Intro to Series

"When Everything Cracks" is a mental health memoir set in Old San Francisco. Duncan MacLeod, the author, reads his manuscript. Be prepared for a strange trip, as the narrator grows unreliable during a psychotic episode lasting several months.

Chapter One

Meet Duncan MacLeod, a nineteen-year-old gay man living in 1980s San Francisco. He's broke and hungry and just lost his job at the Stud Bar. After a chance meeting with a rail-riding hobo and visiting a witch's dingbat apartment for a seance, the seeds of his undoing are planted.

Donny and I get our Goth on at the Underground, where we meet up with Lola and get high. As I wake up out of my opium cloud, I see and hear things that may not really be there. I'm cracking.

In a misguided attempt to escape imminent financial doom, Donny and I decide to hop a boxcar to Los Angeles, with disappointing results.

I'm suddenly struck with an idea. It's the beginning of the cracks that formed in the sidewalk of my brain. It progresses until I suddenly figure out where itts att.

Now that I know where itts att, the cracks widen, and everything falls apart. I'm Gertrude Stein. I belong at the Top of The Mark, where aliens will easily abduct me. You get the idea.

It's just like it sounds. Aliens dressed as cops abduct me while I switch identities from Gertrude Stein to Andy Warhol (Harlow, just to confuse them). I can fly. The trip to the new planet is much shorter than I expected. Cracking continues.

This planet sucks! I get shuffled from room to room, kicked, cursed out, my head held to the floor, and worst of all, I give away my dollar bill and remove my ID bracelet, so I'll never be president.

The title of this first volume of "When Everything Cracks" is "5150." The title comes from the form a jail facility must fill out to transfer an inmate to the psychiatric hospital. This is the chapter where I am 5150'ed. In real life, the call to my Grandmother really happened, and that is how my identity was finally revealed to County Jail and General Hospital.