Home Baked

by Alia Volz

  Mer and her friend waited in the car while Patty went for the box. The post office occupied the ground floor of the Milwaukee Federal Building, an ornate Gothic structure festooned with gargoyles. In the late summer afternoon, its spires cast knifelike shadows down the avenue.

  Patty emerged balancing a large box in one arm and the baby in the other. The baby started to squall, so Mer hustled to help with the package.

  As Meridy stooped to get back into the car, she felt the unmistakable sensation of a gun barrel pressed to the back of her head. The unnaturally loud click of the hammer being cocked.

  * * *

  I’ve heard my mom tell the story of her 1969 bust countless times.

  When she gets to this part, her voice drops into a menacing growl. “All right, ya goddamn hippie. You’re under arrest for interstate transportation of narcotics.”

  Meet Patrolman Robert Buxbaum: crewcut, Ban-Lon shirt, razor-sharp creases in his slacks.

  In my mom’s version, Buxbaum is her nemesis, the comic-book villain. The evil super cop determined to vanquish her. “The guy got a sadistic kick out of scaring us,” she says, still outraged decades later. “Three unarmed women and a crying baby. Did he think we were going to resist arrest? He didn’t have to hold a gun to my head, for Chrissake. Then he cocks the hammer! I thought he was going to kill me.”

  Buxbaum herded the women and baby into the Federal Building and down a seemingly endless corridor to a bare room empty but for a long table. He placed the sealed package in front of Meridy, and said, “Open it.”

  Mer was terrified. She felt sure that if she opened that package she was going to prison, so she gambled, hoping to buy a little time. “That’s not addressed to me,” she said, her heart pinballing around her chest. “Isn’t it illegal to open someone else’s mail?”

  Buxbaum’s jaw twitched.

  The patrolman tried to intimidate Sue and Patty into opening the box, but they followed Mer’s lead. The proper addressee slept in Patty’s arms, saliva bubbling on his lips, hands balled beside his cheeks. He wouldn’t be opening mail for years.

  Mer watched Buxbaum’s face rinse through deeper shades of pink. “He was really losing it,” she tells me. “You could just see his blood pressure going up.”

  Finally, the patrolman sliced into the box himself. The dusky scent of Mexican gold bud wafted through the room.

  A female officer performed the strip searches and found the girls’ orifices vacant of drugs. Mer’s wicker purse, however, was more interesting.

  My mom’s purses have always been cornucopias of random crap. The cop who sifted through her belongings would’ve pulled out coconut oil, makeup, art supplies, toothpicks, jewelry, and countless scraps of paper. Plus four seeds, three joints, two roaches, and a partridge in a pear tree.

  * * *

  Today, though marijuana remains a political hot topic, it’s been decriminalized for certain controlled uses in most states. As of 2019, Wisconsin remains strict; the only permitted cannabis is nonpsychoactive CBD prescribed for medical conditions. Still, getting caught with an old roach isn’t likely to land someone in the big house anymore. But back then, one could do hard time for any amount of pot.

  Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been inundating the American public with antipot propaganda under the guidance of booze prohibitionist Harry J. Anslinger. Lurid coverage of bud-induced crimes and propaganda films like Reefer Madness riled the public’s fear of the “killer weed.” One article Anslinger wrote himself began:

  The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana, and to history as hashish. It is a narcotic used in the form of cigarettes, comparatively new to the United States and as dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake.

  This purported deadly viper had been used medicinally for at least three thousand years in Asia and Africa. It had been an important pharmaceutical component in the United States since the mid-1800s. According to the New York Times, twenty-nine out of thirty members of the American Medical Association disagreed with claims about the dangers of cannabis in a survey taken at the beginning of Anslinger’s crusade. Furious, Anslinger systematically targeted pro-cannabis doctors with threats and ultimately bullied the AMA into reversing its stance. In 1941, he strong-armed the United States Pharmacopeia and Formulary into purging cannabis from its pages—where “Indian hemp” had previously been listed as a remedy for more than one hundred ailments.

  Antipot legislation gradually populated the books at both federal and state levels, but recreational marijuana use only increased.

  There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

  Jazz and blues musicians composed songs about “tea”; the Beats wrote odes and great rambles under its effects. Weed was driven underground but never stamped out. Smugglers brought it up from Mexico and farmers grew it in the backwoods. It was alcohol prohibition all over again. Then rock ’n’ roll happened, and hippies passed joints to the white middle class. By the late sixties, America’s youth was smoking dope as a rite of passage.

  Enter Richard Nixon. Blustering with law-and-order rhetoric, he harnessed the fears and frustrations of the “silent majority” toward what historian Dan Baum calls the “lawless wreckers of their own quiet lives—an unholy amalgam of stoned hippies, braless women, homicidal Negroes, larcenous junkies, and treasonous priests.” The Nixon administration swiftly identified drug criminalization as a powerful weapon to wield against its foes.

  Decades later, Nixon’s chief legal advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted as much in a 1994 interview with Baum in Harper’s Magazine.

  The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

  Nixon claimed that drugs were “decimating a generation of Americans,” but the facts didn’t support him. As Baum points out, more people died from falling down the stairs in 1969 than from all drug use. Eighteen times as many people lost their lives to cirrhosis of the liver, a condition associated with alcoholism. Marijuana has never caused a single known death.

  Antipot laws were rooted not in science, medicine, or sociology, but in politics and racism. Sentences varied dramatically and could be extreme. Black Panther Lee Otis Johnson got hit with a thirty-year prison sentence for passing a joint to an undercover cop at a party in 1968. A white, twenty-year-old University of Virginia track star named Frank LaVarre got twenty years for possession of three pounds of marijuana in 1969—the same year Mer and Patty were busted with 2.2 pounds. LaVarre was later pardoned by a different judge after a heartbreaking portrait in Life magazine. In the days before mandatory sentencing, the courts had ample discretion to mete out punishment according to personal beliefs. Mer faced potentially life-crushing charges.

  * * *

  Meridy used her one phone call to contact her dad. Bill was not a pot smoker and surely didn’t approve of the jam his daughter had gotten herself into, but he played it cool. “Just keep your mouth shut,” he told her. “Don’t say word one until I get down there with the lawyer.”

  Meanwhile, the booking officer was pressing Mer for basic information. He struck her as kind, maybe sympathetic, but she couldn’t give him her address. There was the oak trunk full of Mexican weed that she and her roommate were storing in their living room. Plus, they each had their own stashes of LSD, mescaline, peyote, speed, or whatever the drug du jour was. Mer thought it would be a matter of time before the police figured out her ad
dress.

  So she lied. “My dad can’t get a lawyer,” she told the nice cop, scrunching her eyebrows. “Couldn’t I have one more call? I don’t know what I’ll do . . .” When she started sobbing—easy to do as she was genuinely terrified—he gave in.

  Mer phoned her apartment. “I’ve been arrested for possession of marijuana,” she said. “Take care of things.” Picking up the signal, her roommate rushed from room to room gathering and flushing drugs.

  * * *

  Mer’s dad had once owned the Loop Super Bar in downtown Milwaukee near the police station. After catching his nephew embezzling funds, Bill lost his bar and went to work at a local tavern until he slipped two disks in his spine lifting a keg of beer. Mer was thirteen when her dad went on disability permanently. Still, Bill kept friends on both sides of the law and friends who bridged the gap between. With Mer and Patty facing serious charges, he called on an old lawyer pal, Milton Bordow, to represent both girls.

  Bordow was slick—a fast walker, smooth talker, and natty dresser. A man who knew how to work the system. He argued that because the package was addressed to someone else—the baby—and because Buxbaum had opened the box himself, the subsequent search and seizure was illegal. In a December 3, 1969, hearing, Bordow petitioned for dismissal.

  “I don’t buy that, by golly,” the judge snapped. “He gets a report and two women pick up a package. They’re both involved in the handling of a package of marijuana. It was found to contain marijuana. In a further search of this defendant, [he] actually found more marijuana on her person. Motion to dismiss denied.”

  By golly. Did people really talk like that? The transcript reads like a moralistic 1950s crime drama. Court dates slogged on through a slushy winter, derailing Mer’s studies. Instead of returning to Madison to resume classes, she languished at her parents’ house in Milwaukee. One evening, she noticed an unmarked car across the street and recognized Buxbaum in the front seat, about as subtle as Joe Friday on Dragnet. She told the lawyer, but he seemed unsurprised; he figured Buxbaum was hoping to patch the holes in his case. Mer’s job was to stay home and give him nothing to use.

  She watched television. The trial of eight young activists charged with conspiring to incite violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago dominated local news. Courtroom drawings depicted Bobby Seale chained to his chair in view of the jury, silenced by tape covering his mouth and fabric tying his jaw shut. Photos showed Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin wearing judicial robes and cocky smiles, hot to heckle the judge. Protesters flooded the streets outside the courthouse, facing down cops wielding well-worn billy clubs. Stuck watching the country convulse on her parents’ black-and-white Motorola, Mer felt utterly isolated.

  Bordow used antipot propaganda to his clients’ advantage, portraying them as well-behaved young ladies who’d become temporarily confused under the deleterious effects of the Devil’s lettuce. No Abbie Hoffman, Mer put on an act of innocence, dressing for court appearances in a blue church dress with a Peter Pan collar, her curly hair wrestled into braids. Buxbaum never missed a hearing. Even when his presence wasn’t required, she remembers him always being there, sitting bolt upright in the front of the gallery.

  Mer’s mother was barely speaking to her and never once came to court, but her dad accompanied her every time—which was a treat. They’d sit together and dream up tortures for Buxbaum. Bill would whisper, “I’ll serve him a cow-piss gimlet.” And Mer would whisper back, “We’ll put his balls in a blender.” They’d end up in fits from trying not to giggle in the courtroom.

  Ultimately, Bordow got the matter transferred to another judge—one who saw things his way. Buxbaum had broken the chain of custody and blown the case. On March 20, 1970, the complaints were ruled “defective.”

  Case dismissed.

  * * *

  The story might have ended there, but Patrolman Buxbaum was just getting started. He seemed to take the loss personally. He had screwed up his own case by opening the package, and perhaps he resented Mer for manipulating him into a rookie mistake. Maybe he couldn’t stand getting bested by a hippie, a young woman at that. Or maybe he really did think Meridy was a criminal mastermind who must be stopped. Whatever the reason, he nursed a grudge.

  A week after the judge’s decision, Bill received a call from a friend at the station. “Be sure your kid keeps her nose clean. Buxbaum’s not done with her. He’s fishing for a new warrant.”

  “No kidding,” Bill said. “He’s right across the street.”

  Buxbaum had been staking Mer out for months, but after he lost the case, it got worse. If Mer borrowed her dad’s Malibu to go to the grocery store, Buxbaum would show up behind her, not even trying to blend into traffic. Mer thought about confronting him, but she was afraid; the memory of his gun barrel against her head remained fresh.

  Mer couldn’t go on dates or relax with friends because she might jeopardize them by bringing a policeman along. She intended to transfer to the Milwaukee campus to finish her degree, but what if he tailed her to school? It was humiliating. She felt trapped. The harassment dragged on for months.

  But he was a cop. What could she do?

  Then, in the depths of winter 1970, Bill came into Mer’s bedroom where she was drawing. “Get this,” he said, already laughing. “Buxbaum was bending over to put a traffic cone in the street, and he got hit by a truck—right in the tuchus. The putz is dead!”

  Mer dropped her charcoal pencil, suddenly unmoored. A release of pressure so unexpected that she felt she might go flying around the room like an open balloon. She was free.

  * * *

  I first heard the story of Mom vs. Patrolman Buxbaum on the barge. I was a kid; I don’t know how old. She was telling the story to a customer, but I was hanging around as usual. When she got to the part where the evil cop gets hit in his derriere, the barge rocked with laughter.

  It became one of my favorite stories. There’s comfort in a tried-and-true ending, in the familiar moment when the bad guy meets his demise. The huntsman eviscerates the wolf. Gretel shoves the witch into the oven. The good guy wins, which means the good guy will always win.

  When you grow up knowing that the cops could show up at any moment to drag your parents to prison, the death of an officer with a hard-on for hippies is what passes for a happy ending.

  Although, for my family, this ending was also a beginning.

  My mom took the demise of her nemesis as a cosmic green light. She would soon move to San Francisco, launch a high-profile magic-brownie business, and spend the next quarter century dealing large quantities of marijuana. And while it’s impossible to be sure, I suspect that none of this—San Francisco, Sticky Fingers Brownies, me—would’ve happened without Buxbaum. The way he hounded my mom and was then suddenly wiped out of her life as if by the hand of some god. A sense of invincibility buoyed her throughout her illicit career.

  In reality, Buxbaum wasn’t killed in the car accident as my mom believed. When I unearth his obituary, I learn that he survived the accident—barely—and ultimately died of cancer in 1999. Whether this discrepancy arose through confusion on Bill’s or Mer’s part, I don’t know. Either way, Buxbaum was injured gravely enough to keep him on disability until his death almost thirty years later. The effect on my mom’s life was the same. Buxbaum fucked with her and paid a heavy karmic price; she charged forth, overconfident and unscathed.

  Truth is untidy. There are no good guys, not really. No bad guys either. Robert Buxbaum’s obituary describes him as a “loving father,” “dear grandpa,” and “beloved brother.” He sounds like a family man, not a supervillain—just someone who might have taken his job too seriously. He survived a terrible accident and undoubtedly suffered during his years on disability and his battle with cancer. But what interrupted his life made mine possible. When the accident got him out of my mom’s way, she popped like a champagne cork. That energy propelled her into the next phase.

  When I ask my mom if she learned any lessons from her 1
969 bust, her answer is pure bluster: “Yeah,” she says. “Don’t get caught.”

  * * *

  In 1971, the War on Drugs officially began. Describing drug abuse as “America’s public enemy number one,” Nixon announced a “new, all-out offensive.”

  Months before, Congress had ratified the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 as part of a massive omnibus crime bill. Buried among its pages were major curtailments to civil rights. Narcotics agents could now conduct no-knock raids (breaking down doors unannounced); preventative detention became an option for arresting suspects before they committed a drug crime; and witnesses could be jailed indefinitely for refusing to testify in drug cases.

  The new legislation created a scheduling system that ranked drugs according to their health risks, addictiveness, and medicinal value. It also mandated that a blue-ribbon committee evaluate the cannabis threat once and for all. With this investigation pending, marijuana was temporarily placed in Schedule 1—the category reserved for drugs with the highest abuse potential and no accepted medical use.

  Nixon packed the committee with his drug-hawk cronies. “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana,” he told his chief of staff in 1971. “I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.” But the chairman he’d appointed, a retired Republican governor of Pennsylvania, took his job seriously. Raymond Shafer commissioned more than fifty research projects and conducted extensive hearings with scientists, community leaders, doctors, students, and law enforcement, recording thousands of pages of transcripts. When the report arrived in 1972, it was 1,184 pages long.

  It was not what Nixon had in mind.