by Alia Volz
Mer didn’t seem to understand. “You can’t write this stuff down. Are you crazy?”
“How else are we supposed to track our progress?”
“Why on earth would we do that?”
“This is what businessmen do!” Doug snapped, feeling dismissed.
“If we get busted, this is evidence against us.”
It escalated into a screaming fight, their first real battle. When the next weekend came around, Doug didn’t ask Mer’s opinion. He recorded his figures and stashed the ledger among his things.
* * *
Four thousand square feet was a lot of room for two people. At $400 per month, the rent was more than either of them was used to scraping together without roommates. Since the loft up front sat empty, they decided to look for a housemate. Doug posted flyers on community boards along his new route to see who might turn up.
They got Jeep.
Eugene “Jeep” Phillips was an artist, photographer, carpenter, and jeweler. He was tall and wiry, with keen blue eyes, an avian profile, and curly brown hair that frizzed around his temples and floated down his back. An Aquarius with a quick, creative mind, Jeep had a funny habit of adding “blah, blah” or “da, da, da” to most sentences, as if his brain moved too quickly for his mouth. He had been a biology major in his hometown of San Luis Obispo but got sidetracked into doing psychedelic light shows. He developed a technique for preprogramming multiple projectors with punch tape—cutting-edge back then. With that segue into the party scene, he moved to the City and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute.
“I have to ask you something,” Doug said, when Jeep came to see the warehouse. “Do you smoke marijuana?”
“Occaaaaaasionally.”
“Have you tried magic brownies? We, uh, make them here sometimes.”
“Sure,” he said. “I kind of make brownies, too, sometimes.”
That was the magic answer.
* * *
A week later, Jeep was using a spray gun to paint a seascape mural in his new loft in the warehouse when he heard a ruckus in the kitchen below. Peering over the railing, he was surprised to see Doug grinding what looked like an entire plant’s worth of marijuana leaves in a food processor, enveloped in a dust storm of pot like some desert traveler on a green Sahara. Then Carmen and the Wrapettes showed up. Jeep hadn’t realized it was a major operation.
Jeep was a birdman. He liked being up in the rafters where errant pigeons occasionally roosted. He’d watch the goings-on from his aerial vantage, feeling that if he was quiet enough people forgot he was there. He came to love the slow process of waking up on weekend mornings to the sound of banter in the kitchen below. He’d descend, half-dressed; make an espresso; and eat a brownie fresh from the oven and topped with milk or ice cream. He’d fall into lively conversation or drift into his studio to make art. Through the life of Sticky Fingers, Jeep would be the sole person to experience the full process intimately without getting sucked into the business—an inside outsider.
The most outlandish part to Jeep was how many decisions were made using the I Ching, from the life-changing to the trivial. Once, when Jeep accompanied Mer to Cala Foods for baking supplies, she amazed him by whipping out her brass coins—right in the grocery store—to determine whether to buy organic flour or the usual cheap stuff. In this big illegal business, hippie magic was calling the shots.
Doug and Meridy were not quiet roommates. They fought often and loudly. Thinking back on it, Jeep says, “There was a kind of volatility. You know, they both have strong personalities, very dramatic, and so I think it would play out in anger and a certain amount of yelling or loud interaction, etcetera, etcetera.”
Perched up in his loft, Jeep would shake his head. What month is it? Where is the moon? Them people at the other end of the building sure are making a lot of noise . . .
* * *
All three roommates had active, messy studios. The warehouse was organic, alive, ever changing. It became a fertile scene, a place for throwing parties, holding court, and spreading your wings as wide as you pleased.
Doug sought ways to make Sticky Fingers more spiritually and artistically satisfying. He realized that the lunch sacks they used to package each dozen could become a medium for communicating with the City. He started coming up with an original design each week and spent hours copying it onto hundreds of pastel-colored lunch bags. The designs were necessarily simple at first: a series of squares within squares within squares and the phrase The Space Within; a female figure and the words Green Goddess.
He also began a large painting of the warehouse crew, entitled We Are All One. We Are None the Same, featuring photo-realistic portraits of Barb, Carmen, Jeep, Mer, himself, a friend from the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and a homeless alcoholic from up the block. The symbol for each person’s astrological sign floated beside them. Behind the homeless man, the door to enlightenment stood slightly ajar.
* * *
Mer had been hearing about Doug’s spirit-child for months. One night in March 1977, Doug lay back on the bed after lovemaking, sweat shining on his nose in the dim light drifting down from the skylights. “There,” he said. “Now you’re pregnant.”
Then he draped his forearm over his eyes and slept.
Mer lay awake as Doug’s breath elongated. She felt uneasy. He was startlingly psychic, but how could he possibly know? In four months of dating Doug, she’d gone from not wanting a child to letting him talk her into it. Was she midcycle? She was. A baby would change everything. Maybe she should have stayed on the pill a little longer.
As she listened to her lover sleep that night, Meridy imagined a small flash of lightning—the beginning of new life inside her body. And as she visualized this happening, she felt it happen.
She didn’t bother with a pregnancy test.
* * *
“None of us could imagine your mom with kids,” Donald says now. He’d returned to San Francisco by April 1977—though not to the business. Having known Mer since the Milwaukee days, he was skeptical of her conversion. “She was never into children, just not a kid person. And she was this total party girl, you know. So when she announced that she was pregnant, it was like, Oh, my God, that poor kid! It was impossible to imagine.”
Mer enjoyed a variety of drugs. Alphabet-soup drugs like LSD and PCP. The naturals: weed, shrooms, mescaline, opiated hash, peyote. She’d tried heroin a couple of times and didn’t like the nausea. But quaaludes, poppers, cocaine? Sure.
When I ask her if it was difficult to sober up during her pregnancy, I’m a little nervous that she might tell me she didn’t.
“Nah, it was easy,” she says. “Hormones pretty much took care of that. Everything made me want to puke.”
* * *
Morning sickness usually hit her at two or three in the afternoon, woozy waves rising through her guts. Sometimes she’d have to stagger to the nearest bathroom right in the middle of her sales run.
She quit cigarettes, alcohol, and coke right away. And who needed psychedelics? She could feel another consciousness awakening inside of her own. Part of her yet separate. The loneliness that had often tugged her sleeve dissipated; wherever she went, she had company. This was trippier than any drug.
She’d been fasting off and on since meeting Doug. Now he encouraged her to eat, eat, eat—which would’ve been fun had the queasiness not stripped the pleasure out of it. She went from fasting to force-feeding herself. Doug made stir-fries with brown rice, great heaps of scrambled eggs, salads, and all the tofu she could stand.
* * *
Sometime during the early days of this pregnancy, my parents agreed to marry. Neither of them remembers a proposal. “I don’t know,” my mom says. “I was pregnant with you. It was the thing to do.”
So pragmatic, so conventional, so uncharacteristically dull. A love letter from her time in New Jersey gives a more colorful answer. On February 10, she wrote, “To me, first of all, [marriage] is merely another contract. One which I feel that
we have already made to each other, perhaps New Year’s Eve in the cabin . . . In terms of myself alone, I love you so deeply that with or without it, I would love you the same.” Then this: “In terms of our child, it is of great importance . . . that he have his father’s name, to carry out the word, to carry on the great Volz empire.”
* * *
Somewhere under the overblown language, Mer was hiding a dreamy midwestern heart. As much as she might’ve wished herself immune, she yearned for a storybook romance. Take the matter of the wedding ring. She wanted one while Doug couldn’t fathom spending hundreds of dollars on a bourgeois tradition.
“You care about that stuff?” he said, squinting at her appraisingly. “We don’t need some status symbol to prove that we’re united on a deeper level. Anyway, I don’t have the money for fancy rings. Maybe down the road or something.”
“Forget about it,” Mer said. “Sorry I brought it up.”
Doug left the room, his boots echoing off the wood floors. She heard him pause and draw a deep nasal breath and slowly release it through his mouth, grounding himself. Then his footsteps returned. He stood in the doorway with one hip cocked in that loose way of his.
“I’ve got two hands,” he said. “I’ll make them myself.”
Doug stayed up late that night hunched over his drafting table, the white cone of light from his metal desk lamp illuminating his busy hands. When Mer edged over to see what he was doing, he shooed her away.
The next morning, he sat beside her on the bed and opened his hand to reveal two strips of bright rainbow plastic.
“Electrical wire,” he said. “From a carpentry job before we met. I knew I was saving it for something special.” He’d taken cuts of flat two-millimeter electrical cord in bright colors, aligned the strands into a rainbow, and meticulously glued them in place.
“Isn’t it neat?” he said. “You and me, baby. We got electricity.”
With a small smile, a one-sided dimple, he wrapped the rainbow around her finger.
* * *
Doug had always gotten a small thrill from shocking his mother. It wasn’t easy to do; Jan was an independent widow, an artist herself, a traveler—usually unflappable. She had bought a house in Mijas, Spain, and was in the middle of elaborate renovations. Doug phoned long distance and caught her coming in from the garden. She launched into grievances about a worker who hadn’t shown up and how difficult it was to find good help in Spain.
Doug cut her off. “I’m getting married.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait until I get a roof on the house.”
“It’s no big deal, Mom. Just a small ceremony.”
“What does Judith think about that?”
“I’m not marrying Judith.”
That got a stammer. “Wh-wh— what are you talking about?”
When his mother left California months before, Doug had been dating a different woman—Judith, one of his fellow psychics from the institute. Jan knew Judith and liked her. Doug hadn’t mentioned the break up—or his new girlfriend.
“Please tell me what you mean,” Jan said, with forced calm. “You’re not making sense.”
“I’m engaged to Meridy.”
“Mary what?”
“Meri-dee.”
“Mary B?”
And so on.
“Doug, you don’t even know this person!”
“I know she is the woman I’m supposed to be with.”
Jan tried to talk him out of it. If nothing else, she wanted him to wait until she could come to the wedding.
“There’s something else,” Doug said, going for the big kaboom. “We’re having a son.”
By then, Jan was too upset to consider planning a trip. She wouldn’t meet Mer for another year. This awkward beginning placed the two women in positions of guarded suspicion, a mutual stiffness that would take years to soften.
* * *
Mer knew her parents wouldn’t be able to come to California. Bill had lost his leg below the knee to diabetes years before. He suffered constant back pain, the result of slipping two disks while lifting a keg of beer. Her mother was deep in Alzheimer’s dementia. Bill gave his blessing over the phone. “If you’re happy, I’m happy,” he said. Mer promised that she and Doug would visit at the first opportunity. She didn’t mention the baby then, not wanting them to think she was marrying because she’d gotten knocked up.
No parents would witness the union, but there would be friends, lots of friends, and a hell of a party. They settled on Sunday, May 15, choosing the date because Mer’s favorite hexagram was “15. Ch’ien/Modesty” and because the moon would be entering Taurus, a good phase for staying grounded in a large group of people.
Doug was twenty-three, Mer was twenty-nine. Both were adults; and yet this was in some ways a marriage between children living in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along fantasy world of 1977 San Francisco.
* * *
“See?” Doug said, as they exited the 101. “It looks like a woman sleeping.”
Mer squinted at Mount Tamalpais, the triangular hill rising some 2,600 feet above Marin County. “Maybe it’s my angle . . .”
“She’s lying on her back, staring up at the clouds, waiting for her lover.”
Mer could kind of see it. The highest green peak formed the Miwok maiden’s face, her hair flowing in waves down the mountainside. A lower peak shaped her breasts. There was the small rise of her hip bones and the smooth declination of her legs stretching into the green-gold foothills.
They drove through tree-lined Fairfax and up the swooping curves of Mount Tamalpais. Doug parked the VW at a widening of the road. Taking Mer’s hand, he guided her between oak trees and through knee-high grass to an elevated clearing.
“This feels like the spot. What do you think?”
“Is this one of her boobs?”
“I don’t think so. The boobs are that way. We might be on her shoulder.”
“As long as it’s not her armpit,” Mer said.
“Or her beaver.”
They giggled. Mer turned a slow circle. Insects hummed in the grass. The wind picked up, smelling of ocean and dust. To the south, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge blazed between rolling hills. She could see stretches of Ocean Beach, its ragged lines of surf, and the downtown skyline with its construction cranes and money vibes. To the east, the silver gleam of the bay, and beyond that, smoggy Richmond. To the west, the Pacific sprawled under a sky crosshatched with clouds and contrails. A meeting of earth, sun, wind, and water.
* * *
Through a dry spring of exceptionally blue skies, Mer’s breasts swelled and ached. She felt voluptuous. Sometimes she thought her pregnancy must be obvious to everyone, not because of her body, not yet, but because of how she moved and the energy she exuded.
Doug’s handmade rings had been charming at first. But in the depths of an insomniac night, emotions churning, Mer decided she needed metal. Solid, unbreakable, permanent. It didn’t have to be lavish, but rainbow electrical wire? Too weightless and silly, too easy to unravel. She’d get her own ring if necessary.
Jeep was taking jewelry design classes at the Art Institute, so Mer nosed around his workspace.
“I’m learning this really neat Japanese wood-grain technique,” Jeep said. “You solder different colors of metal together, like silver and gold, and blah, blah, blah. Then you fuse them in a furnace and the colors kind of whorl.” He wiggled his fingers. “Then, while the metal is still hot and soft, you can carve it so it looks like wood grain. The technique goes back to ancient Japan. It was used in crafting swords for samurai warriors, and etcetera, etcetera.”
A samurai ring. Mer liked the sound of that. Tough.
Later, she and Barb sat at the kitchen table picking at chips and guac from El Faro. A joint smoldered in the ashtray, and light streamed through the skylights, illuminating rising swirls of smoke.
Barb tapped her pencil on a blank page of her sketch pad. “Are you thinking white?”
M
er snorted. “White is a mixer I use to lighten other colors of paint.”
“Give me something to start with.”
“All I know is I want to wear my shitkickers.”
Barb came back with sketches of a Renaissance-inspired coat with dramatic bell sleeves, a gored skirt, a décolleté neckline, and leather lacing up the bodice. Boots peeked below the hem of a flowy underdress. The women chose a Japanese floral batik in royal blue and burnt sienna for the jacket and soft white muslin for the underdress.
* * *
In my mom’s box of assorted papers, I find an itemized list of wedding expenses scribbled on the back of an envelope. My parents didn’t pay for the patch of grass on Mount Tamalpais or rent a tent, tables, or chairs. Doug’s BPI guru, Lewis Bostwick, and his wife, Susan, officiated the wedding free of charge. Guests brought drinks and potluck dishes. The list consisted of the fabric for Mer’s dress, a few food items, wine and beer, a cake from Tassajara Bakery, and incidentals. The grand total came to $187.
A turkey was listed among the food items. Of the things that perplex me about the wedding—and there are a few—this is the detail that boggles my mind: on the morning of her wedding, a woman who to this day cannot reliably boil water roasted a twenty-pound turkey.
“I don’t know what got into me,” she admits. “Hormones, I guess.” She doesn’t know where the recipe came from, though she says she still remembers what it was. “You just get a big turkey, slather it all over with mayonnaise, throw it in the oven at like four hundred or whatever, and bake the hell out of it.”
