by Alia Volz
At three and four years old, I was supposed to be asleep during the seances, but I’d watch through the balcony rails until I got ushered back to bed. I don’t recall being afraid of ghosts, though I believed in them. It was always like that with me: if my parents were cool, I was cool.
At Hearst, my memories tilt toward galloping through tall grasses, inventing games to play with imaginary companions. There was my blooming obsession with horses, and my blooming loneliness as an only child in the woods. But mostly I think of summer. The box freezer where we’d keep organic juice until we could eat it with a fork by the lazy green river. There was a high boulder my dad would scale to huck himself into the water; beside that was a smaller rock that I could jump from wearing my floaties. I remember sitting in my mom’s arms in the gentle rapids beyond our swimming hole and how we had to wipe tiny leeches off afterward. The long afternoons, the sunburns. The dusty manzanita and the deep silence.
* * *
My mom in the woods makes as much sense as a bear in the city.
She has always been clumsy on uneven terrain and would never hike to the top of a mountain for fun. Confronted with natural beauty, she’ll rock on her heels, tilt her head, and squint. “Pretty,” she’ll say, fluttering her long bright fingernails. She seems to regard nature as two-dimensional. As if a misty meadow were actually a painting of a misty meadow.
Most Willits women were “earth mother” types, but Meridy wasn’t into meditation or sunrises or gardening. So she tried to citify Willits. Mer taught her own brand of jazzercise classes at the local gym and cofounded the Willits Dance Coalition, a spandexy troupe that performed throughout the county to raise funds for antinuke actions. Mer also cocreated a political affinity group called the Rainbow Light Brigade and became the area’s primary nonviolent-resistance trainer and action coordinator for protests at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She and her friends joined massive demonstrations and chained themselves to fences. During this time, the brownie bags for monthly runs were often antinuke-themed. Between 1981 and 1986, Mer would get herself cuffed eleven times for civil disobedience. Once, heading to a Diablo protest, Mer sewed packets of prenatal vitamins and herbs into the lining of her bomber jacket so she could smuggle them to pregnant women in the holding camp when she got arrested. She didn’t feel like herself unless she was bucking the system.
Then there were the “shows,” annual fundraising extravaganzas that involved half the town and drew sold-out crowds from throughout the Emerald Triangle (the tricounty area sometimes called the “cannabis breadbasket”). Mer had her fingers in every aspect of production: auditioning, directing, writing, choreographing, and creating special effects. She made costumes by hand at our kitchen table.
To this day, some Willits people talk about the “Meridy years” as a unique epoch in the community’s history. She blew into that little town like a hurricane.
Mer adapted in some ways. She wore less makeup and let her hair grow long and frizzy. Tie-dye crept into her wardrobe as did long flowing skirts. We ate tofu instead of meat, carob instead of chocolate. Once, for an ill-fated round of brownies, Doug and Mer tried substituting carob, molasses, and wheat flour for the usual baking ingredients, but the result was disgusting. In pictures from this period, she always looks slightly cramped, like a kid in a school picture.
* * *
My dad, on the other hand, felt he could finally relax into his skin. During the hundred-plus-degree summers, he’d hike into the golden hills to draw bearded oaks en plein air. Drum circles excited him, and he picked up enough guitar to write folk songs. He took mushrooms and acid, and camped alone in the woods.
Late 1981, Doug decided that he needed a new name.
The idea came from a friend named Morningstar. She was a classic nature hippie, with long graying hair, clear eyes, and wide hips. Her name had once been Susan Smith, but she’d changed it through a Native American–inspired vision quest. Doug found it spectacular that she could go from an ordinary handle to such a magnificent one. He coveted an experience like that for himself.
One autumn evening, Morningstar and Doug tromped into the woods with a sack of psilocybin mushrooms, ate them together, then parted ways to wait for their respective inspirations. Late that night, Doug awoke in his sleeping bag to a vision of a feather on fire floating in the sky overhead.
Firefeather.
* * *
What does it mean?
Ask my dad now, and you’ll get a long and complicated answer that has something to do with the abundance of Scorpio in his astrological chart coupled with his Sagittarius sun sign; something to do with his belief that his art will guide people to higher consciousness someday; something to do with having no choice but to bear the torch of illumination.
When I press him to translate his name into one statement, he makes a couple of false starts, then says, “Hidden self that is emerging from dark water, being reborn, and becoming highly visible.”
Soon after the vision quest, my dad wrote to Social Security and made it official. He changed his name to Douglas Firefeather and asked everyone to call him by the new last name.
* * *
December 1981, Mer did a pre-Christmas brownie run. She was making her way up Castro Street toward Market when she saw a small crowd studying a poster outside the Star Pharmacy. She leaned in to check it out.
GAY CANCER it said across the top. Below that was a series of graphic Polaroid photos of sores on a man’s legs, feet, and arms. The back of Mer’s neck prickled. Hadn’t she seen one of those little spots on Roger’s wrist that afternoon? Weird, she thought, as she continued on to do the next deal.
The flyers were the work of Bobbi Campbell, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old registered nurse studying to be a nurse practitioner who specialized in gay men’s health. Mer had occasionally sold Bobbi brownies at Café Flore. A couple of days prior, Cleve Jones had been walking past the Twin Peaks Tavern when a friend tapped on the window and motioned him inside. Bobbi was there. He took off his shoes and socks. Small purple sores covered his feet and calves. That same day, Cleve helped Bobbi photograph his lesions for the poster he wanted to make.
Bobbi Campbell was among the first people diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma. He was also one of the first in the country to sense the enormity of the danger. As a public health nurse, he was not going to sit back and watch. Declaring himself the Kaposi’s sarcoma poster boy, Bobbi began a column in the San Francisco Sentinel, a gay newspaper, detailing his experiences. His first piece, “I WILL SURVIVE!” ran that month. The tone of the column was buoyant and witty, but it dispensed crucial information. And although Bobbi would not, in fact, survive—he would die within four years—he became a hero of the AIDS epidemic.
Until that point, there had been a few AP articles buried with other low-priority news. Rare skin cancer seen in young homosexuals. Fatal pneumonia caused by a common fungus. It was enough to interest a couple of journalists and concern some doctors—one of whom, Dr. Marcus Conant, would contact Cleve several weeks later to warn him. But there were still fewer than three hundred identified cases nationwide.
It started in that small way: whispers, rumors. Something going around. People feeling fatigued and vaguely ill. A recurring flu. A stomach bug that wouldn’t quit. Those painless purple spots showing up out of nowhere.
It was still business as usual in the Castro.
* * *
And business was good enough. With Mer coming down once a month (sometimes with Cheryl or me, sometimes solo), customers stocked up on larger quantities of brownies. Beck’s Motor Lodge could be rowdy on weekends, popular among Castro boys for both cruising and tricking for money. On the plus side, that meant people came and went for various reasons, which Mer thought gave her cover. Safe to say, Beck’s personnel didn’t want to know what people did in their rooms.
Sunshine, a photographer and cook who’d been a customer for years, usually bought five or six dozen; she�
�d sell some to friends and keep the rest in her freezer to last through the next visit. Sunshine remembers approaching Beck’s and seeing a buck-naked guy standing in the picture window overlooking Market Street. She thought it was weird, so she mentioned it to Mer, who shrugged it off. Apparently, it was this guy’s deal to hang out nude in the front window so he could cruise without ever having to put clothes on or walk down to the street; his tricks could come up and find him. Sunshine also remembers there “always being a child there.” She’d enter the motel room, and Mer would whisper, “Shh, Alia’s sleeping.”
It’s not true that I was there every time. But I adored going to the City with my mom. As we sailed through puffs of fog crossing the bridge, we’d belt out, “San Francisco, here we come! Da-da-da! Right back where we started from!” I loved the sound of traffic below the motel windows. I loved customers waltzing through the door with a singsong “Hello, darlings!” How the damp night air would trail them, clinging to their leather jackets and smelling of the street and the ocean. How their hair was never shaggy like up north but spiked and dyed bright colors or coiffed into artful shapes. I loved that everyone told me how tall I’d gotten since the last time. I loved shrill city laughter, the boldness of it. The magic of carelessly caring so much about everything. I loved going to Sylvester’s, that sumptuous wonderland of fabric and antiques and music. But I especially loved the barge—which was any bed my mom captained. Just floating along on a squeaky motel bed with the grown-ups. The whisper of money in my mom’s hands, the dry snap of rubber bands when she counted it out at the end of the weekend.
Meridy and Alia on a brownie run.
If that environment was too much for a girl of four and five, I didn’t notice.
My mom was there. I was safe.
19
Mirrors Become You
On January 14, 1981, policemen knocked on the door of a Victorian flat in the Castro. A plump woman with curly gray hair and owlish glasses answered. “I figured you guys were coming,” she said sweetly, as the cops filed in. They nabbed fifty-four dozen brownies, eighteen pounds of pot, a half ounce of psilocybin mushrooms, thirty-five pounds of margarine, fifty pounds each of flour and sugar, twenty-two dozen eggs, and twenty-one thousand feet of plastic wrap.
Mary Jane Rathbun had been a waitress for forty-three years until she fell while working the graveyard shift at IHOP. She told reporters—and later the courts—that she’d been selling marijuana brownies for the past six months to supplement her Social Security income. Calling herself Brownie Mary, she’d posted flyers on telephone poles around the Castro offering “magically delicious” baked goods and listing her phone number and regular business hours. She’d been an easy catch for narcs, who only had to phone and ask for her address.
It’s possible that Mary had been baking with weed longer than she admitted (Dennis Peron later said he’d carried her treats at his Big Top Marijuana Supermarket for a while during the late 1970s). But if Mary’s version is true, she began peddling brownies in the Castro several months after Sticky Fingers left for the country. She’d found a hungry market.
This was how Mer the Brownie Lady became conflated with Brownie Mary. Both women sold high-grade sinsemilla brownies in the Castro. They didn’t look alike—Mer favored glitzy outfits and vampy makeup while Mary, twenty-five years older, wore Hawaiian-print shirts and polyester slacks—but they were both full-figured white women with curly hair. Sticky Fingers closed right before Brownie Mary opened shop. Then Mer reopened for monthly stints at Beck’s just as Mary’s home sales were expanding. Who wouldn’t get confused?
“People in the neighborhood would ask for her [Brownie Mary’s] brownies,” says Dan Clowry of the Village Deli. “Even though we had Sticky Fingers and knew that name, people would come in and say, ‘Do you have Brownie Mary’s brownies?’” He didn’t bother correcting them.
Anyone getting busted was bad news. At the same time, Mer had to imagine that if any cops had been eyeing her since the warehouse days they would now assume that they’d found the real culprit.
Mary Rathbun stepped boldly into the limelight after her arrest. What she lacked in subtlety she made up for in charm. Though only fifty-seven, she gave off serious granny vibes. She spoke in a warbly voice and hobbled on bad knees. Her only daughter had died in a car accident in 1974; you couldn’t help but sympathize. There was something irresistible about Mary Rathbun, and she knew it. “I was pretty blatant, to say the least,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But who’s gonna mess with me—a little old lady who fell on her butt and baked health food brownies to supplement her income?”
The press was smitten.
The courts didn’t seem to know what to do with such a likeable dealer. Mary fretted to one interviewer that she was looking at fifteen-to-twenty years in the slammer; but as an elderly white woman with no previous record, she got off with a thirty-day suspended sentence, three years on probation, and five hundred hours of community service.
The community service turned out to be life-changing for Mary. She started in the soup kitchen at St. Martin de Porres House of Hospitality but soon switched to the Shanti Project, an organization offering end-of-life counseling and hospice care. Shanti was beginning to look after the young men coming down with gay cancer—many of whom were outcasts from their birth families. After finishing her court-ordered service, Mary went right on volunteering. She found a home for her soul among the City’s lost boys. As Dennis later wrote, “Mary had lost her only daughter in an auto accident . . . and now she adopted every kid in San Francisco as her own.”
Mary noticed that cannabis helped with a variety of gay cancer symptoms—notably nausea, appetite loss, insomnia, pain, and depression. In defiance of the court, she went back to what she did best: baking. In December 1982, one of the same narcs who’d originally arrested Mary caught her with four dozen brownies. Rathbun explained that she had baked them for a friend suffering from cancer. She was charged with multiple counts of possession and violation of her probation.
By now, Mary’s reputation had grown, and the community rallied—circulating petitions, fundraising, and writing letters. Mid-1983, the district attorney bucked convention and dropped the charges against her.
From the beginning, Brownie Mary had described weed as “health food” or “medicine” for her sore back and knees—never as a drug. Though ganja lovers had been extolling the medicinal value of cannabis for ages, Mary was among the first to successfully sell that notion to the US media. Maybe America needed someone grandmotherly to do it—especially with ultramaternal Nancy Reagan adopting the War on Drugs as her FLOTUS pet project. Mary was sweet and earthy. Her tireless volunteerism won hearts. People could disagree with her, but it was impossible to paint Mary Rathbun as a villain.
The tenor of the Castro was changing. Boys were still on the street, cruising, looking good, laughing. But there was something in the air, snaking through the crowds. A new scent.
Fear.
Everyone knew someone who had gay cancer.
Mer saw it on her monthly runs. Those little purple spots. Roger had one, then Michael had two, then Patrick had five. Pudgy Ronald, who was always trying fad diets to lose weight, seemed excited to have found a regimen that really worked; a month later, his collarbones protruded. When Mer phoned Rick to say she was in town, he apologized that he wasn’t feeling up to company—down with the flu again. What the hell was going on? Were these a bunch of little problems or one big one? Could it have something to do with the poppers everyone was into at the discos and sex clubs? Was someone poisoning the liquid soap in the bathhouses? Was the CIA in on it? Some guys started eating healthier, taking more vitamins, going out less. Others played harder, leaning heavier on cocaine and poppers, and spending night after night at the baths—might as well have fun.
Bobbi Campbell, the nurse who’d made the gay cancer poster, joined an order of drag nuns-cum-activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Reinventing himself as Sister Fl
orence Nightmare, RN, Campbell encouraged the group to draw attention to the illness with its rambunctious brand of street theater. In June 1982, the Sisters hosted a campy dog show at Hibernia Beach, drawing a crowd of some five hundred people with both the dogs and the owners in costume. It was the Sisters’ second annual dog show. This year, however, all proceeds went to the new Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation—possibly the world’s first fundraiser to fight gay cancer.
Two months later, Mer’s friend and customer Michael Maletta died.
When Mer heard the news at Beck’s, it hit her right in the third eye, spun her momentarily out of her body. “Jesus,” she gasped. “But he’s so young.”
Not only young but vibrant. A stylish and handsome New Yorker with strawberry blond hair and a wicked wit. One of those people who seemed more alive than others around him. In the warehouse days, Mer had sold him brownies every week at his in-home hair salon on Market Street. Michael was known for throwing lavish all-night happenings; the outrageous Stars party, where Mer had sold brownies in 1978, had been Michael’s doing. He’d been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma a mere nine months before dying in hospice care. Mer hadn’t seen him in a while, but it hadn’t occurred to her to worry. Now he was dead.
A couple of months later, in November, Patrick Cowley, Sylvester’s synth player and the producer of Step II—the album that had rocketed the singer to international disco stardom—died from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Mer had smoked pot with Patrick at Sylvester’s house and chatted with him at gigs. He was a pale willowy blond. A little bookish, quietly sarcastic, someone who always seemed like the smartest guy in the room. In the last year of his life, aware that he was dying, Patrick worked against the clock. He cofounded Megatone Records, and wrote, arranged, and recorded three complete albums as well as two dance-club hits. Patrick would be lauded posthumously as a key innovator of electronic music; decades later, his tracks would be collected and reissued. He died at thirty-two.
