by Alia Volz
By the end of 1982, the San Francisco Department of Public Health had recorded forty-six deaths from what was now being called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Nationwide, some nine hundred cases had been reported to the CDC. A former brownie customer, Ellen Freed, was now working as a medical assistant in an STD clinic with gay clientele. At night, when she went dancing at the Stud, friends would bounce up to her: “Hey, Ellen, look at this spot on my arm. Do I have the gay cancer?” She would squint at their skin under the strobing disco lights and suggest they make an appointment for a proper exam. Then they’d go back to dancing.
* * *
Few could fathom the enormity of what was coming—least of all a five-year-old. With that capacity young humans have for absorbing new realities, I gathered that some of my mom’s friends were sick—the suddenly skinny ones, the frail and hunched ones—though the gravity escaped me. Nothing changed how much I loved coming to the City.
I was more comfortable hanging out with stoned adults than with other children. I’d twirl around the motel room, tell jokes I’d made up myself, wiggle loose teeth with my tongue—and they rewarded me with laughter and attention. Kids were heavy and baffling, but grown-ups loved me.
By early 1983, we had moved from Hearst to a smaller ranch house closer to town. My parents enrolled me in a Waldorf school where we learned basic math by drawing gnomes who gathered and lost gemstones. I did well in class but poorly on the playground. I’m not sure what alienated me from other children so early, but I imagine it had to do with being socialized in such a peculiar environment. Perhaps learning to keep secrets at a young age made me cagey. There must have been a moment when my parents sat me down and explained that their business was illegal—that I’d have to lie to protect them—but I don’t remember it. That knowledge seems to have always been with me. By five, I understood very well that if I told anyone about the family business—the garbage bags of pot, the gooey brownies, our thrilling weekends at Beck’s—my parents would go to jail.
I was an early and avid reader, hiding books under my bed to read by my dim night-light when I was supposed to be sleeping. My favorite was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Looking back, it makes sense. Consciousness began in the warehouse with its parade of curious characters: Day-Glo punks, leather daddies, cross-dressing belly dancers. On brownie runs in the stroller, I ogled jugglers and drag queens and tap-dancing nuns. We’d visit Sylvester; in my memory, he’s draped languidly on his divan in glittery robes and turbans, smoking a fat joint: the stoned caterpillar in human form.
And, of course, I was Alice. Admitted to the inner circle without really belonging. Too young to understand the jokes but keen enough to pick up on the mood and always allowed to listen. Like Alice stumbling into the Mad Hatter’s unbirthday party and the Red Queen’s croquet match, I’d find myself in the middle of the action but a few steps behind the plot . . . curiouser and curiouser. By then, long blonde curls hung in tangled waves down my back. I had large blue eyes and snaggleteeth. My favorite dress was a square-dance number with puffy sleeves and a faux apron that I loved precisely because it resembled Alice’s.
San Francisco was my Wonderland. I must have sensed a growing darkness, but that didn’t make me want to stay away. Alice’s dreams were scary, too.
* * *
In Willits, money problems were ongoing. Mer scraped together rent but rarely without stress. From her perspective, Firefeather wasn’t doing much to help. He’d never excelled at sales, but back in the warehouse days, he had walked his route and taken the same risks as she and Cheryl. With money flowing abundantly, it had been enough.
Now that things were tight, she expected more effort. Firefeather took odd work and construction gigs, but opportunities were scarce and the work he found didn’t suit him. Eventually, he’d offend someone or get fed up with whatever the work-culture bullshit was and quit. He also had rotten luck—like when a kitchen fire destroyed the restaurant where he’d begun waiting tables. Nothing lasted. Mer had never worked a straight job either, but she hustled when it was time to hustle. She thought Firefeather was being a prima donna. She wanted him to get a job, any job, so the pressure wouldn’t sit so heavily on her shoulders.
Firefeather felt both frustrated and emasculated, ill-equipped to support his family. His best wasn’t good enough. He had always been critical of Mer’s extra cushion, but during the warehouse days, the margin had been small—ten or twenty stubborn pounds. Now, in the nowhere of Willits, Mer began to pack it on in earnest. The more Firefeather rode her about it, the uglier she felt and the more she sought comfort in binge-eating. Twenty pounds became fifty, then seventy-five, then a hundred.
The familiar arguments worsened.
When are you gonna make some money?
When are you gonna lose some weight?
They fought prodigiously, impressively, endlessly.
Mer’s artwork intensified. She painted impasto, using a palette knife to create Van Gogh–esque swirls, piling her pigments an inch thick in places. Instead of flesh tones, her figures vibrated with yellows, purples, and greens. She unleashed her frustrations on old mirrors, which she piled into a burlap sack and bashed repeatedly with a sledgehammer, growling and cursing. Then she pressed the shards into the deep wet paint on a life-size depiction of a spinning belly dancer. Standing in front of it, you’d see your face reflected in deconstructed slivers, your features scattered and multiplied.
* * *
Summer of 1983, Firefeather signed up with a crew of men heading to Shasta, California, some four hours northeast. The plan was to camp for a week during which they’d harvest pine cones for the rich, expensive nuts. This involved climbing tall evergreens and dangling from harnesses while gathering the cones.
As much as Mer wanted him to work, the image of Firefeather climbing trees dozens of feet tall turned her stomach. She suspected he was messing with his meds again. “What if you have a seizure up in a tree? You could die.”
“I won’t have a seizure.” Firefeather was sick and tired of being nagged about money, and the organizer promised a lucrative return. They bickered, as they bickered about everything. Then he left.
The job turned out to be a scam. The crew had to provide their own food, transportation, and camping supplies. The work was high-risk and physically strenuous, and in the end, no one got paid what they’d been promised. A close friend of Firefeather’s who also went on the trip, Jeff Crawford, would later sue the organizer over unpaid work.
When I ask my dad about this now, that’s all he remembers: that he went to Shasta to pick pine cones and never got paid properly. The rest of the story is blank to him.
But according to Jeff Crawford, on the second or third night of camping, Firefeather vanished from the campsite without a word. The men called out to him in the woods, foliage absorbing their voices. In the morning, they searched the nearby forest.
Hours later, Firefeather wandered back to camp. He was pale and shaky, scraped and bruised as though he’d fallen. He told Jeff that a spirit had awoken him during the night and led him through the woods on a vision quest. A seeker himself, Jeff respected his friend’s spirituality; it wasn’t what Firefeather said that concerned him but the look in his eyes, the unsettling gaze. His pupils were dilated like someone on an acid trip, though Firefeather swore he’d only smoked a little pot the night before. Jeff would later describe the episode as “some kind of psychological-spiritual meltdown.”
No way Firefeather should climb trees in that shape.
Meridy was furious when she got the phone call. I knew it, she thought. He went and had a fucking seizure and now he’s delusional. She found a babysitter, then drove the four hours to Shasta to collect her husband. Upon arriving, Mer found him rambling semi-incoherently. He claimed he’d been bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake, but when he pulled up his pant leg to show her the wound, all she saw were some scratches from wandering in the woods.
* * *
Firefeather’s seizures
generally began with a radiant, prismatic mandala floating in his peripheral vision. The attacks could leave him confused or delusional. He lost chunks of memory. But the preseizure aura was so inspiring that it almost made the consequences worthwhile.
Even today, when my dad talks about his epilepsy, it’s not with the voice of someone who feels afflicted. “Light,” he says, “is nothing but the fabric of life pulled aside to reveal the true splendor of the Absolute or the Divine. [By taking Dilantin] I felt like I was turning my back on something extremely exciting. Why would I want to deny myself that?”
My dad is not alone in romanticizing his epilepsy. Fyodor Dostoevsky experienced his seizures as holy gifts. “For a few seconds of such bliss,” he wrote, “I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life.”
According to science writer Sam Kean, a lot depends on where in the brain the seizures happen. If the short-circuit occurs in the temporal lobe—possibly the case with my dad—the experience can be spiritually charged—what’s called “ecstatic epilepsy.” Some temporal-lobe epileptics, Kean writes, “feel their ‘souls’ uniting with whatever godhead they believe in.”
Mandalas featured prominently in Firefeather’s artwork. He spent untold hours hunched at his drafting table with his compass, ruler, and colored pencils producing vivid, kaleidoscopic images. They plastered the walls of our home. He began a series of twelve visionary oil paintings he called the Light Series, representing the “twelve steps of spiritual awakening” and featuring rivers of energy, exploding rainbows, and multiethnic spiritual symbols.
What Firefeather wanted was to explore his preseizure auras without suffering the consequences of a grand mal attack. In the early 1980s, Firefeather landed on what he thought of as an effective method for controlling the seizures without medication. He found that if he turned his eyes firmly away from the mandala he’d eventually feel a little pop, and the orb would float away like a balloon on a broken string. But many of his seizures came late at night when he wasn’t conscious enough to control his impulses. And sometimes, even when he was awake, he couldn’t resist the magnificent visions.
* * *
I vividly recall my dad showing me his rattlesnake bite when my parents got home from Shasta. Even though it had been his hallucination, I saw weeping fang marks on his calf—the puncture marks surrounded by yellowish waxy flesh. I panicked, thinking he might die. At five, I still accepted his delusions as truth, and my imagination supplied the missing details. Not until recently did I learn that my dad has never in his life been bitten by a snake. This is a pitfall of growing up with an unstable parent: his unreality made my reality dubious.
What I call the “mandala snakes” must have started then. In bed at night, as I tried to fall asleep, multicolored circles spun behind my closed eyelids and transformed into jeweled snakes that unfurled in the dark and swam toward my face, fanged mouths gaping to swallow my head. This terrified me as a little girl. Even now, when I’m battling insomnia, I’ll sometimes slip into an unpleasant loop of imagining colorful snakes winding toward my face.
My dad recalls little of the Shasta episode. “It’s so strange hearing about all these things that I did that I just don’t remember at all,” he says.
Sometime in the 1990s, he switched to Tegretol, an anticonvulsant that he likes better and takes regularly. He hasn’t had an attack in nearly twenty years. But I sense that a part of him misses it a little bit. “My life sure is boring now by comparison,” he says.
* * *
On December 15, 1983, my mom tied a blindfold over my eyes during my sixth birthday party. I heard unusual noises and gasps from the other kids. My mom whispered, “Happy birthday, baby,” and untied the blindfold. Standing in front of me was a shaggy Shetland pony, brown with white splotches, wearing a red bow in his forelock.
The big reveal.
Meridy gave me a pony for my birthday.
I had been obsessed with horses since I could remember and had started taking kiddie riding lessons at four from a woman named Susan. I saved pennies and nickels in a jar labeled PONY FUND. My mom had scrounged up a few hundred dollars and splurged. I named the pony Acorn, and we housed him at my riding teacher’s ranch.
In truth, Acorn was too unruly for a kid my age. He bucked and bit and took off galloping. I had neither the muscles nor the skill to earn the respect of a mean little pony like Acorn. I did better with Susan’s gentle school horses.
After six months or so, money got tight again, and my parents ended up selling Acorn, with promises to buy me a bigger horse when I was old enough to take care of one myself. From the beginning, the plan had been unfeasible. Giving a child gifts you really can’t afford seems irresponsible when I think of it now. I’m sure I was brokenhearted. And yet, I don’t remember that part. What stands out in my memory is the great reveal. That moment of pure magic when my mom made my most treasured dream—a surprise pony for my birthday—come true.
She was like that with me: encouraging, dazzling, unrealistic.
* * *
My mom kept her cocaine grinder on top of her highboy. I remember a brown plastic cylinder with a little crank and a film of white dust around the cracks. A pocket-size makeup mirror sat beside it along with a crusty little straw. I knew where these things were kept, and I knew they weren’t toys.
She must have acted differently when high—tense and overexcited and self-absorbed—though it wasn’t obvious to me back then. Since babyhood, I had been surrounded by adults in altered states. Mushroom trips, LSD trips, brownie highs, cocaine highs, occasional periods of delusion. The air in our home was always thick with pot smoke.
It was an atypical, looking-glass childhood, but it wasn’t a bad one. I kept up with riding lessons. I went to Wavy Gravy’s circus camp one summer and a horse camp the next. I swam in rivers and ran through sunstruck fields. I experienced the vibrant intensity of urban life, too. My parents could be self-involved and erratic but not neglectful. I never went without food or shelter or someone to comfort me when I cried.
* * *
Spring of 1984, Firefeather tried his hand at growing pot. He planted twelve seedlings in white five-gallon buckets and later transferred them into a small clearing in the woods near our house. Throughout the summer, he hauled buckets of water into the woods, two at a time, then trudged back up to the spigot for refills. Hot sun pounding on his neck, blue sky spinning overhead. The price of Mendocino bud was climbing. If this starter crop worked out, he planned to go bigger next season.
I’d tag along when he watered, scampering to keep up with his long legs. I knew marijuana in other phases—the Dr. Seuss silhouettes of uprooted plants drying on clotheslines, the gooey buds that left miniature crystals on my fingers, the avocado-green dust that went into brownies—but our weed babies were different. Leaning close to the leaves, I whispered encouragement until they swayed above my head. I remember looking up at the jungle-green star points haloed in sunlight. And the tight fists of new buds huddled close to the stalks.
Then the caterpillars came.
Alice had one bigmouth caterpillar to deal with, but our plants shivered under a writhing mass of thousands of blue and yellow bodies. Beautiful and gruesome, they wrapped themselves around stems, dangled from leaves, and squirmed over one another.
My dad gawked in dismay, his skin rinsing pink. He hurled the water bucket against the trunk of a nearby tree. “Goddamn it!”
I trapped a wriggling caterpillar in my cupped hands and scurried home. Tiny sticky feet. Delicate bright fur tickling my palms. My mom poked holes in the lid of a pickle jar. The next morning, I sneaked to the clearing and saw that my dad had torn the plants from the ground, leaving a wasteland of holes. Their corpses lay in a heap, dirt clinging to their naked roots, stripped almost bare by the caterpillars. I gathered scraps of pot leaves from the ground and sprinted home to feed my pet his favorite food. I hoped he would build a cocoon and turn into a butterfly, but he died in my glass trap.
* *
*
Firefeather took the caterpillar invasion as a sign that he wasn’t meant to be a grower. Despite the fighting and financial pressure at home, this might have been for the best. It was becoming increasingly dangerous.
Reagan had promised a new war on drugs; in July 1983, he’d lobbed the first grenade—at California’s pot growers. The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, known as CAMP, was a coalition of local, state, and federal agencies tasked with stamping out cannabis cultivation in California. To explain his targeting of rural hippies, Reagan trotted out the old “gateway drug” theory—the statistically unsupported notion that marijuana would lead people to heavier drugs.
There was a more mercenary reason for targeting pot farmers. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 expanded antiracketeering laws that allowed the government to confiscate property used in committing a federal crime—and auction it for revenue. The administration talked plainly about it. “The biggest focus of what we’re doing is going to be on land seizures,” deputy commander of CAMP William Ruzzamenti told journalist Ray Raphael. “Anybody who is growing marijuana on their land, we’re going to take their land. It’s as simple as that.”
