by Alia Volz
For the time being, Sticky Fingers settled for what they made on the street. Mer was returning from her Friday runs having peddled eight hundred to a thousand brownies. Saturdays on the wharf—with stops in North Beach and South of Market on the way—could be nearly as good. Between Polk and Union streets and Friday sales at the warehouse, Cheryl was pulling in similar numbers. Doug was not.
“He never did very well with it,” my mom says. “And was always freaked out that he didn’t do very well, you know . . . I remember coming in and he would’ve sold two dozen. Period.”
In Cheryl’s words, “He couldn’t make a dime. Not a damn dime.”
Doug had better weeks and worse weeks. But he was cut from a different cloth than Mer or Cheryl. “It’s like I got on a Disney ride,” he says, looking back. “That’s what life was like. It was all about fun, you know? It’s not very realistic. It’s not grounded. I’m going to say it’s not very honorable. You don’t have a lot of self-esteem if you’re running around life like that.”
At the same time, Doug didn’t like being bested. He’d stew over the disparity in numbers, saying things like “Well, you were in the Castro, so of course you’re going to do well there.”
Cheryl might chime in, “Then why did I do so well on Union Street, Doug?”
They’d fall into three-way spats. Or Doug would brood in his studio, then launch a counterattack later, turning his attention more sharply toward Mer’s weight.
For the time being, there was bounty to go around. After Carmen and the Wrapettes were paid and funds set aside for ingredients, the remaining amount got divided evenly between the three salespeople, who each netted around $1,000 per week. As a couple, my parents were earning five or six times the average household income in 1978. They had a pile of cash to count every week.
15
Paint It Black
In Barb’s dream, three men stood in the warehouse facing away from her. Single file, like they were waiting in line for tickets at a movie theater. She didn’t know who they were or why they were there, couldn’t see their faces. The man at the rear raised his arm. In his hand, a glint of metal: a gun. Before Barb could react, he shot the person ahead of him point-blank in the back of the head. With the jerky movement of an automaton, he stepped over the body to shoot the third man, who hit the floor with a thud that shook the walls.
She awoke with blood pounding in her ears, her skin tingling. Her eyes adjusted slowly, picking out bluish rectangles high above: skylights. I’m in the warehouse. In bed. It was just a dream.
Barb called to Boogie in a whisper. She heard his claws click across the wood floor and his panting draw near. She felt for her cigarettes in the dark, then smoked one while stroking Boogie’s shaggy ears. She heard overlapping snores: from the back of the warehouse where Doug and Mer and the baby slept, and from Cheryl and Noel’s loft in front. Everyone was all right. Boogie snuffled, settling on the floor by the bed.
Barb had landed back in San Francisco after her summer on the road with A Chorus Line and was staying in the warehouse while looking for her own place. Having fantasized about starting her own clothing line for some time, she’d enrolled at the San Francisco School of Fashion Design to learn about merchandising. Maybe, she thought, the rootlessness is starting to get to me.
The next morning, Barb mentioned her nightmare to Doug. “This building used to be a livery stable, like after the 1906 quake,” he said. “There could have been a shoot-out here long ago. Maybe you’re picking up old vibes.”
Barb stirred cream into her coffee. “I have been really psychic lately,” she said. “It’s almost too much.”
She blamed this on her new boyfriend, a real estate agent named Mike White. She’d met him at a party—tall, sandy-haired, kind eyes—then bumped into him again at a Scientology meeting. When they met a third time on the street, Mike asked her out. He was divorced and had a son who lived out of state. One evening, out of the blue, Barb said, “I think your mother’s going to call tonight. Something about your son. He wants to live with you again.” Mike’s phone rang a little later, and guess who it was. Within weeks, Mike’s thirteen-year-old son had moved back to the City. Ever since they’d started dating, Barb’s antenna had been picking up signals from all over the place.
She sipped her coffee, smiled at Doug. “Guess I’m pulling stuff out of the air.”
But the dream lingered, remaining vivid as weeks passed.
* * *
Late September, my parents packed their blue plastic suitcases and my portable stroller for a trip to Europe. This would be their honeymoon. Barb and Cheryl would handle brownie sales until we returned in mid-November.
In my baby passport picture, my dad’s knobby hands hold me up in front of a screen. I’m wearing a little milkmaid outfit and smiling. The first stamp, on September 30, 1978, is an entrance to Paris. From there, we toured Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Trains, planes, automobiles. Four countries over six weeks with a baby in diapers. My mom had already decided that motherhood wouldn’t knock the adventure out of her life; I would be part of the fun. And it’s true that I look cheerful in pictures from the trip, all toothless smiles and balled fists. My parents wear stylish travel outfits—Mer in an off-the-shoulder sweater and a burgundy beret; Doug in his leather cowboy hat and a denim shirt Barb had embroidered with an image of a falcon flying over a river valley.
Art had brought Doug and Mer together, and it would be the focus of the trip. Museums in every city. At the Uffizi in Florence, my mom says we sat for an hour in the Botticelli room while I baby-talked to the cherubs in The Birth of Venus. I’m told I took my first baby steps in my grandmother’s garden in Mijas, Spain, where on clear days you could see Morocco like a mirage across the water.
* * *
The City was not quiet while we were away. Senator John Briggs was stumping for Proposition 6, stirring the pot at every opportunity. He campaigned throughout the state but focused especially on San Francisco, which he liked to describe as the “moral garbage dump of homosexuality in this country.” He gave California’s more conservative elements a platform. For those in San Francisco who’d been displaced by gay gentrification—families who couldn’t compete economically against newcomers with two incomes and no kids—Prop. 6 offered a chance to punch back. And it was working. A widely published September poll had the measure leading 61 percent to 31 percent, with only 8 percent undecided.
But San Francisco’s lesbians and gays were ready for battle. Harvey, who’d just lost his lover Jack Lira to suicide, threw himself into the campaign like a man on fire leaping into a swimming pool. The community rallied around him. There were televised debates, marches, and fundraisers. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. Even punks got into it; the Mab threw a September benefit party called Save the Homos featuring performances by DV8, the Dils, and the Offs!, all proceeds going to Harvey’s anti-Briggs fund.
Bay Area activists bused to the most rural nooks of the state, hoping that if people could speak face to face with real homosexuals the monster image would crumble. This was classic Harvey, who insisted that people were innately good and intelligent, just educated differently. He thought anyone could be won over if you were earnest and friendly and open.
Meanwhile, Dennis Peron was running a campaign of his own. Dennis had been out on bail, with his trial over the Big Top bust ongoing, when he’d marched into the registrar’s office—flanked by dozens of supporters and a bugle player for dramatic flair—and announced that he had 20,800 signatures to get Proposition W on the ballot: toot-tootle-oo!
Prop. W stated: We, the people of San Francisco, demand that the District Attorney, along with the Chief of Police, cease the arrest and prosecution of individuals involved in the cultivation, transfer, or possession of marijuana.
Toward the end of Dennis’s trial, his defense received a major boost from an unlikely source: Dennis’s own irrepressible mouth. Whenever he saw the cop who’d shot him in the hall outside the courtroom, Dennis ma
de catty remarks, complimenting Makaveckas’s footwear or hairstyle in a queeny tone. One day, according to Dennis, the cop snapped. “You motherfucking faggot! I wish I’d killed you,” he said. “One less faggot in San Francisco.” The judge happened to overhear. In court later that day, when asked to demonstrate how he’d angled his gun during the raid, Makaveckas pulled out his service revolver and aimed it at Dennis for some thirty seconds. Outraged, the judge threw out the policeman’s testimony, stripping the prosecution of their key witness. Dennis got a light sentence of six months in county jail followed by four years of probation.
Once the verdict came down and Dennis started doing his time, he went right on fighting for Prop. W—from jail. He also launched a campaign for a seat on the city charter revision commission. The press seemed amused. “[Peron] has determined that 200 of his 2500 fellow inmates at San Bruno are registered voters of San Francisco,” one reporter wrote. “And he is forced to confine his electioneering largely to them.”
Mer was impressed, if a bit baffled. “Dennis was fearless,” she says. “Just absolutely fearless. Such a sweet guy, you know, Dennis wouldn’t harm a fly. But he had balls of iron! I was pretty brave but never like that.”
My parents had cast absentee ballots before leaving for Europe. They wouldn’t learn the results until our return in mid-November.
* * *
Barb had a second dream in the middle of October that was almost identical to the first. Again, she saw three men standing in a line with their backs to her and felt a surge of adrenaline. Again, the man in back shot his two companions. A pool of dark blood swamped her feet. The name White drifted through her mind.
She awoke panting. What the hell did Mike White have to do with this? She knew he kept guns; she’d seen them in a glass cabinet at his house. They had a date the next night, so she decided to confront him.
“This is going to sound weird,” she said to him at dinner. “I’m having these really vivid dreams where you’re shooting people.”
Mike squinted. “What?”
“I’m getting your name in the dream, too. I just . . . I feel like something bad is going to happen to you. Or maybe you’re going to do something bad.”
“That’s a rotten thing to say.”
Barb leveled her gaze. “Well, I know you have guns. I’ve seen them.”
“So what! I inherited them, okay? My father was a cop. I don’t . . . shoot people, Barbara.”
Mike brooded through dinner. Barb didn’t hear from him for days after that. When he finally called, it was to break up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But this psychic stuff with you is too much.”
Barb felt defeated; she was fond of Mike. But she decided that the dreams must have been a warning to steer clear of him. She would ask for an aura cleansing from Doug when he and Mer got back from Europe. She’d gotten too hooked into Mike White’s psyche somehow.
* * *
Halloween night 1978, Senator John Briggs tried to prank San Francisco’s gay community. He called the SFPD early that evening to say that he was heading to Polk Street (which would be cordoned off for the annual street party). He also notified the press, obviously angling for publicity. “I’m here because this is a children’s night and I’m interested in children,” he said. A gaggle of journalists turned up for the expected confrontation between the homo-hating senator and some 80,000 queens on their high holiday.
Mayor Moscone caught wind of the planned shenanigans and intervened. Instead of delivering Briggs to Polk Street, a police cruiser escorted him to nearby Larkin Street, where he was met by the mayor, supervisors Milk and Silver, and Police Chief Gain, along with some twenty-five cops under orders to keep him out of Polk Gulch. A handful of years before, the SFPD had routinely arrested and often brutalized flagrant homosexuals. Now, some of the same cops were being used to protect them from an outside agitator. This didn’t help the mayor’s abysmal relationship with the SFPD rank and file.
On November 7, the Briggs Initiative got walloped in the voting booths—definitively and permanently crushed. Prop. 6 lost two-to-one statewide. When the results were announced, the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band took to the streets with baton twirlers. So many people flooded the Castro for an impromptu dance party that the police had to block traffic until four in the morning.
The following week, we returned from Europe.
To Mer, the news seemed good on all fronts. Not only had Briggs failed, but Dennis’s weed proposition had blazed to an easy victory. The city measure was nonbinding, but it would send a message about the people’s will: leave stoners alone.
Mer decided to put a call in to Goran the nitrous oxide–huffing lawyer to discuss the next step. She thought the moment to take the brownies aboveboard might be imminent.
She was wrong. In the chaos of the coming weeks, Prop. W would be lost in the shuffle. It would take Peron nearly two more decades to push the next piece of pro-pot legislation through. By then, marijuana would no longer be a good-time drug; it would be medicine.
My mom still believed we were cruising on the upside of a wave. But there was gravity to consider.
* * *
Mer hit the wharf on November 18, 1978, with me in the stroller—her first brownie run since Europe. It was an exquisite day on the waterfront, with fresh salt breezes sailing in from the Pacific to nudge wispy clouds inland. The vermilion bridge looked particularly majestic, its height and breadth accentuated by Mer’s sea-level view.
Pier 39, a new shopping center-cum-tourist attraction, had launched with a big whoopty-do while she was away. Mer was eager to check it out and had brought extra brownies to use as samples for new customers. After doing her usual route around Aquatic Park, Ghirardelli Square, the Cannery, and along Jefferson Street, she made her way toward the white and blue flags marking the entrance of the new mall. Maneuvering the stroller through a pushy crowd, she entered a multilevel complex of shops, restaurants, and entertainment, all with a nautical aesthetic—like a Disney version of the pier that had been there before.
Hundreds of people staffed the new stores and attractions. And if they were dealing with throngs of tourists from morning until night, Mer figured they’d want to get high. It wasn’t easy to navigate Pier 39’s wooden staircases with a stroller, but Mer managed to give out sample brownies at several new shops and concession stands.
Among her first customers on the pier was a unicycle-riding juggler and funnyman named Robert Armstrong Nelson III, better known as the Butterfly Man. Decades later, Butterfly would remember that first day clearly. “I was at [Pier 39] on day one; Meridy was probably there on day two. She was young and not so innocent, and she was hungry in those days or she wouldn’t have been out there pounding the road like I was. She was living by her wits; I was living by mine.” Butterfly had gotten a giant monarch tattooed on his prematurely bald pate as a commitment to juggling. (Who would hire him for anything else?) He saw Mer as one of his kind. “Your mother became an icon because of her choice of nomenclature—the Brownie Lady—and the way she approached it,” he says. “She had this look that she gave you. She had these beautiful eyes and she was so commanding in her presence. She’d say, ‘Would you like to buy some brownies?’ And she never veered from your gaze. You felt like you were being read by a psychic. She became a staple of our subculture.”
With dedicated areas for busking, Pier 39 was an extension of the vaudevillian street-performing scene that had erupted on the wharf in the early seventies. It was also an evolution. Two levels of balconies surrounded the main stage, bringing a vertical aspect to theater in the round. Shows got bigger and splashier. One stage converted into a nine-foot-deep pool, and a high-dive team performed dizzying leaps from an eighty-seven-foot ladder.
Pier 39 had been controversial from the start—rife with accusations of bribery and political favoritism, and complaints from those who wanted to preserve what little remained of the working-class waterfront. By the time the complex opened, the FBI had alread
y launched an investigation into whether a certain supervisor got a food concession in exchange for pushing permits through. The subject of the investigation was the straitlaced thirty-two-year-old from Visitacion Valley, Dan White.
Having given up a fireman’s salary to begin his new job, White was struggling to support his wife and infant son on a supervisor’s modest income of $9,600 per year. At the new Pier 39, he opened the Hot Potato, a fried-spud stand. The week prior, on November 10, he’d tendered his resignation to Mayor Moscone, explaining that the potato stand was consuming too much time but that he needed the money.
If on that Saturday, my mom had offered a sample brownie to Dan White at the Hot Potato, she would’ve been met with a cold reception—if not a call to the police. Most likely, she took one look at White’s anchorman haircut and pushed the stroller right past, barely noticing his all-American good looks. The world would know that face soon enough.
* * *
That very afternoon, in a steaming jungle 4,396 miles away, the Reverend Jim Jones gave orders for the Jonestown medical doctor to mix tranquilizers and potassium cyanide into a vat of Flavor Aid.
