by Alia Volz
Who else could produce a crowd like that on a moment’s notice?
Supervisor Barbagelata remained convinced that he’d been robbed of the mayoral seat by a “coalition of liberals and radicals.” In May 1977, he’d collected enough signatures to require a special referendum that stood to effectively recall Mayor Moscone, Sheriff Hongisto, and District Attorney Joe Freitas—all in one swoop. On August 2, San Francisco voted two-to-one against Barbagelata’s recall attempt; they also voted to sally forth with the district elections, which would benefit Harvey. Whether or not there had been shenanigans in the 1975 mayoral race, voters chose decisively to stick with their current leadership. Moscone joked to the press, “I just finished my midterm exams and I got pretty good grades.”
* * *
Mer had promised her dad that she would bring her husband to Milwaukee at the first opportunity. In October, she made good. Milwaukee displayed its finest features in autumn, the air crisp but not frigid, the trees ablaze with oranges and reds. Bill was overjoyed to learn he had a grandson on the way; even Florence, in moments of lucidity, seemed happy.
In pictures from that visit, my mom looks oddly childlike, hair in tight Shirley Temple curls. Her outfit, a maternity shirt with a high neckline and horizontal stripes, seems girlish and conservative compared with her usual style from that period—kimonos, harem pants, turbans, and her leather bomber jacket. Doug is playing it square, too, dressed in a beige and navy-blue rugby shirt with a white collar, the only rainbow being the one around his ring finger. Though Bill disliked using his prosthetic leg, he’s broken it out for the occasion and stands with a cane. Florence squints through coke-bottle glasses, her expression confused, hair unruly, Alzheimer’s in bloom.
Even in Milwaukee, Mer’s wheels kept turning. She needed to plan for time off when the baby came. Doug had his routes in Noe Valley and the Haight, but his sales were never great. Mer wouldn’t have said it to his face, but she didn’t think he’d do well in the Castro. (It’s possible that Mer sensed a certain awkwardness Doug sometimes felt around gay men that stemmed from the urges she didn’t know he was suppressing.) He was too blunt, too serious for that party scene. Barb was out of the picture, gone to Boston to open a costume business with an old friend. While staying with her parents, Mer decided to look up another old Milwaukee pal who might help.
Cheryl Beno stood six feet one in sock feet, with mile-long legs, sharp elbows, elegant cheekbones, and brunette hair in a Cleopatra bob. She had a brassy Milwaukee accent, and when she laughed, she’d jut her chin forward, open her mouth wide, and squawk, “HA!” Or occasionally, “AAAH-ha!” A fun, startling, uncouth sound. And Cheryl knew her way around drug culture.
To hear Cheryl tell it, she and Mer first met outside of a friend’s house back in 1970. Minutes into their conversation, Mer looked Cheryl dead in the eye, and said, “You and I could be really great friends.” In Mer’s version, they met at a party around the same time. Cheryl walked in wearing a floor-length raccoon coat, spun on black beauties, and accompanied by a rude rock ’n’ roller in fringed leather pants.
Either way, they remained casual acquaintances for a year or so until a stolen cake of hash brought them together. The hash incident happened during the mellow period after Patrolman Buxbaum’s accident. A friend had given Mer the hash, which she was slowly selling to friends. She didn’t consider herself a dealer then, but maybe she was dipping a toe in the water. Mer kept her stash in an antique beaded purse hanging on her wall. One afternoon, she made the rookie mistake of letting a customer, a rich kid who hung around the Eastside, see her hiding place. The purse vanished later that night.
Mer knew who the thief was, but he’d disappeared. She would have shrugged it off—easy come, easy go—but she kept running into her stolen stash all over town. She’d go to a party and someone would pass her a pipe loaded with familiar-tasting hash. Annoyed, she asked around. So-and-so got it from so-and-so, who got it from so-and-so. The crumbs led to the door of a man I’ll call Victor.
Victor was a tall skinny speed dealer—the guy you phoned if you wanted black beauties or bennies. When Mer showed up at his place looking for her hash, his live-in girlfriend answered the door: Cheryl.
As it turned out, the thief owed Victor money for speed pills and had used Mer’s hash to satisfy the debt. Victor believed in karma. So, feeling pretty sure that the hash was stolen, he’d been giving it away for free.
Victor gracefully paid Mer for the hash and even threw in some black beauties for no hard feelings. After that, the three of them became tight. Victor was a devotee of the I Ching, and though Mer already knew the basics, he got her into the habit of using it regularly. Cheryl was an ace thrift shopper. She and Mer would thumb through musty racks all afternoon, then get dolled up in their new-old outfits and hit the blues clubs.
Victor eventually went to prison for dealing. By then, Cheryl was pregnant with his baby. She didn’t have a car, so Mer would drive her three hours to the prison and read in the parking lot while the couple visited. The romance survived Victor’s sentence only to dissolve when he got out.
Fall 1977, Mer found Cheryl living with roommates and raising her toddler son alone. “Why don’t you bring your son out to San Francisco for a few months?” Mer said. “You can stay with us in the warehouse and take over my sales routes while I recuperate.”
Cheryl said yes without blinking. She would take the train to San Francisco after Thanksgiving.
* * *
One Friday shortly after returning to the City, Mer walked into a dive on Castro Street called the Nothing Special. The after-work crowd was out. Business types loosened ties and rolled up French cuffs while chatting up lumberjack clones. Baby Galen kicked Mer’s belly in time with the thumping disco beat; he always seemed to get excited as her run wound down. Mer was finishing a deal with the bartender when a guy in a leather jacket burst through the door. “They got her!” he yelled.
“Who?” the bartender said.
“Anita Bryant! She got pied!”
The bar crowd hooted and applauded.
“What flavor?” someone inquired.
“Banana cream, of course!” And he was off to the next bar.
The pie sniping, which took place in Des Moines, Iowa, had been the work of four Minneapolis activists. But news traveled fast, especially on gossipy Castro Street. Mer heard cheers erupting as the story spread up the street. At the Nothing Special, the bartender poured a round of Anita Bryants on the house—apple juice and vodka (Mer toasted with plain apple juice). The rest of her run, she moved through crowds giddy with schadenfreude.
The next night, there it was on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” Anita, with her imperious cheekbones and backswept coiffure, was speaking at a press conference about a recent appearance that had been “met with protest and all kinds of problems, and—”
Splat.
Cream filling bulged around the tin as it slid slowly down her face. Obscene white gobs clung to her eyebrows. The camera panned to a man in a tweed sport coat holding his hands over his head. Security moved to apprehend the pie sniper, but Bryant’s husband said, “No, let him stay. Let him stay.”
Wiping cream from her eyes, Anita quipped, “Well, at least it’s a fruit pie.”
Bryant’s husband called her to seriousness. “Let’s pray for him right now, Anita. Let’s pray.”
“Father, we want to thank you . . .” she began, then burst into sobs. Creamy tears streamed down her cheeks.
Back to Jane Curtin: “Fortunately, Miss Bryant, who was not injured, enjoyed a good laugh and said it was okay if the assailant dated her husband.”
* * *
On November 8, 1977, Harvey Milk captured a definitive victory in his district. Legend would affix Harvey as the first “upfront gay” elected to public office. This wasn’t true; two openly lesbian women and one gay man had been elected in other states during the early 1970s, though to little fanfare. Harvey’s charisma combined with increasingl
y splashy media battles against the antigay crusaders made him a national icon in a way his predecessors had not been.
After eleven on the night of the election, Harvey rode back to Castro Camera from city hall on the back of a motorcycle driven by a striking leather-clad lesbian. Sheriff Hongisto rode beside him on a motorbike of his own. A crowd of some three hundred waited in the street. Harvey held court at Castro Camera through the night while friends and colleagues streamed through and beer flowed freely. The image of the politicians tearing around town on motorcycles made front-page news.
For his next brownie-bag design, Doug drew six swimming geese, heads and necks above water. One goose’s head is burned black, sending up little squiggles of smoke, and the words Your goose is cooked. It was a message to the conservative old guard. On the ragged left edge of the country, free spirits seemed to be firmly in charge.
But nothing is simple.
The same night Harvey and friends thundered up Market Street, a voice from that other San Francisco also made itself heard. A handsome thirty-one-year-old named Dan White won in his district of Visitacion Valley, an Irish Catholic neighborhood two miles south of the Castro. With his square jaw, cleft chin, and tidy haircut, White was the image of a young conservative Democrat.
Both an ex-cop and an ex-fireman, Dan White presented himself as the law-and-order candidate. He gave a voice to San Franciscans who felt morally outraged, edged out, and dispossessed. Those who wanted to reclaim their hometown.
“I’m not going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals, social deviates, and incorrigibles,” his campaign literature promised. “You must realize there are thousands upon thousands of frustrated, angry people such as yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignancies which blight our beautiful city.”
Patrolman Jerry D’Elia, whose brother had gone to school with Dan White, thought the young supervisor-elect was too idealistic for his own good. “Dan White was Don Quixote if he ever lived,” D’Elia says. “He was looking for perfect. He was looking for Utopia in a very nonperfect world.”
Ironically, Harvey Milk, who was in many ways Dan White’s polar opposite, also liked to compare himself to Don Quixote. In speeches, he sometimes said that he couldn’t tell whether he was wearing the helmet of Mambrino or a barber’s bowl on his head. “Maybe I see dragons where there are windmills,” he once told a crowd. “But something tells me the dragons are for real, and if I shatter a lance or two on a whirling blade, maybe I’ll catch a dragon in the bargain.”
The two quixotic crusaders—one representing old San Francisco values, the other rising from the new city—were on a collision course.
* * *
Since early in Doug’s involvement in Sticky Fingers, he’d been drawing a unique doodle every week, then copying it onto hundreds of Zee brand paper lunch sacks in various colors—each of which neatly held a dozen brownies. Repeating his designs by hand took many hours. And the drawings were getting more complicated.
In November, he drew a humanoid form perched inside a circle, eyes closed, one foot extended. The figure is hairless and sexless, its features half-formed. An umbilical cord winds up from its belly. Arcing over its head are the words, Child of Life’s Long Labor.
Among Doug’s stops in Noe Valley was a small print shop staffed by artists his age. Flyers and posters covered the walls floor to ceiling. Doug found the smell of ink and the clacking noises of the printing presses intoxicating. The printmaker was impressed with Doug’s fetus drawing. “Are you doing all of these by hand?”
“That’s right.”
“You know, we could print these for you.”
“You can print on lunch bags?”
They could.
Doug arranged to trade brownies for printing services. He returned home elated. Now his designs could become intricate and more meaningful, each bag carrying a unique message to the City’s freaks. The weed would carry the word.
To this day, when people wax nostalgic about Sticky Fingers Brownies, the artful designs on the bags are invariably among the first things mentioned. Some customers prided themselves on having deep chronological collections. An underground comic from an underground bakery.
Shortly thereafter, Doug found a screen printer to make T-shirts. He chose a photograph of Mer in the early days of her pregnancy, spent a week sketching at his drafting table, and came up with an extraordinary piece of stoner art for the logo.
Meridy, rendered in black ink, appears in the center of a round frame, looking like a mirror or a clock face. She eyes the viewer with a sidelong come-hither look, hair curling around her cheeks. Her left hand extends a plate of fresh brownies out of the frame, as if to say, “Take one.” Her right hand lifts a brownie to her parted lips for a satisfying bite. Light is exploding around her. Looping above Mer’s head, elaborate script reads, Sticky Fingers Brownies. The letters ooze and drip. Along the upper arc of the frame are the words, Eat it, Baby!
Customers began wearing them around town. Only the coolest of the cool cats knew what they were about.
* * *
Meridy was thirty-seven weeks pregnant when Cheryl took a train from Milwaukee to San Francisco with her son, Noel, a towheaded two-year-old with intense black eyes. She made the classic newbie mistake of bringing light clothing to San Francisco, assuming that the lack of snow meant warm weather. Then she froze her skinny ass off during the first cold snap in the unheated warehouse. She and Noel settled in Mer’s middle room. They folded instantly into the Sticky Fingers family.
Mer was barely waddling through her runs by then. Galen was a watermelon sitting on her bladder. She suffered backaches and heartburn, and was plagued by Braxton Hicks contractions—agonizing abdominal clenches that felt like real labor but bore no results. She and Cheryl did the Castro and wharf runs together once, then Cheryl took over. Mer still didn’t know how to relax. She’d sit up in bed with a TV tray and wrap brownies in the stretches between her Braxton Hicks torture sessions. Even in late pregnancy, she was like a downhill freight train with bad brakes.
12
Galen’s Batch
Mer went into labor on a gray Tuesday, December 13, two weeks after Galen’s due date. Doug drove her the six blocks to San Francisco General, but after a cursory exam, the midwife sent her back home with instructions to return when the contractions were four minutes apart. Mer passed the day deep breathing and timing contractions that made her curl around the baby and groan. She smoked occasional joints for pain. The build was annoyingly slow, minutes creaking into hours. “Time to wake up, kiddo,” she said, patting her strained abdomen. “It’s your birthday.”
A brownie bag Doug had designed would serve as their birth announcement: the words galen’s batch in fanciful bubble letters. Cheryl dropped off the design at the print shop, took Noel to a babysitter, and returned wearing a conical happy birthday hat.
Mer’s anticipation mounted through the hours. Finally, at eleven at night, the contractions reached four-minute intervals. Doug pulled the VW around, and Cheryl helped Mer waddle out to it. The moon was obscured by rainclouds the gray-green of a chalkboard.
The nurses settled her into a private room in the alternative birth center: floral-print wallpaper, innocuous landscape paintings, and an armchair with throw pillows. Like a movie set of a small-town motel room.
The midwife wanted her to walk and walk and walk. She walked with Doug then walked with Cheryl. Then Jeep showed up and she walked with him. Up and down the halls of the maternity ward. The hours lost shape. Other women bellowed and grunted and screamed while fathers-to-be chain-smoked in the hall. When contractions hit, Mer gripped the wall and did her hoot breaths.
She labored through that sleepless night and the following day. The second night was ablaze. Lightning shot brilliant white light around the blinds in the birthing room—which was disorienting, because when was the last time anyone had seen lightning in San Francisco? The taiko-drum boom of thunder rat
tled the fixtures. It seemed to Mer as though the elements had gathered to usher in this child.
Later, a brownie customer would give Mer a photograph taken from above Dolores Park that night. The San Francisco skyline appears in silhouette, the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower clearly distinguishable before a lavender sky. A tremendous lightning bolt jitters from a high purple cloud and splits into four distinct tines that strike the bay behind the buildings.
The pain mounted, peaked, subsided, climbed again. Gusts lashed the old brick hospital and shook the windowpanes. When the rain finally came, it came all at once, like a spigot turned on full force. And with that, Mer entered the transition phase, the wrenching apart of the birth canal. The Bradley teacher had warned her, “You might want to leave your body right about now.” Doug was hunched beside the bed doing his coaching routine—the eye contact, the breathe-with-me’s—while she gasped like a hooked fish and lightning strobed the room.
A nurse listened for the baby’s heartbeat, and Mer caught a glance between her and the midwife. “It’s posterior,” she said.
The midwife nodded, businesslike. “We need to rotate your baby,” she said to Mer. A nurse wheeled in a monitor that showed her contractions as a tiny white light rising and falling with her pain. They tried different positions: all fours, knees to chest, on one side, then the other. Nothing worked. Galen was still upside down when he started to crown. “You’ll to have to birth him this way, honey,” the midwife said. “Time to push!” There were hours of pushing in all positions. One foot up on Cheryl, the other on the midwife. Galen was stuck.
Toward dawn, the baby’s heartbeat showed signs of distress. The midwife sent the nurse scrambling for a doctor. They wheeled Mer out of the soft light of the alternative birth center. When the next contraction hit and the midwife told her to refrain from pushing so they could wheel her to another ward, Mer howled. Banks of fluorescent lights streaked overhead.
