by Alia Volz
She led him into her bedroom, which Mer had obsessively cleaned and arranged to perfect the gypsy boudoir vibe, replete with incense and flickering candles. She’d dressed simply in jeans and a slimming black turtleneck with an oversize ankh necklace. Her eyes were elaborately kohled and shadowed.
Mer chattered to fill the silence while showing Doug her latest artwork, mostly watercolors. The conversation began haltingly, but art loosened both of their tongues. They fell into a natural one-upmanship, each waxing about their own creative obsessions.
For the reading, they sat facing each other on Meridy’s queen-size bed. She felt a little intimidated—Doug was so cute and seemed to fit her parameters—so she took deep breaths to clear her mind. Once she hit her stride in the reading, she relaxed and let the cards guide her.
* * *
I wish I knew what my mom saw in the cards that night, but all she remembers is congratulating herself on giving him a good reading. My dad isn’t any more helpful, his memory coming up blank.
Did she draw the Lovers and get distracted by a fluttering in her stomach, wondering if the lover in question might be her?
Did she see opportunity on his horizon, maybe the Ten of Pentacles, a hint that he was about to go from chronically broke to joining an increasingly lucrative illegal enterprise that would sustain him for years?
Did she glean from the Empress card that he would soon create a child?
It’s also possible that she saw none of this, her reading totally off the mark, blinded by attraction.
* * *
Doug had an aloof air, traces of a British accent, and a goofy sense of humor that helped offset his arrogance. The reading opened lines of communication between them, and Meridy was struck by a sense of being on the same level, playing by similar rules.
“I have a little side gig,” she said, with a half smile she hoped was sexy. “I sell magic brownies on the wharf.”
“Well! I might have to try one.”
Perfect response. They shared a small dose, and Mer made herself more comfortable, propped on pillows. When she asked Doug about his family, his answer took her by surprise. His grandmother, Paula, who at that time was seventy-four years old, was married to a ghost.
He explained: Lieutenant Commander Edward P. Clayton had been a decorated frogman in World War II and Korea. He and Paula had had a tumultuous on-again, off-again affair for years, but circumstances kept them apart. Ed died of lung cancer in 1969. One year later, his ghost showed up in Paula’s bed and made love to her. She could neither hear nor see him, but she felt his touch. When the ghost proposed marriage through a Ouija board, Paula accepted and assumed his last name.
“She talks to him all day long,” Doug said. “In some ways, they’re like any married couple except that you can’t hear his side of the conversation.”
“Like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” Mer said.
“Every afternoon she has what she calls her ‘quiet time’ with Ed when she disappears into her back bedroom and he takes her all around her universe.”
“And is she otherwise . . . ?”
“Sharp as a tack. Totally conscious and present to this day. She just has an invisible husband.” He grinned at Mer’s astonished expression. “Gramsy’s not ashamed either, let me tell you. She is absolutely in love with her own story and trusts herself with complete conviction. Growing up, we were kind of like The Addams Family, you know? Anything was possible.”
An extraordinary response to an ordinary question. An answer a magician would give.
Doug drove away at midnight in a white VW notchback. From her window, Mer watched the taillights shrink, then flare, before vanishing around a corner. They had agreed that she would visit him at his warehouse the next day for her Berkeley Psychic Institute–style aura reading. She lay awake for hours after he was gone, replaying the evening.
* * *
Meridy’s footsteps boomed through the barnlike warehouse at 3117 Twentieth Street. Its floors were of rough, unvarnished wood and its ceiling soared high overhead. Skylights flooded the space with natural light. Freestanding walls, half-built rooms, and makeshift partitions, art everywhere. Doug showed her his visionary artwork—the large triptych Barb had described and a series of mandalas. His use of vivid color turned her on more than anything else.
In an open central space, Doug set up two chairs facing each other and directed her to sit, legs uncrossed, hands on knees. He closed his pale-blue eyes. “I want you to ground yourself,” he said. “Envision a blue cord running the length of your spine down through the floor and the building’s foundation into the earth itself. Plug yourself into the source.” He took long breaths through his nose, his features slackening.
Doug in trance.
Moments passed. A truck backfired outside. Then Doug extended the fingers of one hand toward Meridy’s lap. “This is the root chakra that connects you to Mother Earth. If anyone has hooked a cord into your root chakra, we’re going to detach it right now and send them on their way.” He flicked his wrist to the right, and Mer felt a lightness through her lower torso and groin. He moved up through the seven chakras, cleaning each one in turn. As he went, he mentioned images and feelings he found there. At one point, he smiled slightly. “I’m getting a clear picture of Shirley Temple,” he said. “A pudgy little girl in tap shoes trying to win the world over with a giggle.”
Mer had indeed looked like a brunette version of Shirley Temple as a kid. She’d taken tap lessons throughout her childhood, and she still saw herself that way—as a beaming, curly-haired stage hog dancing up a storm to make the City smile. He couldn’t have known her that well, and yet he did.
Doug had seen through the adult mask to the child she still was inside. The reading left Mer’s brain buzzing, a vibration around her third eye so intense it was slightly painful. Like coming down from an acid trip. She felt spacey and exhausted, but wide open.
She expected Doug to ask her on a real date. Now that they’d plumbed the depths, they could take a step back and have a little fun along with the intensity. She was ready to enjoy this guy.
But if Doug’s finest characteristics were on display in those first interactions, his worst were not far behind. Apropos of nothing, he said, “You know, Meridy, I was going to ask you on a date. But I’m going to have to reconsider. You’re holding on to too much, and it shows. You need to lose the weight.”
* * *
“You know your father,” my mom says, decades later. “Mr. Tactful.”
It’s true: my dad is infamous among our family and friends for making biting, off-the-cuff observations.
“How did you respond?” I ask.
“I was stunned. Hurt. After someone reads your aura, you’re very vulnerable. I left quickly.”
Doug doesn’t remember making this comment at all. Nor does he remember not making it. This isn’t unusual for him. My dad’s memory has gaps, some quite large. My family’s version of he said, she said arguments would be she said; he doesn’t remember.
My mom’s version prevails, though it bears mentioning that it’s not the only possibility.
* * *
At five feet five and around 150 pounds, Mer was a little plump, as she’d been since childhood. She dieted, did cleanses, took dance classes, overate, dieted again. Even her skinniest wasn’t skinny. She’d never have a Julie Christie figure. If that’s what Doug wants, she thought, we have no business dating. Another rejection for the compost heap. But this one stung more than usual because everything else had felt so right.
No time to mope. With Thanksgiving coming up, advance orders for brownies were rolling in. Sticky Fingers kept Mer busy, but it didn’t stop her from obsessing. She vented her outrage to Barb and Donald—sucking up all the air while the three of them wrapped brownies together. At night, she lay awake in bed, thinking up comebacks. Mentally, she gave him a whole different type of reading. She told herself she didn’t want to see him again. But she couldn’t leave well enough alone.
After days of stewing, she settled on a comeback she liked and wrote it on a scrap of paper: Shirley Temple didn’t become Shirley Temple Black for nothing. ’Twasn’t necessary to shoot.
Cryptic. Give him something to chew on since he was such a smart-ass. She found his car parked near his warehouse in the Mission and tucked the note under his windshield wiper.
She had meant this to be the last word between them, but a few days later, Doug called. With no mention of the note or the rude comment he’d made, he asked her out to dinner. In spite of herself, Mer didn’t turn him down.
* * *
They sat in the window seat of an inexpensive Chinese restaurant. Mer felt fidgety under Doug’s iceberg eyes. Beautiful, ethereal eyes, somehow distant. Mer ate what was on her plate—Slowly, don’t be a piggy—but didn’t take the second serving she wanted and toyed with the soy sauce and chili bottles instead as he gobbled the rest of the chicken lo mein.
They’d shared a brownie and a little coke before dinner, which made them both talkative. Mer told Doug about her travels in Europe and Morocco, how she’d nearly married a Berber. She talked about her father, the teddy-bear tough guy, her idol. She spun a yarn about narrowly escaping a gang bang in Florida, turning it into an adventure story, a laugh riot.
Doug deepened his own history in response. He came from a long line of intense female artists—his mother, grandmother, aunt, and great-aunt. His father, a brilliant navy engineer who’d taught at MIT, had died in a freak drowning accident on a salvage dive at Pearl Harbor. Doug was only five.
“I grew up fatherless,” he said, “surrounded by strong women, with no men anywhere around. Sometimes I don’t know how a man is supposed to act. I don’t always say the right thing. You might have noticed that.”
Not an apology, exactly, but Mer decided it was an attempt at one.
After his father’s death, Doug’s mother took her sons to England, where she suffered a nervous breakdown that kept her bedridden for most of a year. Unable to care for Doug and his older brother, she sent them to boarding school. “Let me tell you,” Doug said. “That place was cold on every level.” Holmewood House was a hulking, castlelike stone structure originally occupied by Queen Victoria’s gynecologist. Since Doug and his brother were in different grades, they rarely interacted. Between his father’s death, his mother’s collapse, and this final separation from his older brother, Doug’s childhood had been overwhelmingly lonesome.
Mer felt herself softening. Wasn’t everyone a little broken? Weren’t they all doing the best they could?
Art had been Doug’s refuge. “All the other boys would be out playing sports, which I never, ever did, and I’d be in the art department on my lunch break.”
Mer wasn’t a loner like Doug, but art had been her way of escaping her mother’s meanness. She’d lock herself in her bedroom and draw for hours.
Eventually, Doug had entered a fine arts program at UC Berkeley with a full scholarship. But he dropped out in 1975, months before he would’ve graduated. “I had this painting teacher who was all about modernism and understatement,” he said. “He didn’t get my work. And you know what? Fuck that. I went to the Berkeley Psychic Institute instead.”
An uncompromising artist. Finally.
“The first week I spent with your mother,” my dad says, looking back, “I did greater quantities of more kinds of drugs than I had done in my entire life up to that point. I remember coming to a point—maybe we were experimenting with brownies or something—of lying on the kitchen floor. I was totally wiped out, totally unable to stand. All I could do was lie there on the linoleum. And I was laughing, rolling on the ground and laughing with total abandon.”
They had gotten off to a rocky start, but my parents found a lot of common ground. They were both bright, sensitive, and creative, rollicking full throttle through their lives. Maybe they were too similar. As artists, they would become natural rivals, mutually inspiring but also resentful of each other’s accomplishments.
The seeds of destruction nestled inside love’s first bloom.
* * *
After dinner at the Chinese restaurant, they went back to Meridy’s flat in the Haight and had sex for the first time. It was awkward, eager, intense. They fell asleep lying side by side in guttering candlelight, the room wreathed in incense.
Mer awoke in the lightless early morning with her bed violently shaking.
“Earthquake!” she gasped, sitting bolt upright.
But the room was still. Nothing rattled; nothing toppled. Doug thrashed beside her under the blankets.
“Hey—hey, Doug!” She nudged his shoulder and found it slick with sweat. Grabbing his bicep, she tried to squeeze him awake. He made gurgling sounds, then stilled.
Was he having some kind of overdose? She flicked on her light, ready to call an ambulance, and there was Doug, expression placid, his breathing regular. She watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple sliding up his throat and back down. Sleeping like an angel.
“Hey, Doug, you okay?”
He murmured and rolled away toward the wall. She watched him for a while, then clicked the light back off and pulled the covers up to her chin. The sheets were soaked with cooling sweat. She didn’t sleep again until sunrise.
Over coffee that morning, Meridy waited for Doug to mention something—anything—about the night before, but he seemed mysteriously detached. He sat at the kitchen table flipping through a book of Aubrey Beardsley prints. Mer’s attempts at conversation fell flat. Typical, she thought. Wham, bam, freak out in your bed, thank you, ma’am.
Donald padded into the kitchen for his morning coffee. Seeing Doug there, he smiled knowingly. “Good morning, you two. Nice night?”
Mer narrowed her eyes at Donald. He pursed his lips and took his mug to his room.
“So . . .” Mer ventured. “You slept really rough. You were kind of kicking in your sleep. Did you have a bad dream?”
Doug didn’t respond at all, apparently too absorbed in the book.
“Hey, hello there, Doug.” His eyes snapped into focus. “You were kicking in your sleep. Seemed like you had a bad dream. Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said with complete nonchalance. “No dreams I remember.”
Men could be so damned cold. The night suddenly seemed like a mistake.
But Doug warmed up after coffee and a joint. As he prepared to leave midmorning, he planted a sweet-enough kiss on Mer’s lips to make her feel floaty throughout the day.
Not until late afternoon, when the smell set in, did she realize that he had urinated in her bed.
6
A Zillion and One Raindrops
The holiday season of 1976 looms large in Sticky Fingers lore.
The story revolves around a defunct department store called Ransohoff’s near Union Square. Since opening in 1929, Ransohoff’s had been a source for upscale women’s fashion in the tradition of I. Magnin. Models walked the showroom floor in outfits clients could purchase with a flick of the wrist. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this is where Jimmy Stewart drags Kim Novak to clothe her in the image of his presumed-dead love. The grand old store failed in 1976 after “losing piles of money” to the recession, the owner told reporters.
Soon after Thanksgiving, the Street Artists Guild pooled resources to lease the empty space for an indoor artisan fair. The elegant gilded fixtures were still in place. An open showroom floor led to a dramatic staircase that circulated through multiple balcony levels. The ceiling soared high overhead.
Through the month of December, showcases that had held perfume and opera gloves now carried handmade moccasins and mosaic boxes. Shoppers who’d likely come to Union Square for its department stores and designer boutiques were lured inside for something completely different.
The economy was improving by 1976, but shoppers still felt the pinch, and it was a drought year. Tight and dry. Whether because money went further on handmade trinkets than on pricier consumer goods, or because the hippie etho
s held sway, or because the environmental movement was steering people away from mass-produced goods—the street artists had a boom season in the old department store.
Sticky Fingers did, too.
* * *
On the wharf, the street artists were always glad to see the Brownie Lady, but at Ransohoff’s, they seemed downright jubilant. There was nowhere to smoke a joint on Union Square—security guards and cops everywhere—and Mer offered an alternative.
The mobile bakery had been going since July. Mer, Barb, and Donald were each earning several hundred bucks per week. It was enough to pay rent, buy pot for smoking and cooking, and other drugs for snorting and swallowing. It kept the telephone on. But Mer thought there was untapped potential.
In the parched days of early December, something began to gnaw at her. A dry ache, almost a thirst. It built slowly through the month.
* * *
Barb’s dad picked up on the potential from all the way in Milwaukee. “Your mom and I have been talking,” he told her on the phone. “We want to invest in your bakery. Help you get this off the ground.”
“Invest?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Find yourself a storefront with a nice kitchen, and we’ll loan you enough to get in the door. Look, Barbara, I know you’re working hard out there. It’s tough to launch a business without seed money.”
Barb planted her forehead in her palm. She’d always been close to her dad. Henry Harry Hartman—most people called him Hank—was a well digger who’d started his own company and worked two jobs throughout much of Barb’s childhood. Of the nine kids, Barb had always suspected she was his favorite, the first of the Hartman girls to break the Milwaukee-housewife mold and strike out on her own.
