by Alia Volz
On June 14, 1977, a state senator from Orange County named John Briggs stood on the granite steps of San Francisco’s city hall and announced his plan to get homosexuals banned from working in California schools. Briggs hoped to run for governor the following season and was looking for buzz, so he borrowed rhetoric from Anita Bryant. His team notified gay activist groups in advance of the press conference to draw a hostile crowd for the cameras.
A week later, four youths attacked a gay couple near Whiz-Burger Drive-In a few blocks from the Sticky Fingers warehouse. A nineteen-year-old stabbed Robert Hillsborough fifteen times in the chest, stomach, and face while screaming, “Faggot! Faggot!” long after the man was dead.
Hillsborough, a thirty-two-year-old city gardener whom local kids affectionately called Mr. Greenjeans because of the grass stains on his work clothes, became a martyr to rally around that summer. Thousands attended his memorial service.
* * *
Mer could hear the motors revving long before they came into view: dozens of tough-looking women decked out in leather and bandannas riding double on motorcycles. Signs read DYKES ON BIKES and WOMEN’S CONTINGENT. Applause swelled. In the crowd, Mer linked arms with Doug.
The 1977 Gay Freedom Day Parade was the biggest it had ever been. There seemed to be a million banners for a million clubs. Ministers for Human Rights, East Bay Lesbians, San Jose Gays, Straights for Gay Rights, Gay Socialists, Gay Teachers, the Gay Yacht Club. There was a gay marching band with baton twirlers, gay cowboys on horseback, even a contingent of gay Republicans. Dressed head-to-toe in white with a flower behind his ear, Sylvester rode in the back of a convertible looking as prim as a black Queen of England.
A row of giant signs aligned Anita Bryant’s smugly wholesome face with images of Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and burning crosses. Throughout the parade, people carried flowers to pile on the steps of city hall in memoriam to the gardener who’d been murdered near Whiz-Burger.
Mer, who lived for color, cheered loudest for the more lavish, sparkling floats. Drag queens in headdresses and elaborate gowns, a peacock with a six-foot tail fanning behind her, a shimmering mermaid surrounded by an undersea tableau, a pharaoh among glittering pyramids.
And then, coolest of the cool, Grace Jones cruised by, swathed in fiery orange fabric. Her oiled body and shaved head gleamed like obsidian as she sang her hit single, “I Need a Man,” in a resonant growl. An endless disco procession followed her.
Newspapers would estimate a crowd of 250,000—all walking in the same direction, toward freedom, responding to the hatemongering with renewed strength. Watching the community come together filled Mer with hope. She felt increasingly confident that this was the right time and place to have a baby. The world was becoming freer. Their son could be who he wanted to be, love whom he wanted to love. She enlaced her fingers with Doug’s; he squeezed her hand. They smiled together out at the sea of determined lovers.
11
Child of Life’s Long Labor
Doug awoke in the dark. He fumbled for the legal pad and pen on his nightstand. His eyes adjusted, capturing streams of watery blue drifting down from the skylights. His dream had started to fade, but he wrote what he could remember. When his pen ran off the right-hand side of the page, he used his finger to follow the indentations back across, and began a new line.
Doug had dreamed that he was in a collapsing building. He ran with a group of people from room to room, looking for an escape. Then he saw the spirit-child, his golden-haired son, standing calm and unafraid. The child’s blue eyes penetrated the illusion. I’m dreaming, Doug thought, and stopped running. Then they were in a summery field in the country. Looking at each other, smiling. The child said something to him. A name.
Doug strained to remember. It was an ancient name, one he’d heard before. But it had already fallen into the slipstream, back into his subconscious.
Meridy snored beside him. Her form hulked under the blankets, a she-bear in hibernation, her breathing labored under the extra weight of the unborn child inside her womb. Doug rolled onto his back and took a deep breath. If he stopped trying to remember the name, it might come back on its own.
In a few months, Doug would become a dad. Fatherlessness had defined his youth. His own dad had drowned when he was five, leaving him with scant memories, mere flashes of the time before. He remembered a moment of riding on his dad’s shoulders, as high as a bird. Another moment of perching on his dad’s knee, settling into the safe cage of his arms on Christmas morning. His dad’s indescribably unique smell swirled with that of his mother’s fresh-baked cookies. Then there was the endless time after. The boat ride to England with his brother and mother and her captain friend—how alone he’d felt even with them. The cold stone halls of Holmewood House, the housemaster who’d spanked his bare ass with a sneaker, and the headmaster who’d used a cricket paddle; Doug couldn’t remember his transgressions, only the beatings. His mother never remarried, never fell in love again. He’d had no positive male role models. Nobody to show him how to be a man.
This, Doug believed, was at the root of the attraction he sometimes felt toward other men: an old yearning for his father. Like a broken bone that hadn’t been set properly and ached from time to time. This child was Doug’s karmic contract, his destiny. He would experience the relationship he’d missed out on but in reverse. The father would raise the child; the child would heal the father.
Doug rolled onto his side and rested his palm on his wife’s stomach—hard with pregnancy, tacky with sweat. He felt it rise and fall with her breath. This was no ordinary child, no doubt about that. He would be a healer. And then, a whisper in his mind, Galen.
Galen, the ancient physician, one of the Greeks. Being careful not to wake Mer, Doug got up and padded into the kitchen, where a book of baby names sat beside a rolling tray. He flicked the lighter and looked up the name. It meant calm.
A healer of men, a healer for the people, for the world. Bearer of peace in a time of tumult. The calm eye at the center of a storm.
* * *
Warehouse life was chaotic. The only dependable routine was the production of brownies, but even that involved half a dozen people coming and going, smoking and drinking, laughing and arguing. Mer felt increasingly testy. There was plenty of space in the warehouse but no privacy. Sometimes she wished for a door to close.
One afternoon, she and Doug were walking around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. The wedding ring Jeep made was a little large for her finger. It had slipped off and Doug was holding it—but not holding it, exactly. He was playing with it, tossing it into the air, then catching it. “Come on, you’re going to drop it,” Mer cautioned as they started across a footbridge.
Doug ignored her, apparently enjoying ruffling her feathers. He never knew when to stop.
In the air, the ring caught light as it spun and fell smoothly into his palm.
He tossed it up again. The ring bounced off the rail and plink! A glimmer as it sank out of reach beneath the greasy green surface.
Mer was furious. They fought for days. By the end of it, Doug had agreed to build Mer her own room. He and Jeep erected walls and helped her set up her armoire and chest of drawers and a queen-size bed she bought secondhand. She still slept in Doug’s bed under The Eye of God, but when the pregnancy wore her out and messed with her moods, she liked to stretch out in her own space and read.
That autumn, the book was Dune by Frank Herbert. Mer didn’t usually go for science fiction, but Doug had read it over the summer and assured her that it was more than space gadgetry and aliens. She loved it. The characters all had unique philosophies and mantras that fascinated her. They used psychedelic drugs to enhance telepathy. Mer especially dug the Bene Gesserit, a powerful order of women whose psychic mastery ran centuries deep. Men feared them, believing them witches, but still depended on their insights and strength. Meanwhile, the Bene Gesserit used the men to further their own political ends.
Midway through the story, a Bene Ges
serit named Lady Jessica disobeys taboos and drinks the psychotropic Water of Life while pregnant. Awakened by the drug, the fetus inside Jessica’s womb absorbs the memories of her ancestors. Baby Alia is born speaking complete sentences and is so powerful and strange that even the other Bene Gesserit are terrified.
“Alia.” Meridy said the name aloud. It had music. The character was a little dark, but what a powerhouse! They were having a boy; Doug was certain of that, and Mer believed him; Galen it would be.
Still, she wrote Alia on a scrap of paper and tucked it in the back pocket of her maternity jeans. From time to time, she came across the scrap and whispered the name to herself before shoving it deeper into her pocket.
* * *
Any pregnant hippie worth her salt chose a natural birth. It would be painful, of course. But Mer didn’t want to be numb when Galen entered the world; she wanted to be present and clear.
She and Doug signed up for weekly Bradley method classes at nearby General Hospital, which was dabbling in some of the more mainstream New Age methods amid high demand. According to the Bradley teacher, a plump midwestern midwife, 90 percent of mothers who used the method gave birth with no medication at all, having learned to control pain through deep relaxation, breathing, and physical preparation. Physical preparation, Mer learned, meant squatting.
Squatting and meditation. Meditation and squatting. Kegel clenches and hoot breathing. Bland, healthy food. And plenty of rest. She tried to stick to the regimen. She ate all the vegetables and brown rice she could handle. She hooted and squatted and clenched. But rest? That wasn’t her style.
Mer took figure-drawing classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. She went dancing with Doug or Donald. She micromanaged the baking routine. Then she loaded herself with some thirty pounds of brownies and lumbered around the Castro on Fridays, the wharf and North Beach on Saturdays—returning to the warehouse achy and exhausted.
* * *
Castro Street was buzzing with news on July 22: the Big Top Marijuana Supermarket had gotten raided two nights before and a cop had shot Dennis Peron. Mer picked up bits of the story at different stops. Details varied as to how badly Dennis was hurt, who else had been arrested with him, and how much they’d confiscated. Mer finished her run feeling woozy.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story along with a photo of Dennis recovering from a shattered femur in the hospital, wearing his usual scraggly hairdo and mischievous smile. And damned if he wasn’t pinching what looked like a joint between his fingers.
According to the article, Officer Paul Makaveckas had originally claimed he opened fire because Dennis pointed a gun at him. When no gun was found, the story changed; now Dennis had hurled a five-gallon glass water bottle down the stairs at him. The cop then shot him in the thigh in self-defense. The SFPD vice squad arrested Dennis along with thirteen other people, a combination of employees and customers, and seized a serious quantity of pot along with hashish, hash oil, LSD, mushrooms, marijuana plants, $8,000 in cash, Big Top records, and letterhead stationery.
* * *
Dennis’s memory of his 1977 bust strays from the official take. “This guy with a gun was coming up the stairs,” Dennis says. “He had on a fatigue jacket, big hair, and a hat.” The Big Top had been robbed twice before, so Dennis panicked. Instinctively, he grabbed an empty Alhambra water bottle from the landing—a pathetic excuse for a weapon, but he was a peacenik and it was all he had. Then Dennis felt an explosion of pressure in his thigh. Collapsing backward, he dropped the bottle behind him. A second bullet whizzed past his ear.
Dennis still believed he was getting robbed. I’m going to die over money, he remembers thinking. It’s so mindless! He started pulling cash out of his pocket, yelling, “Take the money!”
When uniformed police came in behind the shooter, Dennis’s first reaction was relief. The cops are here—good. Then they thundered up the stairs and handcuffed Dennis while he bled on the landing. He didn’t learn until later that the gunman was a plainclothes officer. They had a warrant. Dennis had sold weed and LSD to a narc.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that police had confiscated “between 30 and 150 pounds of pot”—a perplexing range. Dennis claims they actually took two hundred pounds, but a “mouse” kept eating it in the evidence room. “More like a rat,” he jokes darkly. “It was Colombian pot, so this was a very selective rat.”
Decades later, in 2015, the cop who shot Dennis would go to prison for accepting bribes from would-be taxi drivers. For the moment, he was a hero; the Police Officers Association awarded Paul Makaveckas a Silver Medal of Valor for his bravery while being “attacked by a man with a five-gallon water bottle.”
* * *
Dennis’s bust left Meridy shaken. She had come so close to selling at the Big Top. Thirteen of Dennis’s associates had been picked up in the raid. If the I Ching hadn’t steered her away, Mer could have been among them. She didn’t want to have this baby in jail, but the brownies were their only source of income.
It was a close-enough call to make Mer worry—particularly about the ledger Doug insisted on keeping, meticulously logging the details of their business each week: how much money they’d earned, how much they’d paid Carmen and the Wrapettes, how many dozens they’d sold, how much pot they’d used. Money coming and going.
“Doug, we need to get rid of that ledger.”
“This again?”
“Records are bad. Records could put us away.”
“You’re generating an awful lot of negative energy around this.”
Mer considered stealing the ledger and getting rid of it herself, but it would cross a line of trust in their relationship. She turned to her hexagrams. Every Friday and Saturday before leaving the warehouse, Mer consulted the oracle for warning signs. Then she packed her duffels and headed out into the City to work her magic.
* * *
Late July, a monthly magazine called New West published an exposé by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy on some disturbing goings-on within the Peoples Temple. Ten temple defectors were accusing Jim Jones of conducting fake healings, bilking money and property from his congregation, subjecting temple members to brutal public beatings and humiliation, and manipulating political elections.
In the months leading up to publication, New West had received as many as fifty phone calls and seventy letters per day begging them not to run the article. Temple spokespeople went to the press with rebuttals before the article even came out. By the time the piece ran, Jim Jones was already gone, having absconded to the church’s agricultural mission in Guyana.
What most people—my parents included—wouldn’t understand until later was how deeply Jim Jones had insinuated himself and his followers into the liberal power structure. Jones counted among his supporters the likes of Governor Jerry Brown, Assemblyman Willie Brown, and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. Even First Lady Rosalynn Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale had taken time to meet with Jones personally.
Back in spring of 1977, two Temple defectors had taken their allegations to the police. To work on the case, District Attorney Joe Freitas had assigned a deputy district attorney named Tim Stoen as his liaison. Freitas would later claim that he had no idea that Tim Stoen was Jim Jones’s personal lawyer and a prominent member of the Peoples Temple.
Freitas had also assigned Tim Stoen to oversee the investigation into the voter fraud alleged in the 1975 election. Not only did Freitas direct the investigation into voter fraud alleged in the election that had brought him to power, but he did so with the assistance of a high-ranking member of the organization accused of perpetrating that fraud. As historian David Talbot puts it, “The foxes had free run of the henhouse, and they left only feathers.”
In 1979, after the Jonestown nightmare had played out, federal investigators would ask to see the voting rosters from the 1975 election—only to find some one hundred voter registration books missing. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Freitas’s office h
ad notified the registrar that the records were “no longer needed.”
Whether the Peoples Temple stole the 1975 election for Moscone and his cohort may never be known for certain. One can only guess whether cantankerous John Barbagelata—if he’d become mayor instead—could have done anything to stop Jim Jones or save his followers.
Even Harvey Milk, though less implicated than others, had shown his face at Temple services. He had also utilized the group to help distribute campaign materials. Once, Cleve Jones recalls, Harvey wanted a last-minute crowd for a midday press conference and told Cleve to call the Peoples Temple. Forty-five minutes later, three school buses pulled up carrying conservatively dressed African Americans. Jones didn’t appear that day himself. The crowd seemed to take cues from a muscular black man in mirrored shades who stood at the front of the group. When he clapped, they clapped; when he stopped, they stopped. Cleve found it chilling.
Patrolman Jerry D’Elia remembers those school buses well. “We used to laugh,” he says. “You know, in San Francisco at that time, we had over three hundred protests a year or something. And anytime they wanted a turnout for whatever the cause was, these buses would pull up . . . The Peoples Temple would show up and it would be like, Oh, here they are again!”
They even came in the dead of night. When hundreds of San Francisco deputies, police officers, and mounted patrol descended on the International Hotel to finally evict the two hundred elderly people who lived there, they found themselves faced—at 3:18 a.m.—with an estimated three thousand protesters, largely from the Peoples Temple. Authorities bypassed the human barricade by using a hook-and-ladder rig to access the roof, but it was a showdown.