by Alia Volz
Outrageous, all of it, and yet Meridy wanted to believe in a love that could transcend death. Paula didn’t say much about Doug—she mostly talked about Ed—but it wasn’t necessary. Mer absorbed what she needed to know about him just by being in that charmed house and in Paula’s presence.
Mer would have liked to stay longer, but Sue expected to go into labor at any moment, so she reluctantly returned to the prosaic drama unfolding at her brother’s house.
“The lady is a supreme and divine soul,” Mer gushed in a letter to Doug the night she got back to New Jersey. “She is your heritage smiling at me.”
In Paula’s world, romance was the fabric of the universe—vital as art, vital as air. Mer wanted to live in that world! And if Doug, the descendent of this powerful medium, felt certain that they were meant to create a child together, she wouldn’t resist him.
“Your love fills me with a quiet joy this evening,” she wrote. “You fill me with more ecstasy than I ever dreamed of. The magnitude of your wit, and your brilliance . . . yes, your brilliance, is making me so proud to be your lady, and have your child . . . accept your seed . . . your beautiful and perfect seed . . . a divine child . . . one manifested out of divine love.”
Mer thrilled at the momentousness of her decision—promised in writing. The fact that she hadn’t imagined herself as a mother made the move seem even more daring. As if having a baby was the most rebellious thing she could do. And in a way, it was. Not rebellious against her parents or society—but against her own expectations.
She could still surprise herself.
Doug’s response was ecstatic: “Really supreme to hear some new words coming from you that I have never heard before,” he wrote, “especially since they emanate from the heart chakra . . . And now, with no concept of time and space, back to the limitless love we have for each other. Thoughts have come and gone, and my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth shout in unison, ‘We’re going to have a baby!’”
“Percy’s a good name,” he joked in a postscript. “Percival Volz.”
* * *
On February 6, Sue gave birth to a brown-eyed girl with a fuzz of dark hair.
Holding her squirmy little niece, Mer imagined the baby surrounded by golden light. As she described in a letter to Doug later that night, she had a “vision” of holding their own blond baby—the spirit-child—in her arms as she breastfed. She pictured Doug at her side, “smiling with love and paternal pride.”
By the time she’d returned to San Francisco, the image of a family of three had replaced Mer’s perception of herself as a solitary, independent woman.
* * *
These letters send me spinning. It’s obvious that my parents were in the flip-out stage of falling in love, and that this level of intensity couldn’t last forever. But I consume their words greedily, with an unexpected thirst.
True, their marriage didn’t make it through the eighties, much less transcend death. I was raised in a broken home by a single mother and a mostly absent father. The magic turned out to be fleeting, while the bitterness lasted decades. That’s all true.
So were these letters, this perfect love.
“I know that with this trust we won’t fail each other,” my mom wrote. She was wrong; they would fail each other again and again.
But I know now that I was born of delirious, audacious love.
9
Kings and Queens
I bike to the Mission on a brilliant day in 2018. The temperature hovers at around eighty-five—warm enough for shorts, but not so hot that I’ll sweat standing still. Situated between Twin Peaks, Mint Hill, Potrero Hill, and Bernal Heights, the Mission simmers close to sea level. The hills shoulder off wind and moisture, so this area often cooks when other parts of town are swaddled in fog.
I pause for a red light beside Dolores Park, birthplace of my hometown. It used to be a lagoon. The Ohlone peoples (as the tribal communities from this region are collectively known today) had hunted and fished by its fertile banks for several thousand years before the Spaniards showed up. Friar Francisco Palóu said mass by the lagoon in 1776, and with that, the Mission Dolores introduced the heathen public to “civilization.” They served a typical colonial cocktail: European disease, enslavement, cultural erasure, and outright slaughter. Within a century, some 90 percent of the Ohlone population had been wiped out.
Today, the only evidence of the lagoon are the puddles that gather beneath the swing sets when it rains and linger there for days. Kids swarm the play structures, Crayola-bright blurs. A paletero pushes his popsicle cart through the crowded park. The tennis courts are in use, and there’s a herd of tech bros playing Frisbee. On picnic blankets, people vape now-legal cannabis oil and gaze at their tablets. Couples grin into phones for that us-on-a-picnic selfie.
With the Bay Area serving as headquarters for today’s most powerful tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Salesforce—we’ve been walloped by gentrification. The Mission is a hotbed of dastardly evictions and suspicious building fires. Condos rise from the ashes of community institutions and rent-controlled housing. Fancy mixology bars replace rock ’n’ roll dives and LGBTQ+ hangouts. The Mission of today is mostly white, mostly moneyed. No longer a haven for recent immigrants, artists, and freaks.
My parents belonged to the classic first wave of gentrifiers: white bohemians who move into an inexpensive ethnic neighborhood and made it appear trendy. I took my first breaths walking distance from here. This is the point from which my universe expanded.
Heart of this city, heart of memory.
I pedal east, passing two Teslas and a Maserati. An Uber driver brakes in the middle of a narrow street, clogging traffic in both directions, while three white women pile out squawking on cell phones. Squeezed onto the tip of a peninsula and hemmed by water on three sides, San Francisco will never extend beyond its forty-seven square miles. When new people arrive, others must leave. Most of my friends are already gone—evicted, priced out, or simply disgusted.
I know better than to come to the Mission, but I was thinking about beginnings and wanted to visit mine. Eight blocks later, I lean my bike on a lamppost at Twentieth and Alabama streets. The warehouse. Its facade of eggnog-yellow boards with powder-blue trim looks the same except for a new row of windows at second-floor height. A brownie customer named Sian used to tell me, “Look up when you walk down the street, punkin; you see the most innnterrresting things in upstairs windows.” And he was right: a shadow is moving behind one of the new windows. I’ve come here before and left notes for the current resident but never heard back, so now I’m yelling and waving. “Excuse me! Hello!”
The window slides open. A handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair pokes his head out. “Can I help you?”
“Do you live here?”
“This isn’t a residence,” he says.
“It used to be.”
“No, there was a start-up here before us. I know that for a fact.”
“I lived here when I was little,” I say. “I’m curious to know what’s become of it.”
He comes downstairs and we introduce ourselves on the sidewalk. The warehouse, he tells me, is headquarters for the Gurdjieff Foundation of California.
It seems too esoteric for today’s Mission. George Gurdjieff was an Armenian guru whose ideas were popularized in the United States during the fifties and sixties after his death. Gurdjieff believed that humans moved through life in a daydream. He devised methods for awakening the sleepers, including ritualistic dance, music composition, and marathon meetings. There are currently forty-three Gurdjieff study centers worldwide. Some people consider it a cult.
I tell him about the magic-brownie business and the parties that used to shake the rafters.
“We can feel those vibrations. It’s a very energy-rich place.” He pauses, smiles. “You know, when we moved in, we had to replace the floors. We jackhammered through the concrete foundation, and in the dirt underneath, we found a bunch of broken china
and rubble from the 1906 quake.”
Could the warehouse truly carry our imprint—and of those who came before? As my hometown becomes unrecognizable to me, is there some essence that remains forever local? A current running all the way back to the Ohlone?
I ask if there’s any chance I could peek inside the building just to see if I recognize it after all these years.
“Absolutely not.” His tone is stern. “People are meditating.”
He shakes my hand to let me know our conversation is over and slips back inside. I hear a dead bolt slide shut.
* * *
Soon after Mer returned from New Jersey, she moved into the warehouse. A narrow facade made the structure look deceptively small. You entered through a tight hallway, rounded a corner, and the space exploded into four thousand square feet. Skylights ran the length of thirty-foot ceilings. Heavy beams crossed overhead. Its barnlike quality fascinated her. It had, in fact, been a livery stable in the 1920s; the grayish wood floors bore faint horseshoe tattoos.
Near the entrance, a rustic bathroom stood on a low platform: claw-foot bathtub, mismatched toilet and sink, ten-foot walls, and no ceiling. Next, primitive stairs led up to the empty loft where Doug’s roommates had lived before moving out. The kitchen had a leaky Frigidaire, a utilitarian steel sink, rough-hewn shelving draped with Indian saris, and a Wedgewood oven from the 1950s. Cooking utensils hung from nails on a freestanding wall. This was where the brownies would be baked from now on. Beyond the kitchen was an open area where Mer piled her belongings and set up her armoire and chest of drawers. She’d never had so much room.
The back third of the warehouse was Doug’s territory, his space delineated by plywood walls and a pair of copper bank doors he’d scored dumpster diving. Passing through these, you reached his art studio and, farther back still, in the deepest recess, his bedroom.
On the wall above his bed, Doug had built a large three-dimensional wooden sculpture using driftwood from Ocean Beach, ornate table legs found on the street, wainscoting from a demolished Victorian, fence posts, and other scraps. He called it The Eye of God.
The raw nakedness of the warehouse invited transformation. Walls went up and came down. Stretches of spackled drywall alternated with murals. There were drawings, collages, mirrors, mannequins, piñatas, musical instruments, and a real taxidermied chicken.
The Mission was funky and vital, largely populated by Chicano families. Weekend nights, lowriders bumped down the main artery in gleaming American cars tricked out with hydraulics, their mufflers chugging alternative base lines to mellow Latin soul tunes. Crowds clustered along Mission Street to cheer and catcall the slow-going cars. When the cops didn’t swarm in to break up the party, it went all night.
Art collectives and communes dotted the area east of Mission Street. Three blocks from the warehouse was a multidisciplinary live-work art space and theater called Project Artaud. Last Gasp, a publisher of underground comix like Slow Death and Young Lust, was nearby. A vibrant lesbian community had taken root on nearby Valencia Street, with women’s cafés and bars and a broad range of businesses run by women for women—including typically male-dominated services like auto repair and construction. There was even a new woman-owned sex-toy shop called Good Vibrations, thought to be the first sex shop in the world tuned specifically to female pleasure.
Two of the City’s largest housing projects were also within walking distance. Muggings and street violence populated news reports. Drunks, junkies, and acid casualties camped in doorways and loading docks. Still, Doug and Mer felt safe enough to keep the front door unlocked. The real neighborhood menace was a mayonnaise plant that on windless days made the whole district stink like rotten eggs.
* * *
Soon after Mer moved in, the Sticky Fingers driver-cum-baker took a job offer in Hawaii. Before leaving, Cam introduced Doug and Mer to Carmen Vigil. Carmen looked like a jolly, disarming cross between Santa Claus and Tommy Chong. He made his own wine and worked part-time at an avant-garde film collective known as the Cinematheque.
Carmen became the official Sticky Fingers baker at twenty dollars per pan. His wife didn’t want the risk of him baking at home, so the whole operation unfolded in the warehouse. An early riser, Carmen would arrive on Friday mornings while the household was sleeping, let himself in, and begin (Doug would have already ground the pot and left it waiting). The creaky Wedgewood was a workhorse, though it only fit four pans at a time. Carmen usually churned out three batches before anyone else got up. Along the way, he’d lick spoons and nibble crumbs until he felt like a helium balloon floating in the rafters. “Never come down ’til Monday,” he’d say. He whistled while he baked.
Carmen’s wife, Susan, came on board to wrap brownies. She’d bring her toddler son and usually a girlfriend to help. The wrapping crew—nicknamed the Wrapettes—would spend the afternoon at the large kitchen table in a haze of pot smoke, snacking and drinking wine as they worked.
Saturday afternoons, Mer and Doug went out to sell.
The “green routine” became the heartbeat of warehouse life. It gave rhythm to a week that otherwise lacked structure.
* * *
Doug had abandoned his reservations about working with pot now that he and Meridy were partners. Every week, he tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and pulverized dry Humboldt shake in a food processor before running the powder through a flour sifter until it was fine. Fragrant green dust billowed around him, clinging to his arm hair and eyebrows.
He kept the Haight route and decided to try breaking in another area of his own. Noe Valley, to the immediate west of the Mission, caught his eye.
Today, Noe Valley is stroller central. It’s a posh neighborhood of high-end boutiques and the subset of jewelry store that displays diamond rings on mossy tree branches.
Back in 1977, it was a small enclave of arty types. Hip cafés and restaurants lined the main drag along Twenty-fourth Street. On his first day, Doug walked into a little coffeehouse called Acme Café and was assaulted by the most abrasive music he’d ever heard. Jarring atonal guitar noodled over a frenetic drumbeat. A guy snarled repeatedly about how repulsive his lover was. Flyers plastered the walls with images that seemed intentionally disturbing: screaming faces, rabid dogs, men wearing hazmat suits. Customers were scattered around the café. Doug tried not to stare at a woman with a shaved head and safety pins holding her tattered shirt together.
Unbeknownst to Doug, the San Francisco punk scene had recently barreled into existence. The Ramones had blown some thirty people away at the Savoy Tivoli in August 1976. A couple of months later, a local guitarist cajoled the owner of a Filipino dinner club into letting his band, the Nuns, play on a dead Monday. So many people showed up that the club soon gave itself entirely over to punk. The Mabuhay Gardens, known to denizens as the Mab, became the grimy, graffitied heart of an intense demimonde. The Acme, which had always been a little freaky, was tipping that way, too.
Doug felt like turning tail, but the discomfort intrigued him. Whatever was happening here, it was new . . . And these people certainly looked like they got high.
The guy behind the counter wore a scuffed leather motorcycle jacket covered in cryptic pinbacks. His hair was dyed an unnatural blue-black. Doug had only dealt with established customers before. Mer, he knew, would suggest making small talk before sliding into the subject of brownies almost as if it were an afterthought. But Doug hated small talk. And what were you supposed to say to a guy like this?
Doug cleared his throat. “What’s this music you’re playing?”
“Crime. It’s the B side of ‘Hot Wire My Heart.’”
“Doesn’t the negativity get you down?”
The counterman smiled with half his mouth.
“Okay.” Doug faltered. “Well, what I wanted to ask was . . . What would you say to a magic brownie?”
“I’d say, ‘Hello, beautiful.’”
“Then here’s one for you to try.” Doug pushed a cellophane-wrapped brownie
across the counter. “It’s on me.”
* * *
Decades later, Kevin Kearney aka Stannous Flouride still remembers the day the lanky hippie with the leather hat came in and gave him a free pot brownie. Stannous considered himself an experienced pothead, so when my dad cautioned him to eat a quarter of the brownie, then wait at least forty-five minutes before trying more, he smirked. Yeah, whatever you say, space cowboy. He ignored the advice and regretted it. “I ate it at work,” he says, “which I shouldn’t have done. And I got really, really blitzed. Oh, these were gooood.”
Stannous fumbled through his shift, seeing tracers, his body vibrating. Too stoned to converse cogently or assemble a decent sandwich. The following Saturday, when Doug came back in, he bought a dozen.
Stannous picked up on the concept right away. If you sold to people working in businesses and left the after-market sales up to them, you’d be less likely to get busted. The cops wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the origin of your product. You’re not approaching strangers on the street or dealing out of your home. It had none of the usual trappings. It struck him as subversive and smart. Stannous began buying for the café. He saved the greasiest brownies—the ones visibly oozing green oil—for himself and kept the rest near the register. Once word got around, people knew they could talk to a certain punk at the Acme if they wanted Sticky Fingers brownies.
* * *
Doug had never run a business before and the prospect excited him. He wanted to approach it properly. Mer, he thought, was used to running things with a feminine flow, but disorganization irked him. One thing Doug knew for sure: businessmen kept ledgers. So he bought an account book, the kind with columns labeled for gross income, wages paid, expenses, etc. It would help them stay focused and organized.
