by Alia Volz
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
On the Barge
Part I
Eat It, Baby!
The Hand
If All the World’s a Stage
September’s Song
The Touch
A Zillion and One Raindrops
The Power at Hand
Part II
Going Round the Bed
Kings and Queens
Ride That Brownie
Child of Life’s Long Labor
Galen’s Batch
Part III
The Devil’s Playground
Off My Cloud
Paint It Black
No Peace
Give It Up and You Get It All
Part IV
The Crossroads of Infinity
Mirrors Become You
Ella-Vay-Shun
The Wheel
Licking the Spoon
Acknowledgments
Sources
Image Credits
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2020 by Alia Volz
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Volz, Alia, 1977– author.
Title: Home baked : my mom, marijuana, and the stoning of San Francisco / Alia Volz.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028706 (print) | LCCN 2019028707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358006091 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358007074 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358315094 | ISBN 9780358316626
Subjects: LCSH: Volz, Alia, 1977—Childhood and youth. | Mothers and daughters—California—San Francisco—Biography. | Eccentrics and eccentricities—California—San Francisco—Biography. | Bakers—California—San Francisco—Biography. | Cooking (Marijuana) | Marijuana—Therapeutic use. | Children of divorced Parents—California—San Francisco—Biography. | San Francisco (Calif.)—Biography.
Classification: LCC CT275.V5926 A3 2020 (print) | LCC CT275.V5926 (ebook) | DDC 979.4/61092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028706
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028707
Cover design by Martha Kennedy
Cover photographs courtesy of the author; paper bag texture © Robert Kirk/Getty Images
Author photograph © Dennis Hearne
v2.0420
Photograph and illustration credits can be found on page 417.
An alternate version of chapter 1 first appeared in essay form under the title “My Mother the Ganja Dealer” on Narratively.com in 2014. Several chapters include parts of an essay titled “In Any Light, by Any Name,” first published by Tin House in 2014. Chapter 2 contains portions of the author’s oral history with Shari Mueller, which first appeared in Instant City in 2008. All written and used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Recipes in this book are for illustrative purposes only. The author and the publisher disclaim liability for any adverse effects resulting directly or indirectly from information contained in this book.
Some names and descriptions have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved. Most people appear as themselves.
For Doug and Meridy.
You kept me safe from the squares.
Prologue
On the Barge
When I was nine, my public elementary school participated in a program best known by the slogan, “D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs!” It was one of Nancy Reagan’s pet projects, a prong of her Just Say No campaign. One afternoon per week, the entire fourth grade crowded into the cafeteria, where a uniformed policeman lectured us about the perils of narcotics like marijuana. We learned techniques for deflecting peer pressure and identifying and avoiding dealers. And we broke into groups to playact situations. I was careful to follow the program’s script.
I knew how to keep a secret.
At home, there were giant black garbage bags of Mendocino shake crammed into the closet of our spare bedroom, along with pounds of fragrant, manicured buds sealed in gallon Ziplocs. My mom had operated Sticky Fingers Brownies—a massive, profoundly illegal marijuana-edibles business—since before I was born. Throughout my infancy, she and her partners distributed upward of ten thousand brownies per month; it was the first known business of its kind to operate at that scale in California. By the age of nine, I was helping my mom bake and individually wrap brownies on weekends. Sometimes I tagged along on deliveries after school.
We were the people the cop warned my class about.
By 1987, the year of my first D.A.R.E. lessons, AIDS was ravaging my hometown. People I loved as surrogate aunties and uncles were suffering gruesome, agonizing illnesses. Cannabis eased their discomfort and helped curb the deadly wasting syndrome. After-school deliveries had become tours of sickbeds.
I had been my mom’s accomplice since I was in the stroller. Some of my earliest flashes of memory are from brownie runs back when San Francisco had a technicolor glow. I grew up believing that I was made of my hometown, that there was no difference between me and the place I was born.
My family’s secrets sometimes isolated me from other kids, but secrets also act as a bonding agent between those in the know. I was never neglected like some hippie children were; I was fawned over, encouraged, welcomed into the conspiracy. An outcast at school, I was inner-inner circle within the Sticky Fingers world. The coolest of the cool kids.
And wherever we lived, the inner sanctum of the inner circle was my mom’s king-size bed, nicknamed the “barge.” Many customers became trusted friends. She’d invite them aboard, and they’d sprawl sideways or belly down and converse for hours—unpacking relationship troubles, planning career changes, swapping stories. Equal parts therapist’s couch, executive boardroom, and ladies’ lounge, the barge was a place for sharing and intimacy. It was also where my mom counted stacks of hundreds and fifties.
I can still see her enveloped in a miasma of pot smoke, blue-green-amber eyes gleaming with her latest anecdote or an old favorite. And then flopped over on her back, wheezing with laughter and slapping the covers. I remember how the barge trembled with a good punch line, and how steady it felt when you were down and needed reassurance.
There have been countless barges over the years—from mattresses so well-worn they were permanently imprinted with my mom’s shape to hotel beds that carried us for a night or two. Wherever my mom “gets horizontal” for a heart-to-heart talk with someone she loves, that’s the barge. It’s a state of mind as much as a place.
That’s where this book began. Sometime around 2007, I started taping my mom’s best stories on a handheld cassette recorder. At first, I was just archiving for myself. But as she unspooled the yarns of Sticky Fingers, I became curious about how her contribution to cannabis history fit into the broader legalization movement and the story of my hometown, even my country. I wanted to understand the historical moment and social pressures that created the secretive world I grew up in. And to know why she risked her freedom—and my safety—to blaze trails in this illegal industry during the drug war.
To find out, I barged with my godmother and then my dad, both of whom helped build the business. The conversations began with people close to my heart, but the circle soon widened exponentially; it’s the nature of drug dealing to radiate outward. The Sticky Fingers crew guided me to former cus
tomers, who brought their friends into the project. Some came to me, and others I had to hunt. Several people have passed away in the years since we talked, leaving me with staticky recordings of their memories. A hollow silence remains in place of the voices of our many friends lost long ago to AIDS.
Since beginning my recordings, I’ve conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with cannabis farmers, dealers, customers, activists, artists, business owners, city officials, and law enforcement—all of whom were somehow touched by this family-run pot-brownie business. I’ve sought to corroborate their memories with historical records, archival research, and contemporary news sources. All scenes and conversations are re-created with guidance from the original participants. Throughout, I’ve hoped to retain the sweetness of our early conversations. My “interviewing,” if I must call it that, is relaxed and informal, as close to barging as I can manage.
Before I could spell my own name, I understood that I came from an outlaw family. If I ever revealed what my parents did for a living, I knew that they could go to prison and I could become a ward of the state. Whenever adults asked, I said my folks were professional artists—a true statement, though incomplete.
As of this writing, California is among eleven states (plus D.C.) to authorize the recreational use of cannabis for adults. Thirty-five states permit varying degrees of medicinal use, and another two states allow controlled preparations of CBD. Only Idaho and Nebraska still practice total prohibition. Marijuana laws are shifting so quickly that the landscape will likely be different by the time this book is printed. This sea change began in my lifetime; it began in my hometown of San Francisco, among my mom’s close friends and associates; it began with a plague and the bravery and determination of those who fought for what their bodies needed.
The statute of limitations expired on my family’s crimes years ago. The federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 narcotic—more tightly controlled than cocaine or pharmaceutical opioids—but no one is going to do time because of this story. I’m writing with the consent and collaboration of those involved.
I vividly remember my mom dissuading me from taking a “cola” bud the length of my forearm to kindergarten show-and-tell. Now, as I enter my forties, I’m eager to break the silence I grew up with. I can finally bring Mom’s home-baked brownies to share with the rest of class.
Part I
1
Eat It, Baby!
MAIL CONTAINS DRUG, YOUNG WOMEN SEIZED reads a 1969 headline from the Milwaukee Journal. Below, in grainy black-and-white, floats Meridy Domnitz’s mug shot. My mom, twenty-one years old, already making a name for herself.
In the photo, she looks more pathetic than criminal. Her head is cocked to the right, forehead contorted into an expression of woe. Her frizzy hair has gone renegade from a sideways ponytail, and she’s wearing what appears to be a paisley kurta. The mug shot beside my mom’s stands in contrast. It belongs to her cousin’s wife, Patty Abrams. Patty is all dimples and teeth, like it’s her school picture.
This article details my mom’s first dalliance with the wrong side of the law; by the time she had me nearly a decade later, the dealer persona had taken center stage.
* * *
A trail of brownie crumbs leads to the day when my mom stopped being a good girl: October 18, 1967, a chilly autumn afternoon with a wool-gray sky.
On her way to class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Meridy heard shouts breaking out between the frigid gusts coming off Lake Mendota. She rounded Bascom Hall and walked right into the Dow Chemical protest.
As Mer gleaned that morning, the company that gave the world Saran Wrap was also the US government’s sole manufacturer of napalm, which bonded with and quickly liquefied human flesh when exploded in a bomb, causing gruesome injury and death. Dow representatives were in the Commerce Building trying to recruit from the student body. Protesters jammed the building. The overflow—around a thousand people—grouped in the quad, pumping signs that read DOW SHALT NOT KILL and MORALS NOT BOMBS. A visiting contingent from the San Francisco Mime Troupe tooted bugles and rattled tambourines.
Mer had grown up on a tranquil, elm-lined street in Milwaukee. She was a daddy’s girl through and through. With the McCarthy witch hunts in mind, her dad had sent her to college with a warning about protests. “Be careful who you run with,” Bill had said. “And don’t sign your name on anything.” She kept her head down and her hair ironed. Now, by pure accident, she’d landed in the center of the action. Hugging her books to her chest, she slipped into the crowd. Mer had never been to a rock concert before, let alone a massive demonstration. She felt transported by the warm exhales of proximal humans, their mingled sweat, and unified spirit.
Thirty-five of Madison’s finest arrived decked out in riot gear, some with their badges removed. They threaded into the crowd in a narrow phalanx, a long black snake, helmets gleaming. The police thrust into the Commerce Building and unleashed pandemonium with their billy clubs. One thing about head wounds: they gush. Students scrambled out of doors and windows, blood streaming down their faces. Once the hall had been cleared, cops let loose on the kids in the quad. Mer jittered around the periphery while protesters fought back with shoes, bricks, and books, sending thirteen policemen to the hospital together with sixty-three students. She had been raised to trust police, but they were bludgeoning college kids; it didn’t look right.
A class period had ended, swelling the crowd with passersby, when the first canisters hit the ground, catching Mer in a billowing cloud of tear gas. Her eyes were still stinging when she got back to her dorm that night and flipped on the television. There she was on the evening news. Her hair was in a stiff flip, and she wore mustard-yellow Bermuda shorts and knee-high socks her mother had picked out at a department store. Her first thought: Oh God, what if my parents are watching? Second thought: I look like a total square.
Meridy in her “total square” days.
She was mortified. At the same time, it was kind of thrilling. She knew what side she wanted to be on.
The next day, Mer borrowed bell-bottoms from her roommate and joined about two thousand people below the campus statue of Abraham Lincoln. Protesters had outfitted Abe with a gas mask. It was a much larger crowd, with as many straight-looking students as longhairs. Homemade signs announced the new theme: POLICE BRUTALITY: KILL IT BEFORE IT MULTIPLIES!
Madison was a tranquil midwestern city ringed by dairy farms and factories; it had been voted Best Place to Live in America in a nationwide poll. A few small antiwar protests had taken place, but the Dow riot seemed to transform it overnight. Student groups called a moratorium on classes. Speeches drowned out lectures; organizing usurped homework. Madison suddenly became one of the most politically active campuses in the United States. The nicest kids, wearing the crispest creases, called themselves radicals. It wasn’t Berkeley, but almost.
Later that week, one of Meridy’s cousins who lived in Madison made Grass-A-Roni (Rice-A-Roni cooked with pot butter) and they danced around the apartment to an Otis Redding 45. It was Mer’s first taste of marijuana.
She liked it.
Mer morphed. She went from Dionne Warwick and Johnny Mathis records to the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. From setting her hair in juice-can rollers to au naturel curls, the bigger the better; Indian kurtas; and no bra. She dug oil paints and politics; she dug LSD, mushrooms, grass, amphetamines, and heroin; she dug Jung, Ginsberg, and Marcuse; she read tarot cards and consulted the I Ching.
The middle-class counterculture split into two general camps: hippies and radicals. They were tines of the same fork. Both rejected prescribed ideals; both loathed cops. But their priorities differed. Mer was a hedonist at heart, so she rowed merrily, merrily down the hippie stream.
* * *
Meridy arrived at her parents’ door for summer break, 1969, decked in hippie regalia: fringed leather vest, cowboy boots, oversize necklace, hair frizzed out in a tongue-in-socket halo. Her mother, Florence, was a sobe
r, dictatorial first grade teacher with a mean streak; as a child, Mer had often worn long sleeves to hide bruises.
Seeing Mer’s new hippie look, Florence scowled. “What’s the matter with your hair?”
Bill, a former tavern owner, doubled up in laughter. In many ways, he was Florence’s opposite: tough but charming, always ready with a joke. While he didn’t exactly understand hippies, he saw them as more ridiculous than threatening.
Mer planned to stay in Milwaukee until fall, but definitely not with her parents. She took a flat on the Eastside with a nurse whose boyfriend dealt reefer smuggled in from Nogales. He stored the pot in an oak trunk in the girls’ living room. In exchange, Mer and the nurse could smoke their fill.
* * *
The trail takes a sharp turn here.
One of Meridy’s cousins—I’ll call him Nathan—had moved to California, where he attended UC Berkeley and intermittently dealt pot. He’d married a Native American woman, Patty, and together they had a son. In August 1969, Patty brought her four-month-old baby to Milwaukee to meet the family. She and the baby stayed at Mer’s apartment, and the two women bonded over mushroom tea.
In classic hippie-dippie fashion, Patty had arrived without plane fare back to California. So Nathan mailed a special package through the USPS: a kilo of weed for Patty to sell. He sealed the 2.2-pound brick of grass in plastic, boxed it, wrapped it in butcher paper, and addressed it to his infant son. With love, Dad.
Mer wasn’t involved in the scheme, but she did know about it. On August 21, she and her friend Sue planned to rent horses at Big Cedar Lake. The package had arrived by then and was waiting at the post office. As an afterthought, Mer offered Patty a lift to the post office to save her and the baby a sweltering trip on the bus—fully aware that they were about to collect a package of marijuana.
