Home Baked

by Alia Volz

  A short walk from the heart of the Tenderloin was the mile-long strip of bars, restaurants, and boutiques locals affectionately called Polk Strasse. It had been a “gayborhood” back when Eureka Valley was still working-class and Catholic. Both the annual Halloween street party and the Gay Freedom Day parade (now Pride) had started on Polk. And it didn’t have that upwardly mobile, same-sameness of streets thronged with Castro clones. Sex workers of all genders turned tricks in doorways and alleys. Historian Josh Sides quotes a transgender woman named Regina McQueen: “One side would be men standing out there posing, luscious little creatures—oh! And on the other side of the street would be women dressed in evening gowns with feather boas and big hair and lots of makeup. And the next night, some of the boys would be over there on the other side of the street in femme drag and vice versa.” If the Castro was gay uptown, this was gay downtown. Cheryl got a kick out of the funkiness and the sexually charged air. Even the name, Polk Gulch, sounded like the title of a porno flick.

  Until then, Cheryl had followed Mer’s established routes. Now she had to walk into rooms cold and sell drugs to strangers. It helped that Sticky Fingers had a wide reputation.

  She’d open with “Hey, ever heard of Sticky Fingers Brownies?”

  Often, the response would be “Oh, are you the Brownie Lady?”

  Why, yes, she was.

  It could be that easy, though not everyone went for it. When Cheryl got turned down, she’d smile sweetly, and say, “I won’t bother you again,” on her way out the door.

  Cheryl dressed to party; it helped her get in the mood. Sequined blouses, tight satin pants, high heels or strappy platforms, 1940s hats, and Jackie O. glasses. Sometimes she teased her hair into a giant triangle like a hot version of Roseanne Roseannadanna from Saturday Night Live. One day, she dressed up in a real Girl Scout Brownie uniform that fit her like a micromini—complete with activity patches, pigtails, and knee socks. Clicking down Polk, Cheryl felt sexy and subversive. Customers greeted her with flirtation, laughter, and cash.

  Once, when she was covering Mer’s run in the Castro, she wore a sparkling gold trench coat and high heels and nothing underneath, and when she walked into Hot Flash of America, everyone stopped what they were doing to applaud her entrance.

  At six feet one (six feet five in certain shoes), Cheryl got noticed walking into a room. She had yards of skinny limbs, a rawness in the visible tendons and joints. When sitting, she tended to fold herself so her elbows and knees formed isosceles triangles like an origami crane. When she wore blouses unbuttoned to her waist (in fashion then), her upper ribs rippled beneath her cleavage, looking both sexy and savage. Not pretty in a girlish way but gorgeous and strange.

  People had been telling Cheryl since high school that she should model, but she’d lacked the confidence. She thought that her nose was too wide, her face too long. She’d never felt especially graceful in her movements. But here she was, cutting a high profile in San Francisco and relishing it. She enrolled in modeling classes at the Barbizon school downtown. Most of the other students were too young to drink in bars; Cheryl was twenty-seven and the mother of a toddler. She thought of the classes less in terms of starting a new career than cranking up the volume of her natural assets.

  At Barbizon, she learned how to vary her hairstyles—permanents, updos, disco puffs, Farah Fawcett flips. How to use bronzer to slenderize her nose and accentuate her intense cheekbones. How to work the camera with slinky, provocative poses and geometric shapes. How to high step into a room and own it.

  Cheryl.

  She got everyone at the warehouse involved. Before each sales run, she’d yell, “PHOTOSHOOT!” in a brassy Wisconsin yowl. Mer, Cheryl, and Doug took turns posing using the warehouse’s ample props and patchwork spaces, and drawing inspiration from fashion magazines, dance classes, and one another. Cheryl challenged herself to never repeat a look on her brownie run, a game all three salespeople started playing. They shopped while they dealt. You could trade almost anything for brownies: taxi rides, meals, other drugs, massages, concert and theater tickets, and clothes and jewelry from shops on your route. Anything traded was fair game.

  The crew prodded one another, conjuring increasingly dramatic versions of themselves for the camera, exploring themes. Furs, hats, feathers, signs and statement pieces, face and body paint. Doug—always striving for order (a Sisyphean task in the Sticky Fingers world)—began a chronological photo archive of their weekly looks that he housed in five oversize photo albums decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs—what we in the family call the Brownie Books.

  The clothing wasn’t merely about looking good; it became an art form. Sometimes they dressed in theme: one day, all three went for a 1930s picnic look; another time, they all wore head-to-toe orange. Often, the outfits reflected the brownie bag designs. Distributing the product was their exhibition; the City was their gallery.

  Customers loved it. “It was like an explosion of color and glitter coming down the street,” says Patricia Rodriguez, aka “Sunshine,” a punk photographer who day-jobbed as a cook at the Neon Chicken, a diner on Mer’s route. “I remember, very distinctly, there always being a baby. I remember the stroller and ribbons and balloons and glitter and wild outfits . . . I thought to myself, Man, not only are they here selling brownies, but they’re, like, making a big deal out of it. Not on the down-low or anything.”

  It was gutsy to draw attention to oneself while committing a felony. But my folks had another way of looking at it: They wanted to be so obvious that cops wouldn’t suspect them. They’d hide in plain sight.

  If you saw a woman dressed to the nines on a weekend afternoon trundling a happy blonde baby down the street in a stroller with balloons streaming off the back, would your first thought be drug dealer?

  * * *

  Part of the weekly fun was hearing about the mischief customers had gotten into.

  Eating a whole Sticky Fingers brownie wasn’t usually a great idea; the recommended dose was a quarter. But people didn’t always listen. Hence, many a story started with I ate the whole thing and . . . ended up in Las Vegas or passed out at my brother’s wedding or let my boss take me to an orgy.

  Bette Herscowitz from Mendel’s in the Haight, now Doug’s route, liked to keep extra brownies in her freezer. Once, while Bette was vacationing in Thailand, her mother happened upon the stash. She noticed that the brownie tasted funny but ate it anyway. An hour later, her lips became rubbery and numb, and she couldn’t think coherently. Bette’s mother was in her late sixties and thought she was having a stroke. She went to the hospital. The doctors kept her overnight, running tests. By the time they pronounced her healthy, she was feeling fine again. Overdoses—though not physically dangerous—were common.

  Sunshine still remembers figuring out her ideal amount. “I never ate a whole one,” she says. “They were too strong. And if I ate a half, I would feel like I wanted to pass out. And a quarter was a little bit too small. But a third was a perfect dose. I could function and still do things. It was a lot of bang for your buck.”

  Even if you were careful, the high could be unpredictable. Today, California cannabis products are precisely labeled with THC and CBD proportions as clear as nutritional information on packaged foods. Not so in the 1970s. Plus, since Sticky Fingers sourced their shake from multiple sinsemilla growers, the intensity of the active ingredient varied from week to week. Their best gauge of the product were the anecdotes that came back.

  The warehouse was a playground for the Sticky Fingers kids. Children’s toys accumulated: a wooden rocking horse, handmade stuffed animals, wagons and dolls and dump trucks. Two-year-old Noel stomped around in his first cowboy boots. Fridays, when Carmen and Susan Vigil came to bake and wrap, their toddler got into the mix; Marcus and Noel had epic indoor tricycle races.

  In a vast, booming space where none of the rooms had ceilings, it got loud. Jeep moved out to live with bachelor friends in the Haight; it was one thing to be kept awake by roommates arguing o
r having sex, and another to be kept awake by squalling babies. So Cheryl and Noel moved into Jeep’s old loft overlooking the kitchen. Cheryl could walk out onto the rafters, high above the floor, and look down into different areas. She sometimes “visited” Mer in her middle room and talked to her from above.

  “It was nuts to be in that place with a baby,” my mom says. The mulchy wood floors were full of splinters. There were exposed wires and carpentry tools, jars of turpentine and palettes of wet oil paint. The rickety stairs up to the loft lacked a guardrail. Cockroaches scuttled in the corners. No heat or insulation from the Pacific chill. With one door and no windows, it was a fire trap.

  And why not address the brontosaurus in the room? Weed was everywhere: green clouds engulfed my dad when he prepared the ghee, coating dishes and utensils; dank buds lolled on rolling trays and in unlocked stash boxes; joints smoldered between our parents’ fingers, then shriveled in ashtrays already heaped with roaches; brownie crumbs blanketed the floor where we played. Between second-hand smoke, secret finger swipes of batter, and stolen crumbs, we tots consumed a significant amount of cannabis. It is, I suppose, a testament to the drug’s natural mildness that all three of us have developed into capable, healthy adults.

  Meridy swore she wouldn’t be like her mother—domineering, critical, resentful, and depressed over suppressing her own desires to tend a family. She knew what she didn’t want to do, but what did the alternative look like?

  In the 1970s, a lot of parents were asking themselves this question. Mer joined a group of new mothers that met every week to share ideas and discuss quandaries in improvised parenting. They were artists and writers and activists exploring new concepts in child-rearing, determined to raise kids without sacrificing their own dreams—a revolutionary notion for women who’d grown up in 1950s households.

  A series of photos documents a wind-whipped afternoon at Fort Funston. My folks and a bunch of other adults sit in a circle amid sand dunes and ice plants for some sort of ritual led by a woman swathed in billowing pink plastic and wearing an Egyptian-style headdress. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, but it involves people shouting into abandoned bunkers while the woman in the headdress dances in the wind. My dad has painted the Eye of Horus on his face. I’m there, too: a pudgy pink baby, looking like a figment of someone’s acid reverie.

  My parents didn’t let me slow them down. They simply carried me along through the tornado of their lives.

  * * *

  Doug still believed in his duty to carry out the Berkeley Psychic Institute word. He gave readings and shared off-the-cuff observations with friends, brownie clients, and sometimes strangers. His famous phrase was “I just have to tell you . . .” followed by whatever he thought you ought to confront about yourself, your blind spots and weaknesses. He’d call people out on pessimism, denial, hypocrisy, addiction. In Mer’s case, her fluctuating weight. He was everyone’s self-appointed magic mirror.

  The reactions were mixed. Maybe Doug’s impromptu readings stung because they hit home. He was perceptive, but he lacked social grace. Instead of waiting for a private moment, he’d dress people down in the middle of a party, in front of friends and lovers, or while trying to sell them brownies—confident that he was doing them a favor by being honest.

  Some people found Doug’s candor refreshing. Like Stannous Flouride, the punk counterman at Acme Café in Noe Valley. Stannous had come to San Francisco to be a hippie in the late sixties but found the flower children mealy. Punk culture had all the hedonism and playfulness of the era minus the cheery mood. It offered Stannous a delicious outlet for his manic energy and the internal fuck you he’d been nursing since childhood.

  Doug couldn’t wrap his head around punk. The music made him cringe, and the poster art disturbed him. But despite their opposing aesthetics, Doug and Stannous found common ground. They were both intellectual, artistic, and iconoclastic. Both got a buzz from freaking people out. Doug would ask one of his confrontational questions like “What do you get out of projecting hostility into the world?” and instead of taking offense, Stannous would challenge him back. They indulged in long debates about discordance as an art form, the role of violence in social change, and, of course, the Nuns vs. the Bee Gees.

  A friendship bloomed. Stannous started hanging out at the warehouse. “I had been buying brownies for a long time before I was ever around during production,” he says, “because production was such a serious operation and the guys who were cooking and stuff wanted to keep it low-key. When I realized the extent of what they were doing, it was like whoa.” Stannous eventually designed two brownie bags, one of which depicts a champagne bottle with the cork popping off, and says, If all the world’s a stage, San Francisco is the cast party!

  Stannous had thought the business model was smart from the beginning, but he hadn’t pictured the high volume. “The nature of the distribution made it so that people think, Oh, yeah, the bakery was in Noe Valley, because we were in Noe Valley and we thought it was local,” he says. “I don’t think most people realized that it was citywide, that it was as large as it was.”

  By spring of 1978, the brownies were all over town, though few people knew where they came from. Even today, many former customers are surprised to learn the size of the operation. If you were on Polk Street, Cheryl was the Brownie Lady. If you were on the wharf, it was Mer. Why would you expect multiple salespeople working different routes simultaneously?

  * * *

  Doug carefully measured out a thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot square on the warehouse floor. He’d borrowed a power sander from a friend who worked in construction and spent the afternoon shaving away layers of splintery wood. Mer was in Milwaukee introducing her parents to their granddaughter—leaving Doug with much-needed time alone.

  It felt good to work with his hands. The roar of the sander, sawdust kicking into the air as he erased old hoofmarks and gouges. He finished the edges meticulously by hand, making clean right angles in the corners. He didn’t have to think, and no one was talking. Beautiful wordless time.

  Cheryl and Noel came and went, and he ignored them, deep in his work, eyes on the lines. Later, he suggested they leave again so he could apply thick layers of toxic varnish to seal in the splinters that plagued the rest of the warehouse. Then he installed a ballet barre that he’d found dumpster diving and hung large mirrors. Their own home dance studio.

  The dance floor was a gift for Mer. She was bigger than ever after the pregnancy. She took dance classes three days a week but didn’t exercise on the off days. And if Doug didn’t stay on her case, she reverted to eating unhealthy foods. Doug couldn’t figure it out: Why did she choose to be fat?

  As the I Ching hexagram “43. Kuai/Break-through (Resoluteness)” said, “The best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.” So here he was, focusing on a positive outcome.

  The dance floor would be the centerpiece for amazing parties. And with this in the house, Mer would have no excuse not to exercise daily. It would be a superb surface for the kids, a no-splinter zone for crawling and sliding. A boon to the whole Sticky Fingers family.

  With the project finished and Mer still in Milwaukee, Doug allowed himself one small indulgence—an experiment he’d wanted to try for a long while.

  * * *

  “After we became friends,” Stannous Flouride tells me, “your dad took me to see Women in Love at the Castro Theatre. He wanted me to see it because of the wrestling scene. Have you ever seen Women in Love? It should be called Men in Love because it’s actually about the relationship between these two men. And there’s a scene in it where they wrestle. Your dad wanted to see that because he wanted to do that. I was a little taller, but we were both about the same weight. And it was nothing. Get the person down until they say ‘Give’ and then let them up. And then, you know, do it again. And I mean for several hours.”

  I ask Stannous if he and my dad were lovers. He gives me a wry, one-sided smile that I’ve noticed is prominent in h
is facial repertoire. Very punk.

  “He and I were probably both . . . I don’t know about bi . . . but sluts at that time in our lives. But this was physical, and it was romantic without being sexual. It was, you know, a chance to be physically intimate with somebody in a nonsexual manner. Wrestling puts you so tightly and so closely into contact.”

  Women in Love, a 1969 British melodrama directed by Ken Russell and based on the D. H. Lawrence novel, follows two male friends—Gerald and Rupert—who fall in love with each other and try to make sense of their feelings while surrounded by women. The Castro screened it on March 16, 1978, along with a gay coming-of-age comedy from France, a double bill the theater called “The Search for Sexual Identity.”

  I imagine my dad taking Stannous to that resplendent old film house with its gilded statues, velvet curtains, and imposing deco chandelier. Sneaking glances at his companion’s face in the darkened theater, trying to gauge his reactions.

  The wrestling scene takes place in a lavish drawing room in front of a crackling fire. “I have a feeling,” Gerald says, eyeing his friend, “that if I don’t watch myself I might do something silly.”

  “Why not do it?” Rupert says.

  They flirt for another beat. Rupert mentions that he used to do a little “Japanese-style wrestling.”

  “How do you start?” Gerald asks.