the devil's quadrant by peter plate

    This is an anecdote, just a trifling about San Franciso. The way things work, this story may or may not be real; but we can always take solace in knowing this was an anecdote told at a perfect hour. The truth will not matter, since there isn't any because as with everything else in the city, the facts have been stolen and rearranged.

    These are demographics and they point out where we are going.

    In this story the landscape displays itself, starting with the sometimes bright but often tarnished colors of 16th and Valencia streets in the Mission district. In the middle of the chi-chi cafes, the crack hippies, the cute, kitsch-inspired second hand stores, the speed vegans, the homeless guys and their shopping carts, a solitary man is sitting, hunching over on a bench at the Muni bus stop.
     He is thinking about the summer of 1966. It was a season for change, the month of August to be exact. The man at the bus stop is reminiscing under questioning, of interrogatives posed to him from me, about a police officer he once shot.
     It was a few weeks before the murder of sixteen-year-old Peanut Johnson in the Bayview district by a San Franciscan cop. It was a section in our tale where little was getting better, and it was fast becoming a time to destroy, to set fire to what was unhealthy, and to start over.
     Riots ensued, fanning out from Third and Palou, spreading to the Fillmore. Martial law was declared; National Guard soldiers patrolled the neighbourhoods. Three weeks after this, the Diggers began to feed homeless people in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. The world was turning quicker.
     In the second chapter to the story, the man at the bus stop has reached the munificent age of forty-nine, but he looks about seventy-five. His profile: tall and gaunt with piercing grey eyes that are murky or clear, depending on the amount of medication travelling through his bloodstream. But in between every opportunistic infection on the planet plaguing his body, he's got this thing about smiling at the most painful subjects.
     "That's right," he says, wheezing, "I shot that cop right there on Albion street. He didn't have his badge on, but I had a gun," he grins.
     He points up the street with a long finger . I know what he's talking about. The story should be left alone as a fragment, as something to tease the minds of readers, or to be employed as most words are, as a pause or as punctuation for circumstances that have become forgettable. Albion is just another typical block in the neighbourhood, tree-lined, populated by nickel bag dealers, but apart from the geography, another factor has entered the passage of events.
     "Listen to this", I say to him. His name is John Bigarani, He is a well known police officer who gained prominence by repeatedly arresting and beating the poet Bob Kaufman during the late 1950's. Bob Kaufman was a labor organizer from Louisiana and Texas, a black man and a jew who was, arguably, the finest poet to arise from the propaganda campaign known as the beat generation.
     "You're fucking with me," the man at the bus stop comments. "I don't know much about poetry, but I didn't like cops, and that Bigarani, he was a bastard of a cop. The way he cracked heads open at the San Francisco State student strike a couple of years after I shot him, man, it was breathtaking," he cackles. "But when I shot him, he didn't even have his badge on. An when I got caught, I had to serve seven years in Soledad State Prison."

    With this incident, the story turns a page or jumps several chapters ahead, not heeding the logical order of sequence, but rather choosing its own destination at random, as to imply that nothing can be taken for granted anymore. Among other things, it's possible to say the injuries of Bob Kaufman suffered at the hands of John Bigarani resulted in permanent damage to his spirit and health. Some years later, the writer passed away. The policeman is still living (but the poet is hardly remembered).
     That's a common refrain to any chronicle about this town; a narrative which accretes pieces, spewing them out like vomit from drunk's open toothless mouth when too much has been taken in. When we put two and two together, when we do our arithmetic like we learned in school: it seems that only in San Francisco could a man presently expiring from AIDS avenge a poet by shooting a cop at the edge of the Valencia street housing projects in the summer time.
     It's one of the angles we can look at the situation from in an epic of unacknowledged debts. The names of the innocent have not been changed to protect the guilty. For the purposes of confidentiality, the man at the bus stop is called Paul Stevens, a community organizer with the Mission Rebels on the day he put down John Bigarani.
     I had the pleasure of meeting him on the sixth floor of the city prison. I was handcuffed to a bench near the holding cell, and he was sitting next to me. Several county sheriffs were discussing whether to kick the crap out of me or not. Perky as hell, the gray-haired man on the bench introduced himself to me by whispering: "Relax. These assholes aren't jackshit."
     And I believed him.

    Here is where the dialogue of Paul Steven and myself began; it was the balmy evening of the Dan White riot on May 21st in 1979. Some memories do not bear repeating; other recollections must be turned into ciphers that have hope and meaning for the living.
     The story will emerge from when McAllister street went up in the flames of eleven burning police cars. Every window to San Francisco's city hall was broken; only the public library escaped harm. For books are important; they possess the fiction that is always changing, and the stories themselves tell us : the city looks quite attractive when it's smoking. More accurate, less precious, untranslatable and unable to present itself as a backdrop for tourists taking pictures.
     "Remember? The police picked me up on Castro street," Paul Stevens quips. "I was a nurse, and I was wearing my surgical smock. But when I stepped out of a taxi cab, and I saw cops attacking people in the street, I started throwing rocks. So what were you busted for?" he asks me.
     "For torching a cop car," I reply.

    This is where the anecdote could possibly stop. We might save our places with a book marker for the next time. It will be the journey of a thousand jail cells, and the less we imagine what this is like, the better off we feel. At this very moment, Paul Stevens sits at the Muni stop when the weather is good; he stays in bed when the temperatures are low. The conclusion to the story will become a dream, hastily planned, irrevocable.
     "This is my last year," he informs me. "The doctors can do so much. Chemotherapy can only take you so far. Do you know what I mean?"
     Where he is going, that's where this story will take us. He announces his own departure from life while gazing at the exhausted drift of traffic on Valencia street. Born in a Catholic orphanage, the city is Paul's body, and he has worn it well.
     "But it doesn't matter," he says, shaking his head. "It doesn't fucking matter."
     I stare at his face, and I see the last days of Bob Kaufman. I glance at 16th street, at the mojados, the pretty college students, the winos and the police station down the block to see a river with Paul Stevens' name floating on its surface. I look to myself and I know these episodes were borrowed, deformed and fabricated.

    What are the choices? There aren't any. From here, we can only go back to the beginning again, because no story can end without an act of freedom, not in San Francisco.

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