Home Baked by Alia Volz

Author:Alia Volz [Alia Volz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358007074
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

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Doug still believed in his duty to carry out the Berkeley Psychic Institute word. He gave readings and shared off-the-cuff observations with friends, brownie clients, and sometimes strangers. His famous phrase was “I just have to tell you . . .” followed by whatever he thought you ought to confront about yourself, your blind spots and weaknesses. He’d call people out on pessimism, denial, hypocrisy, addiction. In Mer’s case, her fluctuating weight. He was everyone’s self-appointed magic mirror.

The reactions were mixed. Maybe Doug’s impromptu readings stung because they hit home. He was perceptive, but he lacked social grace. Instead of waiting for a private moment, he’d dress people down in the middle of a party, in front of friends and lovers, or while trying to sell them brownies—confident that he was doing them a favor by being honest.

Some people found Doug’s candor refreshing. Like Stannous Flouride, the punk counterman at Acme Café in Noe Valley. Stannous had come to San Francisco to be a hippie in the late sixties but found the flower children mealy. Punk culture had all the hedonism and playfulness of the era minus the cheery mood. It offered Stannous a delicious outlet for his manic energy and the internal fuck you he’d been nursing since childhood.

Doug couldn’t wrap his head around punk. The music made him cringe, and the poster art disturbed him. But despite their opposing aesthetics, Doug and Stannous found common ground. They were both intellectual, artistic, and iconoclastic. Both got a buzz from freaking people out. Doug would ask one of his confrontational questions like “What do you get out of projecting hostility into the world?” and instead of taking offense, Stannous would challenge him back. They indulged in long debates about discordance as an art form, the role of violence in social change, and, of course, the Nuns vs. the Bee Gees.

A friendship bloomed. Stannous started hanging out at the warehouse. “I had been buying brownies for a long time before I was ever around during production,” he says, “because production was such a serious operation and the guys who were cooking and stuff wanted to keep it low-key. When I realized the extent of what they were doing, it was like whoa.” Stannous eventually designed two brownie bags, one of which depicts a champagne bottle with the cork popping off, and says, If all the world’s a stage, San Francisco is the cast party!

Stannous had thought the business model was smart from the beginning, but he hadn’t pictured the high volume. “The nature of the distribution made it so that people think, Oh, yeah, the bakery was in Noe Valley, because we were in Noe Valley and we thought it was local,” he says. “I don’t think most people realized that it was citywide, that it was as large as it was.”

By spring of 1978, the brownies were all over town, though few people knew where they came from. Even today, many former customers are surprised to learn the size of the operation.

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