Joni Flint-Gonzales

there lives a policeman.

No, I do not know how nor when he

got there. He subsists mostly off nuts and

seeds and for the most part I leave him be.

He lives there

in the same way people live in million dollar homes abutting San Quentin

in the same way the Weather Underground

lived in a home in Bernal in the 70s

then early 90s a woman digging in her garden

finds her house came with 100

sticks of dynamite buried in the backyard. So

on the phone she said “Yes, in my backyard,

so many bombs” then the police came and

everyone evacuated and the neighborhood

belongs to the police now. This is a fact

that people come to terms with. They get

there in different ways. I got there

when I moved into a house with a policeman

living in the backyard. He eats nuts and seeds but

I’ve never seen him pee. Retention equals

tidy, obsessive, deferent to authority which

are all instrumental to the police. So he

does not pee, in the same way you must

when walking through Hayes Valley toward

downtown with a dearth of public bathrooms.

If you have to go the shops are expensive. 50

years ago who knows about bathrooms but

it was inexpensive. It used to be a Black neighborhood

and the freeway ran through the backyards

like Tom Petty sang or John Cougar sang it

too. Watching the sunset from the rooftop,

almost night or winter, that’s how 80s radio

feels. The 80s were probably the last decade

Hayes Valley was a Black neighborhood

and by the end you knew it was over

because 1989 the big one hit, biggest in 80

years and the freeway was torn

down. People did that, the

earthquake only started the job

because with a city job you get

a Disaster Service Worker number and

everyone’s got called that day so whatever

your job was your job was to make disaster

less disastrous now. This included

tearing down freeways, destroying

neighborhoods that were already destroyed

but the alternative was worse so

the disaster service workers made a choice.

I wonder did I make any important choices

when my DSW number was called, as it was

during the storms earlier this year and it was

called for COVID too. I sit in front of a computer

all day helping people who sit in front of

computers all day post messages which

sometimes tell you that a disaster is happening

and here’s what you can do. Other times the

messages say “Mayor Breed Announces Innovative

Vision for Reducing Police Response Times.” Posting

these messages is disaster work. It’s different

from the kinds of work done in 1989. One

coworker says it was the only time she felt

actually a part of San Francisco. Digging

up people from under rubble. When

your purpose is clear everything else falls

away. She said it felt close to that

with COVID, the concept was near

but in a pandemic or in this analogy

rubble is people. She grew up

in Hayes Valley and said before

the freeway came down

it was like a forcefield for

cops. Even if you called

they would not come.

Mission, Tenderloin,

Alamo Square station they

would not go under the freeway

and the backyards were loud

70 decibels and copless no

cops called not coming and now

they come all the time, despite what

you might hear.