by Alia Volz
Macrophotography shot with the same erotic sensibility accompanies the writing. Seed pods shaped like vulvas, pistils that look like erect penises. It’s over the top but also useful. The photos teach you to identify the plant’s sex organs at various stages so you’ll know when to kill males, when to wait, and when to harvest mature females.
This book passed from hippie to hippie in the California backwoods. Growing good sinsemilla is difficult—so much can go wrong—but the guide made the subtle art appear accessible, even fun.
* * *
The three friends lay side by side on a blanket on Mumser’s deck looking up at the clouds. Mer was in the middle, holding hands on one side with Barb and with Donald on the other side, enjoying the energy flowing between them. The mescaline trip had mellowed, but she still felt quietly ecstatic, glad to be with close friends.
“You know, Donald, I always wanted you to be straight,” Mer said. “You’re so my type. Why can’t you be straight?”
Donald stuck out his tongue. “Ew.”
“Seriously? Go to hell.”
“Did you always know you liked guys?” Barb asked, breaking the chain to prop herself on one elbow.
“I was never really in the closet,” Donald said. “I don’t think I could find the closet.”
They fell quiet for a time. Then Donald sat up, clasping his hands around his knees. “I actually remember the exact moment. I think I was maybe thirteen, and I ran across the word ‘homosexual’ in my father’s dictionary. I remember turning beet red and realizing, Oh, my God, that’s me. There’s a word for what I am.”
“What about your parents?” Barb asked. “Were they, you know, cool?”
“Oh, no. I came home one day from school, and my father had intercepted a letter from my boyfriend, this was like in high school. He called me into his office, and he was shaking this letter at me, and he said, Is your girlfriend’s name Gary?”
The women laughed.
“He was furious. He chased me out into the car, then he and my mother took me down to the police station in Green Bay, where they locked me in an interrogation room. This police psychiatrist came in and told me all the horrible things that were going to happen to me if I stayed a faggot. He said I was going to die in a gutter, shot by a jealous lover.”
A smile swept across his face. “I’ll never forget that phrase. It’s got a certain poetry, don’t you think? It sounded . . . wonderful to me.”
* * *
Late in the afternoon, the group gathered in Betsy’s kitchen to talk business. Her place was nicer and larger than Mumser’s. Betsy had thrown on a plaid flannel shirt and put her hair in a low ponytail. She dragged in a giant garbage bag, opened it, and ran her fingers through the leaves and stems inside.
“We haven’t harvested the new crop yet, so this is what’s left over from last year. We were trying to figure out whether to burn it or compost it or what, so if you guys can use it for your cooking, more power to you.”
Mer felt giddy. Here was a part of the ganja plant that usually went to waste; in the brownies, it would find new life. She tried to sound casual. “How much are you asking?”
Betsy shrugged. “Eh, I don’t know . . . How about fifty a pound?”
They were paying six times that amount for lousy Mexican bud. Riding the end of her trip, Mer envisioned their profit margin as a glowing green line shooting to the ceiling where it burst into greenish-golden light that bathed the room.
“We’ll take everything you’ve got.”
Barb gave her bug eyes, but Mer just smiled.
Betsy weighed the shake in batches on a triple beam. There were ten pounds total.
If only Patrolman Buxbaum could see Meridy now.
* * *
At sunset, when the light poured soupy and orange through the treetops, Barb crammed the garbage bag of shake into an antique icebox she kept in her truck bed. Boogie hopped in back to stand guard. “We should put a blessing on the drive,” Barb said. She closed her eyes. Mer and Donald followed suit. “I’m envisioning a golden bubble around this truck that will carry us home safely, no funny business.”
Thus guarded against calamity, they began the bumpy trek down from the hills. They’d gotten a late start, and by the time they’d stopped for dinner at a greasy spoon, the sky was a velvety black. The afternoon of drug-fueled frolicking was catching up to Barb, making the two hundred or so miles feel like eight hundred. “Guys, I’ve got to pull over,” she said. “I have to get some sleep or I won’t make it.”
Barb exited the 101 at a small state park and followed a fire road to a grassy clearing. A half-moon crept above jagged silhouettes of pine trees. Barb cuddled up with Boogie. Mer and Donald laid out blankets in the dry grass. Cricket song lulled them to sleep.
Mer awoke in the crisp blue of early morning to find a park ranger in a broad-brimmed hat standing over her. “Ma’am, do you have a camping permit?”
She blinked up at him.
Barb sat up in the truck bed, blonde hair awry, mascara smeared. “I got tired so I pulled over,” she said. “What’s the big deal?”
The ranger looked nonplussed. “You can’t be here without a permit. I need you to leave.”
“For God’s sake,” Barb snapped. “Do you have to be all bossy and uptight just because you’re wearing a big stupid hat?”
“Um, Barb,” Mer said, getting to her feet. “Calm down.”
“Oh, please,” Barb said. “Smokey Bear over here would rather we had an accident than sleep in his precious park.”
Boogie growled, baring his teeth.
The ranger placed a hand on his gun holster. “Ma’am, you need to call off your dog!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Mer saw Donald taking small steps backward, eyes darting, ready to break and run for the woods.
“Look, we’re really sorry,” Mer told the ranger. “We’ll get going right now. Come on, Barb, let’s go home. Now.”
“All right. Sorry,” Barb said. “Give us a minute to pack up, would you?”
Luckily, the ranger only wanted them to leave, which they managed to do despite Barb’s tongue.
The incident wouldn’t seem funny until years later. “Never fuck with Barb early in the morning.” My mom laughs a little ruefully. “You know how she can get. She has that Scorpio rising, so there’s a nasty streak, especially if she hasn’t had her coffee and her first cigarette. We’re carrying ten pounds of pot, and she’s laying into this ranger like he’s some schmuck fighting over a parking space.”
It was with a profound sense of relief that they crossed the Golden Gate later that morning. Pores opened to the damp bay air. Nature had its charms, but there was nothing like coming home to the City.
5
The Touch
Meridy liked this new side of herself: the outlaw entrepreneur. Stepping out to work the wharf each weekend, looking sharp, she felt her energy crackling dangerously—a stripped wire. Her circle of acquaintances grew exponentially, and her reputation began to precede her. “Oh, you’re the Brownie Lady!” Among the wharf characters were several fine men to flirt with. She had fair-weather boyfriends here and there, hey-baby-free-love romps, and the occasional awkward orgy—but nothing she could hold, nothing to return to. Most nights, she spent sprawled between cold sheets.
Granted, she was choosy. She wanted a knock-down, drag-out, transcendental romance. She didn’t go for the bucket jaw, toothpaste teeth, harmonica mustache look that was mainstream. Forget Burt Reynolds; bring on David Bowie! Creative, slightly broken, effeminate types gave her butterflies. She considered herself an artistic genius and was, at the very least, an artist of significant promise, therefore she wanted a lover of the same ilk. A Diego to her Frida, a Rodin to her Claudel. A man who dealt from a full deck of cards.
Preferably tarot cards.
But whenever Mer felt a genuine zap, the guy backed off. She had a knack for both dazzling and scaring the shit out of the opposite sex. As the Butterfly Man, one of her wharf customers, w
ould recall decades later, “She was a striking lady. Kind of terrifying, to tell you the truth.” So despite possessing intelligence, good looks, and cojones—or maybe because of these traits—Mer drummed her fingers in fern bars on Clement Street and cafés in North Beach, waiting.
Barb kept saying they needed to find her a magician.
He’s here somewhere, Mer thought. Somewhere in this seven-mile town.
* * *
He was about three miles away.
My future father walked the Mission toward what he didn’t know. He liked to be on the street, checking people out, getting checked out. He stood an even six feet, with good posture beaten into him at boarding school, and moved with an easy long-legged swing. Music in the wooden heels of his cowboy boots striking the sidewalk, rhythm in his hips. On a clear day, he was the kind of guy who would try to stare directly at the sun and meditate—once burning his corneas so badly that he had to wear gauze patches.
He walked, destination wherever, soaking in the scene. Passing the Sixteenth Street BART station, he checked out the Chicanos in high-waisted slacks and bandannas. Round brown-skinned women selling tamales. The crowd surged and ebbed. Occasionally, he’d see another freak coming the other way. They’d lock eyes and nod, a current passing between them. He could get overloaded with energy, like a circuit breaker receiving too much juice. He’d been trained to read auras, and sometimes he couldn’t turn off the colors enveloping strangers. He liked the smell of grilling meat, the sound of ranchera music a little circusy to his ears. The funk of junkies, the occasional rainbow of a kindred spirit. He walked, feeling alive inside his skin. We are all one light, he thought. All the world’s children . . .
* * *
It was Barb who found him.
John Battle, the Viking carpenter she was dating, had recently moved into an enormous warehouse on Twentieth and Alabama streets in the Mission. “I’m living with all these kooky psychic hippies,” he told her. “You won’t believe my housemates.”
Barb liked kooky psychic hippies. She visited John at his new space, and that’s where she met Doug Volz.
Doug told her that he’d graduated from the Berkeley Psychic Institute the prior autumn, earning the grandiose title of ordained reverend of the Church of Divine Man. Barb had never heard of it. Doug explained that they trained students in clairvoyance, aura readings, chakra readings, telepathy, and telekinesis. When he mentioned that he’d painted a mural of all the graduates who’d preceded him in exchange for his tuition, Barb’s ears perked.
“Oh, you’re an artist?” she said.
“Come right this way.”
He directed her to sit in a straight-backed wooden chair facing an enormous triptych of canvases about seven feet tall and three feet wide. The central panel featured a life-size woman with long blonde hair sitting on a wooden chair and staring frankly out at the viewer, palms resting on her knees, as if about to give a psychic reading.
“I call this piece My Old Lady Is a Dancer,” Doug said. “It might not look like she’s dancing, but sit with her for a little while. See what happens.”
Barb could feel Doug eyeing her for a response as she tried to relax and focus on the painting. A green field stretched toward barren trees behind the seated figure and filled the other two panels. Puffy clouds drifted across an intensely blue sky. Doug’s style was photo-realistic; the detail was so fine that she thought he must have painted with the tiniest brush imaginable. But there was something otherworldly about the image, too. She looked at the woman’s calm brown eyes, and the painting began to move: the grass swayed, the blonde hair twisted in the wind.
Oh, my God, Barb thought. Doug and Meridy are going to be together.
By early November, the bakery was running low on magic ingredient. Mer sent a letter to Betsy and Mumser saying that she was coming back up for another visit. She didn’t hear back right away, so she and Barb decided to drive up on a Sunday and take their chances. The season had been dry, the drought deepening, but a soft, welcome rain fell that afternoon.
On the way up, Barb told Mer about the handsome psychic she’d met. “I got his number for you.”
“I can’t call this guy out of the blue,” Mer said. “I’ve never met him.”
“Oh, come on,” Barb said. “What do you have to lose?” She cajoled, but Mer dug her heels in and changed subjects.
They drove all the way to Garberville only to find out that Betsy and Mumser had harvested late and were still drying their plants; they didn’t have any shake ready.
“It’ll be all right,” Mumser said. “Plenty of us up here.” She put a call out on her CB—which people in the community used to track storms and wildfires and notify one another when law enforcement was prowling. “This is Merry Widow,” she said, winking at Barb and Mer. “Anybody got eggs for sale out there? Got friends up here looking for eggs. Over.”
Eggs. A codeword, apparently.
The radio was quiet. Then a voice broke through. “Affirmative, Merry Widow, I got some eggs.”
Mumser drew a complicated map, which Mer and Barb followed down unmarked dirt roads into the deep woods. The rain swelled from a sloppy drizzle into a downpour, and liquified clay streamed from the roads, exposing hunks of rock and giant potholes. They ground up a precipitous hill, then sharply down. At the nadir, a roiling brown creek cut across the road. Someone had laid two planks across the surging water.
Barb hit the brakes. “I don’t know about this. If we go in that creek, we’re screwed.” Barb’s 1966 Datsun pickup didn’t have four-wheel drive. If they got stuck, they’d be marooned in the deep boonies. Miles from any phone booth, they’d have no way to call for a tow truck. It was a narrow road. On one side, snaky black roots laced a tall clay bank. On the other was a sheer drop into the woods, an ocean of pines and redwoods rolling into the gray distance.
There was no room to turn around, no chance of backing up the steep hill.
Nowhere to go but forward.
Barb exhaled slowly. “Promise me you’ll call this guy and I promise you we’ll make it.”
Mer gave her a sidelong look. “Fine. It’s a deal.”
Barb patted the dash, and Mer white-knuckled the door handle, as they eased toward the creek. Milkshake-brown water licked the boards. Barb kept her foot steady on the gas and gripped the steering wheel at ten and two. The boards shuddered under the truck’s weight but did not give.
“Yahoo!” Barb screamed on the way up the next hill. “I feel like we’re in a movie!”
Mer and Barb bought everything the guy had, three fat black garbage bags full of shake—thirty pounds total—crammed it into the cooler in the back of the truck, and covered it with a tarp.
The drive home was nervous, slow, careful.
That much weed, they knew, could send them to prison for years.
* * *
The first phone call between Mer and Doug was awkward, but Barb had prepared them both.
“I hear you’re good with the tarot,” Doug said. “Well, you know, I’m trained to read auras. Since we’re both into psychic work, why don’t we exchange readings? Let’s skip all the bullshit and pretension, and find out who we really are.” He laughed in a way that made it sound like an adventure.
Mer always liked to put her skills forward first, and she was confidant with the tarot. No matter what else happened, she figured she could give a decent reading. They agreed that Doug would come to her house first. Then, the following day, he’d read her aura at his warehouse. Tit for tat.
No coffee, no concert in the park, no wine to break the ice. Just a hard-core display of psychic chops: the hippie blind date par excellence.
* * *
Four decades later, two loose pages of my dad’s 1976 day planner surface in a box of old letters, offering a snapshot of his life. On November 8, there’s a dental appointment and the name Barbara Hartman circled, the day they first met. Later that week, my dad has scheduled three psychic readings, including one with someone named Est
ania and the parenthetical note SPIRITUAL-SEXUAL UNION.
I don’t know what that entails, and maybe that’s for the best. But it’s clear that my dad was making a go at becoming a professional. It might seem outlandish in any other time or place, but psychic work was serious business in the Bay Area in 1976. Multiple cities were currently embroiled in debates over the legalities of psychic services. The ACLU was suing the city of San Francisco over the right of palmists and other occult practitioners to advertise their services. And the California state senate was holding hearings on a bill to set up a statewide licensing system for astrologers.
On Sunday, November 14, Doug planned to fast, take mushrooms, and see a double feature of The Exorcist and The Other. Then, on Tuesday, November 16, there’s Meridy Domnitz’s name along with her address and phone number and the note 8:00 P.M. READING WITH.
“I have this clear image of the first moment I saw your mother,” my dad says, looking back. “Her apartment was up these long narrow Victorian stairs, and she was standing at the top with the light from the door shining behind her. I had to climb all the way up there to reach her. She didn’t budge, like, to meet me halfway or anything. It seemed to take a really long time. She was like no one I’d ever met before, that’s for sure.”
* * *
Meridy eyeballed her date as he climbed the stairs, thinking that Barb certainly had fixed her up with a good-looking guy. Doug had a full reddish beard; a strong, straight nose; high cheekbones; freckles; and light-blue eyes. He was tall, lean, and loose-limbed. He wore shitkickers and a leather cowboy hat—which made Mer smile. (She and Barb were both reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins that fall.) Doug removed his hat at the top of the stairs, revealing a shiny bald crown like that of a much older man, though his skin was smooth and youthful.
