I’ve long wanted to publish guest entries from the farflung
menagerie of writers and other artists I count as my friends.
This is the first such guest entry. Daniel Morris is a talented
fucker who has completed no fewer than three novels and
countless screenplays in the time it’s taken me to get halfway
through my manuscript. He’s a right bastard, he is.

Everybody knows.

D A N I E L   M O R R I S

22 May 2002—Everybody knows the city is coming undone. Bricks are falling from the high ledges of the old buildings that line Brannan Street. UFOs hover low over the Bay Bridge but no one will admit to noticing them. A homeless man who lives in the shadow of the skyscraper at 50 Beale Street was telling me that a pitbull is roaming the city looking for revenge on the people who sank Tom Ammiano’s mayoral campaign. The cops all look tired, like their hearts just aren’t in it anymore, and none of the cars along the sidewalks in Chinatown have moved in months. Even the weather, not so good these days.

Everybody knows the music is no good anymore; the bands at Bottom of the Hill all sound like chainsaws. A man dressed as the sun and a woman dressed as the moon danced in the park and no one was watching them. A black kid near the Metreon was rapping freestyle but no one was listening. In the Mona Lisa restaurant on Columbus, there was a young man out on a first date with a shy girl and they were chased out of the place by a mob of hooting young businessmen drunk off of cheap wine. In the Zodiac bar in Noe Valley the jukebox is broken; there’s no way to select the Sublime cover of “Scarlet Begonias.”

Everybody knows that walking in the city is dangerous. On Fifth Street a car was hurtling like a comet and two schoolchildren were stepping out into the crosswalk, one girl leading the other, and the first girl who stepped out was plowed into and flung two blocks away, the car screeching to a stop in the middle of the intersection, then silence, not a sound, because everyone within earshot knew immediately what the sound meant, a gut-sick thump and then the screeching brakes, then silence, nothing, no sound until the other little girl began screaming, a scream that broke something in us and made us slump to the sidewalk in horror, hearing her wail and our instinct was to get low to the concrete so that the sounds of this horror might somehow drift above and by us, but they didn’t. Those sounds moved right into us and they are still in there now.

Everybody knows that glass is breaking all over the city. At the bus stops, the display cases are smashed and serrated. The windshield of a brand new BMW 735iL exploded outward for no reason at all, showering a meter maid with fragments of safety glass, drawing a crowd of onlookers but only for a minute before they all continued on their way. Sitting on the N Judah, the glass pane only inches from my face as I watched the pedestrians along the Embarcadero, a piece of the pane cracked and then as the train jostled along its track, the crack spread and sliced, right in front of me, it cracked into a wide leer.

Everybody knows that messages keep turning up in the scraps of paper that drift by in ankle winds. Balled-up pages of the Chronicle bouncing along Mission Street like tumbleweeds, I noticed as it skidded past me there was a headline that read Experts See No End in Sight for Threat. In the City Lights bookstore, I noticed a girl reading a book about the making of the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue and she was leafing through it for at least half an hour afterward, looking around her at the men passing through the aisle, and I remember wishing that a Miles Davis fan would hurry up and find her but none ever did, and eventually she tucked the book under her arm and went to the register and paid for it and left. Across the street later in the Tosca Café, I was talking to a friend and we noticed a wadded-up cocktail napkin on the bench next to us and on a whim I unfurled it, a woman had written on it in lipstick these words, I am the most beautiful woman in the world and I am all alone.

Everybody knows their best friends are gone. Carrie is in the East Bay now with her husband, trying to make the rent every month until he can graduate from school and take a job. Jeremy is in Chicago, where he is maybe happy and at least has his blues clubs. Natalie has disappeared, no one is sure where she went off to but I suspect she is back in Alaska where she says life is simple and frigid and better. Eric and Paige both got laid off and have moved to San Diego where he is from, and where at least they say there is sun every day. There are still friends, of course, but not the best ones. Everyone knows the best ones are gone and now we are the only ones left in the city.

Everybody knows you can disappear down a crack in the city. I saw a homeless man crawl down one of the steaming grates along Market Street, and he did not reëmerge. I was smoking a cigarette in the alley behind ThirstyBear and I heard a voice moaning for a cigarette. I looked around and realized the voice was coming from beneath a dumpster so I tossed a cigarette underneath the dumpster and then heard a voice thank me. A frightened woman lives in the elevators of the Bank of America tower; if you encounter her she will politely press the button for your floor and then cower in the corner until you leave. A friend once told me he was detoured around the construction on the Harrison Street off-ramp from the Bay Bridge, and he wandered the side alleys of the financial district in darkness trying to make his way back to a street he knew, driving past the murmuring secret society that dwells in the vacant lots.

Everybody knows we have missed whatever moment draws a generation to San Francisco. I have stood in the apartment in which Allen Ginsberg wrote his rage-filled poem “Hadda Been Playing on the Jukebox” in the wee hours of the night of December 8, 1975, as I was being born fifty miles away; now there is an exhausted old lady living there. I have been drunk in the Fillmore where my father watched stoned as Jimi Hendrix played to a writhing house, but the band I was seeing was Everclear and I’ve already forgotten what songs they played. I’ve had business meetings in the squat gray China Basin Landing office complex, when all I could think about was the stinking black water beneath the Lefty O’ Doul Bridge where Jack London once waited in line for work as a shipyard laborer. I have stared out over the city from the observation deck of the opera house on Van Ness, where Andrew Cunanan was introduced to Gianni Versace. I have sensed the city’s grand ghosts but what I have never done is encounter anyone who will leave a good one.

Everybody knows that there are too many hypodermics to safely walk Ocean Beach in bare feet, that the fog is getting thicker, rolling in over the hills in great leaden curtains. Everybody knows the scene is empty now. Last Halloween in the Castro a girl was abducted in a van and raped for two days. Dogs are starting to smell fear on us. Everybody knows the county jail is not a luxury hotel, which is what it’s been carefully camouflaged to look like from the I-80 approach to the Bay Bridge. Everybody knows that the dead lightbulbs in the neon Coke sign will never be replaced. Everyone can tell you’re flagging, no longer quite young exactly, carrying yourself around more carefully than you did a few years ago. Looking more like everyone else. Everybody knows there’s too much doubt, not enough money, a nervous chattering anxiety in the bars and silence at every bus stop. Everybody knows the blinking red light on Signal Hill is counting down. Everybody knows it, just no one talks about it.