by Alia Volz
The crowd broke through police lines, tore the elegant ironwork off the doors of city hall, and used it to break windows. They set dumpster fires and trashed nearby buildings. Police attacked with tear gas and batons, while rioters threw rocks and bottles. Several policemen had to be rescued after getting trapped inside city hall when the crowd surrounded the building. By the end of the night, twelve squad cars had gone up in flames, their melting sirens moaning like wounded animals.
Reporter Warren Hinckle was on Castro Street when rogue squad cars rolled up: “They came in marked cars, first in twos, then in threes,” he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The cars were sardine-full of cops; three in the back seat, sometimes three in the front.” Never mind that many of the people who’d stayed in that neighborhood were the ones not rioting at city hall. Officers were heard yelling “Banzai!” as they charged into the Elephant Walk—one of Mer’s regular brownie stops and a favorite performance venue of Sylvester’s. Cops bludgeoned patrons and employees, broke windows and chairs, and shattered the artful elephant-motif stained glass, raining shards onto those cowering behind the bar. As one bar patron who was hospitalized with five broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung commented later, “They were down here to crack a few heads open.”
A former police inspector who’d tagged along with Hinckle that night found Captain Jeffries directing troops, and confronted him: “It was all quiet before you sent these guys in here. You’re provoking these kids and putting a lot of cops in danger. What kind of police work is this?”
“We lost the battle at city hall,” the captain snapped. “We aren’t going to lose this one.”
* * *
Patrolman Jerry D’Elia, a single dad, had just come home to his kids after a long day on Muni transit detail when the call came in to go back on duty. D’Elia assumed it was a prank and hung up. The dispatcher called back and explained that there was a problem with the White verdict and that all hands were needed. They had even put out a mutual aid request for surrounding counties to send available officers.
By the time D’Elia got to Castro Street after putting his kids to bed, the melee had escalated. Police were getting pelted with beer bottles and debris. D’Elia wasn’t close enough to the Elephant Walk to see what happened there. “But tensions were running pretty high by then,” he says, thinking back. “The cops were really heated because Gain muzzled everybody. We were a really well-trained big department and he wouldn’t let us clear the streets or anything. So once that happened—once they knew we weren’t going to do anything—well, we kind of became piñatas for them.”
D’Elia joined a skirmish line on Market Street. He remembers glancing down the line and seeing a group of Castro guys poking his deputy chief in the chest, and saying, “You take one more step . . .” At another point, he struggled to process a surreal vision of flaming car tires rolling downhill toward him and the other police.
At about two in the morning, D’Elia and some of his colleagues decided of their own volition to disperse. “We were so disgusted, we left,” he says. “Just one by one, the whole thing dissolved. We didn’t cross their line and I guess they got tired, too. Everybody went home to fight another day.”
Most news outlets reported that sixty-one police officers and more than one hundred civilians were injured that night. The Police Officers Association claimed it was the other way around, with twice as many cops hospitalized as civilians. Either way, people got hurt.
* * *
When Dan Clowry got to work the next morning, he was stunned to see the Elephant Walk’s windows boarded up and glass all over the sidewalk. He had marched to city hall with everyone else but left when things started getting broken. One of his regulars came in for coffee after being released from the ER. He had pins in his arm from getting whaled on with nightsticks. “They beat him into a corner,” Dan recalls. “And then they beat him some more.”
Mayor Feinstein thought the manslaughter verdict was a miscarriage of justice, but she could not abide rioting. She gathered prominent gays and lesbians in her office the next morning. Permits had already been issued for a street party to celebrate Harvey Milk’s birthday later that night. According to Cleve Jones, Feinstein had assembled them to explain her decision to summon the National Guard. Convinced that this would only escalate violence, he dissuaded her by lying. “I have five hundred trained monitors ready to keep the peace on Castro tonight,” he bluffed. “If you keep the police away, there will be no violence.”
The fib worked. Activists spent the day teaching last-minute volunteers how to monitor a crowd. They planned escape routes in case people needed to scatter. Finally, Cleve marshaled the ultimate peacekeeping weapon: he asked Sylvester to perform.
That night, some people showed up for the celebration wearing helmets and carrying baseball bats. The mood was tense. But when Sylvester started to groove, the crowd got high and danced in the street. The cops maintained their distance, and no harm was done.
At one point, someone in the crowd burst out screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead and he’s never coming back!” People surrounded and embraced the man, holding him as a group, while Sylvester led the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to Harvey Milk.
* * *
When Mer did her run later that week, some businesses were still boarded up. People wore their injuries like badges of honor. Doug had designed a beautiful bag that week: a Buddha-like face in meditation, with the I Ching hexagram “11. T’ai/ Peace” on his forehead. Mer thought Castro Street looked more like a war zone.
New graffiti in the neighborhood struck a different chord than before. One wall read, DAN WHITE & CO. YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE, FOR VIOLENT FAIRIES WILL VISIT YOU EVEN IN YOUR DREAMS.
“We were swaggering,” Cleve says about the mood following what became known as the White Night Riots. “Yeah, we were swaggering.” He brings up something Allen Ginsberg told the Village Voice after the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn: “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.”
The cops didn’t come around so much after that.
* * *
As 1979 careened into summer, Sticky Fingers reached a degree of notoriety that sometimes unnerved Mer. Everyone seemed to know who they were, and thanks to the raucous costume parties and Cheryl’s Friday-night warehouse sales, a growing number of people also knew where they operated.
Early June, one of Mer’s wharf customers told her that the extra brownies he was buying were for a friend heading to the SALT II talks in Vienna; he planned to smuggle them in his suitcase. Another customer said that the famed columnist Herb Caen was purchasing brownies through a friend. “Cool,” Mer said. “So long as he doesn’t put us in his column.”
Sticky Fingers had been courted by writers—one who wanted to include the Brownie Ladies in a book on iconic San Francisco women—and a few journalists hoping to write articles, but the hexagrams were never right, so the brownie crew demurred.
A photojournalist named Laurence Cherniak convinced them to reconsider. He had some impressive bona fides—like founding what was probably the world’s first head shop in Toronto in 1965 (predating San Francisco’s legendary Psychedelic Shop by several months). Cherniak also marketed his own line of purple-and-red-speckled rolling papers, which were popular then. He’d been documenting hashish production worldwide since the 1960s, and his sensual images often graced the pages of High Times. Now he was launching The Great Books of Hashish, the first in a planned trilogy to be published by And/Or Press in Berkeley. The first book focused on the Middle East, but the second one would include a section on the United States, and Laurence’s editor sent him to find the famous Sticky Fingers Brownies.
Dennis Peron made the introduction. Cherniak was handsome and loquacious, with a shock of dark hair and olive skin. He promised to refer to Sticky Fingers only by their business title and exclude personal information and identifiable photos. He came to the warehouse bearing an astounding hunk of opiated Nepalese Temple
Ball hash to share.
As usual, hexagrams had the final say. This time the oracle gave a green light.
Between June and August 1979, Cherniak hung around the warehouse, photographing the baking process. Mer even brought him along on a Saturday sales route.
“They were producing thousands of brownies at that time,” Cherniak says, looking back. “And I remember standing over the warm stove as the butter was melting, and then stirring in the cannabis and carefully mixing each ingredient in. How much care went into each stage of preparation. So when we carried the brownies up to the twentysomething floor of the Transamerica building to deliver them, that love was present. I saw the joy and gratitude come over the faces of their customers, who returned that love. That’s what it’s all about.”
When I ask Laurence if, in his extensive travels through the underground cannabis world of the 1970s, he ever encountered an operation like Sticky Fingers—either in scope or in the relationship they had with their community—he doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not,” he says. “If it wasn’t happening in California, it wasn’t happening in the United States at all. This was where it was revolutionary. That’s why I came several times to photograph the process. And why I have that wonderful picture of you in my book.”
The picture Laurence is referring to appears in The Great Books of Cannabis, his second volume, which begins with a preface by Timothy Leary. You see a pan of gooey, freshly baked brownies along with a brick of weed, a small pile of homegrown, an array of wrapped brownies, and—invading one corner of the frame—my blonde head and one curious blue eye staring straight into Laurence Cherniak’s lens.
17
Give It Up and You Get It All
Doug dreamed of an earthquake. Crevasses opened in city streets. Buildings collapsed, sending dust plumes into the sky. A gleaming tidal wave reared so high that the Transamerica Pyramid looked like a child’s toy. People swam in water poisoned by their own sewage. There would be famine because we’d forgotten how to grow food, disease because too many people lived in close proximity. Waking up, he thought, Mother Earth is pissed. And we had better be ready for her wrath.
To survive our karma, mankind would have to return to simplicity. Go back to the land, restore harmony. The meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania that March should have been a wake-up call. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was a mere fifty miles from San Francisco. What sort of fools built a nuclear weapons research facility on a major tectonic fault?
Doug had recently seen in an article that major earthquakes came in cycles of roughly eighty years. The 1906 quake had hit seventy-three years ago. Sometimes Doug felt like the only lemming in the pack to look around and say, Hey, guys, isn’t that a cliff up ahead?
The big one was coming. Doug did not want to be in a crowded city when it hit.
* * *
“The big one is always coming,” Mer argued, exasperated. “You’re just freaked out because you had a seizure. And if you would take your damn Dilantin like you’re supposed to, this wouldn’t happen so often.” They were having coffee in the kitchen. The kids were playing with a Playskool vacuum that sounded like a cross between a popcorn maker and a machine gun.
“It’s not the fucking epilepsy,” Doug countered. “People aren’t supposed to live piled up on top of one another.”
Maybe Doug didn’t see the pattern, but Mer did. He’d have a grand mal seizure in bed, and in the days and weeks that followed, his dreams would become apocalyptic. Even when he wouldn’t admit he’d had an attack, she could tell from his behavior. The spaciness, the brooding, the scary pronouncements.
Doug talked about “getting out of the rat race” more and more since they’d been making trips to Willits. Mer could see that he loved it up there, how he relaxed and brightened. Maybe it would be good for their marriage to get Doug away from the pressures of city life. It could be good for raising a child, too. Open fields, blue skies, and all that.
But Mer wasn’t a country girl.
“Look,” Doug said. “Maybe you think earthquakes are no big deal because we’ve been through a couple of shakers. But we haven’t seen shit. Tens of thousands of people are going to be wiped out by what’s coming.”
Mer didn’t know what to think. Sure, there could be a big earthquake. But was that a reason to move? You didn’t leave Hawaii because there might be another tsunami. You didn’t abandon Kansas because your house could get picked up in a twister. Doug was psychic but not infallible. Were the apocalyptic dreams fears? Hopes? Visions of the future?
Mer, meanwhile, had been having nightmares about a bust: police kicked down the door while Carmen baked and the Wrapettes gossiped at the table; three cops dressed all in black slipped in like ninjas during the night to steal Doug’s ledgers; a customer reached into a pocket for money and instead came out with a badge. There were dreams of losing her family. Dreams that ended in prison.
Early July, Dan Clowry at the Village Deli told Mer about an unsettling incident at the café. An unfamiliar man had come to the counter and ordered a brownie. Dan put a regular chocolate brownie on a plate for him.
“Don’t you have magic brownies here?” the guy said.
Dan feigned surprise. “Gosh, not that I know of! We’re just a café.”
The guy blinked pointedly, paid for his unmagical brownie, and ate it on the way out the door.
“I don’t know why,” Dan told Mer. “But I knew he was police. Anyway, he wasn’t one of us.”
As usual when anxiety kicked in, Mer lay on the barge in her room and tossed hexagrams. What is my inspiration for this week’s brownie run? and What are the effects of continuing to sell at the Village Deli? Indications were all right, so she sallied forth.
* * *
Now that Mer was no longer breastfeeding, there was more blow in the house—and that bothered Doug. Not just for occasional parties anymore, but for the pre parties and post parties and between parties. The ladies would bring stuff home from their brownie runs. Look what so-and-so traded me!
On coke, Mer and Cheryl buzzed with ideas and humor, but the drug had a stiffening effect on Doug. It left him stressed and edgy, electricity fizzing in his brain. Late one night, he blew his nose in the bathroom and saw red streaks on his handkerchief. Suddenly, blood gushed from his nose down over his mustache and lips. In the bathroom mirror, his face looked drawn and somehow jagged. He heard Mer and Cheryl cackling uproariously in the kitchen, and thought, This is not my divine path.
Thereafter, he worked against party plans—which made him the bad guy.
Once, he came home to find Mer giggling hysterically on her bed with some flaming gay guy Doug didn’t even know. Doug thought, Why the fuck is this man in bed with my wife? He knew she wasn’t cheating, but it chafed him to see her in tears of laughter with a stranger while their own conversations drifted into frequent arguments, the joy draining out of their shared life.
Doug sealed himself behind the copper doors of his studio. His paintings came slowly, laboriously. Art, for him, was about revealing paths toward enlightenment. The message had to be perfect. Sometimes he’d cover an inch of canvas in a whole day. Sometimes all he did was undo his work from the day before. Sometimes all he could do was think.
Meridy, on the other hand, turned out drawings and paintings in a kind of ecstatic frenzy. She didn’t have her own studio but worked wherever, whenever. If she didn’t work, she became touchy and overwrought; but as long as she applied pigment to a surface, she seemed pleased with herself at the end of the day. It was all so easy for her.
* * *
Summer 1979, a book came out that would have a major impact on my dad’s life. To this day, he keeps a copy prominently displayed on his bookshelf: Sexual Secrets: The Alchemy of Ecstasy. The spine is cracked, pages worn from being referenced repeatedly over the years. (I remember this book being around throughout my childhood; our copy bears crayon marks from when I colored a detailed drawing of a blow job in grass gree
n.)
Sexual Secrets is a compendium of sex and mysticism rooted in Eastern traditions. The jacket copy describes it as the “distillation of more than two thousand years of practical techniques for enhancing sexual awareness and achieving the transcendental experience of unity.” The author, Nik Douglas, had studied for eight years in the Himalayas and did many of his own translations from Sanskrit. The text—scholarly, dry, research heavy—appears alongside hundreds of original illustrations by collaborator Penny Slinger as well as reprints from pillow books and sacred texts.
The book was an instant hit among spiritual seekers like my dad. I imagine him reading it in the armchair in his studio surrounded by his own paintings, which incorporated symbols of Hinduism, Taoism, Tantra, and Native American religions. Not just paging through the erotic drawings but carefully reading the text. How spiritually serious he was, how sincerely he wished for enlightenment.
I envision him arriving at page 336 and beginning the section “Male Homosexuality” with a mixture of trepidation and thrill.
Nik Douglas depicts homosexuality as a perversion of the natural balance between masculine and feminine energy—an abomination. He claims it’s the negative result of aggressive copulation between the parents, an unhealthy pregnancy, or a childhood without male role models. The author describes gay men as having the “hormonal chemistry and minds of women” and anal sex as “unnatural, unhealthy and potentially damaging to the psyche.” He waxes at length about various religions that have condemned homosexuality for one reason or another.