automaton, he stepped over the body to shoot the third man, who hit the floor with a thud that shook the walls.
She awoke with blood pounding in her ears, her skin tingling. Her eyes adjusted slowly, picking out bluish rectangles high above: skylights. I’m in the warehouse. In bed. It was just a dream.
Barb called to Boogie in a whisper. She heard his claws click across the wood floor and his panting draw near. She felt for her cigarettes in the dark, then smoked one while stroking Boogie’s shaggy ears. She heard overlapping snores: from the back of the warehouse where Doug and Mer and the baby slept, and from Cheryl and Noel’s loft in front. Everyone was all right. Boogie snuffled, settling on the floor by the bed.
Barb had landed back in San Francisco after her summer on the road with A Chorus Line and was staying in the warehouse while looking for her own place. Having fantasized about starting her own clothing line for some time, she’d enrolled at the San Francisco School of Fashion Design to learn about merchandising. Maybe, she thought, the rootlessness is starting to get to me.
The next morning, Barb mentioned her nightmare to Doug. “This building used to be a livery stable, like after the 1906 quake,” he said. “There could have been a shoot-out here long ago. Maybe you’re picking up old vibes.”
Barb stirred cream into her coffee. “I have been really psychic lately,” she said. “It’s almost too much.”
She blamed this on her new boyfriend, a real estate agent named Mike White. She’d met him at a party—tall, sandy-haired, kind eyes—then bumped into him again at a Scientology meeting. When they met a third time on the street, Mike asked her out. He was divorced and had a son who lived out of state. One evening, out of the blue, Barb said, “I think your mother’s going to call tonight. Something about your son. He wants to live with you again.” Mike’s phone rang a little later, and guess who it was. Within weeks, Mike’s thirteen-year-old son had moved back to the City. Ever since they’d started dating, Barb’s antenna had been picking up signals from all over the place.
She sipped her coffee, smiled at Doug. “Guess I’m pulling stuff out of the air.”
But the dream lingered, remaining vivid as weeks passed.
Late September, my parents packed their blue plastic suitcases and my portable stroller for a trip to Europe. This would be their honeymoon. Barb and Cheryl would handle brownie sales until we returned in mid-November.
In my baby passport picture, my dad’s knobby hands hold me up in front of a screen. I’m wearing a little milkmaid outfit and smiling. The first stamp, on September 30, 1978, is an entrance to Paris. From there, we toured Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Trains, planes, automobiles. Four countries over six weeks with a baby in diapers. My mom had already decided that motherhood wouldn’t knock the adventure out of her life; I would be part of the fun. And it’s true that I look cheerful in pictures from the trip, all toothless smiles and balled fists. My parents wear stylish travel outfits—Mer in an off-the-shoulder sweater and a burgundy beret; Doug in his leather cowboy hat and a denim shirt Barb had embroidered with an image of a falcon flying over a river valley.
Art had brought Doug and Mer together, and it would be the focus of the trip. Museums in every city. At the Uffizi in Florence, my mom says we sat for an hour in the Botticelli room while I baby-talked to the cherubs in The Birth of Venus. I’m told I took my first baby steps in my grandmother’s garden in Mijas, Spain, where on clear days you could see Morocco like a mirage across the water.
The City was not quiet while we were away. Senator John Briggs was stumping for Proposition 6, stirring the pot at every opportunity. He campaigned throughout the state but focused especially on San Francisco, which he liked to describe as the “moral garbage dump of homosexuality in this country.” He gave California’s more conservative elements a platform. For those in San Francisco who’d been displaced by gay gentrification—families who couldn’t compete economically against newcomers with two incomes and no kids—Prop. 6 offered a chance to punch back. And it was working. A widely published September poll had the measure leading 61 percent to 31 percent, with only 8 percent undecided.
But San Francisco’s lesbians and gays were ready for battle. Harvey, who’d just lost his lover Jack Lira to suicide, threw himself into the campaign like a man on fire leaping into a swimming pool. The community rallied around him. There were televised debates, marches, and fundraisers. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. Even punks got into it; the Mab threw a September benefit party called Save the Homos featuring performances by DV8, the Dils, and the Offs!, all proceeds going to Harvey’s anti-Briggs fund.
Bay Area activists bused to the most rural nooks of the state, hoping that if people could speak face to face with real homosexuals the monster image would crumble. This was classic Harvey, who insisted that people were innately good and intelligent, just educated differently. He thought anyone could be won over if you were earnest and friendly and open.
Meanwhile, Dennis Peron was running a campaign of his own. Dennis had been out on bail, with his trial over the Big Top bust ongoing, when he’d marched into the registrar’s office—flanked by dozens of supporters and a bugle player for dramatic flair—and announced that he had 20,800 signatures to get Proposition W on the ballot: toot-tootle-oo!
Prop. W stated: We, the people of San Francisco, demand that the District Attorney, along with the Chief of Police, cease the arrest and prosecution of individuals involved in the cultivation, transfer, or possession of marijuana.
Toward the end of Dennis’s trial, his defense received a major boost from an unlikely source: Dennis’s own irrepressible mouth. Whenever he saw the cop who’d shot him in the hall outside the courtroom, Dennis made catty remarks, complimenting Makaveckas’s footwear or hairstyle in a queeny tone. One day, according to Dennis, the cop snapped. “You motherfucking faggot! I wish I’d killed you,” he said. “One less faggot in San Francisco.” The judge happened to overhear. In court later that day, when asked to demonstrate how he’d angled his gun during the raid, Makaveckas pulled out his service revolver and aimed it at Dennis for some thirty seconds. Outraged, the judge threw out the policeman’s testimony, stripping the prosecution of their key witness. Dennis got a light sentence of six months in county jail followed by four years of probation.
Once the verdict came down and Dennis started doing his time, he went right on fighting for Prop. W—from jail. He also launched a campaign for a seat on the city charter revision commission. The press seemed amused. “[Peron] has determined that 200 of his 2500 fellow inmates at San Bruno are registered voters of San Francisco,” one reporter wrote. “And he is forced to confine his electioneering largely to them.”
Mer was impressed, if a bit baffled. “Dennis was fearless,” she says. “Just absolutely fearless. Such a sweet guy, you know, Dennis wouldn’t harm a fly. But he had balls of iron! I was pretty brave but never like that.”
My parents had cast absentee ballots before leaving for Europe. They wouldn’t learn the results until our return in mid-November.
Barb had a second dream in the middle of October that was almost identical to the first. Again, she saw three men standing in a line with their backs to her and felt a surge of adrenaline. Again, the man in back shot his two companions. A pool of dark blood swamped her feet. The name White drifted through her mind.
She awoke panting. What the hell did Mike White have to do with this? She knew he kept guns; she’d seen them in a glass cabinet at his house. They had a date the next night, so she decided to confront him.
“This is going to sound weird,” she said to him at dinner. “I’m having these really vivid dreams where you’re shooting people.”
Mike squinted. “What?”
“I’m getting your name in the dream, too. I just . . . I feel like something bad is going to happen to you. Or maybe you’re going to do something bad.”
“That’s a rotten thing to say.”
Barb leveled her gaze. “Well, I know you have guns. I’ve seen them.”
“So what! I inherited them, okay? My father was a cop. I don’t . . . shoot people, Barbara.”
Mike brooded through dinner. Barb didn’t hear from him for days after that. When he finally called, it was to break up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But this psychic stuff with you is too much.”
Barb felt defeated; she was fond of Mike. But she decided that the dreams must have been a warning to steer clear of him. She would ask for an aura cleansing from Doug when he and Mer got back from Europe. She’d gotten too hooked into Mike White’s psyche somehow.
Halloween night 1978, Senator John Briggs tried to prank San Francisco’s gay community. He called the SFPD early that evening to say that he was heading to Polk Street (which would be cordoned off for the annual street party). He also notified the press, obviously angling for publicity. “I’m here because this is a children’s night and I’m interested in children,” he said. A gaggle of journalists turned up for the expected confrontation between the homo-hating senator and some 80,000 queens on their high holiday.
Mayor Moscone caught wind of the planned shenanigans and intervened. Instead of delivering Briggs to Polk Street, a police cruiser escorted him to nearby Larkin Street, where he was met by the mayor, supervisors Milk and Silver, and Police Chief Gain, along with some twenty-five cops under orders to keep him out of Polk Gulch. A handful of years before, the SFPD had routinely arrested and often brutalized flagrant homosexuals. Now, some of the same cops were being used to protect them from an outside agitator. This didn’t help the mayor’s abysmal relationship with the SFPD rank and file.
On November 7, the Briggs Initiative got walloped in the voting booths—definitively and permanently crushed. Prop. 6 lost two-to-one statewide. When the results were announced, the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band took to the streets with baton twirlers. So many people flooded the Castro for an impromptu dance party that the police had to block traffic until four in the morning.
The following week, we returned from Europe.
To Mer, the news seemed good on all fronts. Not only had Briggs failed, but Dennis’s weed proposition had blazed to an easy victory. The city measure was nonbinding, but it would send a message about the people’s will: leave stoners alone.
Mer decided to put a call in to Goran the nitrous oxide–huffing lawyer to discuss the next step. She thought the moment to take the brownies aboveboard might be imminent.
She was wrong. In the chaos of the coming weeks, Prop. W would be lost in the shuffle. It would take Peron nearly two more decades to push the next piece of pro-pot legislation through. By then, marijuana would no longer be a good-time drug; it would be medicine.
My mom still believed we were cruising on the upside of a wave. But there was gravity to consider.
Mer hit the wharf on November 18, 1978, with me in the stroller—her first brownie run since Europe. It was an exquisite day on the waterfront, with fresh salt breezes sailing in from the Pacific to nudge wispy clouds inland. The vermilion bridge looked particularly majestic, its height and breadth accentuated by Mer’s sea-level view.
Pier 39, a new shopping center-cum-tourist attraction, had launched with a big whoopty-do while she was away. Mer was eager to check it out and had brought extra brownies to use as samples for new customers. After doing her usual route around Aquatic Park, Ghirardelli Square, the Cannery, and along Jefferson Street, she made her way toward the white and blue flags marking the entrance of the new mall. Maneuvering the stroller through a pushy crowd, she entered a multilevel complex of shops, restaurants, and entertainment, all with a nautical aesthetic—like a Disney version of the pier that had been there before.
Hundreds of people staffed the new stores and attractions. And if they were dealing with throngs of tourists from morning until night, Mer figured they’d want to get high. It wasn’t easy to navigate Pier 39’s wooden staircases with a stroller, but Mer managed to give out sample brownies at several new shops and concession stands.
Among her first customers on the pier was a unicycle-riding juggler and funnyman named Robert Armstrong Nelson III, better known as the Butterfly Man. Decades later, Butterfly would remember that first day clearly. “I was at [Pier 39] on day one; Meridy was probably there on day two. She was young and not so innocent, and she was hungry in those days or she wouldn’t have been out there pounding the road like I was. She was living by her wits; I was living by mine.” Butterfly had gotten a giant monarch tattooed on his prematurely bald pate as a commitment to juggling. (Who would hire him for anything else?) He saw Mer as one of his kind. “Your mother became an icon because of her choice of nomenclature—the Brownie Lady—and the way she approached it,” he says. “She had this look that she gave you. She had these beautiful eyes and she was so commanding in her presence. She’d say, ‘Would you like to buy some brownies?’ And she never veered from your gaze. You felt like you were being read by a psychic. She became a staple of our subculture.”
With dedicated areas for busking, Pier 39 was an extension of the vaudevillian street-performing scene that had erupted on the wharf in the early seventies. It was also an evolution. Two levels of balconies surrounded the main stage, bringing a vertical aspect to theater in the round. Shows got bigger and splashier. One stage converted into a nine-foot-deep pool, and a high-dive team performed dizzying leaps from an eighty-seven-foot ladder.
Pier 39 had been controversial from the start—rife with accusations of bribery and political favoritism, and complaints from those who wanted to preserve what little remained of the working-class waterfront. By the time the complex opened, the FBI had already launched an investigation into whether a certain supervisor got a food concession in exchange for pushing permits through. The subject of the investigation was the straitlaced thirty-two-year-old from Visitacion Valley, Dan White.
Having given up a fireman’s salary to begin his new job, White was struggling to support his wife and infant son on a supervisor’s modest income of $9,600 per year. At the new Pier 39, he opened the Hot Potato, a fried-spud stand. The week prior, on November 10, he’d tendered his resignation to Mayor Moscone, explaining that the potato stand was consuming too much time but that he needed the money.
If on that Saturday, my mom had offered a sample brownie to Dan White at the Hot Potato, she would’ve been met with a cold reception—if not a call to the police. Most likely, she took one look at White’s anchorman haircut and pushed the stroller right past, barely noticing his all-American good looks. The world would know that face soon enough.
That very afternoon, in a steaming jungle 4,396 miles away, the Reverend Jim Jones gave orders for the Jonestown medical doctor to mix tranquilizers and potassium cyanide into a vat of Flavor Aid.
News trickled out of Guyana slowly; it would take a full week for the public to learn the extent of what happened that Saturday. The first word, Sunday morning, was that California Congressman Leo Ryan had been shot on a tiny airstrip several miles from the Jonestown settlement. (He’d been investigating the Peoples Temple for nearly a year and had flown down to Guyana at the behest of constituents who were worried about their relatives at the agricultural mission.) By nightfall, Ryan was confirmed dead along with three reporters and a woman who’d tried to escape the settlement with Ryan’s group. Another Peoples Temple member living in Guyana’s capital had gruesomely slain her three children with a butcher knife before killing herself.
Monday-morning headlines screamed 400 DEAD IN GUYANA. Gory details emerged. A carpet of decomposing corpses, many beyond identification. People standing in line to drink poison while others writhed and seized on the ground and those who resisted were forcibly injected. On TV and in newspapers, “experts” waxed about suicide cults while the many politicians who’d enjoyed Jones’s support—like Mayor Moscone—scrambled to cover their asses. Some news reports described up to five hundred people escaping into the jungle.
In San Francisco, especially within the predominantly black Fillmore district where many of the Jonestown settlers had lived, vigils stretched through the week in hope that loved ones would emerge from the Guyanese wilds. Fog smothered San Francisco like wet wool, erasing bridges and buildings. Foghorns lowed in the bay. There were terrifying rumors. One Jonestown survivor warned reporters that temple snipers would “seek out their enemies one by one and kill them.” Some feared a large-scale terrorist attack (not far-fetched; Jones had reluctantly abandoned a plan to crash an airplane into the Golden Gate Bridge). Police guarded the Peoples Temple on Geary around the clock to both protect the remaining members from vigilantes and watch their every move. People stayed home, glued to television sets. Bars kept the music low and the news on while drinkers grimly sipped beers or saluted wordlessly with shots of the strong stuff.
Saturday brought devastating news: the whereabouts of the missing five hundred. The corpses thought to be strewn on the dirt actually lay on top of more corpses—piled four deep in places. On the bottom layer, the most profoundly decomposed, were children and babies. Snowplows had to be flown into the jungle to scrape up the remains. Guyanese officials detained only two people related to the killings. Nearly everyone else was dead, including Jim Jones. A week after the massacre, the total body count settled at 918.
My folks didn’t know anyone personally who’d gone to Jonestown. But Mer had lived a couple blocks from the Peoples Temple in the early days of the brownie business and had interacted with temple members on the street. She thought of faces from the neighborhood. The civilian death toll was among the highest in American history, not to be exceeded until 9/11.
An almost seismic shifting, a crack rent into reality.
Doug had designed a lighthearted brownie bag that week, but as the Jonestown tragedy deepened, he threw it out. Instead of having new bags printed at the shop, he decided to do them himself; he needed the release. He glopped acrylic paint onto a board in primary colors and used a dry paint roller to apply broken layers of pigment to bag after bag, doing hundreds of them in a fog of despair.
Doug had never given the Peoples Temple much thought. He’d heard about some of the scandals but mostly remembered admiring their social projects: the soup kitchen, drug rehab programs, senior centers, and their defense of free speech and racial equality. As Doug understood it, they had gone into the jungle to build a new kind of society. He’d idly wondered, now and again, Would I have the fortitude for that? Could I give up my comforts?
Staggering to think that this had mutated into something so evil.
Layers of red, layers of blue, slashes of yellow. Moments of vivid color, moments of hideous murk. He thought about the choices people had made. The pain of the human condition that might draw someone, step by step, to follow a madman to their death. In seeking, in devotion to public service, in striving for equality, those who’d joined the Peoples Temple seemed to express mankind’s finer attributes. It had seemed like the ultimate utopian experiment.
Demise disguised as salvation; an ending disguised as a beginning. He called the bag Camouflage.
Mayor George Moscone vomited when he heard the news. He spent days on the phone calling relatives of people in Jonestown. Jim Jones had become profoundly ensconced in the San Francisco political structure. Numerous politicians were implicated but none as conspicuously as the mayor—who’d already fought off a recall attempt over his relationship with the Peoples Temple. Moscone had appointed Jim Jones chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1976. The massacre at Jonestown could well have wrecked Moscone’s career. But the mayor wouldn’t live long enough for that.
The same week as the horror of Jonestown slowly unfolded, a small drama was brewing at city hall, though it didn’t draw much attention at the time. Dan White, who’d resigned as supervisor to run the Hot Potato at Pier 39, wanted his job back. It would later emerge that members of the Police Officers Association were leaning heavily on White, as was the Association of Realtors. White was their conservative bulwark against a liberal majority on the board of supervisors. Moscone initially told White he could come back. But after hearing complaints from White’s own constituents and a rousing pitch from Harvey for all they could accomplish with an unimpeded liberal board, the mayor changed his mind.
White huffed to reporters, “The gloves are off.”
On November 27, Barb had a third violent nightmare. She floated down a long hallway. A man walked in front of her, whom she could see only from the elbows down, as if viewing him from a fixed camera angle. She watched his shoes moving across the floor, his hands swinging at his sides. He entered a room and approached a large wooden desk that made Barb think of a hotel. Another man sat behind the desk; Barb could see his suit and tie and his hands folded in front of him. The person she followed pulled a gun and shot the man at the desk. Then he passed through a door into another room and slaughtered a second man.
Barb sat bolt upright in bed with the name White burning bright in her mind.
She was living in her own place by then, a flat close to the warehouse. She checked her bedside clock; it was past three. The dreams were growing more detailed, solidifying.
Barb had already been thinking about Mike White that week. He had once mentioned that he’d helped broker the sale when Jim Jones bought the Peoples Temple building on Geary. Now there were rumors about Temple snipers planning to attack. Had Mike gotten tangled up in this somehow? She couldn’t ignore the feeling of dread.
Her hands shook as she dialed.
Mike answered, his voice thick with sleep.
“Uh, Mike? It’s Barb.”
“Jesus, what time is it?”
“I had that dream again, the one where you’re shooting people.”
“Look, I don’t know what kind of drugs you’re on, but don’t call here again. Leave me the fuck alone. Or I will call the police.”
Unable to sleep, Barb chain-smoked until it was time to head downtown for class. A long day of sewing stretched ahead of her. It was an overcast morning, yellowish and windless. Too warm for late November. Two women were talking about it on the bus. “Earthquake weather,” one said.
At school, Barb dove into her sewing project and let the trainlike drone of the machine calm her. She commented to a classmate that awful dreams had kept her awake.
“That’s funny,” her friend said. “I had a nightmare, too. Something in the air I guess.”
“Mm-hmm,” Barb murmured. “Earthquake weather.”
At 11:20, an emergency bulletin interrupted the music on the radio at their shared table. Dianne Feinstein spoke: “As president of the board of supervisors, it is my duty to make this announcement,” she said haltingly. “Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.”
In the sewing room, someone screamed.
“The suspect,” Feinstein continued, “is Supervisor Dan White.”
Patrolman Jerry D’Elia was buying a hot dog at the Doggie Diner on Van Ness Avenue when a high-priority call came in over dispatch. He and his partner jumped into their cruiser and sped the three blocks to city hall. D’Elia ran up the marble stairs to the lavish rotunda. A sergeant he recognized from another station gestured toward the mayor’s office. D’Elia walked in and saw Moscone sprawled in a pool of blood. The office was already crowded with police, so he hurried back out to find the sergeant. “What can I do? Where do you need me?”
“Go down the other end. Harvey Milk’s been shot.”
The situation felt unreal to D’Elia, like some sort of elaborate prank. As he started toward the supervisors’ chambers, he turned, and said, “Hey, Sarge, do you have any suspects?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Dan White.”
Decades later, D’Elia recognizes that he’d entered a kind of denial. “I started laughing,” he says. “I thought, Here’s this time of crisis, and he can come up with a joke . . . I won’t add all the adjectives he called me. But he let me know he wasn’t kidding.”
Mer had just gotten back from dance class and was changing out of her sweaty clothes when the phone rang. It was Donald, who’d come back to the City and was living with roommates in the Haight. He was crying so hard that Mer could barely make out the words, and when she did, they didn’t make sense.
She thought of Harvey as she’d last seen him, walking loose-limbed down Castro Street one Friday before she’d left for Europe, talking with a younger man and casually waving to people they passed. Mer remembered noticing how long and expressive his fingers were and thinking he’d be interesting to draw or paint sometime—she loved doing unique hands. Maybe, she thought, I’ll pitch that idea to him if the opportunity comes up. When their paths crossed that day, Harvey nodded and smiled but seemed engrossed in his conversation. Mer smiled back and continued with her brownie run. Now he was dead.
She sat there, still pantsless, her skin tacky on the wooden chair, and felt a wave of collective sadness roll toward her like the aftershock of an earthquake. It hit her in the solar plexus, seemed to lift her out of the chair for a moment, then drop her back into it.
Our wave, she thought, it’s crashing.
There was no manhunt, no mystery. The details came out all at once on the day of the killings.
At 10:25 in the morning, Dan White had crawled into city hall through a basement window to avoid metal detectors, walked to George Moscone’s office on the second floor, exchanged words briefly. When the mayor turned to fix him a conciliatory drink, White produced his revolver. He shot the mayor four times, once in the shoulder, once in the pectoral, and twice point-blank to the head. He then reloaded his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 36 with hollow-point bullets and hurried to the other side of city hall. White popped his head into the office where Harvey Milk was talking with a colleague. “Say, Harv, can I see you a minute?”
White led Harvey across the hall, into the office that had been his until recently, closed the door behind them, and pulled out his gun. Harvey raised his right hand in a defensive gesture. White shot him once through the wrist, twice in the chest, then twice to the back of his skull.
George Moscone was forty-nine. Harvey Milk was forty-eight.
Some who heard the gunshots thought a car was backfiring outside. Feinstein recognized the sound of gunfire and ran to Harvey’s office, finding him on the floor. When she picked up his wrist to feel for a pulse, her finger slid into a bullet wound.
Amid the confusion, Dan White exited city hall unobstructed. He drove to a nearby phone booth and arranged to meet his wife at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. The couple walked together to the same police station where Dan White had worked in his days on the force. He turned himself in.
Jonestown took a week to emerge, but the murders at city hall took minutes. Both tragedies were impossible to accept and impossible to erase. The brutality of those two gestures. A one-two punch that left the City reeling.
Cleve Jones was picketing with the Local 2 union when an acquaintance yelled to him from a bus window: “Cleve, it’s on the radio, they shot Mayor Moscone!” He caught a taxi to city hall. Time seemed to slow down, his footsteps echoing eerily off the marble as he hurried toward the supervisors’ offices to look for Harvey.
Not until he saw his mentor’s secondhand wingtip shoes protruding from Dan White’s old office did he realize that Harvey had been hurt. Cleve reached the door just as a cop was turning the body over; Harvey’s face was a horrific shade of purple, his skull blasted apart. Blood and brain matter on the walls.
It’s over, Cleve thought. It’s all over.
He felt his emotions shutting down even as another part of his mind kicked into autopilot. Cleve made his way back to Castro Street and quickly put together flyers for a candlelight vigil. People were milling around the neighborhood, some in apparent shock, some weeping. At the Village Deli, Dan Clowry handed out candles and paper cups until they had no more, then shuttered the café.
The crowd grew to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.
Cleve’s flyers had hardly been necessary. The “disaster route” the Castro activists had strategically introduced that summer was working. Everyone knew where to take their grief.
Doug and Mer packed a baby bag and bundled me into a stroller. By the time they made their way to the corner of Market and Castro, most nearby businesses were dark, some with hastily written tributes to Harvey in the windows. Candles glowed in waxed paper cups. At nightfall, the crowd moved toward city hall as one body—some 30,000 people, newspapers would say—walking in near silence. A river of tiny flickering lights keeping pace with a spare drumbeat as steady as a heart. At city hall, the half-mast flags hung limply, the air unusually still.
Dianne Feinstein, who’d been catapulted automatically from president of the board of supervisors to interim mayor, addressed the crowd briefly. Various speakers groped for words. Joan Baez played “Kumbaya” and other folk dirges. Finally, someone held a tape recorder up to the mic and replayed Harvey Milk’s victory speech from a rally held after defeating the Briggs Initiative three weeks before. A short time ago but suddenly a very different time. His voice with the tinny Long Island accent, the bravado and humor, left the crowd cheering and sobbing. The next morning, the statue of Abraham Lincoln was glazed in the wax of hundreds of candles left to gutter out.
Moscone had been the people’s mayor—that was how Mer thought of him. A native San Franciscan who seemed unperturbed by the young people who thronged to his hometown in search of freedom. From old San Francisco but not of it. A guy who wanted to see women and minorities in government, and who didn’t so much mind if people smoked weed. And Harvey, well . . . if Moscone was the head of liberal San Francisco, Milk was its heart. Now the City had lost both.
Doug, Mer, and Cheryl talked about closing Sticky Fingers until the new year but thought better of it. People would need to be soothed. Doug’s next bag was a prayer for those lost and a message of hope for those left behind. He drew a mandala composed of maybe a hundred humanoid bodies radiating outward from a circle of light. Other bodies floated up from the void to join the web. It read, Returning in Pure Compassion to the Wheel.
The City limped toward the year’s end like a crash victim. A hitch in its step, a stagger, not quite itself, but somehow still alive. You think you won’t go on, but you do go on.
Around Christmas, Mer suggested they throw a party to put some closure on the year. “Let’s get the energy flowing in a different direction.”
Sticky Fingers gave a New Year’s bash. In pictures from that night, everyone looks manic and pale, a little desperate, eyes bulging over gritted smiles. Confetti dusts their hair like ash from a house fire. Mer, who was no longer breastfeeding, looks coked out. Cheryl is mostly absent from the pictures; she’d broken her own rule about dosage, eaten half a dozen brownies, and passed out in the middle of the party.
There is a picture of me the next day. One year old, zipped into a flannel onesie and crawling through drifts of confetti past empty bottles of cheap champagne, looking dazed and nervous.
1979 had begun.