Home Baked

by Alia Volz

  Mer’s customers still bought their multiple dozens of brownies at Beck’s or the Village Deli. She still did large deals in parking lots with Dennis’s lover. And much like the old days, the brownies wound their way through the community, with each person buying for their friends and loved ones. But now, along with new wave clubs, discos, and house parties, Sticky Fingers appeared beside sickbeds.

  Cleve Jones hadn’t been a big Sticky Fingers customer in the warehouse days because he found the brownies too potent. AIDS changed that. When he tested positive in late 1985, he was frightened but not surprised. He’d begun experiencing fatigue and flulike symptoms as early as 1979—long before anyone knew what was happening. He’d suffered shingles on his scalp that made him feel like his hair was on fire and bouts of respiratory infections and digestive distress. Like many people, he found cannabis helpful with his sleep, pain, depression, and nausea, but recurrent pneumonia had left his lungs too delicate for smoking. He switched to edibles, which he sometimes bought from Mer at Beck’s.

  Nearly everyone on Mer’s route was either dying, nursing someone who was dying, or mourning the death of a good friend or lover. Canes and walkers were commonplace. Young men shuffled around in wool coats and scarves even in warm weather.

  The Castro had warped into a funhouse-mirror distortion of itself. It seems ironic that AIDS would take root in a community that so highly prized physical beauty—ravaging bodies and faces, eviscerating the cult of youth worship. Strength of spirit shone through death masks.

  There’s nothing superficial about fighting a plague.

  20

  Ella-Vay-Shun

  There’s a photo of my mom in a wheelchair, wearing a neck brace, full-leg cast, and dark sunglasses. She’s bloated and pale, hair in an Einstein frizz.

  The accident happened in November 1986. She was driving through Willits when she got distracted by a pedestrian sporting hot-pink pants and slammed into the car ahead of her. My mom, who hadn’t buckled her seat belt, slid under the steering wheel, mangling the soft tissue around her right ankle and knee. She spent months in a wheelchair or on crutches. Downed-out on Percodan, depressed. The car was totaled, so no trips to the City. My dad wasn’t working. There was no money coming in at all.

  My parents had already separated for a few months during which my mom and I lived in a tract home and she attended Women Who Love Too Much meetings. In their attempt at reconciliation, my parents had rented a fancy yellow house with a swimming pool in the middle of town, but it didn’t help. Their fights shook the windows. My mom screamed herself hoarse; my dad broke furniture.

  At eight going on nine, I became convinced that the yellow house was haunted. It looked the part: a hulking Victorian on a corner lot, with a picket fence, rose garden, and an attic with peaked dormer windows. It had asymmetrical rooms and staircases leading to nooks that served no purpose. Despite its size and amenities, the rent was low when we’d moved there earlier in 1986—and in scary movies, weren’t haunted houses always cheap?

  There were nice moments. Camping out by the pool to watch Halley’s Comet streak slowly overhead. Splashing around on an inflatable pool toy that was supposed to be a horse, though it looked like a giant sausage. But in my bedroom at night, mandala snakes swam toward my face. I felt sure a clown lived under my bed. I had nightmares and insomnia, and sometimes wet the bed because I was scared to walk down the hall; its slanted ceiling played tricks on my eyes.

  In retrospect, the house was probably fine. But my family wasn’t.

  Early December, my dad announced to us that he was quitting his epilepsy medication permanently. Then he climbed to his studio in the attic and stayed for days, coming down only for food. Stuck in her wheelchair on the ground floor, my mom would send me up with messages. I’d find my dad bent over his drafting table, absorbed in bright, intricate designs. Mandalas plastered the walls.

  * * *

  Mer felt like she’d been carrying the family’s financial burden for eons. Now that she was unable to earn money—unable to walk—she needed Firefeather’s help. But instead of stepping up, he isolated himself in his attic and went off his meds.

  On top of everything, a certain somebody’s ninth birthday was coming up, and she’d promised to throw a slumber party. When your kid has trouble making friends, birthdays become overblown with excitement and anxiety. So she rolled her wheelchair up to the kitchen table and spent days hot gluing feathers and flowers to party hats and candy baskets. It felt good, at least, to do something.

  December 15, the day of the party, Firefeather came down to raid the fridge. As he passed her, Mer heard him say, very quietly, “I thought you’d want to know: I’m Joseph. You’re Mary. And Alia is the baby Jesus.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Mer called after him as he climbed back up to his tower.

  He didn’t answer.

  Kids showed up. Meridy wheeled herself around, popping popcorn, putting The Last Unicorn in the VCR yet again. In the early evening, Firefeather brought his knapsack and bedroll downstairs. “The Dalai Lama is speaking in San Francisco,” he said. “I need to see him. He has a message for me.”

  “Now?” Mer hissed. “On Alia’s birthday? While we have a house full of kids and I’m in a fucking wheelchair?”

  “I need to do this,” he said.

  “The car’s totaled.”

  “I’ll hitchhike.”

  She caught his eyes and stared hard, trying to find the bond that was once so strong between them. He stared back, eyes glittering like ice chips. He did not look like himself.

  “Doug,” she said, trying his given name. “Don’t go.”

  He went.

  Terrible scenarios flashed through Mer’s mind: Firefeather could have a seizure on the road, hit his head, forget who he was; he’d end up homeless on the streets of San Francisco. He’d gone too far this time.

  Quietly, she made phone calls, getting one friend to chaperone the party while another drove her to the police station to fill out forms for an involuntary psychiatric hold. If Firefeather got picked up for acting disruptively, she wanted the police to know not to put him in jail. He needed a hospital and Dilantin. She cried in the car. Then she collected herself and returned to the party.

  * * *

  I recall the lead-up to my ninth birthday: my dad drawing in his tower; my mom surrounded by feathers and garlands, joking that the “froof bomb” had gone off. From the party, I remember lying in sleeping bags in wheel-spoke formation, maybe six kids, and telling ghost stories. I remember pepperoni pizza. I don’t remember my dad disappearing. Either I’ve blocked that part out or my mom managed to shield me from what was happening. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  Mer focused her freight-train energy on being Super Mom while my dad chased his spirituality over a cliff.

  * * *

  The Dalai Lama wasn’t scheduled to be in San Francisco then; he was in Bylakuppe, India. But Firefeather didn’t get far enough to find that out.

  He stood beside Highway 101 with his thumb out for an hour or so, then said to himself, Maybe I’m not supposed to go seeking the Dalai Lama. Maybe I already have the consciousness I need within myself. Deciding to embark on a vision quest instead, he set out to circumnavigate the Willits valley.

  Firefeather now acknowledges that this was unrealistic, though it made sense to him at the time. There was no hiking trail around Willits. Even if there had been, it would’ve taken days, and he carried no food or water.

  Firefeather climbed straight up into hills thick with scrub and poison oak. At some point, he stowed his knapsack and bedroll inside a hollow tree and promptly forgot where they were. When the temperature dropped, he took shelter in an abandoned shed. Later, he became certain that something violent had happened there, and he set off again into the night. He soon found himself flailing down a steep hill through oak branches and brush before emerging onto a country road.

  Two cop cars were waiting.

  An area neighbor had h
eard somebody crashing around in the woods and phoned it in.

  Firefeather explained to the officers that he’d been hitchhiking to see the Dalai Lama but decided to walk in the hills instead—which they must have found concerning enough to confirm the alert Meridy had put out. They sent Firefeather to a psychiatric ward in a neighboring town for an involuntary seventy-two-hour hold.

  According to Firefeather, he stayed in a communal room with about twenty patients, some of whom were clearly disturbed. He felt sure he didn’t belong there; this was all a misunderstanding. One woman walked circles around him, drawing close to his body and muttering gibberish. Her smell seemed wrong, more like rotting flesh than human body odor.

  Eventually, Firefeather was taken to speak with the head psychiatrist. He answered the doctor’s questions carefully. Looking back, he recalls feeling confident that he would be released. “Because obviously I was perfectly clear thinking and everybody else around me was not.” He was stunned when the doctor told him they still needed to keep him under observation.

  When Firefeather explained this to another patient in the communal room, the guy said, “I knew it! This place is a coven of witches and the man running it is the warlock. They’ll keep you here as long as they can. That’s how they do it.”

  That made sense to Firefeather, and it infuriated him. Forcing himself to remain calm, he asked to speak with the psychiatrist once more.

  “You need to understand something,” he told the doctor. “I am a graduate of the Berkeley Psychic Institute and I am a reverend of the Church of Divine Man. I demand to be released. Right. Now.”

  As my dad remembers it, he was out of that facility and breathing fresh air within five minutes. To this day, his perception is that he secured his freedom from a hospital controlled by witches by announcing himself as a trained psychic. “Then,” he says, “I went back to Willits and back to normalcy.”

  * * *

  By the time he came home, my mom had taken me into hiding.

  She explained to me that when my dad stopped taking his medication he sometimes “got a little weird.” And this time he was weirder than usual. We stayed with my mom’s friend Kathy, whose daughter Karma was two years older than I was. There are pictures of us girls wearing splotchy makeup and high heels that don’t fit, and blowing kisses in front of a Christmas tree. Through the holidays and into the new year, Karma pretended to be the sister I’d always wanted.

  I didn’t know it then, but my dad, who was living alone in the yellow house, was leaving messages with mutual friends and on community bulletin boards. Tell Meridy that I want to see Alia so I can give her my Christmas presents. My mom called him a couple of times, but he kept describing us as the Holy Family reincarnated—which scared her. What if he harmed himself? What if he harmed us?

  She finally asked her therapist to visit him and assess the situation.

  “He’s having a full-blown psychotic episode,” the therapist said afterward. “I can’t guarantee it’s safe.”

  By January, I was begging to see him. I was over the novelty of a fake sister. I wanted my dad.

  In the end, of course, it was an I Ching hexagram that convinced my mom to risk a visit. Her therapist coordinated with the police, so if Mer called 911 from the yellow house, they would come without asking many questions.

  * * *

  The image of my dad opening the door is seared into my mind. His blue eyes gleamed from a naked face. No eyebrows, head as shiny as a beach ball, chin vulnerable without his red beard. Despite the January chill, he wore a sarong knotted at the waist, his freshly shaven chest and arms bare. When we hugged, his skin felt prickly and unfamiliar, though I recognized his smell.

  My mom, still hobbling in a soft cast, followed me inside and sat beside the phone.

  I gave my dad a wool sweater and was relieved when he pulled it over his bald torso. He gave me a board game called Wildlife Adventure, which involved matching endangered species to their habitats. He read the rules aloud, pronouncing each word precisely in the same tone and cadence that he’d used to read me Alice in Wonderland when I was younger. I watched the colored lights blink and let his voice carry me to a safer Christmas.

  The psychosis eventually passed, but my mom was fed up. She moved us into a double-wide near Kathy and Karma’s. Her paintings stacked against the faux-wooden walls left little room to move. I slept under a heap of stuffed animals.

  We would never live with my dad again.

  * * *

  So when my dad says decades later that he “went back to normalcy” after the psychiatric hospital, I’m taken aback. I remind him that we weren’t there when he returned to the yellow house. That our little family broke.

  “Interesting,” he says. “I didn’t realize those events were connected.”

  My dad recounts his ill-fated trip to see the Dalai Lama with a level of detail that’s unusual for his damaged memory. From the measured way he delivers the story, I feel sure that he’s told it before. That he’s not only remembering what happened but also how he’s described it to other people. But in his version, he didn’t leave on his daughter’s birthday and come home to an empty house. He doesn’t see the experience as a psychotic break, though he can’t explain some of his actions.

  In his telling, the most important part of the story is using his psychic prowess to escape the witches. In my telling, the most important part is losing my dad.

  * * *

  Unable to sell brownies or pot since the accident, Mer had no income and was borrowing money. Cheryl’s boyfriend took up a collection among the Willits growers to buy her a dented mustard-yellow Honda. Nothing fancy, but it would get her to the City. In March 1987, she and Kathy baked and wrapped forty dozen brownies (and it says something about my mom’s level of desperation that she baked). Leaving me with Kathy, she drove down with a loaded trunk and settled at Beck’s for the weekend.

  Mer had been away for only five months—but they had been plague months. Each time someone knocked, she girded herself for the possibility that her friend or customer had wasted to bones, curled into himself, been taken over by KS lesions, lost his mobility, his lover, his beauty, his humor. Catching up meant discovering which mutual acquaintances had died and speculating about who would be next. Even making phone calls to tell people she was in town was nerve-racking.

  A drug called AZT had just hit the market. It was the first AIDS medication to gain FDA approval. At a cost of about $10,000 per year, it was also the most expensive prescription medicine in history. To protest the cost, a newly minted activist group called the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—or ACT UP—staged a dramatic protest on Wall Street, accusing the pharmaceutical company of profiteering and the FDA of ignoring other promising drugs. AZT would turn out to be ineffective over the long term, though it extended some people’s lives. It was highly toxic, causing severe anemia, dizziness, headaches, vomiting, and diarrhea. Many patients couldn’t tolerate it at all. For some, weed helped mitigate side effects.

  On Sunday, Mer met Dennis Peron in a rooftop parking lot above Café Flore. Decades later, she can still picture Dennis leaning on a railing overlooking the Castro, his prematurely silver-white hair ruffling in a breeze.

  Dennis bought all the brownies she had left.

  When Mer told him she and Firefeather were divorcing, Dennis said, “You could always come back. You know what people keep telling me? They say, ‘Dennis, if it wasn’t for this joint, or this brownie, I wouldn’t be out of bed today. It’s keeping me going.’ Brownie Mary is baking her ass off for the guys on the AIDS ward. She’s been pulling names out of a cookie jar. There’s too much need.”

  * * *

  Medical marijuana wasn’t a new idea—but it was still a radical one.

  Veteran potheads like Dennis and my mom trusted their guts about the healing potential of cannabis. That it had legitimate medical properties came as no surprise to them.

  What’s more surprising—and disheartening—is that the gov
ernment knew it, too. Back in 1974, the Nixon administration had created the National Institute on Drug Addiction. NIDA acted both as a research-funding machine and as gatekeeper. Its mandate was to develop and conduct research “for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse and for the rehabilitation of drug abusers.” But scientists kept stumbling on good news about pot instead: that it decreased ocular pressure (1971) and reversed glaucoma damage (1976); that it slowed the growth of Lewis lung tumors and leukemia in mice (1975); that THC was an effective analgesic for patients suffering pain related to cancer (1975); and studies during the seventies and eighties showed that THC minimized nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy patients.

  Subsequent research has uncovered palliative and curative potential for an astonishing range of conditions. But human clinical trials are still scant in the United States, limited by legal hurdles. It’s sobering to note that the first indications that cannabinoids might be harnessed to treat such illnesses as leukemia appeared in peer-reviewed journals more than forty years ago. Instead of chasing those leads, the government prioritized drug-war messaging over science. Because NIDA was the sole legal source of cannabis for researchers in the United States, only studies that served the administration’s agenda were likely to move forward.

  Marijuana has been classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic since 1970—defined by the DEA as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” It’s worth repeating that this classification never had a scientific basis. The attorney general placed marijuana under Schedule 1 as a stopgap while Nixon’s blue-ribbon commission investigated. But when the report recommended decriminalization and further exploration of medicinal value, Nixon rejected it flatly, and the temporary scheduling became permanent. That cannabis is more severely restricted than methamphetamines and oxycodone (both of which doctors can legally prescribe) has always been political—not scientific.