by Alia Volz
Mer soon turned her attention to the neighborhood surrounding the flat she and Donald shared. She faced unique challenges there. Cops might not expect dealers on Fisherman’s Wharf, but the Haight was already an outdoor mall for drugs. Cruising down the sidewalk with a purse full of brownies slung over her shoulder, Mer would hear, “Lids . . . lids . . . lids.” People tried to sell her LSD, quaaludes, angel dust, speed, and smack. Rumors abounded of narcs ensconced among the street dealers.
Mer made it her rule not to do business on the street. She focused on people working in boutiques and eateries who might not want to slink to the corner to buy pot. They could get brownies from a clean, good-looking girl who came to them. She’d stop by every Saturday, requiring neither a phone call nor a commitment. Discretion—probably the one angle that hadn’t been worked in the Haight—became her calling card.
Among her first Haight-Ashbury customers was Bette Herscowitz at a fabric and art supply store called Mendel’s. Mer traded brownies for paint, canvases, and all sorts of fun stuff. Bette liked to keep brownies behind the register to share with friends. As it turned out, she had deep roots in the neighborhood and seemed to know everyone for blocks around.
Mendel Herscowitz, Bette’s father, had founded U-Save Paint and Linoleum with his best friend Vic in the 1950s. Mendel was white and Jewish; Vic was black. Interracial partnerships were rare in those days, but Haight-Ashbury had a surging black population (it grew from 4 percent to 30 percent during the 1950s, then to more than 50 percent over the next decade), and U-Save did well catering to local families. In the late 1960s, young white people arrived in droves, displacing some black families that had put down roots. Absentee landlords didn’t seem to care how many kids crammed themselves into a commune so long as rent got paid.
The Summer of Love media coverage triggered one of the largest, fastest migrations in American history. Some 100,000 people, many of them teenagers, traveled from all over the world to join the party at Haight-Ashbury. Bette, who was then in her mid-twenties, was struck by how young and ill-prepared the flower children seemed. “A lot of people, I think, assume the hippies were more enlightened than they were,” she says, thinking back. “But they were just kids!” Bette was mystified by the tour buses that clogged Haight Street, people leaning out of windows to snap photos of longhairs sitting on the sidewalk. “I’m not sure why it was such a tourist attraction for people to come and see runaway kids,” she says.
Traffic got so congested that U-Save’s customers could no longer load in front of the store, and the business suffered. Vic and his family moved out of town. But Mendel Herscowitz adapted. He began carrying fluorescent paint that glowed under black light, which Bette describes as “the biggest thing since white bread.” When the landlord jacked his rent, Mendel bought a building up the block, added a range of art supplies and fabrics, and renamed it Mendel’s. As the only place in that district selling feathers and beading supplies, the store thrived.
By the turn of the decade, the party had crashed. Amphetamines and heroin flooded the neighborhood, bringing hard-core dealers, pimps, and violence. “I would see these sweet little girls come and then transform, and it was a little bit more than they could handle,” Bette says. “That always used to make my heart cry.” There were gruesome, drug-fueled murders. Historian David Talbot points out that, in 1969, the SFPD reported confiscating more deadly weapons in the Haight than in any other district.
By 1977, when Sticky Fingers rolled in, a new cycle was beginning. People trickled over the hill from the burgeoning gay community in Eureka Valley, inspiring the Bay Area Reporter to proclaim Haight-Ashbury “the newest location of the gay population explosion.” Neglected Victorians could be bought cheap, beautified, and resold. New businesses catered not only to tourists and broke hippies but also to locals with more money.
Many of Mer’s new customers worked at gay-owned bars and restaurants like the Anxious Asp and Mommy Fortuna’s. Even the army surplus store was staffed by gay guys—including a soft-spoken Virginia transplant named Bill Pandolf. On his off-hours, Bill liked to hang out at Febe’s, a leather bar South of Market famous for being among the first of its ilk. Bill’s routine was to buy a few dozen brownies to sell to the bartender, who in turn sold them to patrons. The brownies were becoming a kind of currency.
Another Haight Street stop was Verdi’s Pizza, a sit-down restaurant with a walk-up counter for slices to go. Most of the waitstaff bought. The young man who served slices to go at the counter started out buying two or three brownies at a time, but his purchases soon ballooned. Mer rarely asked what customers did with their brownies, but one day, the pizza guy volunteered a surprising tidbit.
“You know who these are for?” he said with a sly smile. “Hongisto.”
“Sheriff Hongisto?”
The kid shrugged. “He’s a friend of the family.”
Granted, Richard Hongisto was not your typical sheriff. He was a rabble-rouser. For a week during his first term, he’d shown up to work at city hall wearing tattered inmate clothing to dramatize the poor conditions in county jails. He had appointed San Francisco’s first African American undersheriff and was actively trying to recruit gay and lesbian deputies. Hongisto was currently embroiled—alongside Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple—in a fight to halt the eviction of some two hundred people, mostly elderly Filipinos, from the decrepit International Hotel, which a foreign corporation had bought as a tear-down. The sheriff had been charged with contempt of court for refusing to enforce the eviction—for which he would serve five days in his own county jail.
Hongisto was an advocate of drug policy reform, especially with respect to marijuana. He’d even had his badge modified to replace the city seal with a peace symbol. “I’m a liberal,” he once said while dining with inmates in jail. “Maybe even a radical.”
It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine Hongisto’s catlike mouth closing around a brownie. But tasking the pizza guy with buying them?
Mer never found out for sure if the Sheriff of San Francisco really was buying her brownies or if it was just a story the kid told. But she let herself savor the notion. Strutting down Haight Street, digging the rhythm of her boot heels on the sidewalk, she put extra swing into her walk.
* * *
As the business flourished, tensions mounted between the Sticky Fingers partners.
Donald had expected the workload to lighten after the holiday season. It dipped slightly after New Year’s but climbed again with the expanded routes. Donald enjoyed wrapping, which meant shooting the shit with the girls. But preparing the pot—his main responsibility—was dirty, sweaty labor. At this inflated volume, it was just work, and it was chafing his nerves.
Then there was the Mer and Doug show.
Donald looked on in dismay while his roommate mooned and sunned and preened and schemed about her new boyfriend. Meridy in love was insufferable. She spent all her time wrapped up in Doug—if not in his company, then obsessing over him. If Doug neglected to phone, she agonized, tossing hexagram after hexagram; when he did call, she recounted the conversation to Donald in exhaustive detail, weighing each word, asking his advice, then arguing if she didn’t like what he said. When Donald suggested she slow down, she got defensive.
“You can’t stand to see me happy, can you?”
“This is you happy?” he drawled. “Okay, Liz Taylor.”
Doors were slammed.
Donald didn’t dislike Mer’s boyfriend, but an awkwardness hung between them. Doug seemed to get tense whenever Donald walked into the room. And since he was coming over all the time lately, this left Donald feeling uncomfortable in his own home. He’d retire to his bedroom and wait for the lovebirds to go out.
Something was amiss, and Donald had a hunch as to what it might be. His gay antenna tingled whenever that tall cagey hippie came around.
It was merely a suspicion until a friend told Donald about a smutty adventure he’d had at Finnila’s Finnish Baths. Finnila’s wasn’t a hard-
core bathhouse like the Slot or the Folsom Street Barracks. It attracted a mixed crowd of mainly three types that Donald had noticed: (1) old Europeans who self-flagellated in the sauna with birch switches, (2) bisexual boys or closet cases cruising while pretending not to cruise, and (3) oblivious breeders. Sex wasn’t a given at Finnila’s, but when the vibe was right in the men’s sauna, something usually happened. The lights would be low, and you’d see vague shapes of people through the volcanic steam. Sweaty. Slippery. Anonymous. Then you’d shower the strangers off and hit the streets refreshed, relaxed, and smelling of organic lemongrass soap.
Donald’s friend was going on about a hot guy he’d hooked up with in the sauna. “I kept thinking, Haven’t I met you before? Didn’t hit me until later that he’s the dude who always hangs out at your place.”
“Doug?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Donald shook his head. “Meridy is probably the one taking him there. I guess she doesn’t know what it’s like on the men’s side.”
“Are they serious?”
“Deathly.”
Far be it from Donald to judge, but he didn’t want to see Mer get her heart broken. She acted tough, but she was an old-fashioned romantic whose dreamy notion of forever-after monogamy had gone out of style in the sixties. Donald felt squirmy keeping secrets. But he feared that saying anything would damage their friendship.
Either way, he was screwed.
Donald wasn’t going to wait for this to blow up in his face. With cash socked away from the brownies, it was time for a vacation. Mazatlán, maybe. Someplace to wiggle his toes in the sand. Zihuantanejo. Puerto Vallarta. One of those.
Mid-January, Donald announced he was leaving “for a while.” He would eventually return to San Francisco but not to Sticky Fingers.
* * *
Donald was right about Doug, though my dad wouldn’t come out as bisexual for a long time. He’d never gone to a bathhouse until Mer brought him to Finnila’s. When he saw guys fooling around in the steam, he felt unable to resist. But Doug’s bathhouse jaunts were rare. Deep in the closet and profoundly confused, he sought ways to sublimate his desire.
Consider the Triangle, for example—the trio of male BPI graduates specializing in readings for men that disbanded shortly after Mer came into the picture. One of my dad’s partners, Gunter Benz, would later describe it this way: “We did readings at night for men only—in San Francisco. So, you know, we had all kinds of gay guys coming in. There’s the three of us, all with the same intensity, reading people who are mostly gay, and it was hilarious! We really got a kick out of it.”
I’m not sure what was hilarious about reading gay men. But I don’t think my dad knew how to have a male relationship without an orchestrated production. Looking back, he insists that he was only trying to help his clients. Still, prying into their minds probably gave him a glimpse of a lifestyle he lacked the courage to explore. From this distance of years, I feel sorry for my dad—and for the men who looked to the Triangle for guidance and got used in the process.
* * *
Late January, when Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas opened its new season, Mer took Doug as her date. The loose plot followed a squeaky-voiced Snow White on her search for her Prince Charming. Along the way, she met James Brown (two-foot pompadour), Louis XIV (baby-pink wig whipped into twin beehives that looked like cartoon boobs), an Italian waitress (three-foot-tall pile of spaghetti and meatballs on her head), Carmen Miranda (wearing the whole produce aisle), and Jimmy Carter (dwarfed by his billboard-size grin). In the finale, singer Val Diamond belted out the song “San Francisco,” wearing a model of the City’s top tourist attractions on a hat two yards wide.
After the show, Mer and Doug strolled along Columbus, past Italian eateries and neon strip clubs with barkers offering two-for-one admission to the girlie shows.
“Walking is free and so are we,” said Doug.
They held hands, arms swinging lightly. Mer looked down at Doug’s long wizardlike fingers, her long witchy nails. She lifted their interlaced hands. “Lots of potential right here.”
She was talking about the art they could make, but Doug seemed to take it differently.
He stopped, faced her. “You know the woman I saw in my vision of the family on New Year’s Day? I didn’t tell you this part, but she looked like you. She had your hair and your big blue eyes.” He smiled. “But like a version of you if you were to slim down.”
She slipped her hand out of his, stung. He seemed unaware.
“And that little boy you were holding,” he continued. “The most amazingly beautiful pure white light was shooting out of him in all directions. I mean, that child is going to be a healer!”
They paused near the entrance to the Condor strip club. Carol Doda’s neon nipples blinked on and off overhead. Mer didn’t know what to say. How could he build her up and tear her down at the same time? She was perfect for him, yet not perfect enough.
And a baby right now? She was dealing dope and liking it. Was she supposed to do this with a child strapped to her back in a papoose? She hadn’t made her mark as an artist yet. Mer refused to be the woman who forever resented giving up her freedom in order to have kids. Like Florence, her own mother: over-educated, bored, bitter, cruel. Mer was more like her daddy Bill, a wheeler and dealer, a man about town.
She looked down Broadway, past neon signs and hazy street-lamps to the black glass of the bay.
Doug took her hand again, pulling her attention back. “I believe you and I are meant to bring this child into the world.”
Mer exhaled slowly. They had been dating less than two months. “I don’t know if I’m ready. I want to enjoy us for a while.”
He kissed her then. Her mind was loud at first but quieted in the moment’s flow. She could feel energy sparking where their skin touched.
* * *
After Donald left Sticky Fingers, Barb found herself teetering, too.
She had enjoyed paging through her cookbooks for new muffins to try out on the wharf. And early on, when the brownie recipe was still under construction, that had felt creative, too. Her interest in Sticky Fingers had been waning ever since they’d stopped carrying her “straight” baked goods. Every new block Mer broke in meant more identical pans of brownies for Barb.
Melt, measure, mix, bake, repeat.
She was fed up with picking pot leaves out of the dryer filter when she did her laundry. Barb had dope coming out of her ears, literally; cleaning them turned Q-tips green.
When Barb threw a winter party, a bunch of her old theater pals showed up. She hustled between the kitchen and living room, serving trays of homemade hors d’oeuvres and catching up with friends she hadn’t seen since quitting The Wiz. She’d fallen behind on all the gossip.
“Lucky you’re the Brownie Lady now,” a makeup-artist friend remarked. “You don’t have to deal with actors anymore.”
“Oh,” Barb said, embarrassed. “I came up with the recipe, but it’s not like my main thing.”
“False modesty. Your brownies are all the rage.”
Meridy and Gunter on a Humboldt buying trip.
Barb wanted to be respected for her professionalism and skill as a costumer—not as everyone’s favorite dealer. What if this harmed her career?
She had made marijuana-laced peanut brittle for the party. Everyone got wasted. People passed out on the sofa, even on the floor. Barb awoke the next day in a bleary, hungover panic. The theater community would be abuzz over how fucked-up everyone got at the Brownie Lady’s house.
“I want out,” she told Mer. “All you do is yak about how we can make this bigger, more customers, more dope—”
“Cha-ching.”
“Well, I’m tired of blowing green snot out of my nose. My life has to have more meaning than pot brownies.”
“Barb, you know I can’t bake!”
“You’ll figure something out.”
Barb put out feelers. The Local 16 stagehands’ union soon came through w
ith a job costuming The Wonderful World of Burlesque, a Barry Ashton review on tour from Las Vegas that featured topless showgirls in feather headdresses and beaded corsets. The brownies had been a lark; returning to the theater felt like coming home.
Mer, on the other hand, was just getting started.
Part II
8
Going Round the Bed
My mom and I are stretched out on the barge at her current home in Desert Hot Springs, California—a sand-choked suburb beyond the artificial green of the Palm Springs golf courses. She’s a full-time artist now, living on the sales of her paintings and commissioned portraits, and teaching art to at-risk youth and wealthy retirees. I’ve flown down from San Francisco for an art opening at a gallery in the posh part of Palm Springs. At sixty-nine, my mom is still strong, though her lifestyle has taken a toll: diabetes, hepatitis C, high cholesterol. She’s waiting for surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff and props herself uncomfortably on pillows piled on the barge.
It’s 118 degrees and gusty, so we’re hiding indoors. I’ve dragged a box of memorabilia in from the garage. It holds photos, clippings, and old drawings, a hodgepodge of stuff from various decades. Nothing’s labeled, no logic. My mom has always pooh-poohed organization as bourgeois.
I find an envelope postmarked February 1977. It’s addressed to Meridy Domnitz c/o her brother in New Jersey, from Douglas Volz in San Francisco.
“What’s this?” I ask.
She scrunches her face. “Maybe a love letter.”
“You’re kidding.” I can’t bend my father’s voice into the shape of a love letter.
