by Alia Volz
Though no one knew it, the drought was far from over; 1977 would be the driest year recorded in California up to that point. But on December 29, and throughout the coming weeks, the sky released a long, wet sigh.
It had been a momentous year. Mer had glimpsed herself as a celebrity outlaw with a magician by her side. She imagined the two of them painting and healing people with their hippie witchcraft during the week. On weekends, Mer would play the good criminal, the beloved scofflaw. Getting one over on the squares, the rule makers, the money hoarders, the warmongers—the Patrolman Buxbaums of the world.
At the end of 1976, my mom imagined herself rising on a gleaming ocean swell.
The problem with waves, of course, is that they crash.
In the movies, drug dealers—and women who snort coke in bathrooms—end up either in prison or rehab or dead. That’s Hollywood.
But this is San Francisco, and real life is much more complicated. The wave my mom was riding wouldn’t crash for a while. Maybe the whole city was on that wave. It was still amassing power in late 1976. No reason to worry about inevitable crashes. Not yet.
7
The Power at Hand
After the big season at Ransohoff’s, Meridy was ready to cut loose. She wanted to ring in 1977 with romance, so she invited Doug on an escapade. They wound down Highway 1 to Big Sur, where majestic redwood forests met the Pacific and waves hurled themselves against rugged cliffs. Mer rented a rustic cabin near the coast. Barb was still visiting family in Milwaukee, so Boogie came along for the ride.
On New Year’s Eve, a powerful storm blew in off the ocean. Rain pummeled the roof. There was the loamy aroma of redwood mulch and mud. A fire crackled in the woodstove. The elements converged.
It was here that Doug and Mer first professed their love.
They sat facing each other in straight-backed chairs. Knees touching. Eyes closed. Holding hands. Doug guided them through a visualization to remove the psychic hooks sunk into their chakras by ex-lovers, needy friends, parental trips, and societal expectations. Cleansed, impurities shed, they aligned their intentions.
To love each other. To learn from each other. To be king and queen of their shared space. To promote peace and healing and enlightenment with their words and their work.
“Now picture a perfect red rose,” Doug said. “Spread the petals of this rose open and place all of your desires and intentions inside. Allow the petals to close so the rose holds everything you want from the new year. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“You sure?” Mer could hear him smile around the words.
“Absolutely.”
“Then blast that rose into smithereens!”
“Give it up and you get it all,” Mer said.
The next day, they ate mushrooms and tripped out on each other, on their melding minds and melting skin, on roaring oceans of love and the infinite white sky.
* * *
They shot their first roll of film together that weekend. My mom wears a blue flannel shirt, jeans tucked into leather boots laced up to the knee, and a come-hither look on her face. Her curls are springy in the Pacific wind. In one photo, she’s draped kelp around her neck like a feather boa and appears to be doing a shroomy dance routine. My dad, wearing his leather cowboy hat and tight jeans, hunches in front of a massive redwood with his fingers drawn like pistols. Their eyes are like pinwheels. Boogie wanders through the pictures, drenched, a long-legged mop, looking happy and a little mystified by the humans.
In a series snapped during a downpour, Mer, wearing a floppy fisherman’s hat and a plastic poncho, poses beside a road sign that reads IMPASSABLE IN WET WEATHER. She’s pink with laughter.
I can just hear my dad saying, “Dahling, you’re impahssible in wet weather!” in an exaggerated English accent.
And how my mom would give it a raunchy spin: “Baby, I’m just impossibly wet.”
Sometime during this adventure, my dad had a vision. Neither he nor Mer remembers the circumstances—whether he walked off alone to meditate while my mom drew, if it zapped into his mind out of nowhere or bloomed into a dream. He saw a man standing with his arms wrapped around a woman who cradled a blond baby boy. The infant clasped the world in his pudgy little hands. Glorious light beamed from the baby into the surrounding darkness: the spirit-child.
Doug was the kind of guy who’d trap a near stranger in his gaze and ask, dead serious, “So what is your purpose on this planet?” He was a seeker—the subcategory of hippie obsessed with spirituality. This would not turn out to be a phase for Doug but an enduring and defining characteristic of his personality.
Summer of 1971, when Doug was seventeen, he hitchhiked to Quebec—a last hurrah before beginning classes at UC Berkeley that fall. Having spent time in France as a preteen, he enjoyed this chance to use the language again. Somewhere on the Trans-Canada Highway, he climbed into a VW bus with a half-dozen longhairs. They smoked rubbery joints and gnawed magic mushrooms, while magnificent woods scrolled by outside the dingy bus windows.
The group stopped at a cool bottle-green river surrounded by high canyon walls. A girl from the van shed her skirts and stretched out naked on a rock slab, basking like a snake. She and Doug had stared into each other’s eyes on the ride up. He wanted to impress her.
Doug climbed to a jutting ledge twenty-five feet above the river. Nearby rapids drowned his companions’ voices and shushed the birds and insects. The sky was a devastation of blue. Gripping the edge with his toes, Doug squinted through the water’s surface for submerged boulders. It was a long way down. His blood sang in his skull and his gut ached from the psilocybin. A droplet of sweat tickled a path down his back.
A voice inside whispered. He didn’t listen.
Doug sprang into a sleek dive. Not even an illusion of flying, only plummeting. The surface broke with the sound of shattering glass, and there was a blast of wonder, a million cool tongues on his skin.
Then his head smacked the shallow riverbed, and he was lost.
When he crawled out of the water, his head was cocked at a forty-five-degree angle. He couldn’t straighten it. The pain wasn’t terrible once the dizziness passed, but his companions panicked and left him outside a doctor’s office in the nearest mountain village. Doug thought the country doctor seemed at a loss; after a cursory examination, Doug was sent on his way with a fistful of anti-inflammatories. He began hitchhiking toward his aunt’s home in Chicago for help. Then he met a guy who was heading to an ashram near the border. Doug had never seen one before; Chicago, he decided, could wait.
The ashram consisted of a large Victorian farmhouse and various outbuildings on a stretch of wild land. No heat or flushing toilets, but there was a fresh spring nearby. The communards raised animals and grew their own food in a vast garden. Everyone was expected to contribute. Doug, whose neck was still crooked, couldn’t do heavy labor with the other men, so they asked him to stay behind and paint a dingy outhouse white. It was an unpleasant job, but Doug saw it as an opportunity to work out some karma.
He would’ve liked to stay, but he got caught fooling around with a girl—verboten at this ashram. Four guys surrounded him and strongly suggested that he leave to get medical attention. As one man put it, “Go get your head on straight.”
Doug returned to the road, made his way to Chicago, then took a bus to Berkeley to begin school. His neck eventually healed.
Months later, he was working on a drawing assignment at his drafting table when he felt intense pressure from above that knocked him off his stool. The floor and ceiling seemed to squeeze him like a vise. Carpet fibers burrowed into his cheek. Doug saw his futon mattress nearby, though it looked to him like negative space, an empty grave. He dragged himself toward it, then tumbled into bottomless darkness.
It was his first epileptic seizure.
The attacks that followed were different. They began with multicolored lights floating into his peripheral vision, kaleidoscopic orbs of gold and violet and luscious green that loo
ked like mandalas. Doug felt an overpowering attraction to the lights, but the moment he tried to look at them directly, he seized, and everything went black until he regained consciousness. The attacks varied in intensity. His petit mal seizures were brief lapses that could go unnoticed in company, like a stylus skipping over a scratch on a record. Grand mal whoppers laid him flat about once a month. Recovery could be intense: headaches, nausea, vomiting, confusion, and the looming danger of permanent damage.
But these experiences weren’t entirely bad. Waves of ecstasy sometimes accompanied his preseizure auras. These many-hued mandalas manifesting in his peripheral vision before each attack could be incredibly beautiful. Like looking at God.
Doug’s doctor prescribed Dilantin, which controlled the attacks but made his gums bleed, and he resented having to take pills all the time. He’d taper off for days or weeks at a stretch, then start up again when the seizures got scary.
* * *
Doug’s mother, Jan, says he’s got his story all mixed up. According to her, the seizures started after a body-surfing accident in the South of France a year or two earlier—another incident in which his head met the ground beneath a body of water at high velocity. Jan’s memory is generally sharp; she may be right, though my dad is adamant about his version. Either way, my dad got his bell rung in his late teens, and his brain has periodically shorted out ever since.
The beginning of his epilepsy became one of my dad’s origin stories. He doesn’t have a ton of them. Decades of seizures and anticonvulsive medications have Swiss-cheesed his memory; entire swaths of history are simply gone. The stories he retains are often those he’s told many times, cemented by repetition. His own mythology.
Like my mom’s tale about Patrolman Buxbaum, the story might not be 100 percent accurate, but it does reveal some things he believes about himself: That he is damaged. That his life lessons must be painful. That he is touched by God.
* * *
A few years after the accident, a friend told Doug about the Berkeley Psychic Institute near the university. The founder and guru of BPI, Reverend Lewis Bostwick, was a robust man in his late fifties with sparkling eyes, a mischievous sense of humor, and a warm, paternal affect. “A psychic,” Bostwick said in a 1974 interview with Psychic Times, “is a person whose spiritual abilities are out of control and the minute he gets them under control he is no longer psychic; he’s a spiritual being.” He believed that the surge of energy from an epileptic attack could be harnessed and controlled without medication. “[O]ut of every ten people we get,” Bostwick said, “seven of our students are epileptics, or have a history of epilepsy and all of the sudden when we teach them to run the energy correctly, the epilepsy goes away.”
Doug’s grandmother Paula claimed to be married to a ghost. And his mother Jan had been the research director of a small paranormal society while Doug was in high school. An affinity for the occult ran in the family. Add to that Doug’s perennial yearning for a father figure and his frustration with epileptic meds, and you can see how he slipped into Bostwick’s orbit. The BPI guru once boasted to the San Francisco Chronicle that he could “make a phone call and have 200 psychics here in an hour.” In 1975, Doug dropped out of UC Berkeley to become one of them.
As a reverend of the Church of Divine Man, Doug was charged with “spreading the word.” In addition to private aura readings and cleanses, he teamed up with two other guys from BPI to offer trio readings for men only. The three male psychics would sit in a row facing their client, go into trance, and telepathically send one another impressions and images. The psychic sitting in the middle would speak, translating the images into words. They called themselves the Triangle, and printed business cards and flyers featuring a logo of triangles within triangles, black on white on black. Doug also taught BPI classes at his warehouse in the Mission.
Bostwick regarded drugs—including marijuana—as a distraction for the evolving psychic, a perceived shortcut that didn’t lead to genuine enlightenment.
After meeting Mer, Doug found himself pulled in two directions. His training would suggest disengaging from someone so enamored of indulgence. Doug had always cheated a little on the antidrug policy, but Mer tempted him into daily use. They’d split a magic brownie in the afternoon, then hit the town at night, spending her drug money on dinners and disco dancing—lights swimming across skin gleaming with sweat, the metallic tang of poppers in the air, a cocaine jitter channeled into his pumping hips and shimmying shoulders. Meridy’s eyes reflecting strobes of red and indigo. It was not what he had trained for, but it set him free.
* * *
Doug didn’t have an easy personality, as Mer quickly learned.
He could be giddy and playful, suddenly twirling her into a dip or prancing around with a bell pepper hanging from his ear. He giggled like a child. But he didn’t like being bested at anything and sometimes sank into black moods without warning. He seemed to enjoy throwing people off their game. His attention was heavy, his questions exacting to the point of interrogation.
But if you were sick of frivolity, if you sought life’s extremes, if you were looking for a magician, Doug hit all the marks. To Meridy, his self-seriousness was alluring, his intensity enchanting, his artistic eye impressive, his spiritual convictions captivating.
She was smitten.
She and Barb both started taking Doug’s psychic classes. Mer was learning to see auras—something she’d never been able to do. She loved color more than anything, and when she concentrated and trusted herself, she could now see colors swirling around people as they moved through the world. In figure-drawing sessions at the Art Institute, she replaced her charcoal with bright Conté crayons to capture the hues she’d begun to recognize. This one with cleansing purple, that one with the green of imminent change . . .
Of course, Mer had tricks up her sleeve, too. While Doug schooled her about auras and chakras, she taught him to use the tarot, astrology, and the I Ching. They rented side-by-side booths at a psychic fair; Doug read auras and Mer did tarot.
Their skills were complementary in a way that enthralled them both.
* * *
In the wet, early weeks of January, Mer implemented her new strategy of selling to people in their workplaces. She started on the wharf, going into touristy shops and galleries along Beach and Francisco streets. Next, she tackled the boutiques of Ghirardelli Square. She thought of it as “breaking in” new businesses, like walking in a stiff pair of shoes until the leather softened. She developed a five-step technique.
Step 1: Case the joint. Mosey in casually, as if by happenstance. Peruse the merchandise while getting a feel for the place. Do they have security? How many people are on staff and which one is in charge? Make small talk with the salesperson. “Wow, you’ve got fabulous stuff in here! Love the whole wall of scarves. Great colors.” Ignore your pounding heart but trust your gut. Don’t glance around wide-eyed like a prepubescent shoplifter.
Step 2: Pop the question. “Do you like brownies?” Waggle an eyebrow so they know you’re not talking about Sara Lee. If it’s a ‘no,’ exit calmly, making a mental note to steer clear.
Step 3: Drop a sample. “Try one, my treat.” Hand it over casually, as if it were a breath mint. Warn them to start with a quarter of a brownie. Then go on your way, all smiles.
Step 4: Make the sale. Stop by again a week later. You’ll know immediately if it’s a go. Some customers will invite you into a private room. Others will do the deal right at the cash register as you pretend to buy one of those colorful scarves. While you’re at it, buy a scarf. You can afford it.
Step 5: Watch it grow. The new client may buy a single brownie, a dozen, or several dozen. They’ll come to expect you every Saturday and will have the money ready. They may say, “Pop into the ice cream parlor on the corner. Peter is dying to meet you.”
The business spread organically—from Ghirardelli Square to the Cannery and the upper-floor office spaces where desk drones and telephone salespeople we
re trapped in a workday frame of reference; Meridy could snap them out of that. The ticket taker at the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf always bought a dozen. To do the transaction, he led Mer through a hidden door into a room cluttered with celebrity body parts: Judy Garland’s head waiting for repainting, Dolly Parton’s chipped little finger.
She learned the landscapes of kitchens and supply closets, and got to know people working behind the scenes—the cooks and dishwashers, the back-of-house managers, the seamstresses and warehousemen. There was something delicious about peering behind the facade of the City, like opening a mechanical clock to see the cogs dance.
Expansion was easy, so she kept going. Mer hired an underemployed musician named Cam Bruce to circle the block with extra brownies in his beater car while she ducked into the cafés, bookstores, and strip clubs of North Beach humming southeast of the wharf: City Lights bookstore, Vesuvio Café, the Savoy Tivoli, and North Beach Leather.
One January afternoon in North Beach, Mer found herself walking past Club Fugazi on Green Street, home to a cabaret called Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas, a hot ticket for the past three years. Fugazi was closed, but the door stood ajar, and she heard a singer rehearsing inside. On a whim, she slipped into the dim theater, where a busty brunette was working through a song at the piano. A man sat alone near the entrance. “Can I help you?”
Mer offered him a free brownie in a stage whisper.
“You must be the Brownie Lady!” he cried, not so quietly. “I’ve heard about you. Sure, I’ll try one of your treats.”
The following Saturday, he bought two dozen, and introduced her to more cast members, who seemed delighted. It made sense: smoking marijuana could leave singers hoarse, but brownies did no harm. The show was on hiatus, rehearsing acts for the coming season. They gave Mer comp tickets for opening night later that month.