by Alia Volz
* * *
Even now, when I close my eyes and think of home, I envision San Francisco as seen from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Transamerica Pyramid towers above a modest, low-slung skyline blurred by a veil of mist. Our skyline doesn’t look like that anymore; it has morphed into an ice-cube tray of office buildings like any ordinary city. Our tallest building, the Salesforce Tower (what many locals refer to as the “sky dildo”) is the first bit of skyline you’ll see from almost anywhere in town as well as from the Marin Headlands and the Oakland Hills and probably outer space.
When I consider what my hometown has become—the homogeneity, the wealth, the cultural sterility—I think of AIDS. So much death all at once left a vacuum. There were vacancies ready to be filled by tech innovators and money makers, a fresh wave of newcomers who arrived during the first dot-com bubble of the 1990s. This new gold rush economy would burst in 2001 only to balloon again a few years later.
When I tell people I was born in the City, the typical response is a variation on a theme: “I never meet San Francisco natives!” or “You’re a unicorn!”
I’m first generation, nothing special; I know people whose families run five generations deep. But I still see techies as an invading force—here to colonize, pillage, vanquish. In a city limited in size by its geography (as Manhattan is, too), when new people arrive, others must leave. Change is always violent to what came before.
Today, I live near our old Fourteenth Avenue flat. Maseratis prowl our formerly low-key district. My immediate neighbors, a white heterosexual couple with two young daughters, own a late-model Audi, a new BMW, and two SUVs. My hometown becomes less recognizable every day. I’m irked by the money, the flashy cars, the e-scooters, the souped-up strollers. And yet, those strollers carry home-baked San Franciscans, native sons and daughters like me. They may grow up feeling inseparable from this new San Francisco as I felt inseparable from the city that made me. Someday they’ll be usurped, too. People like us seem to be part of every era here: locals who watch helplessly while their hometown is stolen by outsiders. Knowing that San Francisco thrives on cycles of mass migration and collapse doesn’t make the loss less keen.
* * *
My dad was in Willits when the earthquake hit, too far north to feel the tremors. Unable to reach us by phone, he watched the news cycles closely. Undoubtedly, he saw Kali in the rubble—the Hindu goddess of nature’s wrath. After all, he’d been expecting a massive earthquake since the seventies. I’m sure he was worried about me. We must have spoken as soon as the phone lines opened, though I don’t remember the conversation.
I don’t recall much of him from this period at all. I visited a few times a year, but those weekends blur in my mind. I remember a shifting series of houses in Willits, none of which were home to me. I remember Ruthanne’s overstuffed oatmeal couch, its unpleasant softness. And my dad’s record collection, always in the same window-paned cabinet that had housed it since I was a baby.
In health care, he’d found a calling and a career that would sustain him for decades. First as an orderly, then as an LVN, and finally as a home-care nurse, he put in long hours on his feet. He complained bitterly about my mom’s “easy drug money” and “unrealistic lifestyle”—how a poor workingman couldn’t compete.
Mostly, I remember his absence. An empty space shaped like him. I remember the ache of needing someone who didn’t seem to need me as much. He was my first heartbreak.
My mom doubled down on our relationship. We took mother-daughter road trips, had salon dates, and spent foggy afternoons at the old-timey arcade behind the Cliff House, where a nickel would send toy racehorses galloping around a track or make a miniature lion tamer crack his whip.
Late in 1989, Mer received a small inheritance from her mother’s death three years before. Together, we discussed what to do with the money while driving around between deliveries. I could get braces to fix a widening gap between my front teeth. We could upgrade our beater car. Or we could take an extended trip to Mexico, just the two of us.
Of the three options, we settled on the least practical one—also the most whimsical, magical, and adventurous. My mom met individually with each of my sixth-grade teachers and convinced them to assign my schoolwork in advance so I could do it on the beach.
For six weeks, we lived in a small cabana in Zihuantanejo, Mexico, upstairs from a beach with gentle waves. We rode horses, bounced on banana boats, worked on our tans, and bought each other dozens of inexpensive tchotchkes for Christmas, which we wrapped sitting back-to-back on the Mexico version of the barge: la barcaza. We took water taxis to Ixtapa and crashed fancy resort pools, sipping virgin piña coladas with our pinkies in the air.
Months after our Mexico trip, my mom came through on a promise she’d made when I was six years old. Ever since we’d sold Acorn, I’d harbored a fantasy of having my own horse. I’d kept up with weekly riding lessons in Golden Gate Park and periodically brought up the subject, wheedling, swearing that I was totally responsible enough. Finally, my mom agreed that if she sold a significant painting in an upcoming show we’d get a horse with the money.
“Of course,” she says now. “I didn’t expect it to happen right away.” A week later to the day, a self-portrait sold from the gallery for five thousand dollars.
We bought Tango, a scrappy pinto mare with a marking shaped like a goose on her face, and boarded her at a ramshackle barn on the outskirts of the City. Trails snaked to a wind-whipped stretch of beach. Every day after school, my mom drove me half an hour to the barn and returned for me at dusk. My mare, who was a little high-strung, would tremble as soon as her hooves touched the beach. I’d contain her until we got to the water’s edge where the sand was packed hard and turn her loose. We’d thunder through the surf at a dead gallop, Tango’s mane whipping my arms, icy Pacific water splashing my thighs. I fell off countless times, sometimes trudging all the way back to the barn from the beach. But it didn’t matter; I’d found my place in the world.
Tango’s board, feed, vitamins, vet bills, farrier bills, and tack cost hundreds of dollars a month. After a while, I started competing. Then came professional trainers and expensive horse shows and specialized gear. “Well,” my mom sometimes quipped. “It’s cheaper than a lifetime of therapy.” Of course, I owed the horse to drug money. That and a mother who didn’t trivialize her kid’s dreams.
We weren’t rich, at least not usually. When money was tight—what my mom called “scrapey”—she stressed and schemed and tossed hexagrams and made phone calls until something gave way. When money flowed, we spent it. One Christmas, we went to Civic Center and handed out one hundred five-dollar bills to homeless people.
There was no savings account, no medical insurance, no college fund; we had no credit cards and no assets. We never bought a house, a new car, designer clothes, or the latest technology. I never did get those braces. But when I needed a horse, I got a horse.
Rummaging through a box of my mom’s photos, we find her old address book from this period. She flips through it, muttering, “Dead . . . dead . . . almost certainly dead . . . dead . . .” She pauses. “Hmm . . . What happened to Mark? I think he died, but we can try looking on Facebook.” She shakes her head, scans the next page, then stops, her brow furrowing. “Aww . . . oh boy . . .” Her eyes, huge and watery, find mine. “Remember Phillip? My good friend?”
Phillip, oil pastel on paper. Meridy Volz, 1990.
I do. After we moved back to San Francisco in 1987, Phillip Gaston became my mom’s handsome go-to date for comedy clubs or nights at the opera. Tall and sturdy, with wavy blond hair and dimples and a smile that consumed his whole face, Phillip looked like an actor from a soap opera. He favored classy blazers and polished leather shoes. He’d been HIV positive for years but remained healthy. I remember when that changed. Bouts of clumsiness and disorientation led to a diagnosis of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. Extremely rare prior to AIDS, PML attacked the myelin coating that protected the brain’s nerve
fibers, causing dementia and loss of motor functions almost like a series of strokes. Phillip died about six weeks after his diagnosis. He didn’t waste away or suffer KS lesions. He died beautiful, senile, unable to walk or form words. It hit my mom hard.
“I can’t do this right now,” she says. “Too depressing.”
She puts the address book back in the box.
I remember the dismay I felt as a child at seeing loving couples who’d been together in my earliest memories split in half. Barry lost Gino, his musical collaborator and life partner. Sian lost his beautiful Abel and never got over it. Decades later, he still goes into seclusion for weeks around the anniversary of Abel’s death.
My mom often describes the “phenomenon of the last man standing.” How out of a big group of close friends, there would be one guy left alive to carry all the memories, all the guilt.
“It’s just, you know, difficult,” says Lou Briasco, a longtime brownie customer. “Because I didn’t expect to be here now.” For thirty-four years, he ran the same tiny luggage shop on Market Street that he and a friend (deceased) opened in 1982. Lou was diagnosed HIV positive in the mid-1980s and thought for sure he was a goner. But he survived. And kept surviving while the people in his social circle died. Lou, who lived with his dog in a small apartment above the shop, kept the business going mostly to stay busy. Lou’s lease came up in 2016; faced with the inevitable rent hike, he finally decided to close. He says he’s lost more than fifty friends to AIDS.
That number seems to be common among the survivors I know: fifty loved ones dead.
Problems arose that you might not imagine. Like the superabundance of stuff: antiques and knickknacks passing from friend to lover to friend, collections growing exponentially as more people died. The last man standing would find himself buried beneath an avalanche of keepsakes.
When Wayne Whelan arrived in San Francisco in 1986, he was amazed at the quality furniture and antiques abandoned in dumpsters and on street corners. In need of cash, he began collecting and reselling found treasures at flea markets. Among his new neighbors was Val DuVal, an occasional drag performer who ran a chaotic custom dress shop out of his cluttered home. Wayne rented a window in Val’s space to sell some of his antiques, and the two became close. When Val’s health gave out, Wayne helped nurse him through his painful last weeks and ended up inheriting the shop—which he renamed Therapy. For years, Wayne gathered and sold the beautiful trinkets and stylish furniture left behind by the dead, eventually moving into a larger space on Valencia Street. Some objects passed through Therapy multiple times when customers who’d bought them also succumbed to the plague. At estate sales, Wayne would find himself staring at the peculiar mementos kept at bedsides near the end. Why this button or this teacup? he’d wonder. What was important about this? A day came when Wayne couldn’t take it anymore. His store was full of ghosts, everything saturated in heartbreak. He gave up on antiques and switched to new merchandise.
Dan Clowry left the Village Deli after a change of ownership. When a good friend fell ill, Dan became his caretaker. The disease kept coming for more friends until Dan was running himself ragged trying to help them all and still support himself. Finally, he figured, What the hell, and went back to school to become a nurse. He helped launch the AIDS unit at Mount Zion hospital, which soon shifted to UCSF.
Back in the warehouse days, Dan and Kissie would sell two gross of Sticky Fingers brownies while Mer did her Castro run. Now Dan kept a reserve of brownies in his freezer to sneak into the AIDS ward for patients who were wasting. “They came up with a medication that was supposed to stimulate appetite,” he recalls. “But because it was new, they were being very cautious with the dosing. And I was like, ‘This doesn’t do anything, just give them pot.’” He and some other nurses also let patients smoke weed out the windows of their hospital rooms. “We were lucky that we had windows that opened,” Dan says. “We got some complaints now and then, but I didn’t care.”
I ask if the doctors on the ward knew about this. He feels sure they did, though it was something no one spoke about. “What was [pot] going to do,” Dan says, “kill them?”
* * *
January 25, 1990, at around 1 a.m., ten narcs with sledgehammers and a search warrant burst into Dennis Peron’s flat on Seventeenth Street. The cops ordered Dennis and his lover of more than ten years, Jonathan West, to lie on the kitchen floor while they ransacked the house for weed. Jonathan was emaciated and covered in KS lesions, so the cops made a show of putting on latex gloves before touching him. “Do you know what AIDS means?” one officer said. “Asshole in deep shit.” Upon noticing a framed photograph of Peron with Harvey Milk, an older cop launched into a rant about how much he’d hated “that fag” back then.
At first, SFPD told reporters they’d found between two and three pounds of marijuana in Dennis’s flat but later admitted that it was only four ounces of bud—no scales or packing equipment. Nevertheless, they booked Peron for possession with intent to sell and carted him to jail, leaving Jonathan alone in the flat.
A few hours later, narcs raided 663-A Castro Street, where Dennis’s associate, Steve Heselton, was living with another friend. That search was more fertile, turning up “40 pounds of marijuana, two pounds of hashish, a pound of ‘magic mushrooms,’ and about $6,000 in cash,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This was, of course, Dennis’s stash, but he’d learned long ago that he was too hot a target to risk keeping his product at home.
Dennis spent the night in jail worrying about Jonathan. When he finally slept, he dreamed about a large room full of sick people, some in wheelchairs. He saw men and women, young and old, all races, sitting together, laughing, and sharing cannabis. Dennis awoke convinced that he’d had a vision of the future. He would create a public medical-marijuana dispensary where people like Jonathan could gather with friends to smoke pot, unashamed of their infirmities.
When Dennis’s case came to trial ten months later, Jonathan testified. By then, he weighed about ninety pounds and could barely walk to the witness stand. In a hoarse whisper, Jonathan insisted that the weed had been his, and that Dennis, as his caretaker, had kept it and rolled joints for him.
The judge let Peron off with one year of probation, citing a lack of evidence that the four ounces of marijuana were for sale. According to Dennis, she also scolded the arresting officers, telling them she never wanted to see another case like that again.
Two weeks later, Jonathan died. He was twenty-nine.
This was the year that AIDS became the leading cause of death in the United States for men aged twenty-five to forty-four.
Dennis vowed to spend the rest of his life fighting to legalize marijuana for “all the other suffering Jonathans of the world.”
* * *
“Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” This bold statement came from the DEA’s own chief administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, in September 1988. “By any measure of rational analysis, marijuana can be safely used within supervised routine medical care.”
This ended a sixteen-year court battle to remove marijuana from Schedule 1 classification. After considering extensive testimony from doctors, patients, law enforcement, and policy wonks, Judge Young wrote an unequivocal sixty-nine-page decision concluding that marijuana must be moved to Schedule 2 at the federal level.
It was a powerful moment in weed history. Reclassification would enable doctors to prescribe marijuana when medically appropriate. American researchers could finally explore its potential (most studies related to cannabis as treatment were happening in Israel, Brazil, and elsewhere). Everything seemed poised to change.
But an administrative law judge can only make recommendations about federal policy; they can’t force the government’s hand. And this wasn’t what the new Bush administration wanted to hear from the DEA’s leading judge. Bush and his cronies ignored the decision, clung stubbornly to Schedule 1 classification, and con
tinued the tradition of stonewalling medical marijuana.
That same year, the first cannabinoid receptor was identified in the brain of a rat, followed in 1992 by the major discovery of the endocannabinoid system—a complex network of receptors and transmitters found throughout the animal kingdom; even sponges have them.
In humans, the endocannabinoid system helps regulate immune activity, pain response, appetite, memory formation, and other functions. Receptors have since been found in the kidneys, lungs, liver, white blood cells, gut, spleen, and central and peripheral nervous systems. To be clear, this system functions whether or not we use cannabis. It just so happens that some chemical compounds in marijuana fit our native receptors like a key in a lock.
Research into the possibilities this presents is still in its infancy. In the United States, it’s severely hampered by the federal government’s resistance to viewing marijuana as anything other than a party drug. We’re left with a plant that appears ideally suited to interacting with the human body and brain—and a government that discourages unlocking its medicinal potential.
Even so, the medical-marijuana movement gained steam all over the country. Not only in San Francisco, and not only among gays and hippies. In 1990, Harvard University researchers surveyed a third of the country’s oncologists. Of the 1,035 who responded, 48 percent said they would prescribe marijuana if it was legal. Most of those also admitted that they’d already recommended it as an antiemetic.
A hemophiliac from Florida named Kenny Jenks had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion and unknowingly infected his young wife, Barbara. The Jenkses were both wasting badly and suffering intolerable nausea. Someone in their AIDS support group suggested pot. The couple was straitlaced, but they were starving to death. After smoking the first joint, they found they could eat a little.
