by Alia Volz
“Usually, you’d go to a party and it would be all gay guys or all North Beach types,” says Stannous Flouride, who came as the King of Marvin Gardens, head-to-toe in canary yellow with a crown and a shirt silk-screened with RENT $24 WITH ONE HOUSE. “The [Sticky Fingers] parties really reflected the diversity of their clientele. You would have straight white people from Union Street, you’d have freaks from Noe Valley, and gays from the Castro and Polk and that kind of stuff. It was this total cross section of the City—or the stoner population of the City.”
Some people brought exploding bags of confetti and glitter. The mulchy wood grabbed the sparkles and wouldn’t let go. After that first party, the warehouse floors always shone in sunlight as if the wood were inlaid with gemstones.
* * *
Mid-June, Barb blew through town on tour with A Chorus Line. (Her costume business hadn’t worked out in Boston, and she’d moved on.) She had a layover at SFO between cities and spent it at the warehouse.
In a sleeve of photos labeled BARB’S FIVE-HOUR VISIT, I find shots of her and my dad doing cocaine off a pocket mirror, their jaws and brows tense. Cheryl mugs with a small lampshade hanging from her ear. I’m there, too, a bubbly six-month-old in a striped yellow shirt and white moccasins. First in my mom’s arms (who doesn’t appear to be doing coke), then on Barb’s lap. Sometime during the visit, my mom asked Barb to be my godmother.
In yolk-yellow afternoon light, Barb took me for a walk up the block propped on her hip. Seeing our shadows crisp against the wall of a nearby building, Barb lifted my baby hand and waved it—which she says made me squeal in amazement as I recognized my shadow for the first time.
Later, Doug brought Barb into his studio to see We Are All One. We Are None the Same, which he’d finished over the winter. He’d done the portraits in a meticulous photo-realistic style, but he’d also taken some liberty: he had shrunk Mer to a thinner size.
Barb folded her arms across her chest. Doug had painted her wearing a bulky, unflattering sweater. Her cheeks looked chipmunky. “Jeez, Doug,” she said. “If you were going to slim Mer down, why’d you keep me fat?”
“Tell you the truth,” he said. “I think I did you a favor by showing you as you really are.”
“Yeah, well, don’t do me any more favors.”
Decades later, Barb is still pissed about that painting.
And my dad still believes his honesty was a gift. “My mistake was in shrinking your mother down,” he says. “She wanted to be thin, so I made her that way. But you don’t help someone by telling them what they want to hear.”
None of the Sticky Fingers women had a positive body image. Even Cheryl, always skinny, rode an anorexic edge. She’d barely eat for days, then binge alone in her room, scarfing boxes of cookies before burying the evidence in the garbage.
The dance floor became the locus of weight-loss mania. Mornings, Cheryl zipped herself into an ankle-length green-velour housecoat with a hood, piled sweatshirts over that, cranked the music, and ran in place for an hour, sweat streaking her face. Then she dropped to the floor for bicycle crunches, push-ups, and leg lifts.
Mer occasionally joined in, but she hated it. Hated jogging, hated sit-ups, hated feeling obligated. She dieted, fasted, and took saunas at Finnila’s. She loved to dance. But she was never one of those my-body-is-a-temple people. Her body was a box, a container, a house.
Swaggering though the middle of this was Doug with his John Travolta physique. He could eat heaping plates of spaghetti, seconds and thirds of Chinese takeout, double scoops of ice cream—and always look trim. A natural advantage he used for leverage when he felt weak in other ways.
Even people beyond the immediate circle noticed. “They would talk about stuff in front of us,” says Alice Charap, a chiropractor who sometimes hung out at the warehouse. “Doug might say, ‘If Meridy would just shape up, she’d be so much better off.’ He seemed to be very critical. And yet, he was with her by choice. You couldn’t help but think that he’d selected a plump woman. She was always talking about her weight and always on some new regimen. Always looking gorgeous, by the way, but she wasn’t happy.”
* * *
June tended to be gray and damp as hot inland temperatures sucked fog in from the Pacific to loiter over the bay. But a dour weather forecast was no match for hundreds of thousands of cheerful gays and lesbians. As soon as the Gay Freedom Day parade started inching along Market Street on June 25, 1978, the clouds parted, as if some queeny angel were elbowing through to watch muscles flex and sequins sparkle.
Mer and Doug found a spot in the throng. With me in a Gerry carrier, they bobbed along to disco blaring from passing floats and soaked up the sunshine.
The Los Angeles Times would report 375,000 in attendance. Even if that overshot the mark, it was likely the largest gathering in San Francisco during the entire 1970s. “A sense of gay manifest destiny gripped San Francisco by 1978,” Randy Shilts wrote, “as if it were ordained that homosexuals should people the city from sea to shining bay.” An army vet-cum-activist named Gilbert Baker had designed and hand-sewn a pair of enormous rainbow flags. This international symbol for LGBTQ+ diversity debuted that day in San Francisco.
Harvey Milk sat atop his gray Volvo with his legs dangling through the sunroof. He wore a ringer T-shirt, a lei of fresh flowers, and a black armband with the pink triangle symbol used to mark homosexuals during the Holocaust. Milk wasn’t messing around. In his first months in government, he had secured passage of an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against gays in housing and employment (for which the sole opposing vote had come from Supervisor Dan White, apparently in retaliation for an earlier vote of Milk’s); he’d taken on greedy real estate developers with an antispeculation bill; and he’d introduced a pooper-scooper bill to force dog owners to clean up after their pets.
Unbeknownst to the public, Harvey had received dozens of death threats leading up to the parade, including a typed postcard that read, “You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone.” Harvey often wisecracked to friends about being assassinated. Cleve teased him about it. “Who do you think you are?” he prodded. “Martin Luther King? Malcolm X? You’re just a gay shopkeeper.” Joking aside, Harvey had already recorded three tapes at his lawyer’s office that expressed his last wishes in the event of an assassination. As the death threats rolled in, close friends had tried to talk Harvey out of appearing at the parade, but he’d shrugged them off and declined a police escort. Today was too important.
If gays and lesbians seemed to have clout within the glitter-swirled snow globe of San Francisco, the glass was thin. Antigay crusader Anita Bryant had been named Most Admired Woman by readers of Good Housekeeping. She’d nearly lost her $100,000-per-year contract with Florida Citrus, then won it back as her popularity surged. In a lengthy Playboy magazine interview in May, she’d shared her opinion that people should be locked up for at least twenty years if convicted of a homosexual act. “Any time you water down the law, it just makes it easier for immorality to be tolerated,” she told the interviewer. “They’ll have plenty of time to think in prison.”
The evangelicals had yet to lose a ballot-box fight. Now they were coming for California. Senator John Briggs had gotten Proposition 6 on the ballot for November 1978. Briggs’s rhetoric played on fear, linking homosexuality to pedophilia. Most anyone would agree that children should be protected from predators. Therefore, gays shouldn’t be allowed near kids. The language of Proposition 6, however, made no mention of pedophilia or molestation.
Provides for filing charges against schoolteachers, teachers’ aides, school administrators or counselors for advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting private or public sexual acts . . . between persons of the same sex in a manner likely to come to the attention of other employees or students; or publicly and indiscreetly engaging in said acts.
Even heterosexuals accused of “advocating,” “promoting,” or “encouraging” homosexuality could lose their j
obs. It would be left up to school boards and district courts to decide what these broad terms meant. The Briggs Initiative laid the groundwork for a witch hunt. And it had an early lead in the polls.
Increasingly, Harvey framed coming out of the closet as less a personal decision and more as a political imperative. “You must come out,” Harvey would say in his Gay Freedom Day speech later that afternoon. “Come out to your parents, your relatives. I know that it is hard and that it will hurt them, but think of how they will hurt you at the voting booth! Come out to your friends . . . to your neighbors, to your coworkers, to the people who work where you eat and shop . . . [B]reak down the myths; destroy the lies and distortions for your own sake, for their sake, for the sake of the youngsters who are being terrified by the votes coming from Dade County to Eugene.”
Defying the assassination threats, Harvey sat tall on the roof of that Volvo and whipped his arm overhead like a cowboy swinging a lasso.
Supervisor Dan White was also in the crowd that afternoon, granting interviews from the sidelines. He’d been the sole supervisor to vote against closing Market Street for the annual parade. “The vast majority of people in this city don’t want public displays of sexuality,” he’d said. White wasn’t alone in this sentiment. “I think it offends a lot of people because it’s just blatant,” a young man with a bristly mustache said in a man-on-the-street interview. An elderly woman chimed in, “I don’t want people to make a mockery out of themselves.”
One woman who grew up in Eureka Valley in the 1970s still remembers men walking past her stoop wearing assless chaps—clearly unbothered that there were kids like her nearby. There were dozens of bathhouses operating in San Francisco in 1978, plus playrooms, glory holes, and dungeons in many discos. There were water-sports parties, mass orgies, and anonymous sex in public parks at all hours. “Men come and go like food,” wrote diarist Mark Abramson, “and a store is always open when you need one.” Sexuality had reached a high boil and the lid was rattling.
* * *
For the bakery, keeping up with demand that summer required frequent expeditions into the Humboldt wilderness, a four-hour drive on the highway before starting down dirt roads. By July, their usual suppliers had run dry and harvest was still months away. Buying trips became more complicated, leading deeper into the backwoods. The roads were perilous and often unmarked; growers didn’t want to be found. More than once, they’d been greeted with a rifle.
Then Doug and Mer got lucky.
In hippiedom, picking up hitchhikers is considered good karma. One afternoon, Doug and Mer offered a ride to a longhair in Marin, a back-to-the-lander heading to the City for the weekend. Introducing himself as John Schaeffer, their passenger proffered a joint of powerful sinsemilla.
John talked excitedly about his new business venture. He’d been living on a rural commune near the tiny town of Philo and commuting forty miles each way to his job as a computer operator for Mendocino County (back when computers took up entire rooms and were controlled with punch cards). Folks from John’s commune would give him long shopping lists—kerosene lamps, tools, books—and he’d have to stop at five different stores to gather it all. John drove a Volkswagen convertible with a redwood stump for a front seat. Driving back to the commune, he’d smoke a joint and let his mind wander. One night, it hit him: What if you could get all this stuff in one place? He opened Real Goods in the town of Willits, three hours north of San Francisco. It was among the first supply stores in the state that catered specifically to back-to-the-land hippies.
The conversation stuck with Mer. Back-to-the-landers might mean growers.
On the next trip to Humboldt, Doug and Mer were passing through Willits, so they stopped at Real Goods and gave John a sample brownie. “Say,” Mer said. “You wouldn’t know anyone who has shake lying around, would you?”
As it turned out, John did.
The market for California sinsemilla had exploded since Mer’s first trip up to Humboldt in 1976. The San Francisco Examiner reported in 1978 that California sinsemilla was selling for $1,500 per pound within the state (equivalent to $5,892 in 2019) and more in other parts of the country. The high dollar amount attracted both thieves and drug enforcement. Sheriff’s deputies in Humboldt county claimed to have “seized pot worth as much as $5 million in a single day of raids on hidden gardens.”
Farmers were eager to move their product quickly. As one grower told a reporter, “It’s constant paranoia until it’s all gone.” A dusty truck loaded with typical growing supplies—rolls of chicken wire, irrigation pipes, fertilizer—could draw unwanted attention. Always innovative, John had thought of a system to help his customers stay under the radar. He had them arrive in the evening with shopping lists and park in the loading area. John’s crew worked overnight to fill orders. Customers returned in the wee hours, paid for their goods, and hit the road before sunrise with supplies secreted beneath tarps.
Simple to add one more step. Now, twice a month, growers brought bags of unwanted shake for John’s crew to set aside for Sticky Fingers Brownies. The price was fifty dollars a pound: cheap for the bakery and extra cash for the growers, many of whom usually burned or composted their shake. John didn’t make any money from brokering these deals, though there were always a dozen brownies in it for him. He saw it as a service to his valued customers, a favor to his new San Francisco friends, and a way to amass extra karma—which, according to his beliefs, was a kind of currency.
This was a huge break for the bakery. No more rutted dirt roads, no more getting lost. And John seemed to have an endless contact list; it wasn’t unusual for him to have fifty pounds ready for Doug and Mer to cram into their car and transport—slowly, carefully—to San Francisco.
Doug in Willits.
These bimonthly drives awakened something in Doug. He’d see a red-tailed hawk circling overhead and feel his spirit soar with it. He relished the fresh air, the lazy sprawl of oaks, the sweet taste of water from a natural spring. His muscles unwound. He found himself looking forward to the bucolic beauty, quietude, and rightness he experienced on these bimonthly trips. City life could be thrilling, but he envied John a little bit.
Mer saw Willits as fuel for their urban lifestyles; Doug felt like he was visiting his future.
* * *
Decades later, John Schaeffer marvels at the brazenness of collecting that much weed in his store. “I tried to arrange it so it came just in time,” he says. “Even though it was shake, which seemed like it was a little more legal than buds.” He starts laughing. “But it probably wasn’t.”
A pound is a pound is a pound.
I think about the stories we tell ourselves in order to feel secure when we aren’t safe at all. Like Cheryl deciding she wasn’t really a drug dealer since it was only pot. Like Doug thinking he could bring order to his chaotic life by writing numbers in ledgers. Like Mer deciding she wasn’t in danger because she’d consulted the I Ching.
John’s extra karma seems to have paid off, however. He explains that a few months after he connected with my parents, a stranger pulled up to Real Goods with a nine-watt photovoltaic panel in the trunk of his Porsche. The driver, a guy named David Lemm, was looking for a buyer for solar panels rejected from the space program. John bought one panel, tinkered with it, and resold it to a grower for $900. He ordered ten more panels, then a hundred, then a thousand—likely becoming America’s first retailer of solar panels for private homes. “Soon,” John says, “we had execs flying in from ARCO Solar to try and figure out why all these panels were selling in Willits, of all places.”
One word: weed.
Solar helped the illicit farmers stay off the grid. “In hindsight,” John says, “it was a synergistic coevolution between cannabis and solar. Because the cannabis growers in the woods needed solar to support their lifestyles . . . which enabled them to grow their marijuana. At the same time, these same growers, because of their income, were the only ones who could afford these solar panels . . . These two industr
ies were inextricably linked for a time.”
Real Goods celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2018. Along with its sister business, the Solar Living Institute, it remains core to California’s alternative energy industry.
* * *
My parents were also thinking ahead.
People often asked for the secret recipe—which Sticky Fingers withheld as a matter of policy. If they played their hand right, maybe they could patent it and cash in down the road. They joked about selling it to Betty Crocker once marijuana finally became legal—which, with the commander in chief advocating for decriminalization, seemed to them not a matter of if but when.
But how did one patent a recipe that depended on an illegal ingredient? Could it be done? One of Mer’s customers on her Castro route was a lawyer—I’ll call him Goran—who’d handled some intellectual property cases, so she broached the subject with him. He offered to come by and talk it over.
Goran was a flamboyant Yugoslavian who kept a tank of nitrous oxide in the trunk of his car and balloons in his pocket. When he came to the warehouse to discuss patenting, he brought the tank in with him. He periodically filled a balloon for Mer, Cheryl, or Doug, or huffed one himself, his voice dropping and expanding, so it was like hearing a Yugoslavian Barry White talk patent law.
Even with Goran’s help (such as it was), patenting an illegal recipe would be delicate—if not impossible. They decided to hold off for the time being and see what would come from Carter’s interest in marijuana reform.
On July 20, 1978, the president’s drug czar, Dr. Peter Bourne, got caught writing his administrative assistant a prescription for quaaludes under a phony name. Days later, Bourne was accused of snorting cocaine at a benefit for NORML. The drug czar resigned in disgrace. Then seven junior aides told the press that they smoked pot regularly (though never at work), leading to widespread reporting on “drug abuse” in the White House. Faced with a public relations horror show, Carter issued severe warnings to his staff about marijuana use. All talk of decriminalization ceased. (The next US president to publicly discuss softening federal cannabis regulations would be Barack Obama three decades later; even then, the talk would amount to nothing.)
