{"id":198049,"date":"2026-02-28T12:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T12:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/198049\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T12:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T12:27:12","slug":"junior-keeps-watch-at-mission-and-30th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/198049\/","title":{"rendered":"Junior keeps watch at Mission and 30th\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Comic<\/a><\/p>\n

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When I pass Junior\u2019s sprawling sidewalk encampment between the bus stop and the laundromat at 30th and Mission, I say, \u201cJunior, for God\u2019s sake, clean your room!\u201d and Junior chuckles and giggles as if I were the wittiest person, and he\u2019d never heard me say it before.<\/p>\n

He has lived on that corner for at least 21 years \u2014 nearly half his life, maybe longer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Art, who owns the Wash Place, says, \u201cHe\u2019s been here since I bought the place in 2004. Every laundromat has a guy that comes with it when you buy it, and Junior came with this one.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Javier, the owner of the Nicaraguan restaurant next door, has fed him generously over the years, as Junior\u2019s collection spills over to his entrance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe offered to get him a room somewhere.\u00a0Then we asked the police and the health department to get him to stay away, and they posted a stay-away order. They talked to him, but he always comes back.\u201d He sighs, \u201cHe is a good person.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AJunior inherits a fan. Photo by Colin Campbell.<\/p>\n

Junior\u2019s \u201croom\u201d can house a bike-repair operation, a wheelchair or two, mattresses, cakes, fried chicken, Oreos and Lorna Doones, ponchos, gloves, gear, boomboxes, dismantled phones, and female flotsam who wash up on Junior\u2019s shore, never for very long.<\/p>\n

One warm January afternoon, he fanned himself with an elegant lacquered fan one of his women companions had left behind. She\u2019d been shrieking at him and the world for a few days and finally left.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cJunior,\u201d I said, \u201cyou sure can pick some doozies,\u201d and he laughed heartily, \u201cYup, I have to agree with you on that one!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can place Junior back to when he was clean, housed, and wore a red beret and an orange safety vest, a uniform he modeled on New York\u2019s Guardian Angels, a crime-prevention group formed 40-odd years ago. He proudly rode the buses, standing up front next to the drivers, helping lift baby strollers up and assisting wheelchair users down. He even called out the stops.<\/p>\n

But that was a long time ago.<\/p>\n

He had hair and teeth then. He was tall and strong, polite, if a bit too loud and bossy. The drivers tolerated but largely ignored him, their volunteer conductor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But decades of living rough \u2014 plus various run-ins with other street people, fisticuffs with his ladies (they usually win), multiple jail stays, some bad bike accidents and hospitalizations \u2014 have knocked out his teeth and torn off his hair.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHappy Tuesday, Norma,\u201d he calls out to me (having misheard my name a gazillion years ago), or \u201cHappy Wednesday!\u201d or \u201cFeliz Domingo!\u201d (Junior speaks passable Spanish) or \u201cTwo more weeks to my birthday!\u201d<\/p>\n

New Jersey to San Francisco<\/p>\n

Junior was born Norberto Pine in Trenton, New Jersey, on Dec. 30, 1982, and came to California with his siblings and his parents around 1997, he thinks. <\/p>\n

\u201cNorberto, really?\u201d I ask skeptically.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was named for my dad: Norberto Senior, and he was named for his doctor. He told me so.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you Latino?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh no, I just picked up Spanish around here. I am Irish and Italian.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a period of group homes here in his teens, then his parents died, \u201cMy mom in \u201906, and my dad in \u201807, and my siblings left me to the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a neighbor retired to Michigan (he was a meticulous CPA for the IRS), he appointed me to dole out the weekly $10 allowance he paid Junior.<\/p>\n

I continued for a while, then let it go, and Junior never asked for it.<\/p>\n

He is not a lazy guy, and doesn\u2019t panhandle. As far as I know, he doesn\u2019t use drugs.<\/p>\n

You might get the wrong impression, because he sleeps during the day, when people riding the bus, doing laundry or shopping are all around him, and it\u2019s safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He comes to life in the afternoon, doing his many jobs: He pulls out the trash bins for the Nicaraguan restaurant, he helps cart in bottles of booze to Club Malibu a few doors down, he pulls out bags of empties for the recyclers and helps load them clatteringly onto their trucks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There were even years when he worked inside the laundromat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Art, the owner, says, \u201cJunior was mechanically inclined, even helped me to repair some of the machines: Take them apart and put them back together. He helped me move the big machines, too. He was that strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he adds, grinning, \u201cIf I had one big customer for laundry pickup, he would come with me and help me with the bundles, he was much more presentable then.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Junior shuffles and bellows through life<\/p>\n

That was then, and this is now:\u00a0Mostly, Junior lounges and avidly watches his intersection, as if he had the greatest view in the world. He knows the corner\u2019s rhythms and schedules, reminding forgetful neighbors when to move their cars for the street sweepers, banging on their doors urgently, like Paul Revere, shouting \u201cSTREET CLEANING!!!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Junior has a distinctive bellow, a trumpeting sound like an elephant seal, and he can be heard across four lanes of Mission Street traffic when he wants your attention.<\/p>\n

Junior says he has no ID, so he can\u2019t get a phone; he has no documents that prove he exists, so he can\u2019t get an ID.\u00a0His version.<\/p>\n

If you could get a room, anywhere, where would you live? \u201cJust anywhere around here, is all, right here,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He keeps a tent behind the Burger King on Bayshore Boulevard, but that is only for very late at night. A few years ago, he was hit by a car on Bayshore while riding his bike and was hospitalized.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

When he came back to his \u201croom,\u201d he was in a flimsy wheelchair. The neighbors took up a collection and got him a strong, durable wheelchair.\u00a0We thought he was done for and would never walk again. But he recovered.<\/p>\n

As Art says, \u201cHis very strength is that he is completely indestructible.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is an ineffable sweetness about Junior, a gentleness and a desire to be helpful. He was violent in the earlier years, threw punches in frustration, but he is on the losing end of any dustups these days. What\u2019s left is the bellow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A shuffle and a bellow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether due to injuries or arthritic stiffness from sleeping on concrete, he has a Chaplinesque gait, rocking a bit from side to side when he walks, accompanied by a fleet of wheeled contraptions: Buggies, bicycles, shopping carts, strollers, scooters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s his own parade.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also something of a mystery; he is not a linear narrator.<\/p>\n

Easier to know his favorite food is spaghetti, and his favorite music is \u201cJames Brown, Diana Ross and the Supremes. The Temptations, what my parents used to play.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked to explain why he continues to live outdoors, he pauses the music on his player and stops untangling a rope. \u201c\u2019Cause I got tired of being in the programs. Yeah, I was in programs my whole life, me and my family were in all the programs. I am done with programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

He laughs heartily, \u201cI don\u2019t have to answer to NOBODY, to NOBODY,\u201d he stops laughing, \u201cExcept for SFPD. I have to answer to SFPD, but I try to stay out of their way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBesides,\u201d he adds, \u201cI can\u2019t leave the restaurant without no one watching it all night.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI am like their guardian angel. I am still a guardian angel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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