Home Baked

by Alia Volz

  On Saturday, while Shari peddled her baked goods, Mer trailed behind, tugging coffee urns in a red wagon. Back then, you couldn’t walk to the end of any given block and buy an upside-down iced soy macchiato and a low-fat coffee cake in a waxed baggie. It would take Starbucks another two decades to spread like chicken pox throughout San Francisco.

  Meridy peddling tarot readings.

  Mer cobbled together rent that month, so she began dragging herself out of bed before dawn every Saturday to follow the Rainbow Lady.

  * * *

  Nineteen seventy-six was the bicentennial, not only of the United States as an autonomous nation, but also of San Francisco as a colonial conquest. In 1776, the Spanish military claimed the peninsula’s tip for its northernmost outpost. Almost simultaneously, Franciscan missionaries agreed that a lush lagoon six miles inland was a primo site for proselytizing the Ramaytush Ohlone people who’d fished its contributing creek for millennia. The ensuing two hundred years were violent, convoluted, and famously sordid. The name San Francisco didn’t take until 1847; for a stretch, the settlement was called Yerba Buena, after the “good herb” that blanketed the bayside hills. The moniker refers to a species of feral mint, but it’s bound to make stoners smile.

  San Francisco has had dozens of colorful names and nicknames. But the most enduring one is simple, dating to the Gold Rush and the following half century, when this was the only urban metropolis on an otherwise rural and unruly frontier. Even today, to locals, San Francisco is the “City,” capitalized.

  July 4, 1976, was planned as a traditional two hundredth birthday party in the City: a flag-flapping parade through Golden Gate Park, a viewing of naval vessels and pleasure boats in the bay, a railroad and steam engine display, an Americana arts and crafts show, and a fireworks to-do at Candlestick Park. The Emporium advertised a patriotic blowout, featuring discounts on Crock-Pots and leisure suits. There would be antiestablishment rallies and the usual toots and bangs of fireworks, church bells, whistles, air horns, gun salutes, and drunks.

  For her part, Meridy planned to stay in, take 150 micrograms of blotter acid, and draw. Her roommates were out so she had the flat to herself. She dropped her LSD at noon and the day expanded delightfully. The walls disintegrated into cheese curds, revealing the inside of white, where all colors shivered as one. Mer recorded the images in her sketch pad.

  An hour or several hours into her trip, an alarm clock sounded. Time to wake up? The telephone? Mer eyed the phone. It stopped ringing. She turned back to her drawing and the ringing resumed. When she focused on the phone, it stopped. Was this a game? Was the telephone company pranking her for not paying the bill?

  She picked up the receiver. “Stop it.”

  “Mer, it’s Shari.”

  “Oh, hey, man, what’s happening? I thought you were the telephone.”

  Shari giggled, an elfish twitter. “Look, I’m calling because I have a proposition for you.” She explained that she had reached a crossroads. The magic brownies were generating more income than she’d ever made. And she was having fun. Despite not doing drugs herself, Shari found selling them intoxicating; the risk gave her a rush. She had met her goal of $10,000, then exceeded it—and still didn’t want to leave; she was toying with the idea of staying. Then the Universe spoke to her again: You made a commitment to yourself and to the Universe that you were going to Findhorn. Now you want to go back on your word? Things are not going to work out for you if you do that. “The time has come for me to go,” Shari said. “I’d like you to take over the business. I want you to have it.”

  “All?”

  “Whole.”

  Meridy saw herself balancing on a brink. Below yawned an abyss; above gaped the blind sky. If she jumped, would she sprout feathers or would she plummet? “I’ll ring you back, Shari,” she said. “Let me think about that.”

  Mer hung up and set aside her drawing materials. The air throbbed in an ecstatic LSD warble. Practically speaking, the timing was good for marijuana brownies. In the wake of Watergate, Nixon’s War on Drugs had lost favor in the polls. His successor, Gerald Ford, took a less strident approach toward cannabis, and that attitude filtered down to the state level. When the Moscone Act took effect in January 1976, California became the fifth state to decriminalize possession of small quantities of marijuana for personal use. Of course, selling marijuana remained a felony, as did possession of the multiple ounces needed to make brownies. Still, it was a move away from prohibition.

  Did Mer consider this factor? Did she carefully weigh potential prison time against the stress of her unstable income? Not at all. Her decision would come down to three brass coins jingling in her palm; the I Ching would guide her actions.

  Mer had been introduced to the I Ching in Madison by the same cousin who got her stoned the first time. Also known as the Book of Changes, the I Ching described a world in an unending state of flux. Rather than a rigid moral code, it offered guidance in riding life’s ever-changing currents. To use the book for divination, you meditated on a question while rolling three specialized brass coins in one hand. Then you dropped them and recorded how they landed. The result of six throws, called a hexagram, corresponded to one of sixty-four passages—each composed of the Image (a metaphor for the present situation), the Judgment (how one should act in that situation), and the Lines (short passages predicting how the situation would evolve into its next phase). Mer loved the mutability and flow. Although the whole smorgasbord of hippie oracles appealed to her, the I Ching became her enduring favorite. She’d consulted it so frequently in the first years that she knew most of the thick book by heart.

  Mer focused on grounding herself, imagining tree roots reaching from her body through the floor into the earth below. Her brass I Ching coins were greasy and smooth from use. Jingling them in one hand, she repeated a question in her mind: What are the effects of running this bakery?

  Mer cast her coins onto the table six times. The progression led her to a passage titled, “14. Ta Yu/Possession in Great Measure.” It was one of the I Ching’s most fortuitous hexagrams, promising “supreme success” and “possession on a grand scale.” The hexagram was too clear to second-guess.

  “Wonderful!” Shari said when Mer called her back. “I know you’ll have fun with it. I’ll write out all of my recipes, and we can get together and go over them.”

  Mer felt power sparking through her fingertips. She spent the evening scheming, her acid-charged brain chasing possible futures. She wanted to invent a street persona; the Rainbow Lady was taken, and besides, Mer saw herself with more of a rock ’n’ roll edge. If she was going to run a bakery, she’d do it her way.

  3

  If All the World’s a Stage

  A friend gives my mom a sack of Puerto Rican pasteles to bring to a dinner party. Pasteles are made from stewed meat enveloped in masa paste and wrapped in a banana leaf, similar to Mexican tamales. The heating directions couldn’t be simpler: drop the pastel into boiling water, then fish it out after five minutes. I find my mom in the kitchen, looking small and lost, dangling a pastel over a pot of still water.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be boiling?” I say.

  “It is boiling,” she answers, her tone mildly defensive. “Look, bubbles.”

  The water is tepid at best, the tiniest of bubbles swirling to the surface. That’s right: my mom is sixty-nine years old and has never learned how to boil water. Through much of my childhood, we subsisted on Lean Cuisine, Cup O’ Noodles, and takeout, which we habitually ate on the barge while watching TV. She struggled with her weight, undergoing “miracle” diets and medical fasts, none of which involved cooking whole foods. I never went hungry as a kid, but the kitchen was like uncharted territory on a medieval map.

  My mom lives alone in Desert Hot Springs. How she keeps herself alive is something of a mystery, though I know it involves Safeway rotisserie chicken and a nearby strip-mall burrito shop. Faced with a refrigerator of raw ingredients, she might very well starve.

/>   I help her get the water going and hang around, intending only to supervise, but I end up heating the pasteles myself. Sucking people into her projects without their noticing is one of my mom’s superpowers.

  I exact my revenge by telling our friends at dinner that my mom can’t boil water. She laughs, her face reddening and bunching like a Christmas apple doll. “It was boiling!” she yells. “It was, I tell you, it was!”

  * * *

  This same woman took the reins of a do-it-yourself bakery on July 4, 1976.

  She lay in bed the next morning, working out the tendrils of her acid trip. What had sounded like a righteous plan on 150 micrograms seemed impossible hungover. The idea of assembling the Rainbow Lady’s zucchini bread made the bed spin. She would have to call Shari back and tell her no thank you.

  But the hexagram had been unequivocally positive; for a business venture, you couldn’t top “Possession in Great Measure” with no changing lines. If her belief in the I Ching was genuine, she had to follow through. Sipping coffee in bed, Mer realized that the only way she’d be able to do this was to get someone to do it for her.

  When she heard her roommate Donald puttering in the kitchen, she shuffled out to make her pitch. “How about you bake?” she said, after explaining the Rainbow Lady’s offer. “I’ll handle sales. We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.”

  “Do I look like Betty Crocker to you?”

  “You made those chocolate chip cookies that one time,” Mer said. “They were good!”

  Donald cocked one eyebrow. “Darling, a chimpanzee can make chocolate chip cookies.”

  “But can a chimp make pot brownies?”

  This was something Mer counted on: Donald loved drugs. He particularly enjoyed heroin, so much so that he wound up on people’s shit lists for minor thefts and other dishonesties when he got strung out. A problematic friend—and a questionable choice for a business associate—but one who was usually up for an adventure.

  Later, when the Rainbow Lady dropped off a box of recipes written on index cards, Mer feigned confidence. “Don’t forget to write from Findhorn!” Back inside, she placed the box on Donald’s pillow.

  Though by no means an expert in the kitchen, Donald knew these recipes weren’t written in unbreakable code. He agreed to try, beginning with modest goals: bran muffins, regular chocolate brownies, and magic brownies.

  While Donald was dusting himself from ringlet to toe ring in flour, Mer made a general nuisance of herself. She chattered at his back, rolled joints on the cutting board, filed her long fingernails, and tossed I Ching hexagrams at the kitchen table. No question was too grand or too trivial for the oracle. What are the effects of adding ginger to the bran muffins? Jingle, jingle, jingle.

  When Mer quipped that Donald’s bran muffins looked like “mini cow pies,” he frisbeed the mixing bowl into the sink and stomped down the hall to his room. Mer frowned at the wreckage—eggshells overflowing from the compost bucket, chocolate caked to the double boiler, an epic heap of pans and bowls and utensils in the sink—and lay her head on the table.

  A bakery. What was she thinking?

  She cleaned the mess slowly, hoping that Donald would come back to take over again.

  He didn’t.

  * * *

  A couple of days later, a semimiracle happened. Another transplant from Milwaukee, a costumer named Barbara Hartman, quit her job on a production of The Wiz over a tiff with the wardrobe mistress. She was freshly unemployed. And she was a monster baker.

  The girls: Barb and Mer.

  Barb was tall and Germanic, with wheat-blonde hair and an apple-cheeked smile. She had grown up on the east side of Milwaukee, near the lakefront. Her mother, who’d borne nine children, saw baking as an inexpensive way to feed her brood. On icy winter afternoons, Barb would slog home from school to find fresh strudel cooling on the counter. She’d learned to bake in the most natural way; it was something she did from the heart.

  Barb’s ubiquitous companion in those days was a shaggy gray long-legged mutt named Boogie, a canine genius and literal party animal. (He once disappeared for a week, then reappeared on Barb’s doorstep wearing a birthday hat and tie.) In 1976, Barb and Boogie were living with another costumer in the Glen Park neighborhood. Their apartment had a spacious kitchen with a sweet view of the sunny side of town. A carpenter friend had recently built her a bread table near the window with cooling racks overhead.

  Barb joined the mobile bakery and flourished in her new role. Each Friday, she flipped through her recipe books to choose a special for the weekend. She made cranberry-banana bread, carrot cake with raisins and nuts, cinnamon buns, and, of course, magic brownies. An early riser, she relished mornings spent mixing dough as sunrise splashed across the City or relaxing on her sofa enveloped by the aromas of childhood with Boogie’s muzzle on her lap.

  * * *

  Donald was relieved to get out of baking, but he liked handling the pot. Mer was buying bricks of Mexican gold from the same wharf hippie who’d supplied the Rainbow Lady. The bricks came riddled with tiny brown seeds that exploded under heat, exuding a foul odor. Donald would do a little cocaine or Benzedrine and sit at the kitchen table for hours picking apart the bricks to hunt for seeds. It was slow, obsessive work, a project he could lose himself in. He’d then crumble the pot into smaller pieces, run it through a blender, and pass the powder through a sifter before handing it off to Barb to work her kitchen-goddess magic.

  Barb melted butter in a double boiler, added the powdered weed, and simmered the mixture for half an hour, periodically skimming foam. She added the cannabis ghee to melted chocolate, eggs, sugar, baking powder, and flour. Voilà: magic brownies.

  * * *

  Saturday mornings, Meridy and either Barb or Donald would set up the coffee and baked goods on a card table at Aquatic Park on Fisherman’s Wharf. Hundreds of craftspeople gathered on the concrete bleachers to mill and gossip while waiting for booth assignments. The park descended from there to a narrow beach and a semicircular pier with a postcard view of the Golden Gate Bridge ablaze in international orange.

  Fisherman’s Wharf had been a bustling working-class waterfront since shortly after the Gold Rush. From 1895 on, the briny stench clashed with rich aromas from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory. In the mid-1960s, the Ghirardellis sold their San Francisco factory to a real estate developer who restored the redbrick buildings around landscaped courtyards and converted the space into a shopping plaza. A second mall—the Cannery—opened catty-corner in a dormant fruit packing plant.

  Shoppers didn’t rush to the new malls all at once; the area still reeked of fish oil. But a path had been cut and more entrepreneurs followed. A young Cantonese immigrant named Thomas Fong turned a nearby grain mill into a wax museum with more than two hundred celebrities and a chamber of horrors. In the early seventies—after a nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island by a group of American Indian activists asserting their right to disused federal land—the US government decided to rebrand the former maximum-security prison as a tourist attraction. The Red and White Fleet offered the first Alcatraz cruise in 1973. Souvenir shops specializing in ESCAPED INMATE T-shirts mushroomed throughout the area followed by upscale boutiques and art galleries. The blue-collar seaport morphed into one of the most visited tourist traps in the world.

  Hippies began selling crafts on the waterfront around 1970; they were not welcome. Merchants fretted that the peddlers’ shaggy outfits would mar the district’s new image. Police cracked down, making arrests, so the craftspeople pooled their funds to hire a lawyer and founded the San Francisco Street Artists Guild. There were protests, press conferences, more arrests. Eventually, the street artists unearthed an obscure law enacted after half of San Francisco’s merchants lost their places of business to the 1906 earthquake and fire. This statute entitled anyone the right to a peddler’s permit provided they’d made their goods by hand.

  The artisans had an effect on Fisherman’s Wharf that neither the merchants nor
the politicians nor even the street artists seem to have anticipated: tourists loved it. People visiting San Francisco in the decade following the Summer of Love media circus wanted to see, smell, and even touch real hippies. Now they could take home a souvenir crystal necklace or hand-crocheted shawl that still smelled of Nag Champa incense.

  To avoid jockeying over coveted spaces, the vendors came up with a lottery system. From then on, names were drawn from a diaper pail—which, rumor has it, got tossed into the bay more than once by grumpy street artists. The lottery was a slow process and mornings could be miserably cold especially in summer when massive fogbanks clung to the bay. Mer’s mobile bakery had a captive audience.

  * * *

  When the lottery wrapped up at nine in the morning, Mer would head home to take advantage of the morning light. She’d lose herself in drawing or painting; her style evolved, becoming looser and more colorful.

  In the afternoon, she’d meet Barb to restock before heading back to the wharf for a second round of sales, now strolling with a basket of baked goods and a Guatemalan pouch of magic brownies. Mer favored jeans or harem pants tucked into shitkickers with heavy wooden heels that made a satisfying whock with every step. She wore a men’s bomber jacket, soft and scuffed, with a sterling silver housefly pinned to the lapel. While traveling in Morocco, she’d learned to tie elaborate turbans and lined her eyes with Egyptian kohl. Mer had never been girly like the Rainbow Lady with her flowing dresses and sweet giggle; Mer’s laugh was a guffaw.