Home Baked

by Alia Volz

  * * *

  Doug tried to ground his energy. He snapped a shower cap over his head and tied a medical mask over his nose and mouth. Beneath the scrubs he’d been given, his button-down shirt was drenched with nervous sweat and clinging to his body.

  “Christ, what a day,” Cheryl said, her voice muffled through her own mask. “Or two days. Poor Meridy, my God.” None of them had slept.

  “I know she’s going to get through it,” Doug said. “And Galen’s going to get through it. This has been clear from the beginning.”

  It had been clear to him from the moment he’d laid eyes on Meridy standing at the top of her staircase in the Haight with light streaming around her. They were meant to bring this child through. Galen was in a dark tunnel now, but he would come into the light soon, and he would shine.

  The delivery room had much harsher energy than the alternative birth center. White walls, gleaming stainless steel, headache lighting. A new doctor stood at the foot of Mer’s bed, an elderly Asian man Doug had never seen before.

  “Who’s this guy?” Mer moaned, face blotchy and dripping. “Where’s my midwife?”

  “Just relax, Mrs. Volz,” the doctor said. He peered between Meridy’s legs, palpated her abdomen, shook his head. “I need to do an episiotomy and turn the baby around,” he said. “I want to numb you for that, okay?”

  Mer’s head lolled. “Numb me or shoot me.”

  The doctor rolled Meridy onto her side. Doug watched the needle enter his wife’s spine. He saw the scalpel gleaming in the doctor’s gloved hand, then the sex organ being sliced and parting around the opalescent skin of Galen’s pale crown. Then the doctor produced a glass and rubber apparatus that looked like a cross between bagpipes and a Shop-Vac.

  “Wait a second,” Doug said, snapping to attention. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a birthing vacuum.”

  One end of the hose was shaped like a toilet plunger; Doug realized that it would fit on the baby’s head. “No way in hell are you using that thing on my baby! Absolutely not.”

  “Maybe you ought to step out, Doug,” Cheryl said. “Let him do his job.”

  The doctor rolled his eyes, and he shoved the Frankenstein device aside. “Fine,” he said. “Forceps.”

  Bile rose in Doug’s throat as the doctor forced elongated tongs into the bleeding gash, the flesh peeling open like the rind of some alien fruit, then clamped them around Galen’s little head. He rotated the tongs as if turning a heavy log in a fire while Mer made guttural buffalo sounds.

  Later, Mer would tell Doug that the epidural had numbed her pelvis and legs but not her uterus or birth canal; she could feel everything.

  The delivery room became thick with odors from the inside of Mer’s body. The cloying iron tang of blood clashed with prickly antiseptic.

  Suddenly, Galen moved. His shoulders emerged and his body spilled into the nurse’s arms with a gush of fluid. His skin was an eerie shade of lavender. The baby remained silent. There were seconds spent teetering on a cliff’s edge. Doug heard his wife panting, the snick of the cord being cut, liquid dripping into a metal pan. Then Galen opened his maw and wailed.

  “Congratulations!” the nurse beamed. “It’s a girl.”

  * * *

  Mer collapsed back on the hospital bed, her relief like a sledgehammer.

  That was her child crying, tinny and alive. She tried to watch, but they had the baby on a table to the side. Taking measurements, checking the heart rate, wiping away the fluids.

  Wait. A girl?

  “Eight pounds, eight ounces,” the nurse said, placing the baby on Mer’s chest. “She’s big!”

  And there was this hot, wet creature making little croaking-crying sounds. Calm settled over Mer after the long struggle. Then, too quickly, the nurse snatched the baby away. Mer felt a vague prick in her arm, and the room swam into a spinning blackness.

  Her eyes opened onto a different room. She blinked, saw that she was alone, drifted again. A different nurse woke her soon after and told her not to sit up because of the epidural. She came back with the infant swaddled in a pink blanket and laid her across Mer’s belly. The baby mewled and snorted—a new personality in the world—while the nurse showed her how to breastfeed. It took some trying, but when the baby latched on, Mer felt a loosening of mind and body that felt like the first hit of opiated hash.

  She vaguely noticed that Doug wasn’t around, but it didn’t matter. Because here was this gently squirming baby with strawberry blonde hair. Alive. A girl. Alia.

  * * *

  Every year on my birthday, my mom calls me, and says, “Guess what I was doing ___ years ago.” Then she screams into the phone at the top of her lungs.

  Having been down this road before, I know to hold the phone away from my ear so she won’t deafen me. When she’s done screaming, she’ll say, “So I go for a natural birth, no drugs—first time in my life I’m not taking drugs! And you were late, which is so typical of you, and you were as big as a house and facing the wrong way so, of course, you got stuck. You just couldn’t do it like everyone else, could you? Thank you very much, goddamn it.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I’ll say.

  “You could hear me screaming from one end of that county hospital to the other.”

  “I can still hear you.”

  She’ll laugh like it’s the first time we’ve done this. Then she’ll say, “Ask me if I’d do natural childbirth again,” and I’ll hear her smiling around the words.

  “Would you?” I always oblige.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? No way! Fuck that noise. Kumba-fucking-ya, my ass. Really, honey, I’d recommend the drugs.”

  * * *

  Doug rushed out of the hospital. He left because the linoleum floor felt unreal beneath his feet, because he’d been awake for two nights straight. He left to clear the hospital stink from his nose, to shake the shock of seeing his wife turned inside out. He left because his dreams had lied.

  He walked through the waning storm as the sun rose on December 15, 1977. Water dripped from his nose. Listening to his boots striking the concrete, Doug tried to reenter his body after having been thrown a mile clear of himself. He wondered if, by showing him Galen, then sending him someone else, the Universe was fucking with him. Was this punishment for hubris? Galen was to have been the golden thread connecting him to his own dad. The son to heal the father.

  I don’t think he meant to go where he went that morning. There were so many gay bathhouses and sex clubs back then, at least a dozen within walking distance of the hospital, who even knows which one he ended up at. Whether he went there on purpose or simply found himself outside a door behind which lay a certain kind of relief, he walked through it as if in a dream.

  “I know I came as a surprise,” I say to my dad on the phone. “You were expecting Galen.”

  “Oh, yes!” he says, his tone jokey and self-mocking. “I knew for sure that my child was going to be a boy. Right up until she was born.”

  I take a deep breath and plunge. “Do you remember leaving the hospital for a bathhouse, like right after I was born?”

  “What?” he says. He sounds genuinely baffled. “No, I can’t imagine doing that.”

  I tell him what I know: that he disappeared from the hospital right after the birth; that he later confessed to Cheryl about going to a gay bathhouse on the morning I was born; that, later still, he told my mom about it during a fight—and that this was the first she’d heard about his desire for men. “Do you remember not doing that?” I press. “Did you return to the hospital? Did you go somewhere else?”

  He’s silent for a time. “I don’t remember anything,” he says finally, his voice somber. “I’m sorry, it’s blank.”

  My dad was sexually confused—torturously so—and afraid. He was married to a woman with a huge personality, and he fought for his identity in reckless, sometimes brutal ways. He wasn’t strong enough to match wills with my mom. Nor was he suited to the quantities and typ
es of drugs they did; with severe epilepsy and memory problems, he should have kept his distance from cocaine and LSD.

  “Meridy and Cheryl both say that happened?” he asks after a while.

  “I’m afraid so,” I say.

  “Oh, boy.”

  We take deep breaths. The story hangs between us. I feel the urge to apologize for bringing this up, but I swallow it. “Well,” he says finally. “If they both say that’s what happened, I guess it must be true.”

  When we talk again a couple of weeks later, my dad says he can’t stop thinking about what I told him. “It hurts my heart to know that I did that,” he says. “One thing I can tell you is that I fell in love with you at first sight. Maybe I was upset at first that I didn’t get my way. But you were astounding. I felt very blessed to have you as my daughter. So full of light. An incredibly vibrant individual.”

  I believe him. I’ve seen it in pictures. There’s one of us on a picnic blanket in Golden Gate Park on a sunny day. I look squishy and damp and pink, eyes unfocused, arms and legs splayed in that helpless way of very new babies. My dad, shirtless, lies beside me, his fingers curled by his cheek. He’s grinning with his whole face. He looks utterly amazed both at himself and at me just for being there on a blanket in the sun.

  * * *

  “You were always traveling around him,” my mom says over the phone. “Except he thought you were someone else. Mr. Psychic says to me, ‘We’re having a son. I dreamed it and therefore it is so.’ He was so sure! And we were contracted to have a baby, definitely. Except that it was my contract to have you.”

  When I came out a girl, my mom claimed me as her own, no going back. It’s always been that way between us.

  Of the 104 brownie bags in the family archive, galen’s batch is the only one that never circulated through the City. The child unborn. The design shelved. They’d printed hundreds of copies of the bag, then I showed up with my double-x chromosomes.

  Sometime between my Thursday morning birth and Cheryl’s Friday afternoon Castro run, my dad designed a replacement bag: the name Alia in ornate lettering. Where galen’s batch is drawn in playful bubble lettering, Alia is solid black, the lines sharp, elegant, and . . . witchy.

  I hold the two bags, galen’s batch and Alia, one in each hand, and wonder about the spirit-child from my dad’s visions. The blond boy Doug thought would be a beacon of light for mankind. The little healer.

  My birth was a betrayal of my dad’s vision; it called his power into question. I can’t help but wonder: If I’d been born a boy, would I be as much his child as my mom’s?

  * * *

  Meridy’s episiotomy did not heal well or quickly. The nurse stuffed the wound full of gauze, which Doug was supposed to pull out one inch per day. It felt like sandpaper on her shredded flesh. Mer turned to a naturopathic healer, who made a poultice out of pounded comfrey root that Doug applied twice a day. It was a chilly winter in the uninsulated warehouse. Rain streaked the skylights and pattered on the tin roof for weeks on end. Space heaters proved useless with the thirty-foot ceilings. My mom and I spent those first months huddled under an electric blanket. Or bundled beside the Wedgewood oven while Carmen baked—cementing in my mind an early sensory association between the smell of marijuana and chocolate in the oven and the safety of my mom’s arms.

  Doug bought a Christmas tree and decorated it with multicolored lights and ornaments his grandmother had made from dismantled egg cartons, beads, and gold paint. Mer loved the tree’s fragrance and twinkling lights. And the smells of a new infant: milk drying on clothes, baby powder, newly formed skin. Something in that first Christmas lodged in her psyche because she—a Jewish girl with pagan leanings—became a Yuletide nut forevermore.

  Part III

  13

  The Devil’s Playground

  The rain continued into 1978, the two-year drought lost to a slushy winter. Mer’s birth wounds slowly healed. She signed up for dance classes: Bob Fosse–style jazz with lots of body rolls, splayed fingers, and aggressive snapping. Doug joined a modern dance group, all geometric shapes and tumbling.

  On January 9, Harvey Milk walked the two miles from Castro Camera to his swearing-in ceremony at city hall in a drizzle, arm around his lover, brownie regular Jack Lira. A spontaneous procession of about 150 celebrants followed them. Anita Bryant, who’d told People magazine that God had personally summoned her, claimed that California’s two-year water shortage was heavenly retribution for the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill—the bill coauthored by George Moscone to decriminalize sodomy and oral sex. As he was sworn in under an umbrella, Harvey smiled up at the sky. “Anita Bryant said gay people brought the drought to California. Looks to me like it’s finally started raining.”

  Dan White also joined the board of supervisors that morning, though to less fanfare. The Bay Area Reporter had recently described White as “somewhat to the political right of Attila the Hun,” but no one could have imagined how profoundly the handsome young supervisor would change San Francisco by the end of the year.

  Early 1978 had the attitude of a tequila sunrise and a joint. The recession was fading into memory. There were no immediate international threats. Carter had begun advocating for decriminalization of possession of up to an ounce of weed—the first US president to openly discuss easing up since the beginning of cannabis prohibition. His drug czar and close friend, a psychiatrist named Dr. Peter Bourne, had volunteered at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco in 1967. Bourne believed that treatment was a more effective response to drug use than criminal punishment. Yet, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, better known as NORML, 457,000 people had been arrested on marijuana charges in the United States in 1977—the greatest number of arrests in a single year to that point. Bourne argued that jailing pot users for simple possession was a waste of resources; civil penalties (fines) would be more appropriate and much less expensive. Carter agreed. “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to the individual than the use of the drug itself,” he told Congress in August 1977. “And where they are, they should be changed.”

  John Travolta was king; the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” topped charts throughout February. People dressed like Travolta, danced like Travolta, strutted like Travolta.

  Mer resumed her Castro run on February 24, now with a wiggling, crying, pooping little person hanging from her neck in a rebozo-style sling.

  She’d designed a brownie bag, her first, in honor of the I ­Ching hexagram “61. Chung Fu/Inner Truth.” It’s a graceful, subtle design: Chinese characters rendered in calligraphy before a background of woven bamboo bordered in cherry blossoms. The hexagram spoke to influencing others through internal balance and clarity—although schlepping two army duffels full of brownies, a ten-pound baby, and a satchel of cloth diapers and extra clothes hardly suggests an image of balance.

  “Of course, you were always with me,” she says. “First through pregnancy. Then once you were born, I carried you in a front carrier—with all the fucking brownies. Then in a Gerry carrier on my back, which was nice because it freed my arms, and you were cooing in my ear; I loved that. Eventually, a stroller worked because I could put some of the brownies in the stroller.”

  “Seriously?” I say, vaguely disturbed by the idea of my mom dealing out of my pram.

  “Not in,” she says. “But, you know, hanging off the back. They were heavy, so if you were out of the stroller, it would tip backward. Here I was with a beautiful baby and brownies and all dressed up. People loved us.”

  There it is: they loved us. My mom wasn’t the type of druggie who neglected her child; she was the type who took her child on deals. If I was her “karmic contract”—as she’s still fond of saying all these years later—that meant she was also mine. At two and a half months old, I became her accomplice. Cruising along with her from business to business loaded with contraband. Getting my diaper changed in supply closets and break rooms. Being greeted with s
queals of delight and having my little piggy toes wiggled by customers while my mom dished out the goods. Smelling, I’m quite sure, like a Rastafarian in a chocolate shop with notes of sour milk and pee.

  Here’s another thing I know: I liked it.

  True, I was too young for specific memories. My prelinguistic brain had no way of cataloging my experiences or the people we encountered. But something from these early forays into the City stays with me like an aftertaste.

  It’s a peculiar type of nostalgia, undiluted, raw, separate from my remembrances of later years. A feeling more than a narrative. A sense of belonging. I somehow understood, even then, that my mom and I loved San Francisco and that San Francisco loved us back.

  * * *

  Cheryl experienced her first months in California like a trip down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. “San Francisco was the most fabulous city you could ever go to,” she says, looking back. “I mean, what compares? It really is like a carnival.” Her plan had been to return to Wisconsin once Mer got back on her feet, but she was having too much fun. Rather than become superfluous, Cheryl proposed breaking in new turf, beginning with Polk Gulch.

  The area was frothy. It bordered the Tenderloin, a vice district since the early 1900s. An abundance of cheap residential hotels and containment policing made it both a ghetto and a haven for the City’s more marginalized residents: recent immigrants, transgender women, hustlers and prostitutes, drug addicts and alcoholics, and the elderly and impoverished. In 1966, as historian Susan Stryker points out, the management of an all-night Tenderloin diner called Gene Compton’s Cafeteria called the police to roust a group of noisy queens who were hanging around without spending much money. When a cop grabbed one by the arm, she threw hot coffee in his face. Others joined the fray, smashing windows and overturning tables. The ensuing riot consumed several blocks and lasted two days—three years before Stonewall.