On January 14, 1981, policemen knocked on the door of a Victorian flat in the Castro. A plump woman with curly gray hair and owlish glasses answered. “I figured you guys were coming,” she said sweetly, as the cops filed in. They nabbed fifty-four dozen brownies, eighteen pounds of pot, a half ounce of psilocybin mushrooms, thirty-five pounds of margarine, fifty pounds each of flour and sugar, twenty-two dozen eggs, and twenty-one thousand feet of plastic wrap.
Mary Jane Rathbun had been a waitress for forty-three years until she fell while working the graveyard shift at IHOP. She told reporters—and later the courts—that she’d been selling marijuana brownies for the past six months to supplement her Social Security income. Calling herself Brownie Mary, she’d posted flyers on telephone poles around the Castro offering “magically delicious” baked goods and listing her phone number and regular business hours. She’d been an easy catch for narcs, who only had to phone and ask for her address.
It’s possible that Mary had been baking with weed longer than she admitted (Dennis Peron later said he’d carried her treats at his Big Top Marijuana Supermarket for a while during the late 1970s). But if Mary’s version is true, she began peddling brownies in the Castro several months after Sticky Fingers left for the country. She’d found a hungry market.
This was how Mer the Brownie Lady became conflated with Brownie Mary. Both women sold high-grade sinsemilla brownies in the Castro. They didn’t look alike—Mer favored glitzy outfits and vampy makeup while Mary, twenty-five years older, wore Hawaiian-print shirts and polyester slacks—but they were both full-figured white women with curly hair. Sticky Fingers closed right before Brownie Mary opened shop. Then Mer reopened for monthly stints at Beck’s just as Mary’s home sales were expanding. Who wouldn’t get confused?
“People in the neighborhood would ask for her [Brownie Mary’s] brownies,” says Dan Clowry of the Village Deli. “Even though we had Sticky Fingers and knew that name, people would come in and say, ‘Do you have Brownie Mary’s brownies?’” He didn’t bother correcting them.
Anyone getting busted was bad news. At the same time, Mer had to imagine that if any cops had been eyeing her since the warehouse days they would now assume that they’d found the real culprit.
Mary Rathbun stepped boldly into the limelight after her arrest. What she lacked in subtlety she made up for in charm. Though only fifty-seven, she gave off serious granny vibes. She spoke in a warbly voice and hobbled on bad knees. Her only daughter had died in a car accident in 1974; you couldn’t help but sympathize. There was something irresistible about Mary Rathbun, and she knew it. “I was pretty blatant, to say the least,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But who’s gonna mess with me—a little old lady who fell on her butt and baked health food brownies to supplement her income?”
The press was smitten.
The courts didn’t seem to know what to do with such a likeable dealer. Mary fretted to one interviewer that she was looking at fifteen-to-twenty years in the slammer; but as an elderly white woman with no previous record, she got off with a thirty-day suspended sentence, three years on probation, and five hundred hours of community service.
The community service turned out to be life-changing for Mary. She started in the soup kitchen at St. Martin de Porres House of Hospitality but soon switched to the Shanti Project, an organization offering end-of-life counseling and hospice care. Shanti was beginning to look after the young men coming down with gay cancer—many of whom were outcasts from their birth families. After finishing her court-ordered service, Mary went right on volunteering. She found a home for her soul among the City’s lost boys. As Dennis later wrote, “Mary had lost her only daughter in an auto accident . . . and now she adopted every kid in San Francisco as her own.”
Mary noticed that cannabis helped with a variety of gay cancer symptoms—notably nausea, appetite loss, insomnia, pain, and depression. In defiance of the court, she went back to what she did best: baking. In December 1982, one of the same narcs who’d originally arrested Mary caught her with four dozen brownies. Rathbun explained that she had baked them for a friend suffering from cancer. She was charged with multiple counts of possession and violation of her probation.
By now, Mary’s reputation had grown, and the community rallied—circulating petitions, fundraising, and writing letters. Mid-1983, the district attorney bucked convention and dropped the charges against her.
From the beginning, Brownie Mary had described weed as “health food” or “medicine” for her sore back and knees—never as a drug. Though ganja lovers had been extolling the medicinal value of cannabis for ages, Mary was among the first to successfully sell that notion to the US media. Maybe America needed someone grandmotherly to do it—especially with ultramaternal Nancy Reagan adopting the War on Drugs as her FLOTUS pet project. Mary was sweet and earthy. Her tireless volunteerism won hearts. People could disagree with her, but it was impossible to paint Mary Rathbun as a villain.
The tenor of the Castro was changing. Boys were still on the street, cruising, looking good, laughing. But there was something in the air, snaking through the crowds. A new scent.
Fear.
Everyone knew someone who had gay cancer.
Mer saw it on her monthly runs. Those little purple spots. Roger had one, then Michael had two, then Patrick had five. Pudgy Ronald, who was always trying fad diets to lose weight, seemed excited to have found a regimen that really worked; a month later, his collarbones protruded. When Mer phoned Rick to say she was in town, he apologized that he wasn’t feeling up to company—down with the flu again. What the hell was going on? Were these a bunch of little problems or one big one? Could it have something to do with the poppers everyone was into at the discos and sex clubs? Was someone poisoning the liquid soap in the bathhouses? Was the CIA in on it? Some guys started eating healthier, taking more vitamins, going out less. Others played harder, leaning heavier on cocaine and poppers, and spending night after night at the baths—might as well have fun.
Bobbi Campbell, the nurse who’d made the gay cancer poster, joined an order of drag nuns-cum-activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Reinventing himself as Sister Florence Nightmare, RN, Campbell encouraged the group to draw attention to the illness with its rambunctious brand of street theater. In June 1982, the Sisters hosted a campy dog show at Hibernia Beach, drawing a crowd of some five hundred people with both the dogs and the owners in costume. It was the Sisters’ second annual dog show. This year, however, all proceeds went to the new Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation—possibly the world’s first fundraiser to fight gay cancer.
Two months later, Mer’s friend and customer Michael Maletta died.
When Mer heard the news at Beck’s, it hit her right in the third eye, spun her momentarily out of her body. “Jesus,” she gasped. “But he’s so young.”
Not only young but vibrant. A stylish and handsome New Yorker with strawberry blond hair and a wicked wit. One of those people who seemed more alive than others around him. In the warehouse days, Mer had sold him brownies every week at his in-home hair salon on Market Street. Michael was known for throwing lavish all-night happenings; the outrageous Stars party, where Mer had sold brownies in 1978, had been Michael’s doing. He’d been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma a mere nine months before dying in hospice care. Mer hadn’t seen him in a while, but it hadn’t occurred to her to worry. Now he was dead.
A couple of months later, in November, Patrick Cowley, Sylvester’s synth player and the producer of Step II—the album that had rocketed the singer to international disco stardom—died from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Mer had smoked pot with Patrick at Sylvester’s house and chatted with him at gigs. He was a pale willowy blond. A little bookish, quietly sarcastic, someone who always seemed like the smartest guy in the room. In the last year of his life, aware that he was dying, Patrick worked against the clock. He cofounded Megatone Records, and wrote, arranged, and recorded three complete albums as well as two dance-club hits. Patrick would be lauded posthumously as a key innovator of electronic music; decades later, his tracks would be collected and reissued. He died at thirty-two.
By the end of 1982, the San Francisco Department of Public Health had recorded forty-six deaths from what was now being called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Nationwide, some nine hundred cases had been reported to the CDC. A former brownie customer, Ellen Freed, was now working as a medical assistant in an STD clinic with gay clientele. At night, when she went dancing at the Stud, friends would bounce up to her: “Hey, Ellen, look at this spot on my arm. Do I have the gay cancer?” She would squint at their skin under the strobing disco lights and suggest they make an appointment for a proper exam. Then they’d go back to dancing.
Few could fathom the enormity of what was coming—least of all a five-year-old. With that capacity young humans have for absorbing new realities, I gathered that some of my mom’s friends were sick—the suddenly skinny ones, the frail and hunched ones—though the gravity escaped me. Nothing changed how much I loved coming to the City.
I was more comfortable hanging out with stoned adults than with other children. I’d twirl around the motel room, tell jokes I’d made up myself, wiggle loose teeth with my tongue—and they rewarded me with laughter and attention. Kids were heavy and baffling, but grown-ups loved me.
By early 1983, we had moved from Hearst to a smaller ranch house closer to town. My parents enrolled me in a Waldorf school where we learned basic math by drawing gnomes who gathered and lost gemstones. I did well in class but poorly on the playground. I’m not sure what alienated me from other children so early, but I imagine it had to do with being socialized in such a peculiar environment. Perhaps learning to keep secrets at a young age made me cagey. There must have been a moment when my parents sat me down and explained that their business was illegal—that I’d have to lie to protect them—but I don’t remember it. That knowledge seems to have always been with me. By five, I understood very well that if I told anyone about the family business—the garbage bags of pot, the gooey brownies, our thrilling weekends at Beck’s—my parents would go to jail.
I was an early and avid reader, hiding books under my bed to read by my dim night-light when I was supposed to be sleeping. My favorite was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Looking back, it makes sense. Consciousness began in the warehouse with its parade of curious characters: Day-Glo punks, leather daddies, cross-dressing belly dancers. On brownie runs in the stroller, I ogled jugglers and drag queens and tap-dancing nuns. We’d visit Sylvester; in my memory, he’s draped languidly on his divan in glittery robes and turbans, smoking a fat joint: the stoned caterpillar in human form.
And, of course, I was Alice. Admitted to the inner circle without really belonging. Too young to understand the jokes but keen enough to pick up on the mood and always allowed to listen. Like Alice stumbling into the Mad Hatter’s unbirthday party and the Red Queen’s croquet match, I’d find myself in the middle of the action but a few steps behind the plot . . . curiouser and curiouser. By then, long blonde curls hung in tangled waves down my back. I had large blue eyes and snaggleteeth. My favorite dress was a square-dance number with puffy sleeves and a faux apron that I loved precisely because it resembled Alice’s.
San Francisco was my Wonderland. I must have sensed a growing darkness, but that didn’t make me want to stay away. Alice’s dreams were scary, too.
In Willits, money problems were ongoing. Mer scraped together rent but rarely without stress. From her perspective, Firefeather wasn’t doing much to help. He’d never excelled at sales, but back in the warehouse days, he had walked his route and taken the same risks as she and Cheryl. With money flowing abundantly, it had been enough.
Now that things were tight, she expected more effort. Firefeather took odd work and construction gigs, but opportunities were scarce and the work he found didn’t suit him. Eventually, he’d offend someone or get fed up with whatever the work-culture bullshit was and quit. He also had rotten luck—like when a kitchen fire destroyed the restaurant where he’d begun waiting tables. Nothing lasted. Mer had never worked a straight job either, but she hustled when it was time to hustle. She thought Firefeather was being a prima donna. She wanted him to get a job, any job, so the pressure wouldn’t sit so heavily on her shoulders.
Firefeather felt both frustrated and emasculated, ill-equipped to support his family. His best wasn’t good enough. He had always been critical of Mer’s extra cushion, but during the warehouse days, the margin had been small—ten or twenty stubborn pounds. Now, in the nowhere of Willits, Mer began to pack it on in earnest. The more Firefeather rode her about it, the uglier she felt and the more she sought comfort in binge-eating. Twenty pounds became fifty, then seventy-five, then a hundred.
The familiar arguments worsened.
When are you gonna make some money?
When are you gonna lose some weight?
They fought prodigiously, impressively, endlessly.
Mer’s artwork intensified. She painted impasto, using a palette knife to create Van Gogh–esque swirls, piling her pigments an inch thick in places. Instead of flesh tones, her figures vibrated with yellows, purples, and greens. She unleashed her frustrations on old mirrors, which she piled into a burlap sack and bashed repeatedly with a sledgehammer, growling and cursing. Then she pressed the shards into the deep wet paint on a life-size depiction of a spinning belly dancer. Standing in front of it, you’d see your face reflected in deconstructed slivers, your features scattered and multiplied.
Summer of 1983, Firefeather signed up with a crew of men heading to Shasta, California, some four hours northeast. The plan was to camp for a week during which they’d harvest pine cones for the rich, expensive nuts. This involved climbing tall evergreens and dangling from harnesses while gathering the cones.
As much as Mer wanted him to work, the image of Firefeather climbing trees dozens of feet tall turned her stomach. She suspected he was messing with his meds again. “What if you have a seizure up in a tree? You could die.”
“I won’t have a seizure.” Firefeather was sick and tired of being nagged about money, and the organizer promised a lucrative return. They bickered, as they bickered about everything. Then he left.
The job turned out to be a scam. The crew had to provide their own food, transportation, and camping supplies. The work was high-risk and physically strenuous, and in the end, no one got paid what they’d been promised. A close friend of Firefeather’s who also went on the trip, Jeff Crawford, would later sue the organizer over unpaid work.
When I ask my dad about this now, that’s all he remembers: that he went to Shasta to pick pine cones and never got paid properly. The rest of the story is blank to him.
But according to Jeff Crawford, on the second or third night of camping, Firefeather vanished from the campsite without a word. The men called out to him in the woods, foliage absorbing their voices. In the morning, they searched the nearby forest.
Hours later, Firefeather wandered back to camp. He was pale and shaky, scraped and bruised as though he’d fallen. He told Jeff that a spirit had awoken him during the night and led him through the woods on a vision quest. A seeker himself, Jeff respected his friend’s spirituality; it wasn’t what Firefeather said that concerned him but the look in his eyes, the unsettling gaze. His pupils were dilated like someone on an acid trip, though Firefeather swore he’d only smoked a little pot the night before. Jeff would later describe the episode as “some kind of psychological-spiritual meltdown.”
No way Firefeather should climb trees in that shape.
Meridy was furious when she got the phone call. I knew it, she thought. He went and had a fucking seizure and now he’s delusional. She found a babysitter, then drove the four hours to Shasta to collect her husband. Upon arriving, Mer found him rambling semi-incoherently. He claimed he’d been bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake, but when he pulled up his pant leg to show her the wound, all she saw were some scratches from wandering in the woods.
Firefeather’s seizures generally began with a radiant, prismatic mandala floating in his peripheral vision. The attacks could leave him confused or delusional. He lost chunks of memory. But the preseizure aura was so inspiring that it almost made the consequences worthwhile.
Even today, when my dad talks about his epilepsy, it’s not with the voice of someone who feels afflicted. “Light,” he says, “is nothing but the fabric of life pulled aside to reveal the true splendor of the Absolute or the Divine. [By taking Dilantin] I felt like I was turning my back on something extremely exciting. Why would I want to deny myself that?”
My dad is not alone in romanticizing his epilepsy. Fyodor Dostoevsky experienced his seizures as holy gifts. “For a few seconds of such bliss,” he wrote, “I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life.”
According to science writer Sam Kean, a lot depends on where in the brain the seizures happen. If the short-circuit occurs in the temporal lobe—possibly the case with my dad—the experience can be spiritually charged—what’s called “ecstatic epilepsy.” Some temporal-lobe epileptics, Kean writes, “feel their ‘souls’ uniting with whatever godhead they believe in.”
Mandalas featured prominently in Firefeather’s artwork. He spent untold hours hunched at his drafting table with his compass, ruler, and colored pencils producing vivid, kaleidoscopic images. They plastered the walls of our home. He began a series of twelve visionary oil paintings he called the Light Series, representing the “twelve steps of spiritual awakening” and featuring rivers of energy, exploding rainbows, and multiethnic spiritual symbols.
What Firefeather wanted was to explore his preseizure auras without suffering the consequences of a grand mal attack. In the early 1980s, Firefeather landed on what he thought of as an effective method for controlling the seizures without medication. He found that if he turned his eyes firmly away from the mandala he’d eventually feel a little pop, and the orb would float away like a balloon on a broken string. But many of his seizures came late at night when he wasn’t conscious enough to control his impulses. And sometimes, even when he was awake, he couldn’t resist the magnificent visions.
I vividly recall my dad showing me his rattlesnake bite when my parents got home from Shasta. Even though it had been his hallucination, I saw weeping fang marks on his calf—the puncture marks surrounded by yellowish waxy flesh. I panicked, thinking he might die. At five, I still accepted his delusions as truth, and my imagination supplied the missing details. Not until recently did I learn that my dad has never in his life been bitten by a snake. This is a pitfall of growing up with an unstable parent: his unreality made my reality dubious.
What I call the “mandala snakes” must have started then. In bed at night, as I tried to fall asleep, multicolored circles spun behind my closed eyelids and transformed into jeweled snakes that unfurled in the dark and swam toward my face, fanged mouths gaping to swallow my head. This terrified me as a little girl. Even now, when I’m battling insomnia, I’ll sometimes slip into an unpleasant loop of imagining colorful snakes winding toward my face.
My dad recalls little of the Shasta episode. “It’s so strange hearing about all these things that I did that I just don’t remember at all,” he says.
Sometime in the 1990s, he switched to Tegretol, an anticonvulsant that he likes better and takes regularly. He hasn’t had an attack in nearly twenty years. But I sense that a part of him misses it a little bit. “My life sure is boring now by comparison,” he says.
On December 15, 1983, my mom tied a blindfold over my eyes during my sixth birthday party. I heard unusual noises and gasps from the other kids. My mom whispered, “Happy birthday, baby,” and untied the blindfold. Standing in front of me was a shaggy Shetland pony, brown with white splotches, wearing a red bow in his forelock.
The big reveal.
Meridy gave me a pony for my birthday.
I had been obsessed with horses since I could remember and had started taking kiddie riding lessons at four from a woman named Susan. I saved pennies and nickels in a jar labeled PONY FUND. My mom had scrounged up a few hundred dollars and splurged. I named the pony Acorn, and we housed him at my riding teacher’s ranch.
In truth, Acorn was too unruly for a kid my age. He bucked and bit and took off galloping. I had neither the muscles nor the skill to earn the respect of a mean little pony like Acorn. I did better with Susan’s gentle school horses.
After six months or so, money got tight again, and my parents ended up selling Acorn, with promises to buy me a bigger horse when I was old enough to take care of one myself. From the beginning, the plan had been unfeasible. Giving a child gifts you really can’t afford seems irresponsible when I think of it now. I’m sure I was brokenhearted. And yet, I don’t remember that part. What stands out in my memory is the great reveal. That moment of pure magic when my mom made my most treasured dream—a surprise pony for my birthday—come true.
She was like that with me: encouraging, dazzling, unrealistic.
My mom kept her cocaine grinder on top of her highboy. I remember a brown plastic cylinder with a little crank and a film of white dust around the cracks. A pocket-size makeup mirror sat beside it along with a crusty little straw. I knew where these things were kept, and I knew they weren’t toys.
She must have acted differently when high—tense and overexcited and self-absorbed—though it wasn’t obvious to me back then. Since babyhood, I had been surrounded by adults in altered states. Mushroom trips, LSD trips, brownie highs, cocaine highs, occasional periods of delusion. The air in our home was always thick with pot smoke.
It was an atypical, looking-glass childhood, but it wasn’t a bad one. I kept up with riding lessons. I went to Wavy Gravy’s circus camp one summer and a horse camp the next. I swam in rivers and ran through sunstruck fields. I experienced the vibrant intensity of urban life, too. My parents could be self-involved and erratic but not neglectful. I never went without food or shelter or someone to comfort me when I cried.
Spring of 1984, Firefeather tried his hand at growing pot. He planted twelve seedlings in white five-gallon buckets and later transferred them into a small clearing in the woods near our house. Throughout the summer, he hauled buckets of water into the woods, two at a time, then trudged back up to the spigot for refills. Hot sun pounding on his neck, blue sky spinning overhead. The price of Mendocino bud was climbing. If this starter crop worked out, he planned to go bigger next season.
I’d tag along when he watered, scampering to keep up with his long legs. I knew marijuana in other phases—the Dr. Seuss silhouettes of uprooted plants drying on clotheslines, the gooey buds that left miniature crystals on my fingers, the avocado-green dust that went into brownies—but our weed babies were different. Leaning close to the leaves, I whispered encouragement until they swayed above my head. I remember looking up at the jungle-green star points haloed in sunlight. And the tight fists of new buds huddled close to the stalks.
Then the caterpillars came.
Alice had one bigmouth caterpillar to deal with, but our plants shivered under a writhing mass of thousands of blue and yellow bodies. Beautiful and gruesome, they wrapped themselves around stems, dangled from leaves, and squirmed over one another.
My dad gawked in dismay, his skin rinsing pink. He hurled the water bucket against the trunk of a nearby tree. “Goddamn it!”
I trapped a wriggling caterpillar in my cupped hands and scurried home. Tiny sticky feet. Delicate bright fur tickling my palms. My mom poked holes in the lid of a pickle jar. The next morning, I sneaked to the clearing and saw that my dad had torn the plants from the ground, leaving a wasteland of holes. Their corpses lay in a heap, dirt clinging to their naked roots, stripped almost bare by the caterpillars. I gathered scraps of pot leaves from the ground and sprinted home to feed my pet his favorite food. I hoped he would build a cocoon and turn into a butterfly, but he died in my glass trap.
Firefeather took the caterpillar invasion as a sign that he wasn’t meant to be a grower. Despite the fighting and financial pressure at home, this might have been for the best. It was becoming increasingly dangerous.
Reagan had promised a new war on drugs; in July 1983, he’d lobbed the first grenade—at California’s pot growers. The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, known as CAMP, was a coalition of local, state, and federal agencies tasked with stamping out cannabis cultivation in California. To explain his targeting of rural hippies, Reagan trotted out the old “gateway drug” theory—the statistically unsupported notion that marijuana would lead people to heavier drugs.
There was a more mercenary reason for targeting pot farmers. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 expanded antiracketeering laws that allowed the government to confiscate property used in committing a federal crime—and auction it for revenue. The administration talked plainly about it. “The biggest focus of what we’re doing is going to be on land seizures,” deputy commander of CAMP William Ruzzamenti told journalist Ray Raphael. “Anybody who is growing marijuana on their land, we’re going to take their land. It’s as simple as that.”
Astoundingly, law enforcement didn’t need proof of criminal activity to confiscate property; they didn’t even have to file charges. They could now take everything simply by asserting “probable cause.” The new laws presumed that anything purchased “within a reasonable time” of a suspected drug deal was bought with drug money—which made it subject to forfeiture. Not only land, but also cars, computers, and jewelry. Even when the accused was later found not guilty, the legislation offered no roadmap for reclaiming what the government grabbed. In a searing 1991 exposé based on a review of 25,000 seizures nationwide, the Pittsburgh Press reported that 80 percent of the people whose property was taken were never even charged with a crime.
Under these new provisions, the feds were encouraged to divvy proceeds with local law enforcement; a lion’s share of the take flowed right back to police departments. Busting suspected drug offenders suddenly became lucrative in a way that fighting violent crimes—robberies, rapes, murders—was not.
During the Reagan years, CAMP mushroomed into the largest law enforcement task force in US history up to that point, involving more than one hundred agencies, and they all got a piece. In its first six years of operation, CAMP reported seizing $19.7 million in assets (equal to about $40.7 million in 2019) along with cash and thousands of vehicles. On the national level, a fund was created in 1986 to collect and dole out drug war money; by 1990, the kitty held $1.5 billion.
Reagan also championed a program to funnel disused military equipment—U-2 spy planes and helicopters, automatic weaponry, infrared imaging, armored vehicles, flash bang grenades—to local police for use against citizens. Increasingly, “Ronnie’s Raiders” turned to aggressive no-knock tactics—busting doors down unannounced at all hours without giving the occupants a chance to get dressed or comfort children.
Gone were the days when police had knocked politely on Mary Rathbun’s door.
With CAMP, California became the testing ground for drug war tactics that soon spread throughout the country. The inclusion of military-grade weaponry and profit-sharing between the feds and local police became standard. Harking back to the Nixon era, when the drug war’s targets were the “antiwar left and black people,” the Reagan administration put crosshairs on its perceived enemies: counterculture holdouts in rural areas and urban communities of color.
Crack made the scene in the mid-1980s, inspiring waves of sensationalized media coverage. From the beginning, it was portrayed as a black drug, despite similar usage rates across races. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 laid out grossly unequal sentencing for powder cocaine and crack, even though the chemical makeup is the same. The mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison applied to dealers caught with five hundred grams of powder cocaine or just five grams of crack.
Drug arrests doubled during Reagan’s tenure. Defense attorneys in drug cases were soon required to report any fees received in cash as well as payments exceeding $10,000. The federal government could then seize those assets and destroy the attorney-client relationship. Think of it this way: If someone accused of murder had the means, he or she could hire top-notch defense lawyers, but defendants in penny-ante drug cases were stuck with overburdened public defenders.
This was the dawn of mass incarceration, which today imprisons nearly 2.3 million people in the United States. Almost 80 percent of people in the federal prison system and 60 percent of those incarcerated at the state level on drug offenses are black or Latino. One in every thirteen black adults has been stripped of his or her right to vote by a felony conviction.
CAMP, aimed at California growers, was the first salvo in this new War on Drugs. If the goal of those operations was to fatten coffers, militarize police, strip rural hippies of their land, and populate new private prisons with people of color, CAMP was an unequivocal success. But if the goal was to reduce the amount of California homegrown flowing through America, it didn’t work.
The pot-growing community banded together for support. They shared tips (like planting near bright manzanita to confuse infrared cameras) and used CBs and phone trees to warn one another when CAMP was prowling.
Busts drove up the market price. According to CAMP’s annual reporting, California sinsemilla brought an average wholesale price of $3,400 per pound in 1986, more than double what it had been at the beginning of the decade. Who could afford not to either grow or traffic weed? Especially in places like Willits, where legal jobs were scarce and paid little. Before CAMP came along, Mer had mostly stuck to selling brownies. Pot was bulky, odoriferous, and dangerous to transport. She had to bring a triple-beam scale in the car, making her intent to sell patently obvious. But it had become too lucrative to pass up.
These forces were beyond my comprehension as a child, though I knew that our kind was being hunted. I remember the helicopters pounding above our house, the U-2 spy planes cutting arcs overhead. My parents would point to the sky and whisper, “CAMP,” a simple statement of evil.
By 1984, Mer’s trips to the City had become heartbreaking and surreal.
People physically transformed between visits: from a handsome thirty-year-old to a frail seventy-year-old within months. Act normal, she’d think, struggling to mask her shock. Say something funny . . .
She can’t remember who among her friends was next to go after Michael and Patrick. AIDS took out so many people so quickly that it sometimes seemed more like a natural disaster—a tidal wave, a volcanic eruption, a flood—than a disease. Brownie customers disappeared from the shops and restaurants and bars where they’d worked for years. One month, a regular would be there buying his usual dozen. The next month, someone new would be working his shift.
From his post at the Village Deli, Dan Clowry watched his community change. Other waiters at the café began to miss shifts. Sometimes, when customers showed visible signs of illness, Dan’s coworkers would be too scared to serve them. Dan understood this less as a fear of contagion than a fear of confronting their own futures.
All these years later, Dan still thinks about a café regular who always dressed in spiffy 1940s military uniforms. One day, the guy came in with his entire head swollen and discolored “like a big purple balloon.” Nevertheless, he had put on his crisp uniform and plopped the little sailor cap on top of his suddenly enormous head. The other waiter on shift was freaked out, but Dan walked right over and sat down with his customer. “Honey,” he said. “You look fabulous today.”
Two revelations hit Dan that afternoon.
First, that he’d missed his calling; he should have gone into health care.
Second, that they were all in deep, deep shit.
San Francisco General had been the first hospital in the country to open a dedicated AIDS clinic back in 1983. It soon expanded into three wards. Scared of exposure to a disease about which so little was understood, some health practitioners refused to treat AIDS patients. The list of ailments grew longer and more bizarre—including infections normally suffered by cats, birds, sheep, and deer. The doctors and nurses who staffed wards 86 (outpatient) and 5B/5A (inpatient) volunteered to work those posts, running unknown risks. One nurse famously became infected via a needle stick and went right on nursing. These were days of true heroism. But nothing slowed the dying. “I haven’t cured anybody yet,” a nurse told journalist Carol Pogash. “And that’s tough.”
Doctors and nurses at General eschewed hazmat suits, face masks, and gloves—insisting that human touch was an essential component of treatment. Practitioners were encouraged to hug their patients, cry with their patients, feel and express love. “I don’t want them to think they’re like lepers,” one nurse said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “That nobody wants to come near them.” Visitors could stay on the ward all night, and patients were empowered to decide who was welcome, defying the tradition of prioritizing blood relatives. Eventually, practitioners from around the world visited General to study “patient-centered care”; even Mother Teresa took a tour. Not everyone was on board. Four nurses filed complaints with Cal/OSHA but lost their case. The network that arose between public health officials, doctors, community organizers, and patients became known internationally as the San Francisco Model.
The first blood test for human immunodeficiency virus, the cause of AIDS, was developed in 1984 and became widely available in 1985. Brownie customer and editor in chief of Drummer magazine Jack Fritscher remembers the sudden maturity the test demanded. “You look at your lover you’ve been with for all these years, and you think, Should we even get tested? What if one of us has it and one of us doesn’t?” Before visiting the clinic, he and his lover sat down to write up a game plan for each possible outcome. These were end-of-life decisions, normally the purview of couples entering their golden years, forced upon people in their twenties and thirties.
Even with the mode of transmission understood, confusion and paranoia persisted. Was it safe to hug and kiss? Were some kinds of sex okay and others not? Could you eat from the same plate of food? In 1985, the New York Times reported that 51 percent of survey respondents supported quarantining AIDS patients, 48 percent supported issuing identity cards, and 15 percent thought that people with HIV should be forcibly tattooed.
I ask my mom if she worried about contagion on the weekends she spent with sick friends at Beck’s. She answers with an anecdote. When she was five, her appendix burst, and she had to spend some time in the hospital. She got bored and somehow slipped past the nurses. After a frantic search, they found her on another floor, playing with kids in the polio ward. “I guess I knew on a gut level that it was okay,” she says about AIDS. “I worried a lot about my friends, but never about that.”
It’s hard to fathom the apathy with which the Reagan administration met the AIDS epidemic. Journalist Lester Kinsolving had asked the first-ever AIDS-related question at a White House press briefing in 1982. He wanted to know the president’s reaction to the CDC’s announcement that the “gay plague” was an epidemic with more than six hundred cases.
Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, teased the reporter: “I don’t have it,” he quipped, getting a laugh from the press pool. “Do you?”
Kinsolving tried repeatedly over subsequent years to get the White House to answer seriously. Speakes mocked his interest in “fairies” and insinuated that he must have the virus himself to be so curious.
That AIDS wasn’t exclusively attacking gays was a known fact; by late 1982, the illness had also been reported among IV drug users, hemophiliacs who received frequent transfusions, Haitian immigrants, and babies born to infected mothers. But voices within the power structure continued to frame AIDS as a gay affliction: the price of hedonism and perversion. Pat Buchanan, whom Reagan would later appoint as his communications director, wrote, “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
Reagan had made his own views on homosexuality apparent early on. As governor of California in the early 1970s, he’d vowed to veto attempts to reform an 1872 law prescribing felony penalties for “crimes against nature.” Willie Brown and George Moscone had had to wait for his departure to push the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill through. A man who believed sodomy should be a felony was now presiding over the onset of the AIDS epidemic.
Worse, the epidemic erupted during an era of fiscal conservatism, in which both the CDC and NIH were chronically understaffed and underfunded. Annually, like clockwork, the White House budget proposal either lowballed or slashed AIDS funding. Time and again, Congress forced Reagan’s hand to increase the amounts.
The surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, despite being staunchly antiabortion and deeply religious, thought moralizing had no place in a public health crisis of such magnitude. But his superiors within the administration forbade him from speaking about it. “For an astonishing five and a half years, I was completely cut off from AIDS,” Koop later wrote. “The conservative politics of the middle and late years of the Reagan Administration attempted to thwart my attempts to educate the public about AIDS and tried to stir up hostility toward its victims.” Not until after Reagan’s personal friend Rock Hudson died did the president allow Koop to mail an informational pamphlet about AIDS to American households. Fellow conservatives were scandalized when the surgeon general advocated condom use (abstention being the official line) and sex education in schools.
Reagan himself did not utter the word “AIDS” publicly until September 1985 when he was pushed by another persistent journalist. Adopting a defensive tone, the president characterized AIDS as “one of our top priorities,” and said, “I have been supporting it for over four years now.” His administration had just proposed reducing AIDS spending again. Congress, as before, would goose the number back up.
Reagan wouldn’t deliver his first speech on the epidemic until 1987 when he addressed the American Foundation for AIDS Research, an organization that Rock Hudson had helped launch in his last months. During the entire eighteen-minute talk, Reagan artfully managed not to say “gay” or “homosexual” once, instead focusing on babies born with the virus, hemophiliacs infected via blood transfusion, and spouses unaware of their partners’ shady pasts—the perceived innocent victims of the gay plague.
By that point, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease; 20,849 had died.
San Francisco took care of its own.
Mayor Feinstein rose to the occasion. According to historian David Talbot, when Supervisor Harry Britt showed her the first requests for research funding in 1982, Feinstein said simply, “Fund everything.” Throughout the eighties, California consistently dedicated more resources to AIDS annually than any other state.
Community organizing was reborn. “We had to do it ourselves,” Cleve Jones says. “Our friends were starving to death because they were too weak to go out, so we had to create systems to bring them food. Landlords were evicting them because they were afraid of them, so we had to create systems to house them. We had to do our own research. We had to smuggle in medications.”
Organizations arose to help the sick and dying. Bill Pandolf, a longtime brownie customer, volunteered to drive patients to medical appointments through a “buddy” program. Project Open Hand and Meals on Wheels delivered hot food to those too sick to cook for themselves. Shanti Project and other hospice groups provided in-home care, counseling, and end-of-life housing. Project Inform kept people abreast of the latest drug trials, while the AIDS Emergency Fund paid late rent and overdue electric bills.
The plague manifested among white gay men first, but it shifted over time, cutting cruel swaths through neighborhoods of color and other marginalized groups. Transgender women were hit especially hard in a situation compounded by employment discrimination and poverty-related sex work. Where separatist movements of the 1970s had sometimes put lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people at odds, the pandemic demanded collaboration. Lesbians, especially, did a lot of heavy lifting during the worst years. “I counted on my women friends to live forever,” Mark Abramson wrote, “to cheer us on, to take care of us as we slid from our deathbeds into our graves.”
Activists learned to fundraise on a new scale. “I don’t remember what Harvey’s budget was for his [1977] campaign,” Cleve Jones says. “But it was about $25,000, which at that point seemed an astronomical sum. Within years, gay communities all across the country were routinely raising and spending millions of dollars. And then tens of millions of dollars.” The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which had begun as an Easter prank in San Francisco in 1979, blossomed into an international HIV/AIDS education and fundraising organism.
Drummer, the magazine that had most defined San Francisco’s hard-core leather scene, reimagined itself through a lens of education. “We turned to fetishes as an idea of how to approach sex without having bodily fluids,” says Jack Fritscher. “We began to teach safe sex and the glories of solo sex through articles and videos.”
On ward 5B, a dancer named Rita Rockett brought home-cooked meals every Sunday using money she raised by passing the hat at community events. Dressed in showgirl garb, she tap-danced for patients and spent hours just hanging out. When diagnosis was a death sentence, people like Rita tried to make dying less lonely.
Brownie Mary volunteered as a nurse’s assistant and runner on ward 86, logging so many hours that she was named Volunteer of the Year. Convinced that cannabis eased a variety of AIDS-related symptoms, Mary sneaked dosed brownies and cookies to patients on the ward. With scant treatment options, doctors and nurses turned a blind eye.
Dennis Peron and others donated pot so Mary could distribute her goodies on the ward for free. At her maximum, Mary allegedly baked up to 15,000 marijuana treats per month. It wasn’t enough.
On monthly visits to the City, Mer watched the Castro empty out. Suddenly, there was ample parking, vacancies where there’d been a housing crisis, half-empty restaurants. Amid much controversy, the health department began shutting down bathhouses in 1984. Parties evolved into memorials and fundraisers. When local TV news interviewed Dan Clowry about the new challenges facing merchants in San Francisco’s gay corridors, he said, “Business is dying off,” and immediately regretted his word choice.
In January 1984, Dan White was released from prison after serving less than five years for assassinating Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Protests erupted; some demonstrators wore buttons that said, DAN WHITE’S HIT SQUAD. Authorities paroled him to Los Angeles to avoid bloodshed, but he slipped back into his hometown. In October 1985, he ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his 1973 Buick LeSabre into its front window and killed himself. Reporters who went looking for vindictive comments from Castro residents were met with something akin to a shrug. “I’m glad his conscience caught up with him,” one said. There were bigger fish to fry.
Mer’s customers still bought their multiple dozens of brownies at Beck’s or the Village Deli. She still did large deals in parking lots with Dennis’s lover. And much like the old days, the brownies wound their way through the community, with each person buying for their friends and loved ones. But now, along with new wave clubs, discos, and house parties, Sticky Fingers appeared beside sickbeds.
Cleve Jones hadn’t been a big Sticky Fingers customer in the warehouse days because he found the brownies too potent. AIDS changed that. When he tested positive in late 1985, he was frightened but not surprised. He’d begun experiencing fatigue and flulike symptoms as early as 1979—long before anyone knew what was happening. He’d suffered shingles on his scalp that made him feel like his hair was on fire and bouts of respiratory infections and digestive distress. Like many people, he found cannabis helpful with his sleep, pain, depression, and nausea, but recurrent pneumonia had left his lungs too delicate for smoking. He switched to edibles, which he sometimes bought from Mer at Beck’s.
Nearly everyone on Mer’s route was either dying, nursing someone who was dying, or mourning the death of a good friend or lover. Canes and walkers were commonplace. Young men shuffled around in wool coats and scarves even in warm weather.
The Castro had warped into a funhouse-mirror distortion of itself. It seems ironic that AIDS would take root in a community that so highly prized physical beauty—ravaging bodies and faces, eviscerating the cult of youth worship. Strength of spirit shone through death masks.
There’s nothing superficial about fighting a plague.