There’s a photo of my mom in a wheelchair, wearing a neck brace, full-leg cast, and dark sunglasses. She’s bloated and pale, hair in an Einstein frizz.
The accident happened in November 1986. She was driving through Willits when she got distracted by a pedestrian sporting hot-pink pants and slammed into the car ahead of her. My mom, who hadn’t buckled her seat belt, slid under the steering wheel, mangling the soft tissue around her right ankle and knee. She spent months in a wheelchair or on crutches. Downed-out on Percodan, depressed. The car was totaled, so no trips to the City. My dad wasn’t working. There was no money coming in at all.
My parents had already separated for a few months during which my mom and I lived in a tract home and she attended Women Who Love Too Much meetings. In their attempt at reconciliation, my parents had rented a fancy yellow house with a swimming pool in the middle of town, but it didn’t help. Their fights shook the windows. My mom screamed herself hoarse; my dad broke furniture.
At eight going on nine, I became convinced that the yellow house was haunted. It looked the part: a hulking Victorian on a corner lot, with a picket fence, rose garden, and an attic with peaked dormer windows. It had asymmetrical rooms and staircases leading to nooks that served no purpose. Despite its size and amenities, the rent was low when we’d moved there earlier in 1986—and in scary movies, weren’t haunted houses always cheap?
There were nice moments. Camping out by the pool to watch Halley’s Comet streak slowly overhead. Splashing around on an inflatable pool toy that was supposed to be a horse, though it looked like a giant sausage. But in my bedroom at night, mandala snakes swam toward my face. I felt sure a clown lived under my bed. I had nightmares and insomnia, and sometimes wet the bed because I was scared to walk down the hall; its slanted ceiling played tricks on my eyes.
In retrospect, the house was probably fine. But my family wasn’t.
Early December, my dad announced to us that he was quitting his epilepsy medication permanently. Then he climbed to his studio in the attic and stayed for days, coming down only for food. Stuck in her wheelchair on the ground floor, my mom would send me up with messages. I’d find my dad bent over his drafting table, absorbed in bright, intricate designs. Mandalas plastered the walls.
Mer felt like she’d been carrying the family’s financial burden for eons. Now that she was unable to earn money—unable to walk—she needed Firefeather’s help. But instead of stepping up, he isolated himself in his attic and went off his meds.
On top of everything, a certain somebody’s ninth birthday was coming up, and she’d promised to throw a slumber party. When your kid has trouble making friends, birthdays become overblown with excitement and anxiety. So she rolled her wheelchair up to the kitchen table and spent days hot gluing feathers and flowers to party hats and candy baskets. It felt good, at least, to do something.
December 15, the day of the party, Firefeather came down to raid the fridge. As he passed her, Mer heard him say, very quietly, “I thought you’d want to know: I’m Joseph. You’re Mary. And Alia is the baby Jesus.”
“Are you kidding me?” Mer called after him as he climbed back up to his tower.
He didn’t answer.
Kids showed up. Meridy wheeled herself around, popping popcorn, putting The Last Unicorn in the VCR yet again. In the early evening, Firefeather brought his knapsack and bedroll downstairs. “The Dalai Lama is speaking in San Francisco,” he said. “I need to see him. He has a message for me.”
“Now?” Mer hissed. “On Alia’s birthday? While we have a house full of kids and I’m in a fucking wheelchair?”
“I need to do this,” he said.
“The car’s totaled.”
“I’ll hitchhike.”
She caught his eyes and stared hard, trying to find the bond that was once so strong between them. He stared back, eyes glittering like ice chips. He did not look like himself.
“Doug,” she said, trying his given name. “Don’t go.”
He went.
Terrible scenarios flashed through Mer’s mind: Firefeather could have a seizure on the road, hit his head, forget who he was; he’d end up homeless on the streets of San Francisco. He’d gone too far this time.
Quietly, she made phone calls, getting one friend to chaperone the party while another drove her to the police station to fill out forms for an involuntary psychiatric hold. If Firefeather got picked up for acting disruptively, she wanted the police to know not to put him in jail. He needed a hospital and Dilantin. She cried in the car. Then she collected herself and returned to the party.
I recall the lead-up to my ninth birthday: my dad drawing in his tower; my mom surrounded by feathers and garlands, joking that the “froof bomb” had gone off. From the party, I remember lying in sleeping bags in wheel-spoke formation, maybe six kids, and telling ghost stories. I remember pepperoni pizza. I don’t remember my dad disappearing. Either I’ve blocked that part out or my mom managed to shield me from what was happening. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
Mer focused her freight-train energy on being Super Mom while my dad chased his spirituality over a cliff.
The Dalai Lama wasn’t scheduled to be in San Francisco then; he was in Bylakuppe, India. But Firefeather didn’t get far enough to find that out.
He stood beside Highway 101 with his thumb out for an hour or so, then said to himself, Maybe I’m not supposed to go seeking the Dalai Lama. Maybe I already have the consciousness I need within myself. Deciding to embark on a vision quest instead, he set out to circumnavigate the Willits valley.
Firefeather now acknowledges that this was unrealistic, though it made sense to him at the time. There was no hiking trail around Willits. Even if there had been, it would’ve taken days, and he carried no food or water.
Firefeather climbed straight up into hills thick with scrub and poison oak. At some point, he stowed his knapsack and bedroll inside a hollow tree and promptly forgot where they were. When the temperature dropped, he took shelter in an abandoned shed. Later, he became certain that something violent had happened there, and he set off again into the night. He soon found himself flailing down a steep hill through oak branches and brush before emerging onto a country road.
Two cop cars were waiting.
An area neighbor had heard somebody crashing around in the woods and phoned it in.
Firefeather explained to the officers that he’d been hitchhiking to see the Dalai Lama but decided to walk in the hills instead—which they must have found concerning enough to confirm the alert Meridy had put out. They sent Firefeather to a psychiatric ward in a neighboring town for an involuntary seventy-two-hour hold.
According to Firefeather, he stayed in a communal room with about twenty patients, some of whom were clearly disturbed. He felt sure he didn’t belong there; this was all a misunderstanding. One woman walked circles around him, drawing close to his body and muttering gibberish. Her smell seemed wrong, more like rotting flesh than human body odor.
Eventually, Firefeather was taken to speak with the head psychiatrist. He answered the doctor’s questions carefully. Looking back, he recalls feeling confident that he would be released. “Because obviously I was perfectly clear thinking and everybody else around me was not.” He was stunned when the doctor told him they still needed to keep him under observation.
When Firefeather explained this to another patient in the communal room, the guy said, “I knew it! This place is a coven of witches and the man running it is the warlock. They’ll keep you here as long as they can. That’s how they do it.”
That made sense to Firefeather, and it infuriated him. Forcing himself to remain calm, he asked to speak with the psychiatrist once more.
“You need to understand something,” he told the doctor. “I am a graduate of the Berkeley Psychic Institute and I am a reverend of the Church of Divine Man. I demand to be released. Right. Now.”
As my dad remembers it, he was out of that facility and breathing fresh air within five minutes. To this day, his perception is that he secured his freedom from a hospital controlled by witches by announcing himself as a trained psychic. “Then,” he says, “I went back to Willits and back to normalcy.”
By the time he came home, my mom had taken me into hiding.
She explained to me that when my dad stopped taking his medication he sometimes “got a little weird.” And this time he was weirder than usual. We stayed with my mom’s friend Kathy, whose daughter Karma was two years older than I was. There are pictures of us girls wearing splotchy makeup and high heels that don’t fit, and blowing kisses in front of a Christmas tree. Through the holidays and into the new year, Karma pretended to be the sister I’d always wanted.
I didn’t know it then, but my dad, who was living alone in the yellow house, was leaving messages with mutual friends and on community bulletin boards. Tell Meridy that I want to see Alia so I can give her my Christmas presents. My mom called him a couple of times, but he kept describing us as the Holy Family reincarnated—which scared her. What if he harmed himself? What if he harmed us?
She finally asked her therapist to visit him and assess the situation.
“He’s having a full-blown psychotic episode,” the therapist said afterward. “I can’t guarantee it’s safe.”
By January, I was begging to see him. I was over the novelty of a fake sister. I wanted my dad.
In the end, of course, it was an I Ching hexagram that convinced my mom to risk a visit. Her therapist coordinated with the police, so if Mer called 911 from the yellow house, they would come without asking many questions.
The image of my dad opening the door is seared into my mind. His blue eyes gleamed from a naked face. No eyebrows, head as shiny as a beach ball, chin vulnerable without his red beard. Despite the January chill, he wore a sarong knotted at the waist, his freshly shaven chest and arms bare. When we hugged, his skin felt prickly and unfamiliar, though I recognized his smell.
My mom, still hobbling in a soft cast, followed me inside and sat beside the phone.
I gave my dad a wool sweater and was relieved when he pulled it over his bald torso. He gave me a board game called Wildlife Adventure, which involved matching endangered species to their habitats. He read the rules aloud, pronouncing each word precisely in the same tone and cadence that he’d used to read me Alice in Wonderland when I was younger. I watched the colored lights blink and let his voice carry me to a safer Christmas.
The psychosis eventually passed, but my mom was fed up. She moved us into a double-wide near Kathy and Karma’s. Her paintings stacked against the faux-wooden walls left little room to move. I slept under a heap of stuffed animals.
We would never live with my dad again.
So when my dad says decades later that he “went back to normalcy” after the psychiatric hospital, I’m taken aback. I remind him that we weren’t there when he returned to the yellow house. That our little family broke.
“Interesting,” he says. “I didn’t realize those events were connected.”
My dad recounts his ill-fated trip to see the Dalai Lama with a level of detail that’s unusual for his damaged memory. From the measured way he delivers the story, I feel sure that he’s told it before. That he’s not only remembering what happened but also how he’s described it to other people. But in his version, he didn’t leave on his daughter’s birthday and come home to an empty house. He doesn’t see the experience as a psychotic break, though he can’t explain some of his actions.
In his telling, the most important part of the story is using his psychic prowess to escape the witches. In my telling, the most important part is losing my dad.
Unable to sell brownies or pot since the accident, Mer had no income and was borrowing money. Cheryl’s boyfriend took up a collection among the Willits growers to buy her a dented mustard-yellow Honda. Nothing fancy, but it would get her to the City. In March 1987, she and Kathy baked and wrapped forty dozen brownies (and it says something about my mom’s level of desperation that she baked). Leaving me with Kathy, she drove down with a loaded trunk and settled at Beck’s for the weekend.
Mer had been away for only five months—but they had been plague months. Each time someone knocked, she girded herself for the possibility that her friend or customer had wasted to bones, curled into himself, been taken over by KS lesions, lost his mobility, his lover, his beauty, his humor. Catching up meant discovering which mutual acquaintances had died and speculating about who would be next. Even making phone calls to tell people she was in town was nerve-racking.
A drug called AZT had just hit the market. It was the first AIDS medication to gain FDA approval. At a cost of about $10,000 per year, it was also the most expensive prescription medicine in history. To protest the cost, a newly minted activist group called the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—or ACT UP—staged a dramatic protest on Wall Street, accusing the pharmaceutical company of profiteering and the FDA of ignoring other promising drugs. AZT would turn out to be ineffective over the long term, though it extended some people’s lives. It was highly toxic, causing severe anemia, dizziness, headaches, vomiting, and diarrhea. Many patients couldn’t tolerate it at all. For some, weed helped mitigate side effects.
On Sunday, Mer met Dennis Peron in a rooftop parking lot above Café Flore. Decades later, she can still picture Dennis leaning on a railing overlooking the Castro, his prematurely silver-white hair ruffling in a breeze.
Dennis bought all the brownies she had left.
When Mer told him she and Firefeather were divorcing, Dennis said, “You could always come back. You know what people keep telling me? They say, ‘Dennis, if it wasn’t for this joint, or this brownie, I wouldn’t be out of bed today. It’s keeping me going.’ Brownie Mary is baking her ass off for the guys on the AIDS ward. She’s been pulling names out of a cookie jar. There’s too much need.”
Medical marijuana wasn’t a new idea—but it was still a radical one.
Veteran potheads like Dennis and my mom trusted their guts about the healing potential of cannabis. That it had legitimate medical properties came as no surprise to them.
What’s more surprising—and disheartening—is that the government knew it, too. Back in 1974, the Nixon administration had created the National Institute on Drug Addiction. NIDA acted both as a research-funding machine and as gatekeeper. Its mandate was to develop and conduct research “for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse and for the rehabilitation of drug abusers.” But scientists kept stumbling on good news about pot instead: that it decreased ocular pressure (1971) and reversed glaucoma damage (1976); that it slowed the growth of Lewis lung tumors and leukemia in mice (1975); that THC was an effective analgesic for patients suffering pain related to cancer (1975); and studies during the seventies and eighties showed that THC minimized nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy patients.
Subsequent research has uncovered palliative and curative potential for an astonishing range of conditions. But human clinical trials are still scant in the United States, limited by legal hurdles. It’s sobering to note that the first indications that cannabinoids might be harnessed to treat such illnesses as leukemia appeared in peer-reviewed journals more than forty years ago. Instead of chasing those leads, the government prioritized drug-war messaging over science. Because NIDA was the sole legal source of cannabis for researchers in the United States, only studies that served the administration’s agenda were likely to move forward.
Marijuana has been classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic since 1970—defined by the DEA as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” It’s worth repeating that this classification never had a scientific basis. The attorney general placed marijuana under Schedule 1 as a stopgap while Nixon’s blue-ribbon commission investigated. But when the report recommended decriminalization and further exploration of medicinal value, Nixon rejected it flatly, and the temporary scheduling became permanent. That cannabis is more severely restricted than methamphetamines and oxycodone (both of which doctors can legally prescribe) has always been political—not scientific.
In 1976, a glaucoma patient named Robert Randall smoked a joint with friends and discovered, quite by accident, that marijuana eased the ocular pressure that was blinding him at twenty-five. He soon got busted for growing four plants for personal use. In preparing his defense, Randall contacted scientists at NIDA, the DEA, and the FDA, and was appalled to learn that studies had already demonstrated marijuana’s effectiveness in fighting glaucoma. The government knew pot could help people like him. He decided to base his case on medical necessity, a defense that had never been used successfully.
Realizing that even if he won in court he’d just get busted again, Randall audaciously petitioned the government to supply his weed from its own experimental farm. And to stop them from hiding the research from other glaucoma patients, he took his story to CBS News. Amazingly, Randall’s strategy worked; the government provided him with ten joints per day for the rest of his life.
Randall’s case forced the FDA to create the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program to supply legal pot to people who could prove medical necessity. Distributing marijuana through Compassionate IND was a de facto admission that cannabis had therapeutic value—despite ongoing Schedule 1 classification. But they kept the program quiet. Moreover, the red tape was so elaborate, expensive, and exhausting to navigate that few clawed through to certification; at the program’s height, it served fifteen people.
In 1986, the FDA approved a synthetic THC capsule, marketed under the brand name Marinol, as an antiemetic for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting; it would soon be approved for AIDS-related wasting syndrome as well. Unlike homegrown pot, synthetic THC could be patented and marketed by pharmaceutical companies. But it was not without side effects; Marinol came on like a speeding train, leaving some people too stoned and paranoid to function. (Some ongoing research suggests that other cannabinoids—like CBD—may naturally counteract the psychoactive intensity; Marinol was a pure slug of synthetic THC.) Many patients found a couple of puffs from a joint equally effective and less punishing.
Some AIDS doctors saw in marijuana a missed opportunity. First as a fellow in oncology-hematology at the UCSF Cancer Research Institute, then as assistant director of the AIDS ward at San Francisco General, Dr. Donald Abrams had been on the frontlines since the beginning of the epidemic. Abrams found AZT unimpressive. He dissuaded his own ailing lover, Mark, from taking it, though it was the only approved treatment for AIDS at the time. What Mark did do, according to Abrams, was smoke pot every day.
Abrams watched his lover outlive the other patients in three separate support groups at Davies Medical Center. When Mark died in 1989, having surpassed his prognosis by three years, Abrams was left with the impression that cannabis might have helped. At General, he’d heard the rumors about Brownie Mary sneaking pot-infused desserts onto ward 86 to fight wasting, and some of his patients admitted to smoking illegal weed to help with a variety of symptoms. He thought they could be on to something.
A couple of years later, a medical-marijuana research advocate sent a letter challenging Abrams to collaborate on a study to evaluate cannabis as a treatment for AIDS-related nausea and anorexia. He suggested that the proposal should come from “Brownie Mary’s institution.” Looking back, Abrams laughs. “As if she were the dean!”
The letter made an impression nonetheless. “I remembered Mark because he had done so well using cannabis,” Abrams says. Very little clinical research had been conducted into marijuana’s therapeutic potential, but as Abrams has written, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of effect.”
Abrams and his collaborators secured a research grant. But to access marijuana legally, he needed approval from the FDA, the DEA, NIDA, and various other agencies. Over five years, he got the bureaucratic runaround while thousands died. At the height of his frustration, the usually unflappable doctor wrote an open letter to the director of NIDA. “You had an opportunity to do a service to the community of people living with AIDS. You and your Institute failed. In the words of the AIDS activist community: SHAME!”
Finally, the NIDA director told Abrams in person that his organization was the National Institute on Drug Abuse, not for drug abuse. NIDA’s congressional mandate didn’t allow it to support studies into marijuana’s therapeutic attributes.
It was a moment of revelation. Abrams reframed his study: instead of looking for possible benefits, he would investigate whether marijuana harmed immune-compromised patients by interfering with their ability to process protease inhibitors. That got approved in 1997. Abrams eventually concluded that smoking cannabis helped AIDS patients gain weight while showing no adverse effects on viral load or interference with other medications. In a subsequent study, he found that marijuana eased the otherwise untreatable AIDS-related neuropathy. He was only able to get there by tricking the system.
For many people with AIDS, using marijuana to treat their symptoms was common sense especially when it came to fighting nausea and stimulating appetite. Cleve Jones remembers traveling to Sacramento sometime in the early nineties to speak before the state senate in favor of compassionate marijuana. A witness from law enforcement testified that there was no conclusive evidence that cannabis was an effective appetite stimulant. Waiting to testify, Cleve rolled his eyes. “There’s a word in the English language that exists solely because of this phenomenon,” he said when his turn came. “That word, Senator, is ‘munchies.’”
Faced with bureaucratic rigidity, people with AIDS broke the law to self-medicate with marijuana. Dealers became healers.
Back in the stuffy double-wide, Mer stared up at the faux-wood ceiling and thought, What the hell am I doing here? When the school year ended, we moved back to San Francisco.
After eight years in Willits, Mer had direct access to pricey sinsemilla. Charging market rate for bud subsidized the brownies, which were still made with inexpensive shake. She didn’t give brownies away like Mary Rathbun at General Hospital, but she stuck to her 1970s prices—a dollar or two for a brownie that most people split into three or four doses.
She rented us a spacious three-bedroom flat on Fourteenth Avenue, walking distance from Golden Gate Park. It had high ceilings and hardwood floors, French doors, a sunroom, and a scrubby backyard. Mer set up her studio in the living room and began a series of impasto paintings so large that she had to stand on a ladder. In coming years, her work would begin winning awards and being shown in West Coast museums. With new freedom, she stretched more fully into herself.
We had moved seven times since leaving the warehouse. The flat on Fourteenth Avenue became home.
On Market Street one day, Mer noticed new activity in the cavernous space that had housed Castro Camera in the months leading up to Harvey’s assassination. A sheet of butcher paper taped in the window read, THIS IS THE NEW HOME OF THE NAMES PROJECT, followed by a wish list that included sewing machines, fabric, sequins, back rubs, hugs, and money. Mer ducked through the door. Inside, music competed with the thrumming of sewing machines. Bolts of bright fabric reared from bins and cascaded from shelves. This, Mer learned, was Cleve Jones’s new project, the AIDS Memorial Quilt. From then on, Mer stopped in regularly with brownies for the sewers.
Cleve had been nursing the notion of a quilt since the 1985 Milk/Moscone candlelight vigil when he’d asked the crowd to write the names of lost loved ones on their cardboard signs and tape them to the wall of the San Francisco Federal Building; the visual reminded him of a patchwork quilt. Friends teased him, dismissing the idea as too steeped in Americana. But for Cleve, wholesomeness was the point. He wanted to create an avenue for people who weren’t radicals to join the conversation about AIDS.
The project started small. But after the first viewing on the National Mall in D.C. in the fall of 1987, panels would pour in from all over the country along with invitations to display the quilt. Cleve would embark on a twenty-city national tour, bringing him into intimate contact with grieving families from all walks of life, far beyond the Castro. “America came to know her gay children at the time of our greatest suffering,” he says. “A lot of parents discovered for the first time that their son was gay when he came home tell them that he was going to die. And some of those parents responded horribly, and those stories are often told, but most parents would never abandon their child.”
Cleve had experienced this transformation firsthand. When he came out to his family as a teenager, his own father had snarled, “What do you like best, getting fucked in the ass or sucking cock?” They didn’t speak for years after that. But when Cleve called home to say that he was sick, his dad started going to quilt displays and marches.
“People who had never knowingly been around gay people suddenly had gay people coming into their homes to care for their kids,” Cleve says. “They saw the compassion, they saw the solidarity, they saw the incredible courage, and their hearts were touched by it.”
Today, the quilt includes more than 48,000 panels from all over the globe. It was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, by which point HIV cases had been reported from every region of the world. The AIDS Memorial Quilt remains the world’s largest community art project.
Moving made the divorce feel permanent. I loved San Francisco—the salt-lick smell, foghorn serenades, everyone in leather jackets. I wanted to be there, but I wanted my dad, too.
Whenever he phoned, I’d careen around the house screeching “Daddy!” at full volume. In my new bedroom, I arranged an altar to him, decorated with photos and mementos. For visits, my mom drove me halfway to Willits and did the handoff at a roadside diner. I remember howling in the parking lot, gripping one parent with each hand and forcing them to touch.
Summer of 1987, my dad was renting a tiny loft in Willits. We played Wildlife Adventure sitting cross-legged on a braided rug that had been in our home since my earliest memories. That part is vivid: the divided furniture, records, knickknacks. The sensation of visiting objects from a childhood that had suddenly ended. How my dad’s smell grew muskier in isolation. I inhaled lungfuls of him, like taking final breaths before diving underwater.
One night, he kneeled to feed a log to the woodstove and collapsed backward. His fingers curled into claws. His eyes flashed white. Saliva bubbled from his lips. I didn’t know what to do without my mom there, how to bring him back. I hovered over his trembling body, holding my breath while he sputtered. After the seizure had passed on its own, he went to bed with a cold washcloth on his forehead. I lay awake for hours, watching shadows on the ceiling.
Maybe six months after the divorce, my dad moved in with a new woman, Ruthanne.
Ruthanne was studying to become a child and family therapist. She was tough and maternal, which clearly scratched an itch for Firefeather. She was also overweight. But she was good for him in ways my mom wasn’t. She had firm boundaries, insisting that he pursue a profession with a steady income even if it only paid minimum wage. Firefeather had become fascinated with tantric teachings about exposure to death and dying as a way of understanding life’s impermanence, so he took a job as an orderly in a nursing home. His relationship with Ruthanne would last more than twenty years.
I despised Ruthanne.
She couldn’t seem to resist practicing her therapist-in-training techniques on me. When my dad and I argued, she stepped in to mediate—which infuriated me. A few times, I came home from visiting them with a migraine and the dry heaves. An unsubtle reaction to the trauma of a broken family.
Resentments festered between my parents. Firefeather blamed Mer for taking me so far that visits meant gas money and wear and tear to his beater car. Mer blamed Firefeather for never paying child support. Either one could have pressed their issues in court, but neither did. My dad would later say that, in addition to financial and geographic obstacles, it became emotionally painful for him to see me. Our visits dwindled to two or three per year. Phone calls became infrequent.
I blamed my mom, mostly because she was available for blaming. She taught me to cuss, and I used my harsh new words on her. When rage boiled over—occasionally hers, usually mine—we’d yell and slam doors like a warring couple. After the fury passed, we’d sit on the barge and talk things out until we were ready to hug and “start the day over.” Then we’d slather microwaved popcorn in butter and nutritional yeast, and watch Night Court or ALF.
Mer sought guidance from a single parents’ support group, a private therapist, and books like The Drama of the Gifted Child. For a while, she sent me to a therapist, too. Having been conditioned since toddlerhood to dodge prying questions—especially from adults—I clamped my mouth shut, tinkered with figurines in the therapist’s sandbox, and waited for the hour to tick by. My mom tried to convince me to talk about everything except her source of income, but I couldn’t relax. The therapist finally admitted that she wasn’t getting anywhere. I dropped therapy and started riding lessons in Golden Gate Park.
Cooking, as we know, was not in my mom’s repertoire.
Sian, a longtime customer and friend, would later recall peeking into our kitchen and seeing stacks of pizza boxes. “Meridy,” he gasped. “How the fuck can you cook for your kid in here? Look at the stove, it’s all pizza boxes!”
To which she responded, “Why would I cook?”
The only thing warming in the oven were pot brownies.
At nine, I was old enough to help. Baking was my rite of passage. We did it together, giggling at our awkwardness like Lucy and Ethel. I relished the toasty kitchen, the mess, the silliness, and the fragrance of chocolate and weed amalgamating, a smell I would always associate with family.
I soon knew the steps by heart.
Melt unsalted butter in a double boiler. Dump in the powdered weed and heat slowly for thirty minutes, skimming the foam. Break bars of unsweetened chocolate and swirl them into the green butter until it’s velvety and tempting. Don’t lick your fingers; looks like chocolate fondue, tastes like hell. Crack sixteen eggs into a mixing bowl. Smile because they’re sunny. Beat together with a heap of white sugar, then pour in your chocolaty ghee. If you dunk your fingers now, it tastes delicious, but you risk salmonella poisoning. Add flour, baking powder, salt. Go to town with an electric mixer, trying not to splatter the walls; cackle when you splatter them anyway. When it looks like fresh cow poop, you’re ready to bake. Divide the batter into greased pans and slide them into the oven. Close your windows to keep the neighbors out of the loop and relish the aroma blooming in your kitchen. After fifteen minutes, pat the brownies with a spatula to arrest rising. Bake another five to ten minutes until a crispy top layer coats the molten center. Ta-da!
I was an honest kid and I knew not to eat pot brownies, so sometimes we made a pan of “straight” brownies for me. My favorite part was wrapping, the intimacy of sitting with my mom for hours, entertaining each other with stories, hands busy. Place a brownie on a square of cellophane. Fold the top down, the bottom up. Pull the sides tight so no air gets in . . .
We became more like best friends or sisters than mother and daughter. We argued, negotiated, and made decisions as a team, an army of two. There were drawbacks, of course. I lacked security and structure. I was a nine-year-old kid playing adult games.
When I started fourth grade at Sutro Elementary School in the fall of 1987, I was in for culture shock. In Willits, my schoolmates were mainly hippie spawn like me, but most Sutro kids came from conservative Asian American households. They’d grown up on cartoons and video games. Desperate to blend in, I wore black leggings, Keds, and bulky sweatshirts like the other kids. Once, a classmate invited me to play Super Mario Bros. after school. I remember being amazed by how sterile her home seemed—everything tidy and beige, no art anywhere. Her mom brought us a tray of snacks like in a sitcom. I tried to act normal, but the weirdness must have leaked out somehow. The girl’s mom later told her we couldn’t be friends. I didn’t ask why. I felt like an alien from another planet.
Schoolyard dynamics mystified me. During recess one day, a popular kid named Jerry called another boy a fag. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” I said. So Jerry ran around the tetherball court screaming that I had AIDS and was trying to give it to him. Other kids joined in—including the one Jerry had called a fag in the first place. We talked about AIDS at home, so I knew you couldn’t catch it like a cold. Jerry was an idiot, but that didn’t make it less embarrassing. I locked myself in the girls’ bathroom to read until recess ended.
At night, real fags came over, and I loved them. Sian, who had spiky platinum-blond hair and pierced eyebrows, was wickedly funny. He nicknamed me Womb Unit (Wombie for short) because he’d known my mom since she was pregnant. His lover, Abel, was shy and beautiful, and had the longest eyelashes imaginable. There was Barry the cabaret crooner and Gino the salsa deejay with his snappy tropical style. There was my mom’s new best friend, Phillip, whose infectious laugh began deep in his chest and ended in a twitter.
This was the era of the most magical barge. A world unto itself. My mom handled customers she didn’t know well in the dining room, but friends came to her bedroom and stayed for a doobie. I loved listening to their conversations and trying to laugh at the right moments. “You were this little girl with these big eyes,” Sian says about me as a nine-year-old. “Abel and I would come in and you were, like, quiet. Eyes open, just looking at everything.”
My mom’s adult friends were kind, but the children I knew seemed monstrous. When my mom tried to throw me a tenth birthday party, I sat by the front window for hours. No one came.
I retreated into books, especially horror novels. During free-reading period at school, while other girls read the Sweet Valley High series, I dove into The Stand by Stephen King—an 823-page opus about a plague that wipes out most of humanity. It gave my kid brain a way of processing terror and grief from the safety of a fantasy with a happyish ending.
Most regulars came to our flat. But my mom did short weekly runs and a growing number of house calls to customers who were too sick to go out. Sometimes I’d tag along. After school one day, we delivered brownies to a wedding-cake Victorian up a steep side street in the Castro. These were new customers, my mom said, friends of Sylvester’s. I remember the door swinging open by itself—controlled by an old-fashioned automatic butler.
A man’s voice called, “Come on up, dear.”
He stood on the landing backlit by alcove windows. When my eyes adjusted, my breath snagged. He was shirtless, chest sunken like he’d been hit by a flying bowling ball. His sweatpants hung from protruding hip bones. Purple lesions dappled his chest and neck. Up near his collarbone, sores had grown together into a large butterfly. I’d seen KS plenty of times but not like this. I remember feeling embarrassed. Not by his scant clothing but by his scant flesh.
He seemed startled to see a kid. “Forgive me for not dressing up. Fashion’s the first thing to go.”
“That’s okay, sweetie,” my mom said. “I’m a pajamas-around-the-house girl, too. This is my daughter, Alia.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, she’s cool.”
“Alia, what a unique name,” he said. “I wish my parents had come up with something more exotic than David. It’s so pedestrian. Enchanté.”
When David turned to lead us toward the living room, my mom locked eyes with me, her expression a little frantic. Then we were in a large overheated room with gleaming hardwood floors and soaring ceilings.
“Sylvester raves about your brownies,” David said. “Food has gotten so . . . blech.”
“Dessert first,” my mom said brightly. “Guaranteed munchies.”
Near a pretty bay window, a hospital bed was cocked to a half-sitting position. It appeared empty until I realized that the small gray tangle of blankets was a person. Eyes closed, cheeks so paper thin that I could make out his teeth. Pale blond hair fanned behind his shoulders.
I knew he was dying.
“Keith, honey, wake up for a sec,” David said. “I want you to meet someone.”
An IV bag dangled from a hook above the bed, and my eyes followed the yellowish snake of tubing to Keith’s hand, the bruising around the needle, the bulge of his wrist bones. One finger twitched. He murmured.
“What’s that, baby?” David leaned close to his lover’s lips. He placed his palm gently on Keith’s cheek. Another murmur. “Okay, in a moment. I’m getting us those magic brownies.”
David faced us with a smile that wasn’t a smile. “He’s having a bad day.”
While they did the deal, I wandered around the room. A framed photograph sat on the mantel. Two men, shirtless on a beach, arms slung around each other. One looked like Tom Selleck without the chest fur, and the other had beachy surfer hair and bright blue eyes. Both were tanned and muscular, shoulders flecked with sand. I began to sweat.
“Now, don’t eat too much,” my mom was saying. “Start with a quarter of a brownie and give that forty-five minutes before taking more. I’m serious, they’ll have to peel you off the ceiling.”
“More like the floor,” David said with a rich laugh. The contours of his face softened. His teeth gleamed white. For a moment, he was handsome, almost Tom Selleck.
That radiance was the worst part.
In the car afterward, my mom put her hands on the steering wheel but didn’t start the engine. “Wow,” she said. “You okay?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“I wouldn’t have brought you in . . .” She put her clammy hand over mine. Her chin trembled and collapsed. I didn’t want to watch her cry, so I focused on the rooftops scattered below us like jigsaw puzzle pieces in a box top. You could see all the way to downtown. The Transamerica Pyramid rising above the stubby skyline, the gray Bay Bridge loping across the water to Oakland.
As we descended the hill, a van bearing the logo of Project Open Hand—a charity that delivered hot food to sick people—was heading up. “Would you look at that?” my mom said. “They’re bringing the food, and we’re bringing medicine to help the food stay down.” I felt her eyes on me. “You know we’re helping these guys, right?”
Blood pounded in my ears. The whole fourth grade had been ushered into the cafeteria, where a uniformed policeman was waiting. I was sure he’d come for me.
The cop introduced himself and explained that we’d be spending a lot of time together that semester.
We were going to learn how to Just Say No to drugs.
Once each week, amid the reek of old meatloaf, Juicy Fruit gum, and prepubescent body odor, I sat through lectures about the dangers of illegal narcotics like marijuana. About how to handle peer pressure and how to recognize dealers.
The program’s real name was Drug Awareness Resistance Education, but we all called it “D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs”—the slogan emblazoned on the bookmarks, notebooks, and T-shirts we could win by tattling on classmates the cop recruited to playact as dealers. They used corny lines like “Hey, little girl, want to buy some marijuana? It’ll make you look really cool . . .”
I could’ve told them that this wasn’t how it worked.
Instead, I circled the correct answers on D.A.R.E. quizzes, and chanted, “Just say no!” But it never occurred to me—not for a second—that the smiling policeman in the cafeteria could be anything but my mortal enemy. I still remembered the helicopters thundering over our house in Willits.
In the kitchen at home, I held an egg above a metal mixing bowl. “This is your brain,” I said, mimicking an antidrug commercial that was everywhere that year. I cracked the egg on the rim, and the golden yolk joined fifteen others atop a bed of white sugar. I clicked the electric beater on high, scrambling the mess together. “This is your brain on drugs!”
My mom cracked up.
I knew we were the good guys.
Even if it meant lying to police, therapists, teachers, other kids, everyone, really.
By this point, Meridy had been delivering brownies to Sylvester for ten years. First to a cluttered flat in the Castro, then to the flashy multifloor affair on Twin Peaks. Sometime in 1987, he moved down off the hill into a modest apartment on Collingwood.
There had never been a closet big enough for Sylvester. From the acid-drenched genderfuck theater scene that launched the late 1960s into outer space through the übermasculine Castro clone era and deep into the AIDS years, Sylvester was himself. A hippie and a disco superstar and a jazz crooner. A fabulous diva and a strong black man. Royalty parading down the street with his blond borzois and an entourage of boys—but also approachable and funny and generous. He was exceptional in the same way that the City could be exceptional for people chasing freedom.
Sylvester was Rubenesque. He’d do crash diets from time to time and his weight fluctuated, but he’d always been substantial. Late 1987, he started looking too thin. Mer worried. He was performing less, going out less. People gossiped.
One week, someone from Sylvester’s inner circle came downstairs to do the transaction with Mer at the door instead of inviting her up like usual. “Is he okay?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, just tied up.”
She kept delivering every Friday. But she never saw Sylvester again.
On Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day 1988, Sylvester made his illness public by leading the People with ARC/AIDS contingent of the parade. Riding in a wheelchair pushed by a friend, he wore a large black sun hat and held a single balloon in his lap. Mer didn’t attend that year. (“Too sad,” she says.) Others who were present described the crowd’s confusion: a long pause before recognizing Sylvester in his emaciated state, an audible gasp, a cheer, a sob, more cheering. By August, when Sylvester usually headlined the Castro Street Fair, he was too frail leave his apartment. A crowd gathered nearby and chanted his name so he could hear from his bed.
A chamber of San Francisco’s heart shut permanently when Sylvester died on December 16, 1988. It was the full stop at the end of an era.