by Alia Volz
* * *
Monday morning, the phone was ringing like mad.
“Have you seen it? Get a newspaper!”
Herb Caen, the beloved columnist, had written about their decision in his weekly spot in the San Francisco Chronicle.
HEAD SET: “Thank God It’s Friday” had a hollow ring in certain parts of town last Friday, for THAT bakery in the Mission went out of business. THAT bakery made only one product—marijuana brownies, individually wrapped “to insure freshness and quality control”—which brought happiness to hundreds of office-workers each Friday for the past two years . . . In this city of wagging tongues, the secret of the Brownie Ladies and the Mission bakery never got to the law, but the owners decided not to push their pot luck. Fridays will never be the same.
Alia in The Great Books of Cannabis.
Any other week, this kind of press would have sent the crew into a panic. But Caen nailed the essential detail: they had closed. This would send a message to the vice squad that if they’d hoped to pinch Sticky Fingers they were too late. Bark up a different tree, boys. Good old Herb, Mer thought. He waited until we were safe.
Doug and Mer had just finished reading the article together shortly past ten a.m. and were getting ready to dig into their last big day of packing when the warehouse jolted. The old wood creaked, dishes rattled, a coffee mug tumbled off the counter and shattered. Measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale, it was the largest earthquake in sixty-eight years. Aftershocks rolled throughout the morning. They couldn’t pack fast enough.
My parents took me across the Golden Gate, and we vanished into the countryside.
Part IV
18
The Crossroads of Infinity
Late on a golden afternoon in August 1979, Doug turned the twenty-six-foot moving truck onto an unpaved driveway on East Hill Road—a country highway that traversed the Willits valley toward Pine Mountain, where dozens of growers lived. Among the items in the tightly packed truck were the dance mirrors from the warehouse along with the drawings and paintings that had been framed at great expense for the art show. The little farmhouse emerged between oak trees. “Home sweet home!” Doug crowed, failing to notice a gigantic tree root hiding a deep pothole.
As Mer would describe it later, “You could hear every single piece of glass shatter.”
I don’t think there’s a culture in the world that would deem the shattering of two giant mirrors on the final approach to your new home a good omen.
It was a bland house: not old enough to have character, not new enough to be nice. After a tumultuous season, peaceful domestic life seemed exotic to Doug and Mer. The stillness of that first night was stunning. There was the occasional rumble of a pickup heading into the hills, the cluck of the neighbor’s chickens, the hoot of a barn owl. Nobody arguing on the sidewalk, no Friday-night lowriders, no friends stopping by to get high. No Cheryl with her honking laugh, no Noel stomping on plank floors. No Carmen and the Wrapettes. Just a fat silver moon hanging over the fields like the pendulum of a stopped clock. A quiet so profound you could hear the old oaks creak in the breeze.
Doug looking at Mer, Mer looking at Doug. Me, the toddler, watching them both for clues.
All of a sudden, an ordinary family.
* * *
The first clear memory I have from Willits is of chasing the neighbor’s chickens that ran free in the dirt lot next to our house. I was swinging a toy rake over my head. The hens darted on spindly legs, fluffed their butts, and made silly gurgling noises. I thought this game hilarious until the monster-size rooster flapped into the air and zinged toward me. With a scream lodged in my throat, I scrambled for the house, but my foot snagged on a loop of baling wire and I fell. The rooster raised his talons above my face . . . and that’s where the memory ends.
My mom says she “had a heart attack” when I came into the kitchen with blood streaming down my face. New to country living, she was still trying to figure out how much leeway to give a two-year-old to play outside. She thought I’d been blinded. Luckily, the wounds were superficial, no permanent harm done, though I still have a small scar above my right eyebrow.
Before the chickens, I have flashes of memory of San Francisco. There’s a vivid image of my feet in striped tights and satin Chinese slippers stomping in a warm puddle on the sidewalk in front of the warehouse. “Don’t play in that,” my mom said. “It might be pee!” I recall isolated moments, emotions, smells. But mostly it’s a feeling of being elemental to the world we lived in, as if there were no difference between me and the City itself. That all changed in Willits. I remember standing alone in the yard, aware of myself as distinct from my parents and a stranger to my environment. I remember being me.
Early memories are tricky. There are long blank stretches. I don’t, for example, recall almost dying several months later when an allergic reaction to baby aspirin ate a hole in my stomach and I vomited so much blood that I had to be rushed by ambulance to San Francisco for a transfusion. That apparently paled in comparison to getting spurred by a rooster. Sometimes it’s hard to tell how much of what I associate with those days is shaped by what my parents have told me. But the chicken incident is mine. It was my first story: beginning, middle, end. The moral, of course, is that if you’re going to taunt the hens you’d better be ready for the rooster.
* * *
Willits boasted one of the longest-running rodeos in California: Frontier Days, held every July since 1927. That and a train museum were the primary attractions of this town of 4,008 inhabitants, many of whom lived in the surrounding hills. Route 101 cut right down Main Street, stoplights slowing traffic to a crawl. “Downtown” consisted of a family drug store, a battered saloon, a single-screen movie theater, and a strip of old-timey buildings with a few New Age galleries and a little bookstore. Businesses scraped by on the trickle of locals, and motorists who stopped to pee.
The town had redneck roots, complete with a semifamous shoot-out and a dying logging industry. But the hills were alive with hippies. Tree huggers and tree killers living together, with predictable tensions between them. Rural families came to town for groceries and banking, and to pick up their mail from PO boxes; many were growing marijuana and didn’t want their home addresses known. If my parents hoped to get out of the weed business, they chose an inopportune location.
We would stay in Willits for eight years, a fat chunk of my childhood, but these would be tough years. Before Sticky Fingers, Doug had done a little carpentry and psychic work, and Mer had illustrated children’s books; neither had experience with straight jobs. They wanted to live on their artwork. Eventually, they would even open a gallery on Main Street, but it would fail. In an obscure highway town with an already disproportionate population of artists, who would buy the work?
The local job market offered few opportunities. Doug worked briefly for John Schaeffer at Real Goods but either quit or got fired over some now-forgotten argument. Their financial situation soon became dire.
I have often thought that my parents’ plan for making a living in Willits was unrealistic. Now I realize that it’s not that they had a bad plan; it’s that they had no plan. No idea how to survive without dealing. It hits home for the first time just how hasty our exit was, how scared of getting busted my parents must have been to move so quickly.
* * *
Cheryl, meanwhile, was trying to kick-start a modeling career through a contact in Milwaukee. Perhaps this was a stretch at twenty-eight, but after the Sticky Fingers adventure, she felt herself crackling with power; she could do anything. Cheryl returned to Milwaukee thinking that Noel’s father, Victor, would provide childcare while she went after gigs. But Victor wanted nothing to do with such a plan. Cheryl blazed through the money she’d saved from the brownies. Frustrated, she started drinking heavily. When she caught herself adding brandy to her morning coffee, she knew something had to change.
Cheryl took Noel up to Tomahawk, Wisconsin, a tiny lakeside town where she used to spend summers with
her family. It was mid-October. The sky looked like a concrete wall behind trees in autumnal flame. Noel trolled for seashells by the lakeshore (she didn’t have the heart to tell him there were none), his fingers bright pink from the frigid water. The wind was beginning to get mean. Cheryl’s bones rattled under layers of wool. What the hell was she doing back in Wisconsin?
She drafted a letter to Meridy: “I feel like I need to come back,” she wrote. “I thought I was rich, but I’m not rich. Maybe we should do the business again.”
Then she hightailed it back to the City before the first snowfall. She arrived at a friend’s house where she and Noel would be staying until they found a new place. There was a message already waiting for her: Call Meridy.
“How did you get my letter so fast?” Cheryl said when Mer picked up. “I just sent it.”
“I didn’t get a letter,” Mer said. “Barb told me you were coming back.”
“So, what did you want to talk about?”
“I’ve been looking at hexagrams,” Mer said. “I think we should open the biz again but on a smaller scale.”
Cheryl laughed. They had read each other’s minds.
They agreed to share the work: Cheryl would bake and wrap twenty batches at her friend’s house, Doug and Mer would prepare twenty batches in Willits, and Mer would drive them down by herself. The Brownie Ladies would sell, and they’d split the proceeds three ways. Lower volume, abbreviated runs—better than broke. By the time Cheryl’s missive reached Willits a few days later, Doug was already grinding shake for a weekend round of brownies.
* * *
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, Mer rolled down her window and inhaled deeply. The bracing moisture, a slap across the cheek—snap out of it! She’d missed that cool salt air.
She rented a room at Beck’s Motor Lodge, a seedy Market Street motel on the edge of the Castro. Three stories in horseshoe formation around a parking lot. She splurged on the “fireplace suite” at the rear of the building because a corner in the hallway ensured that office staff wouldn’t see people coming and going from her room.
Friday afternoon, she did a small Castro run, stopping by the Village Deli, Sylvester’s flat, and a few other favorites. She let the other neighborhood runs go by the wayside to keep a lower profile. Customers complimented her Indian-summer tan and sun-bleached hair. Mer savored being back on the street, shaking off the country dust, feeling the urban vibrations around her. While Mer worked the Castro, Cheryl did a little run on Polk and Union. Then they met back at Beck’s and held court on the motel bed while customers came to them.
The Beck’s weekends were a risky way to do business—the long drive loaded with contraband, dozens of people passing through the motel room—but they made enough for one month’s rent and bills. From then on, Mer straddled two worlds: the dry, quiet country life and the raucous escapades in the City every fourth weekend (when rent came due). Sometimes I went along. Or she’d go alone, returning to the boondocks with a stack of fifties and twenties like a mama bird bringing food to her chicks.
* * *
In late April 1980, Mer got a call from Milwaukee: Bill was in the hospital with congestive heart failure. For years, he’d been wheelchair bound but mentally very sharp. Florence was deep in dementia but could follow simple instructions. Between his mind and her legs, they’d managed. Now Bill’s organs were shutting down. Mer booked a flight.
In Milwaukee, she hovered at her dad’s bedside, reading him passages from The World According to Garp while he went in and out of consciousness. Bill had always been cool, collected, and connected in tough situations; he was Mer’s anchor and her safety net. Seeing him like that—intubated, catheterized, half-lucid—felt like a violation of natural law. Late at night on May 3, 1980, Bill Domnitz died. He was sixty-two years old.
It hit her weeks after she got back to Willits: deep, wet heaves that rolled and rolled. Meridy came to think of grief as water. An ocean. An endless river. A faucet that you could learn to turn off, though it was always ready to gush.
She still misses him today. “He would do anything to make me laugh,” she tells me in the honeyed tone she reserves for Bill. “His humor wasn’t highbrow. You know, rolling around in his wheelchair with a mop on his head. Or doing a hula dance in the kitchen on his one leg. He never judged me no matter what I got myself into.”
I don’t remember meeting my grandfather when I was a baby. But I understand the relationship my mom describes because I’ve experienced it myself. In elementary school, for example, I got in trouble for calling my teacher a bitch. “Mrs. Ahearn is a bitch,” my mom said. “You’re not wrong. But if you say it to her face, we have to hassle with the principal.” Later, during my teenage punk phase, when I was running around and partying all night, I knew I could call her for help at any hour and she’d never be angry. And when I lost my virginity at fifteen, she gave me her copy of the Kama Sutra. No reason to keep secrets or tell lies. She was unflappable and always available. Having a parent like that in your corner, you feel safe—whether or not you actually are.
* * *
On November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in the presidential election. It had been a lousy year for Carter. Inflation was up; jobs declined. The Iranian Revolution provoked a second oil crisis in the US and created long lines at the pumps. Carter’s reluctant decision to let the deposed Shah receive emergency medical treatment in New York outraged the revolutionaries. In November 1979, an extremist group took over the US Embassy in Tehran, holding fifty-two Americans hostage. Nightly news reports led with the updated count: 110 days, 280 days, 443 days. While Reagan was a guns-blazing, can-do optimist, Carter could be depressing, always going on about oil addiction—ahead of his time, as it turned out. He’d even installed solar panels on the White House, which Reagan dismantled once in office, commenting that the program “hasn’t produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal.”
Carter had been the first US president to advocate decriminalizing cannabis—and he’d paid the price. Reagan doubled down on Nixon-era rhetoric. “Leading medical researchers are coming to the conclusion that marijuana—pot, grass, whatever you want to call it—is probably the most dangerous drug in the United States,” he said while stumping in 1980. “We haven’t begun to find out all of the ill-effects, but they are permanent ill-effects.” In coming years, Reagan would wage a literal war on California’s marijuana farmers and dealers.
A month after the election, John Lennon was shot to death by an obsessed stranger outside his New York apartment. Doug, who’d spent painful childhood years in England before coming to California and becoming a hippie, knew the whole Beatles canon by heart as well as the solo albums and Lennon’s collaborations with Yoko Ono. He had idolized Lennon; the death hit him hard. That such a peace-loving man would meet such a violent end felt like a harbinger of worse things to come.
* * *
Back in San Francisco, Cheryl was renting a room for her and Noel from a longtime brownie customer. She struggled with single motherhood and became adamant that Noel should spend time with his deadbeat dad. Cheryl bought her five-year-old son a plane ticket, duct taped a giant N on his suitcase, stuffed a wad of cash in his pocket, and put him on a flight to Milwaukee to see the father he barely knew.
While Noel was away, Cheryl visited Willits for some fresh air and ended up having a fling with a grower more than twenty years her senior. Cheryl didn’t think much of it at first. But when she returned to the City, he sent a love letter inviting her and Noel to live with him on his pot farm. Though Cheryl wasn’t head over heels, he promised to take care of them—and that sounded good. By the time Noel returned from the week with his dad, Cheryl was packing their belongings. Though Noel would eventually bond deeply with his mother’s boyfriend, he recalls the initial shock of suddenly moving into the deep, secretive woods. No electricity or phone lines, no immediate neighbors, and a brand-new father figure.
* * *
In early 1981, my folks moved us
to an eccentric house in the unincorporated community of Hearst on the Willits outskirts. Built in the 1890s as a stagecoach stop, it had fourteen bedrooms and a great room with a wraparound balcony like in a Wild West cathouse. A flock of peacocks nested under the porch, littering the property with their magnificent feathers and squawking like vuvuzelas. The house was situated in an isolated field on several acres of untamed land. Forests of manzanita, oceans of poison oak, blackberries to pick in summer. A mile down the dirt road, we had a private beach on the languid Eel River. With no one around for miles, we usually swam nude. A hippie paradise.
Naturally, the house was in disrepair: drafty, moldy, and in need of stripping and patching. Peeling the rotting wallpaper from the laundry room revealed layers of German-language newspapers from the nineteenth century. In a triangular closet under a staircase, Doug was stunned to discover a small cache of gay porn magazines left behind by a previous tenant. The desire he’d hoped to escape seemed to be following him.
My parents believed the old stagecoach stop was haunted. One room stayed noticeably colder than the rest of the house, and if Mer passed by quickly, she sometimes saw an old woman in a rocking chair out of the corner of her eye. They invited friends to skinny-dip in the river and held Ouija board seances in the great room at night, often contacting the ghost of a sea captain.
