by Alia Volz
I retreated into books, especially horror novels. During free-reading period at school, while other girls read the Sweet Valley High series, I dove into The Stand by Stephen King—an 823-page opus about a plague that wipes out most of humanity. It gave my kid brain a way of processing terror and grief from the safety of a fantasy with a happyish ending.
* * *
Most regulars came to our flat. But my mom did short weekly runs and a growing number of house calls to customers who were too sick to go out. Sometimes I’d tag along. After school one day, we delivered brownies to a wedding-cake Victorian up a steep side street in the Castro. These were new customers, my mom said, friends of Sylvester’s. I remember the door swinging open by itself—controlled by an old-fashioned automatic butler.
A man’s voice called, “Come on up, dear.”
He stood on the landing backlit by alcove windows. When my eyes adjusted, my breath snagged. He was shirtless, chest sunken like he’d been hit by a flying bowling ball. His sweatpants hung from protruding hip bones. Purple lesions dappled his chest and neck. Up near his collarbone, sores had grown together into a large butterfly. I’d seen KS plenty of times but not like this. I remember feeling embarrassed. Not by his scant clothing but by his scant flesh.
He seemed startled to see a kid. “Forgive me for not dressing up. Fashion’s the first thing to go.”
“That’s okay, sweetie,” my mom said. “I’m a pajamas-around-the-house girl, too. This is my daughter, Alia.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, she’s cool.”
“Alia, what a unique name,” he said. “I wish my parents had come up with something more exotic than David. It’s so pedestrian. Enchanté.”
When David turned to lead us toward the living room, my mom locked eyes with me, her expression a little frantic. Then we were in a large overheated room with gleaming hardwood floors and soaring ceilings.
“Sylvester raves about your brownies,” David said. “Food has gotten so . . . blech.”
“Dessert first,” my mom said brightly. “Guaranteed munchies.”
Near a pretty bay window, a hospital bed was cocked to a half-sitting position. It appeared empty until I realized that the small gray tangle of blankets was a person. Eyes closed, cheeks so paper thin that I could make out his teeth. Pale blond hair fanned behind his shoulders.
I knew he was dying.
“Keith, honey, wake up for a sec,” David said. “I want you to meet someone.”
An IV bag dangled from a hook above the bed, and my eyes followed the yellowish snake of tubing to Keith’s hand, the bruising around the needle, the bulge of his wrist bones. One finger twitched. He murmured.
“What’s that, baby?” David leaned close to his lover’s lips. He placed his palm gently on Keith’s cheek. Another murmur. “Okay, in a moment. I’m getting us those magic brownies.”
David faced us with a smile that wasn’t a smile. “He’s having a bad day.”
While they did the deal, I wandered around the room. A framed photograph sat on the mantel. Two men, shirtless on a beach, arms slung around each other. One looked like Tom Selleck without the chest fur, and the other had beachy surfer hair and bright blue eyes. Both were tanned and muscular, shoulders flecked with sand. I began to sweat.
“Now, don’t eat too much,” my mom was saying. “Start with a quarter of a brownie and give that forty-five minutes before taking more. I’m serious, they’ll have to peel you off the ceiling.”
“More like the floor,” David said with a rich laugh. The contours of his face softened. His teeth gleamed white. For a moment, he was handsome, almost Tom Selleck.
That radiance was the worst part.
In the car afterward, my mom put her hands on the steering wheel but didn’t start the engine. “Wow,” she said. “You okay?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“I wouldn’t have brought you in . . .” She put her clammy hand over mine. Her chin trembled and collapsed. I didn’t want to watch her cry, so I focused on the rooftops scattered below us like jigsaw puzzle pieces in a box top. You could see all the way to downtown. The Transamerica Pyramid rising above the stubby skyline, the gray Bay Bridge loping across the water to Oakland.
As we descended the hill, a van bearing the logo of Project Open Hand—a charity that delivered hot food to sick people—was heading up. “Would you look at that?” my mom said. “They’re bringing the food, and we’re bringing medicine to help the food stay down.” I felt her eyes on me. “You know we’re helping these guys, right?”
* * *
Blood pounded in my ears. The whole fourth grade had been ushered into the cafeteria, where a uniformed policeman was waiting. I was sure he’d come for me.
The cop introduced himself and explained that we’d be spending a lot of time together that semester.
We were going to learn how to Just Say No to drugs.
Once each week, amid the reek of old meatloaf, Juicy Fruit gum, and prepubescent body odor, I sat through lectures about the dangers of illegal narcotics like marijuana. About how to handle peer pressure and how to recognize dealers.
The program’s real name was Drug Awareness Resistance Education, but we all called it “D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs”—the slogan emblazoned on the bookmarks, notebooks, and T-shirts we could win by tattling on classmates the cop recruited to playact as dealers. They used corny lines like “Hey, little girl, want to buy some marijuana? It’ll make you look really cool . . .”
I could’ve told them that this wasn’t how it worked.
Instead, I circled the correct answers on D.A.R.E. quizzes, and chanted, “Just say no!” But it never occurred to me—not for a second—that the smiling policeman in the cafeteria could be anything but my mortal enemy. I still remembered the helicopters thundering over our house in Willits.
In the kitchen at home, I held an egg above a metal mixing bowl. “This is your brain,” I said, mimicking an antidrug commercial that was everywhere that year. I cracked the egg on the rim, and the golden yolk joined fifteen others atop a bed of white sugar. I clicked the electric beater on high, scrambling the mess together. “This is your brain on drugs!”
My mom cracked up.
I knew we were the good guys.
Even if it meant lying to police, therapists, teachers, other kids, everyone, really.
* * *
By this point, Meridy had been delivering brownies to Sylvester for ten years. First to a cluttered flat in the Castro, then to the flashy multifloor affair on Twin Peaks. Sometime in 1987, he moved down off the hill into a modest apartment on Collingwood.
There had never been a closet big enough for Sylvester. From the acid-drenched genderfuck theater scene that launched the late 1960s into outer space through the übermasculine Castro clone era and deep into the AIDS years, Sylvester was himself. A hippie and a disco superstar and a jazz crooner. A fabulous diva and a strong black man. Royalty parading down the street with his blond borzois and an entourage of boys—but also approachable and funny and generous. He was exceptional in the same way that the City could be exceptional for people chasing freedom.
Sylvester was Rubenesque. He’d do crash diets from time to time and his weight fluctuated, but he’d always been substantial. Late 1987, he started looking too thin. Mer worried. He was performing less, going out less. People gossiped.
One week, someone from Sylvester’s inner circle came downstairs to do the transaction with Mer at the door instead of inviting her up like usual. “Is he okay?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, just tied up.”
She kept delivering every Friday. But she never saw Sylvester again.
On Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day 1988, Sylvester made his illness public by leading the People with ARC/AIDS contingent of the parade. Riding in a wheelchair pushed by a friend, he wore a large black sun hat and held a single balloon in his lap. Mer didn’t attend that year. (“Too sad,” she says.) Others who were present described the crowd’s confusion: a long pause bef
ore recognizing Sylvester in his emaciated state, an audible gasp, a cheer, a sob, more cheering. By August, when Sylvester usually headlined the Castro Street Fair, he was too frail leave his apartment. A crowd gathered nearby and chanted his name so he could hear from his bed.
A chamber of San Francisco’s heart shut permanently when Sylvester died on December 16, 1988. It was the full stop at the end of an era.
21
The Wheel
On October 6, 1989, a gray Friday, Mer had wrapped up her run in the Castro and was driving to a customer’s house with a delivery when she passed a protest at city hall. The pink-triangle logo of ACT UP caught her eye. There was a parking space, so she snatched it. She could spare an hour.
ACT UP, the raucous, radical activist group that had roared to life in New York two years before, had now spread to several major cities. Even within the gay community, some people found them too extreme, but Mer admired their chutzpah. She didn’t attend meetings, but she sometimes joined protests. ACT UP coupled the serious study of potential new treatments with disruptive actions. They stormed news programs, heckled bureaucrats, burned effigies, and doused themselves in fake blood. Demands included transparency in FDA approval processes, early access to experimental medications, inclusion of women and minorities in drug trials, and involvement of activists in designing those trials to ensure that patients’ needs would be prioritized over the interests of scientists and pharmaceutical companies.
In time, the combination of headline-grabbing drama and procedural innovation would produce tangible changes—including expanded access to unapproved drugs for terminally ill patients. The FDA usually took about nine years to approve new drugs—a death sentence for many people with AIDS. In the depths of the plague, what was there to lose?
Mer eased into the crowd and soon ran into friends. Some of the protesters looked very frail; a few were in wheelchairs. Mer got swept up in chanting. Demonstrators wearing skeleton masks unfurled a large black banner reading, BASEBALL = DEATH, a reaction to Mayor Art Agnos’s proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new ballpark for the Giants—funds the activists wanted spent on treatment. The rally wasn’t huge, maybe two hundred people, but there seemed to be as many police as protesters.
The cops weren’t being friendly.
When the group marched up Market toward the Castro, police hemmed them onto the sidewalk, rapping the shin of anyone who stepped into the street. The crowd thickened as they moved, joined by the after-work crowd and people like Mer who couldn’t resist a protest. At Castro Street, Mer split off and headed back to the car to finish her deliveries. It was after she left that the night went mad.
Mer heard about it the next day. ACT UP had held a die-in, with some forty protesters sprawling in the street while others painted crime-scene outlines around their bodies. Another fifty people sat in the intersection and refused to move until the cops dragged them into paddy wagons. Demonstrators blew whistles and taunted the police.
The tipping point was undefinable. Suddenly, police were laying into people with billy clubs and kicking them with heavy boots. Like any Friday evening, the Castro was thronged with folks heading home or out to dinner, but the cops weren’t differentiating between protesters and bystanders. “They hit me with their billy clubs when I went to help a woman,” one man told a reporter. “I was just on my way home from work. I wasn’t even part of the protest.” Police forced people to line up against walls and trapped patrons inside shops and restaurants. After dark, a phalanx of officers in riot regalia marched up and down Castro Street, threatening to arrest anyone out of doors. One cop was heard repeatedly yelling, “We declare martial law!”
The Bay Area Reporter ran a multipage spread under the all-caps headline, CASTRO HELD HOSTAGE. Over subsequent days, reports about police using homophobic slurs and excessive force flooded the Office of Citizen Complaints. Though ACT UP was far from universally popular, riot cops stomping down Castro Street seemed like something from a totalitarian nightmare.
“I have been in San Francisco since 1977, marched with Harvey Milk and have participated in many (if not all) public demonstrations since. The police haven’t reacted like this since the White Night Riots of spring 1979,” wrote Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, a founding mother of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. This harked back to the night of Dan White’s manslaughter verdict when police had marauded in the Castro. “Whoever orchestrated the crackdown on ACT UP Friday night lost more than they gained,” the Sister concluded. “There is nothing that will make a queen more radical than having to sit in a police van for two hours without her nail polish!”
The Castro in 1989 stood in stark contrast to the prior decade. Harvey Milk was a martyr from a distant yesterday; death was now an everyday occurrence in a community powered by the sobering resilience of the sick and grieving. Anita Bryant and her cohort were mosquitos compared with this Goliath epidemic. Yet bigotry was still so much a part of it—because anyone could see that the plague would have been taken seriously from the start if the early victims had been suburban housewives instead of gay men. And at the end of the day, overzealous cops still cracked queer heads.
* * *
Later that month, I was stretched out on my mom’s bed in our Fourteenth Avenue flat getting ready to watch game three of the World Series. A bookish, awkward eleven-year-old, I couldn’t have cared less about baseball. But the Giants were battling the Oakland A’s, our neighbors from across the bay, and even non-sportspeople like me had to see it.
My mom was hustling around the room, getting ready to leave for dance class. She had changed a lot since we’d seen Oprah Winfrey—rail skinny in tight jeans and a black turtleneck—strut across the TV screen pulling a Radio Flyer wagon heaped with jiggling pig fat. Oprah had lost sixty-seven pounds on the OPTIFAST diet. My mom signed up.
Between January and October of 1989, she didn’t chew so much as a sprig of parsley. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were shakes made from little packets of powder and eight ounces of water. Between “meals,” she sipped broth. It was one thing having a mother who didn’t cook, and another having a mother who didn’t eat. I watched her melt away, losing eighty-nine pounds in nine months.
Now she was reintroducing tiny portions of bland food. My mom adopted a new style for her thinner figure. She clamped on heavy silver jewelry, slung wide leather belts with giant flying saucer buckles low around her hips, and sawed the necks out of her shirts so her shoulders showed. She got an asymmetrical haircut like Sheila E.’s and lined her blue-green-amber eyes with kohl and purple eyeshadow. She sweated through dance classes five days a week.
Meanwhile, I still lived on microwaved meals and pizza delivery. For the baseball game, I had nuked a bag of popcorn and drowned it in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
My mom adjusted her leg warmers. She bent to kiss me good-bye just as jittery white lines began scrolling down the TV screen. The sound seemed to come from the south: a deep, resonant rumble that grew thunderous, like a stampede of buffalo in a western. The house began to dance.
“Get in the doorway!” my mom yelled.
I hurried over with her, my feet uncertain on shaking ground, and braced myself in the doorjamb like they taught us in earthquake drills in school. I don’t remember fear so much as the sensation of being wide awake. This was both impossible and inevitable: the Big One. The world was breaking open and it was insane and horrible and somehow wonderful—that something so surprising could happen on a banal Tuesday. I heard crashes from around the house: a large ceramic cat tumbling to her death, dishes leaping from cabinets, my model horses diving to the floor. The quake rocked itself out. An eerie silence followed.
We picked our way down the hallway to the front door. Outside, the high gray sky seemed to spin overhead. Then one distant siren multiplied into many. We rode out the first aftershock standing in the street, a rough jittering of the asphalt. The world blurring because my eyes couldn’t keep up. The electricity was out, an
d the phone lines were jammed. We sat on our stoop, my mom still in her leg warmers, until dusk stirred cold winds that chased us inside, where we lit candles and unrolled sleeping bags on the living room floor. The earth shuddered as aftershocks rolled through the night.
Measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale and lasting fifteen seconds, the Loma Prieta earthquake was the biggest to hit San Francisco since 1906. More than a mile of an Oakland freeway’s upper deck collapsed onto the lower deck, trapping motorists. Once power was restored, we watched endless aerial footage of the pancaked stretch of freeway, crunched cars visible through the cracks. There were dramatic rescues, interviews with stunned survivors, tears for those who didn’t make it. Sixty-three people died—forty-two of them on the collapsed freeway. Thousands were injured. Newscasters kept marveling about baseball having saved an untold number of lives since people were positioned in front of televisions at 5:04 instead of driving in rush-hour traffic.
Hardest hit in the City was the Marina, a clean, ritzy neighborhood, the natural habitat of the San Francisco yuppie. It was also the birthplace of Sticky Fingers Brownies back in 1976 when the Rainbow Lady had peddled magic brownies from a pouch over her shoulder on Fisherman’s Wharf. That area had been constructed on landfill—some of it rubble from the 1906 quake—which dissolved. My mom and I volunteered at a makeshift shelter in a Marina school, serving food to rich people suddenly rendered homeless. Nature didn’t care about wealth. The plague didn’t care either. Beauty, talent, affluence, kindness, taste, smarts, determination, love—none of these things kept people safe.
The quake of 1989 was the exclamation point at the end of a devastating decade. Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch was right to raise the specter of Bloody October—that awful month in 1978 when Jonestown and the assassinations of Milk and Moscone sent the City staggering into the violent spring of 1979. The seventies had died with gunshots and a riot; the 1980s died with a riot and an earthquake.