by Alia Volz
“Well, you can’t do much in a stuffed shirt.”
Cut to a lock being turned in an ornate door. Cut to the men, now buck naked, circling each other in front of the fire: sculpted abs and biceps, swinging dicks, hairy balls.
The men box lightly. Then one bear-hugs the other and slams him to the ground. They rise and fall again. Grabbing and twisting and rolling. Muscles flex; sweat glistens. There’s the slap of flesh on flesh, the groans and grunts. Dramatic, dark music swells to a fearsome crescendo.
Afterward, resting on a polar bear rug, Rupert pants, “We ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, perfectly, finally, without any possibility of ever going back on it. Shall we swear to each other one day?”
They nearly kiss. Then Gerald squeezes his friend’s shoulder instead—a restrained, fraternal gesture—and says, “Wait until I understand it better.”
The scene is both erotic and poignant. One feels Gerald’s tumult, the struggle between passion and intellect, his war against his instincts. How he doesn’t want to want what he wants.
* * *
The bag Doug designed that week depicts the grinning face of Satan—pointy Vulcan ears, reptilian eyes, sharp tongue protruding from a seductive smile. Text beside his face reads, The Devil’s Playground. From the Devil’s left eye pours a river of naked, writhing bodies copulating in every imaginable combination and forming the words Sticky Fingers Brownies.
Doug had an affinity for cycles of sin and expiation, dissolution and rebirth. His next bag—for his wife’s return the following week—was a portrait of a haloed Jesus Christ along with a quote from John 3:3: And JESUS said; Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.
* * *
Mer was delighted by the dance floor. She stepped into the center and tried out a few moves on the slick surface. She loved to dance, and Doug’s idea of bringing that into the home filled her with optimism. They would groove together, to their own music, melding their styles.
Doug twirled her into a dip.
They began planning a summer bash.
At first, Mer didn’t see that the dance floor might be a boobytrap. That she would be goaded to exercise constantly whether she had the time and energy or not, that she’d be shamed if she skipped a day. She didn’t immediately notice something backhanded in the gift.
Nor did she know about Doug’s wrestling date with Stannous or his occasional erotic adventures in the men’s sauna at Finnila’s Finnish Baths. She sometimes got jealous when she caught him eyeing thinner women, but she failed to notice his attraction to men.
For the last weekend of March, Mer designed a bag based on an image from her tarot deck: a sweet-faced young man wandering over a grassy hill.
The Fool.
14
Off My Cloud
Summer of 1978, if you weren’t looking for a party, you’d come to the wrong town. And if you were here long before this party started and wanted nothing to do with it, too bad.
Michael Maletta, a hairdresser and disco promoter on Mer’s Castro route, threw a series of outrageous bashes. Michael was a handsome New York transplant with a sarcastic wit, a fanciful imagination, and a disbelief in limits. Friends nicknamed him the P. T. Barnum of the ’70s.
Late May, Michael invited Mer to sell brownies at a mega party called Stars. “You’ll need a can opener,” he said, handing her a cylindrical tin akin to a soup can. On the label was an image of three prancing unicorns. OPEN CAN AND GET READY, it said. MAY 27, 1978, BE A STAR. Mer cracked into it at home. Inside was a baby-blue T-shirt silk-screened with a red star, along with typed instructions for mailing in photographs to be used for your Stars passport, and a slide of yourself “looking and feeling like a star.”
Stars took place in a huge wooden warehouse at a defunct pier on a desolate stretch of the waterfront. When the taxi driver got lost, Mer rolled down her window and they followed a thumping bass to its source. The bouncer seemed surprised to see a woman with a Stars passport. “I’m the Brownie Lady,” Mer said, handing him a freebie. He waved her in.
The sound inside was colossal—an octave-jumping bass line and strings surging through climax after climax. The air was jungle hot and steamy, pungent with male sweat and the chemical tang of poppers. Most boys had already stripped off their shirts, and some were down to jock straps and boots. Slick bodies gleamed in strobing lights.
Mer stood on a chair to get her bearings. Erotic images projected onto billowing fabric on the walls alternated with the cheesecake photos men from the audience had sent in. In one corner, a tower of fresh strawberries rose above a moat of flowing chocolate, and behind that Mer could make out an orgy in progress. Men stood in line on a raised platform over the dance floor. It took a moment to identify that they were pissing into a trough dozens of feet long.
Mer seemed to be the only female in the room. Still breastfeeding and avoiding uppers, she stayed for only an hour, long enough to sell out her duffel of brownies. But she heard that the party went until noon the next day. People talked about it for weeks afterward.
* * *
On the business front, the expansion continued. Once Cheryl had found her footing on Polk, she traversed Nob Hill to the tony boutiques lining Union Street in the Marina, the upper-crusty-but-still-sort-of-bohemian neighborhood Armistead Maupin often featured in his weekly “Tales of the City” serial—where the Marina Safeway and a corner laundromat were depicted as the hottest spots for straights to pick up dates. It was a less obvious match for Sticky Fingers than Polk Gulch. But just because some of the businesses catered to snooty clientele didn’t mean the people who worked in them were squares.
North Beach Leathers became the highlight of Cheryl’s run. Founded in 1967, they utilized snakeskin, buckskin, furry hides, and ample fringe to produce custom leather outfits for Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels, Jim Morrison, Tina Turner, Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Janis Joplin, and, of course, the Rolling Stones. The original workshop was in North Beach, but the Marina storefront catered to socialites gone wild.
The salespeople were all smoking-hot, leather-clad bad boys. For Cheryl, this was a dangerous kind of heaven. “The first time I walked into North Beach Leather on Union Street,” she says, “Afghan Face grabbed me and gave me a big kiss right on the lips.” The guy she calls Afghan Face was a wiry Englishman with a long narrow face, hair in a silver shag. He looked a bit like his dog, an Afghan hound, hence her nickname for him. “I mean, he completely swept me off my feet the first time I walked in there,” she says. “He didn’t even know what I was there for yet. Long live rock and roll and tight pants!”
Since the Milwaukee days, Cheryl had had a thing for guys who wore leather and did mountains of drugs. While Cheryl sold him brownies, Afghan Face laid out rails of coke in the store’s back room. The cherry on top: he knew the Rolling Stones personally. Cheryl nursed a crush for weeks. They eventually slept together.
Later that summer, the Rolling Stones—Cheryl’s favorite—came through on their Some Girls tour and played in Oakland. Afghan Face had backstage passes and asked Cheryl to be his date. She didn’t go. “I didn’t understand him,” she says in an exasperated tone. “There was a language barrier and I didn’t actually find out that he’d invited me until afterward. He was telling me about the show, and I was like, ‘Oh, that must have been wonderful! I wish I could have gone!’ And he said, ‘Well, I asked you if you wanted to go.’ My heart dropped to the floor. His accent was so thick, I probably understood an eighth of what he said to me at any point, but I was in love. Then our romance was over, you know, because he wasn’t used to being turned down by women.”
Customers often tried to score other drugs from Sticky Fingers—cocaine, quaaludes, heroin—but the answer was no. In Cheryl’s mind, the fact that they dealt only wholesome herbal brownies was their karmic shield. “We always felt really righteous about it,” she says. “You know, like we weren’t really dr
ug dealers.”
Most of Union Street was more buttoned-up. Cheryl had to break businesses in cautiously, on high alert. Customers gave tacit signals indicating how to operate in their workplaces. She often followed them into back rooms or supply closets, but some did transactions right in the open in front of shoppers. So long as no one acted paranoid, the straight world wouldn’t be the wiser. A lot was communicated through nods of the head, hand gestures, shifting glances; it was important to read between the lines.
Once, when Mer was wrapping up a deal at a cash register in a magic shop, her customer cried out, “Oh, hello, Officer! How are you today?”
Glancing behind her, Mer spotted a man in a drab sport coat circulating around the store—a plainclothes cop. She grabbed a novelty item from beside the cash register, paid for it with money the cashier had just handed her, and walked casually out the door. Only after she’d put distance between herself and the narc did she glance at her purchase: a phony dollar bill that—presto chango!—turned into a hundred.
* * *
The Castro Street run had reached what Mer calls “gigantor proportions.” She’d start every Friday at around two p.m., first by car, double-parking outside various businesses to drop off individual grocery bags that had been prepacked with advance orders. She’d then load herself down with two army duffels of brownies and hang more off the stroller. With the baby supplies and extra clothes, maneuvering through a crowd with that much stuff was exhausting.
Then Kissie, the waitress at the Village Deli, said, “You know, you could leave some brownies here in the kitchen and come back when you need to restock. Don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on it.” She winked. “For that matter, we could probably sell some for you. The whole damn neighborhood comes through here anyway.”
Mer started doing exactly that: leaving a duffel of loose brownies and a stack of brownie bags at the café for Kissie to sell. Soon thereafter, the Village Deli hired Dan Clowry, a bookish twenty-six-year-old from Pennsylvania, as the new manager.
Dan had recently moved to San Francisco and come out of the closet in one breath. When he arrived, Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” was becoming an international hit. The song had two verses: the first about meeting someone on a dance floor and wanting more to happen, the second about the thrill of a first kiss when the new lovers find themselves together in the dark. But mostly it was Sylvester doing a gospel-style vamp about how real he felt. Dan considered it his “welcoming song.”
“Within a week or two,” Dan says, “I was in a gang right in the heart of things. It was pretty amazing in this community. There was a feeling of closeness brought together by people being unable to come out to their families and creating their own families.”
By the time he started at the Village Deli, Dan remembers, Kissie was selling a full gross of Sticky Fingers brownies every Friday afternoon. “Then we got up to two gross!” he says. That’s 288 brownies, which seems like a lot to sell from the counter of a café in one afternoon. “People were buying them for the bags as well,” Dan adds. “Some people would just buy two or three [brownies] as long as they could get a bag. It was part of the whole feeling of that time.”
Mer didn’t arrive with the brownies until late afternoon on Fridays, but Dan says that as soon as the café opened in the morning people would start asking, “Hey, did the brownies come in yet?” and “What’s the bag like this week?”
Mer gave the Village Deli crew a deal and never asked if they marked the price up for resale; she didn’t care. “I’d drop off a duffel of brownies,” she says. “Two or three hours later, I’d pick the duffel up again. Instead of brownies, it would be full of cash.” After a while, she stopped counting the money. She trusted Kissie and Dan, and they didn’t let her down.
Another fixture at the Village Deli in those days was Cleve Jones, the twenty-four-year-old activist from Arizona. He had curly brown hair, rosy lips, and naturally pink cheeks; behind the baby face was a lefty spitfire.
When he first met Harvey Milk, Cleve tells me, he wasn’t impressed. Being middle-aged and a businessowner put Harvey in a category with the Man. It was only after Anita Bryant and the evangelicals began attacking gay rights that the young activist joined Harvey’s campaign. Cleve had a knack for the mechanics of large protests; he became the supervisor’s protégé and street-level organizer.
Cleve lived in a small shotgun flat with roommates, one wall phone, and no privacy. The Village Deli became his de facto office. He’d claim a small table near the counter, and Kissie and Dan would let him use their phone to plan demonstrations. Looking back, he remembers the heavy traffic on Fridays when people streamed in looking for brownies—though he rarely bought them himself. “I never knew when it was going to hit, you know, so I would eat some and then I wouldn’t feel it, and then I’d eat more, and three hours later it’s like I’m on bad acid. They were very potent.”
The antigay crusaders had been on a roll all spring, successfully repealing city gay rights ordinances in St. Paul, Wichita, and Eugene. As soon as news of each repeal broke, Cleve would muster forces at the intersection of Market and Castro. The crowd would march two miles down to city hall, up Polk Street to California, and up a steeper hill to Grace Cathedral—growing larger and louder along the way. They would then stampede down Powell Street into touristy Union Square.
The organizers called this the “disaster route,” and it was deliberate. “You didn’t have to activate the telephone tree or put up posters,” Cleve explains. “People would know, Oh, shit, something’s going down. Go to Castro right now. It was very, very intentional.”
Carmen and Cheryl.
The fast-paced, hilly marches were also a strategy for avoiding violence; they left the protesters too tired to riot. And the rapid assembly and circuitous route kept the SFPD off guard. “They hated it. I never took out a permit for anything.” Cleve smiles. “I have my permit: it’s called the Constitution.”
* * *
Doug shifted grinding the pot to Wednesday so baking could start on Thursday and continue through Saturday. Carmen churned out batch after gooey batch, averaging forty pans per workday—about 2,800 brownies per week. He stacked the pans perpendicularly in tall wobbly towers while they cooled enough to be wrapped.
One of the Wrapettes designed a bag depicting the Keebler Elf version of the Sticky Fingers baking team. Carmen is pudgy and cute in a giant chef’s hat and overalls, his patchy black beard and sideburns curling around his face. Wearing roller skates and miniskirts, the Wrapettes zoom through the frame with improbable pyramids of brownies piled on trays. The kitchen walls are curved and textured like the hollow inside of a tree, with a hole opening onto rolling hills at sunrise. As if the brownies came from a distant fairy land instead of a ramshackle Mission warehouse.
Hardly anyone knew where Sticky Fingers came from, making a bust less likely. But in the summer of 1978, shortly after the Carmen and the Wrapettes bag, they let that advantage slip away.
Cheryl began selling brownies at the warehouse. It started slowly, with close friends stopping by to make purchases, and gradually expanded to include close friends of close friends, then friends of those friends. To avoid having people show up unexpectedly, Cheryl set a time—four p.m. to seven p.m. on Fridays—when customers could visit. She enjoyed holding court at home for a change, passing doobies and sipping wine.
Of all the risks they took, I can’t wrap my head around this one.
It had backfired on Dennis Peron. After his 1977 bust, Dennis told a reporter, “I didn’t know the narco I let in, but I got good vibes from her.” He’d trusted his gut like my parents trusted theirs. Then the vice squad showed up at his door and a cop shot him through the thigh.
To produce their current volume of around ten thousand brownies per month, Sticky Fingers needed one hundred pounds of raw shake, approximately ten large garbage bags full. It would be impossible to pass as a small operation. Plus, Doug was writing everything down; he’d alread
y filled one ledger and begun a second one. With so much evidence lying around, a raid could have sent my parents to prison—and me, a baby, into the foster system.
When I ask my mom why they did the home sales anyway, she says, “I did a lot of things that made me nervous back then. But if you’re not a little nervous, you make mistakes. You have to understand we were always very careful to consult the I Ching before doing anything like that.”
* * *
Sticky Fingers decided to throw a summer shindig—a Kings and Queens costume party to spark up the dance floor. Unlike today, one couldn’t resort to mass-produced costumes from Amazon. Creativity was king, playfulness was queen.
Mer settled on Cleopatra. Egyptian fever was sweeping the nation as the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit made its slow tour of the United States. She hand-sewed an ornate golden headdress out of lamé, vintage coins, and metallic mesh, with a wired gold cobra rearing above her forehead. Cheryl was the Roller Derby Queen in red satin short shorts, knee-high socks, a sparkling crash helmet, knee and elbow pads, and, of course, roller skates. Doug became the Rainbow King in a headdress made from a baby toy: plastic donuts of gradating sizes and colors stacked to form a rainbow cone on top of his head. Strands of rainbow electrical wire jittered out from the base of the cone like static.
They laid a refreshment table with hundreds of brownies cut into quarters and hired a rock band as well as a doorman to collect the three-dollar admission and make sure no one got in without a full costume. No exceptions.
Some five hundred people came: jugglers and dancers and magicians and mimes from the wharf; radical theater freaks from the Angels of Light, Project Artaud, and Beach Blanket Babylon; Al Fellahin, a genderfuck belly dance troupe in gypsy garb; leathermen and leatherdykes; and strippers who danced on the rafters in stiletto heels.
