: At 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake
: erupted along a section of the San Andreas Fault in the
: Santa Cruz Mountains.

Actual magnitude was later upgraded to 7.2

I was in San Francisco & about to light a joint in my private cubby hole in the basement of a seven story building when it hit. I made it to a small space between two vertical beams and a horizontal at the top. I remember thinking if this lasts any longer I'm gonna die. I just wanted to get outside. Later when I forced open the steel door to the alley, I found the sidewalk and roadway were littered with small chips of concrete that had fallen from the cornice 7 flights up. I'd have been brained.

After checking on some other folks & warning them about all the concrete chips in the alley, I went looking for some liquor.

Lots of small grocery shops along the street and most of them sold beer an hard stuff. But most of the bottles had fallen off the shelves and busted. I finally found a pint bottle of some kind of whiskey, then hopped on my littler Honda and rode up the hill to my friend Victoria's apartment building. She was so happy to see a familiar face....

Five or six of us sat on the roof watching the rescue choppers nosing among the skyscrapers, their searchlights probing for stranded people. "It's like Apocalypse Now," she said, and it was. I slept on the roof that night and in the morning everybody had changed. People were quiet, avoided eye contact. As if the giddiness of survival had worn off and something darker had settled in. Whatever it was, it was time for me to bail. I got on my little Honda and rode down to the South Bay where some old friends from my Pennsylvania days owned a house with a spare bedroom. My buddy checked me out and said, "you look a little peaked."