by Alia Volz
News trickled out of Guyana slowly; it would take a full week for the public to learn the extent of what happened that Saturday. The first word, Sunday morning, was that California Congressman Leo Ryan had been shot on a tiny airstrip several miles from the Jonestown settlement. (He’d been investigating the Peoples Temple for nearly a year and had flown down to Guyana at the behest of constituents who were worried about their relatives at the agricultural mission.) By nightfall, Ryan was confirmed dead along with three reporters and a woman who’d tried to escape the settlement with Ryan’s group. Another Peoples Temple member living in Guyana’s capital had gruesomely slain her three children with a butcher knife before killing herself.
Monday-morning headlines screamed 400 DEAD IN GUYANA. Gory details emerged. A carpet of decomposing corpses, many beyond identification. People standing in line to drink poison while others writhed and seized on the ground and those who resisted were forcibly injected. On TV and in newspapers, “experts” waxed about suicide cults while the many politicians who’d enjoyed Jones’s support—like Mayor Moscone—scrambled to cover their asses. Some news reports described up to five hundred people escaping into the jungle.
In San Francisco, especially within the predominantly black Fillmore district where many of the Jonestown settlers had lived, vigils stretched through the week in hope that loved ones would emerge from the Guyanese wilds. Fog smothered San Francisco like wet wool, erasing bridges and buildings. Foghorns lowed in the bay. There were terrifying rumors. One Jonestown survivor warned reporters that temple snipers would “seek out their enemies one by one and kill them.” Some feared a large-scale terrorist attack (not far-fetched; Jones had reluctantly abandoned a plan to crash an airplane into the Golden Gate Bridge). Police guarded the Peoples Temple on Geary around the clock to both protect the remaining members from vigilantes and watch their every move. People stayed home, glued to television sets. Bars kept the music low and the news on while drinkers grimly sipped beers or saluted wordlessly with shots of the strong stuff.
Saturday brought devastating news: the whereabouts of the missing five hundred. The corpses thought to be strewn on the dirt actually lay on top of more corpses—piled four deep in places. On the bottom layer, the most profoundly decomposed, were children and babies. Snowplows had to be flown into the jungle to scrape up the remains. Guyanese officials detained only two people related to the killings. Nearly everyone else was dead, including Jim Jones. A week after the massacre, the total body count settled at 918.
My folks didn’t know anyone personally who’d gone to Jonestown. But Mer had lived a couple blocks from the Peoples Temple in the early days of the brownie business and had interacted with temple members on the street. She thought of faces from the neighborhood. The civilian death toll was among the highest in American history, not to be exceeded until 9/11.
An almost seismic shifting, a crack rent into reality.
* * *
Doug had designed a lighthearted brownie bag that week, but as the Jonestown tragedy deepened, he threw it out. Instead of having new bags printed at the shop, he decided to do them himself; he needed the release. He glopped acrylic paint onto a board in primary colors and used a dry paint roller to apply broken layers of pigment to bag after bag, doing hundreds of them in a fog of despair.
Doug had never given the Peoples Temple much thought. He’d heard about some of the scandals but mostly remembered admiring their social projects: the soup kitchen, drug rehab programs, senior centers, and their defense of free speech and racial equality. As Doug understood it, they had gone into the jungle to build a new kind of society. He’d idly wondered, now and again, Would I have the fortitude for that? Could I give up my comforts?
Staggering to think that this had mutated into something so evil.
Layers of red, layers of blue, slashes of yellow. Moments of vivid color, moments of hideous murk. He thought about the choices people had made. The pain of the human condition that might draw someone, step by step, to follow a madman to their death. In seeking, in devotion to public service, in striving for equality, those who’d joined the Peoples Temple seemed to express mankind’s finer attributes. It had seemed like the ultimate utopian experiment.
Demise disguised as salvation; an ending disguised as a beginning. He called the bag Camouflage.
* * *
Mayor George Moscone vomited when he heard the news. He spent days on the phone calling relatives of people in Jonestown. Jim Jones had become profoundly ensconced in the San Francisco political structure. Numerous politicians were implicated but none as conspicuously as the mayor—who’d already fought off a recall attempt over his relationship with the Peoples Temple. Moscone had appointed Jim Jones chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1976. The massacre at Jonestown could well have wrecked Moscone’s career. But the mayor wouldn’t live long enough for that.
The same week as the horror of Jonestown slowly unfolded, a small drama was brewing at city hall, though it didn’t draw much attention at the time. Dan White, who’d resigned as supervisor to run the Hot Potato at Pier 39, wanted his job back. It would later emerge that members of the Police Officers Association were leaning heavily on White, as was the Association of Realtors. White was their conservative bulwark against a liberal majority on the board of supervisors. Moscone initially told White he could come back. But after hearing complaints from White’s own constituents and a rousing pitch from Harvey for all they could accomplish with an unimpeded liberal board, the mayor changed his mind.
White huffed to reporters, “The gloves are off.”
* * *
On November 27, Barb had a third violent nightmare. She floated down a long hallway. A man walked in front of her, whom she could see only from the elbows down, as if viewing him from a fixed camera angle. She watched his shoes moving across the floor, his hands swinging at his sides. He entered a room and approached a large wooden desk that made Barb think of a hotel. Another man sat behind the desk; Barb could see his suit and tie and his hands folded in front of him. The person she followed pulled a gun and shot the man at the desk. Then he passed through a door into another room and slaughtered a second man.
Barb sat bolt upright in bed with the name White burning bright in her mind.
She was living in her own place by then, a flat close to the warehouse. She checked her bedside clock; it was past three. The dreams were growing more detailed, solidifying.
Barb had already been thinking about Mike White that week. He had once mentioned that he’d helped broker the sale when Jim Jones bought the Peoples Temple building on Geary. Now there were rumors about Temple snipers planning to attack. Had Mike gotten tangled up in this somehow? She couldn’t ignore the feeling of dread.
Her hands shook as she dialed.
Mike answered, his voice thick with sleep.
“Uh, Mike? It’s Barb.”
“Jesus, what time is it?”
“I had that dream again, the one where you’re shooting people.”
“Look, I don’t know what kind of drugs you’re on, but don’t call here again. Leave me the fuck alone. Or I will call the police.”
Unable to sleep, Barb chain-smoked until it was time to head downtown for class. A long day of sewing stretched ahead of her. It was an overcast morning, yellowish and windless. Too warm for late November. Two women were talking about it on the bus. “Earthquake weather,” one said.
At school, Barb dove into her sewing project and let the trainlike drone of the machine calm her. She commented to a classmate that awful dreams had kept her awake.
“That’s funny,” her friend said. “I had a nightmare, too. Something in the air I guess.”
“Mm-hmm,” Barb murmured. “Earthquake weather.”
At 11:20, an emergency bulletin interrupted the music on the radio at their shared table. Dianne Feinstein spoke: “As president of the board of supervisors, it is my duty to make this announcement,” she said haltingly. “Both Mayor Moscone and
Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.”
In the sewing room, someone screamed.
“The suspect,” Feinstein continued, “is Supervisor Dan White.”
* * *
Patrolman Jerry D’Elia was buying a hot dog at the Doggie Diner on Van Ness Avenue when a high-priority call came in over dispatch. He and his partner jumped into their cruiser and sped the three blocks to city hall. D’Elia ran up the marble stairs to the lavish rotunda. A sergeant he recognized from another station gestured toward the mayor’s office. D’Elia walked in and saw Moscone sprawled in a pool of blood. The office was already crowded with police, so he hurried back out to find the sergeant. “What can I do? Where do you need me?”
“Go down the other end. Harvey Milk’s been shot.”
The situation felt unreal to D’Elia, like some sort of elaborate prank. As he started toward the supervisors’ chambers, he turned, and said, “Hey, Sarge, do you have any suspects?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Dan White.”
Decades later, D’Elia recognizes that he’d entered a kind of denial. “I started laughing,” he says. “I thought, Here’s this time of crisis, and he can come up with a joke . . . I won’t add all the adjectives he called me. But he let me know he wasn’t kidding.”
* * *
Mer had just gotten back from dance class and was changing out of her sweaty clothes when the phone rang. It was Donald, who’d come back to the City and was living with roommates in the Haight. He was crying so hard that Mer could barely make out the words, and when she did, they didn’t make sense.
She thought of Harvey as she’d last seen him, walking loose-limbed down Castro Street one Friday before she’d left for Europe, talking with a younger man and casually waving to people they passed. Mer remembered noticing how long and expressive his fingers were and thinking he’d be interesting to draw or paint sometime—she loved doing unique hands. Maybe, she thought, I’ll pitch that idea to him if the opportunity comes up. When their paths crossed that day, Harvey nodded and smiled but seemed engrossed in his conversation. Mer smiled back and continued with her brownie run. Now he was dead.
She sat there, still pantsless, her skin tacky on the wooden chair, and felt a wave of collective sadness roll toward her like the aftershock of an earthquake. It hit her in the solar plexus, seemed to lift her out of the chair for a moment, then drop her back into it.
Our wave, she thought, it’s crashing.
* * *
There was no manhunt, no mystery. The details came out all at once on the day of the killings.
At 10:25 in the morning, Dan White had crawled into city hall through a basement window to avoid metal detectors, walked to George Moscone’s office on the second floor, exchanged words briefly. When the mayor turned to fix him a conciliatory drink, White produced his revolver. He shot the mayor four times, once in the shoulder, once in the pectoral, and twice point-blank to the head. He then reloaded his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 36 with hollow-point bullets and hurried to the other side of city hall. White popped his head into the office where Harvey Milk was talking with a colleague. “Say, Harv, can I see you a minute?”
White led Harvey across the hall, into the office that had been his until recently, closed the door behind them, and pulled out his gun. Harvey raised his right hand in a defensive gesture. White shot him once through the wrist, twice in the chest, then twice to the back of his skull.
George Moscone was forty-nine. Harvey Milk was forty-eight.
Some who heard the gunshots thought a car was backfiring outside. Feinstein recognized the sound of gunfire and ran to Harvey’s office, finding him on the floor. When she picked up his wrist to feel for a pulse, her finger slid into a bullet wound.
Amid the confusion, Dan White exited city hall unobstructed. He drove to a nearby phone booth and arranged to meet his wife at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. The couple walked together to the same police station where Dan White had worked in his days on the force. He turned himself in.
Jonestown took a week to emerge, but the murders at city hall took minutes. Both tragedies were impossible to accept and impossible to erase. The brutality of those two gestures. A one-two punch that left the City reeling.
* * *
Cleve Jones was picketing with the Local 2 union when an acquaintance yelled to him from a bus window: “Cleve, it’s on the radio, they shot Mayor Moscone!” He caught a taxi to city hall. Time seemed to slow down, his footsteps echoing eerily off the marble as he hurried toward the supervisors’ offices to look for Harvey.
Not until he saw his mentor’s secondhand wingtip shoes protruding from Dan White’s old office did he realize that Harvey had been hurt. Cleve reached the door just as a cop was turning the body over; Harvey’s face was a horrific shade of purple, his skull blasted apart. Blood and brain matter on the walls.
It’s over, Cleve thought. It’s all over.
He felt his emotions shutting down even as another part of his mind kicked into autopilot. Cleve made his way back to Castro Street and quickly put together flyers for a candlelight vigil. People were milling around the neighborhood, some in apparent shock, some weeping. At the Village Deli, Dan Clowry handed out candles and paper cups until they had no more, then shuttered the café.
The crowd grew to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.
Cleve’s flyers had hardly been necessary. The “disaster route” the Castro activists had strategically introduced that summer was working. Everyone knew where to take their grief.
Word spreads on Castro Street.
Doug and Mer packed a baby bag and bundled me into a stroller. By the time they made their way to the corner of Market and Castro, most nearby businesses were dark, some with hastily written tributes to Harvey in the windows. Candles glowed in waxed paper cups. At nightfall, the crowd moved toward city hall as one body—some 30,000 people, newspapers would say—walking in near silence. A river of tiny flickering lights keeping pace with a spare drumbeat as steady as a heart. At city hall, the half-mast flags hung limply, the air unusually still.
Dianne Feinstein, who’d been catapulted automatically from president of the board of supervisors to interim mayor, addressed the crowd briefly. Various speakers groped for words. Joan Baez played “Kumbaya” and other folk dirges. Finally, someone held a tape recorder up to the mic and replayed Harvey Milk’s victory speech from a rally held after defeating the Briggs Initiative three weeks before. A short time ago but suddenly a very different time. His voice with the tinny Long Island accent, the bravado and humor, left the crowd cheering and sobbing. The next morning, the statue of Abraham Lincoln was glazed in the wax of hundreds of candles left to gutter out.
Moscone had been the people’s mayor—that was how Mer thought of him. A native San Franciscan who seemed unperturbed by the young people who thronged to his hometown in search of freedom. From old San Francisco but not of it. A guy who wanted to see women and minorities in government, and who didn’t so much mind if people smoked weed. And Harvey, well . . . if Moscone was the head of liberal San Francisco, Milk was its heart. Now the City had lost both.
* * *
Doug, Mer, and Cheryl talked about closing Sticky Fingers until the new year but thought better of it. People would need to be soothed. Doug’s next bag was a prayer for those lost and a message of hope for those left behind. He drew a mandala composed of maybe a hundred humanoid bodies radiating outward from a circle of light. Other bodies floated up from the void to join the web. It read, Returning in Pure Compassion to the Wheel.
The City limped toward the year’s end like a crash victim. A hitch in its step, a stagger, not quite itself, but somehow still alive. You think you won’t go on, but you do go on.
Around Christmas, Mer suggested they throw a party to put some closure on the year. “Let’s get the energy flowing in a different direction.”
Sticky Fingers gave a New Year’s bash. In pictures from that night, everyone looks manic and
pale, a little desperate, eyes bulging over gritted smiles. Confetti dusts their hair like ash from a house fire. Mer, who was no longer breastfeeding, looks coked out. Cheryl is mostly absent from the pictures; she’d broken her own rule about dosage, eaten half a dozen brownies, and passed out in the middle of the party.
There is a picture of me the next day. One year old, zipped into a flannel onesie and crawling through drifts of confetti past empty bottles of cheap champagne, looking dazed and nervous.
1979 had begun.
16
No Peace
KILL FAGS! DAN WHITE FOR MAYOR! Sprayed in foot-high lettering on a wall by Dolores Park, the graffiti stopped Mer in her tracks. Early 1979: a new world, a dark gray day. Closer to Castro Street, she saw FREE DAN WHITE! in the same rough scrawl.
The dismay must have shown on Mer’s face when she ducked into Main Line Gifts on Castro Street.
“Like the new mural?” her customer Roger said.
“Why do people have to be so ugly?”
He smirked. “We had the bigots scared for a while, but they’re getting frisky again.”
Mer knew homophobia existed in San Francisco, like everywhere else in America. But when your social circle was an echo chamber, you could pretend. Easy to imagine this pretty city as a bubble floating above ignorance and intolerance. Dan White might have acted alone like the papers said, but he wasn’t alone in his hatred. A whole side of San Francisco that Mer had barely noticed before—old-school conservative, morally outraged—was showing its teeth. People who’d been disregarded, first by a hundred thousand or so hippie kids, then by a hundred thousand or so gays and lesbians.
