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The Unofficial Story

TELEGRAPH HILL

MAY 30, 1906. 8:00 A.M.

It was a month ago that I finally managed to convince myself I was still alive. That day—a week after the inferno burned out—the fire clap had faded from my ears enough that I was able to hear a knock on the door of our singed Victorian.

I arose from a seated position on the floor where I had been typewriting day and night on the Remington, and shuffled through inch-deep ash, little clouds erupting with every step. I jerked open the brittle front door to discover an overdressed man waiting on the puffy stoop.

He asked for Annalisa Passarelli, opera and theater critic for the Evening Bulletin, cringing at the sight of me. When I said I was she, he lowered the handkerchief he had been clutching to his nose to ward off the acrid smell of burnt everything and introduced himself as Mr. Charles Appleby. He stated he had been sent by the California State Historian at Sacramento, removed his bowler hat as if preparing for a benediction, and began to recite a litany of statistics.

Three hundred miles of California coastline reconfigured. Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, San Jose, and several dozen other small towns reduced to rubble from Humboldt County to Monterey. Nearly a half million people sent running for their lives, more than thirty thousand buildings incinerated including thirty-seven national banks, the Pacific Stock Exchange, two opera houses; hundreds of million of dollars in smoke and ash.

I interrupted to explain that I was aware of the physical losses, having witnessed much of it with my own eyes.
He then mentioned an honorarium that sounded like one thousand dollars, offering me a position as one of six writers chosen by the State Historian’s office to report the events of April 18, 1906, and the three terrible days that followed. After aiming one blistered ear, then the other, straining for detail, I had my cracked lips parted and my swollen tongue dislodged and was about to accept when he mentioned the phrase “Official Story.” He looked up, braving the sight of me as chivalrously as his horror permitted, stating that all of the required fodder for the effort would be provided by the office of our Mayor, the ever-grinning marionette Eugene Schmitz.

The six writers would be encouraged to add “little dashes of color” and “some inspiring bits of human interest” that would then be reviewed by the Official Information and Oversight Committee. For some reason that portion of Mr. Appleby’s tale came through quite clearly.

The undulating crimson veil that had colored my field of vision had also subsided, enough so that I was able to examine the written proffer. After further Appleby emphasis of just how keen everyone was to perpetrate the official fraud—his voice filtered through the metal-on-metal shriek that had replaced the fire’s throb—I returned his document and gave a shake of my frazzled head, sending a faint halo of ash floating down on him.

He returned to his carriage with the half-skipping gait usually seen on tourists who inadvertently wander—or once wandered—into the Barbary Coast after dark. The dappled mare tethered to the black runabout was as anxious to leave as queasy Mr. Appleby.

Had I accepted, I would have been, at twenty-two, the youngest of the deceitful six and the only woman. Add that I was the opera and theater critic for Mr. Fremont Older’s Evening Bulletin, a crusading journal which appeared, at present, to have soundly lost the crusade, and I was easily the group’s most unlikely candidate. A thousand dollars was an attractive sum in a city living in Army tents, standing in soup lines or spearing rodents for sustenance, but I was content with my decision as I was not prepared to enter the whoring profession just yet.

I had my own version of the story, much of it collected and composed before the horror struck; a version that would do nicely without assistance from City Hall.

But I have gotten ahead of myself, a dangerous state of affairs for a writer.

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