Letter from Kent to Emmett Grogan, ca. 1972.
[Located in the Digger Archives, Catalog No. DP021.]
dear emmett,
jus finished yer book and my head is exploding with its past. book like
a fuse; head like a bomb, rememberin 10 pages of experience for every one
I read. Imagine the cumbersome volume that would contain all of it.
I’m sure Berg will never forgive me for this, but I really enjoyed the
fuckin thing, in spite of the several moments of outrage, but any good
book gives you that. Even now Nina is upstairs nursing Angeline reading it
and laughing and calling you names. Everybody wonders why this or that was
left out, but I was thrilled to find out things I never new [sic], like
what you said to George Romney in the cab of that truck (how we were both
unknowing co-conspirators in frying that guy’s brain); how you felt
about the city hall steps thing; yer rivalry with Berg (even now
understanding is incomplete); the incredible account of yer past... Jeez,
did we really know each other? I remember when you first came to the Mime
Troupe, we walked from the studio to the Panhandle talking about movies
and theater.. who is this guy talking as heavy a rap as Davis or Cohon,
and I still haven’t figured out how to say such incredible things. I
never knew what happened on the trip to Michigan. I never knew what went
on when you guys went to New York and London.
I remember when the girls took over the free food after our last tour
with the troupe. By that time I was into trucks, so I always maintain that
‘51 Chevy pickup Jon Glazer gave me, and was the driver. I sat in the
truck while the girls made contact with the guys in the stalls, and only
came out when there was something to load up. We got more food when the
women ran it than ever before, because in spite of the restrictions
imposed after the Poetry Bust, the girls were able to get through to the
Dept. of Ag. man himself who would go around and tag things for us. As the
months went by, one or another of the women would grow big in pregnancy
and then they’d be carrying the kid around to the stalls. Once the
universal joint went as we were about to bull out of the Produce Market
parking lot, and I spent all day under the thing fixing it. We never went
around delivering it, but set up in a different street each week with a
prearranged delivery time. Sometimes we set up in front of Cole Street and
after a couple of hectic sessions of grabbing, pulling neighbors competing
for first access to the food, I decided on a plan to make things a little
more orderly. I pulled the truck up on the sidewalk, and while Vinnie and
Peter unloaded the food I ran upstairs and stuck the Hi-fi speakers in the
open window. Then I put on a record of Corelli and Vivaldi trumpet
concertos. The result was quite satisfactory. People were courteously
offering each other this or that choice item, stepping back out of the
way, asking if everyone had a fair portion, Oh let me help you pick that
up, etc.
In my head, the time in Frisco has no chronology. I can’t distinguish
the Summer of Love from the summer of riot. Everything is just an
assortment of details. How I learned to correctly adjust the valve gap on
a Chevy 6, a snowball fight from the top of a 3-story tower on the Vernal
Equinox of I don’t know what year, playing the piano for the long line
of people waiting for Larry Mamiya’s free Thursday night dinner at Glide
church, setting off an abortive highway flare on top of a water tower in
Pacific Heights to mark the Summer Solstice, sitting with Ron Thelin and
Arthur Lach [sic] at red-cheked cloth covered table drinking coffee at 7am
on the elevated freeway above the Franklin Street exit with the morning
traffic racing by waving and cheering, following meat trucks up third
street trying to find one the driver left the keys in so we could drive it
to a back alley and unload the meat into one of ours, filling brook’s
Webster Street storefront with stolen lumber for Morningstar and barely
escaping two close inquiries by the police, stealing two arc welders from
a construction site, one for Digger, one for the Angels. Building Chariots
with Frank Corda for the great chariot races, scattering troi hoi leaflet
urging soldiers to desert and come to San Francisco all over the Oakland
Army Terminal parade grounds with Joel and Mo, two guys back from Nam whom
I harbored on Eureka Street, stealing incredible amounts of batteries and
tires from the Presidio motor pool with Claude in his Army Truck. You
teach me to see these shifting sands as history, with a progression and
order of deeper and deeper involvement. Slowly it begins to take more
form, but it will take a while. There’s still a lot I don’t know.
I see what our family is now, how things have developed since the end
of yer story, and I’m not sad. The history of the fishing boat, the time
we ran the coast guard blockade around Alcatraz and took food to the
Indians, the week I spent with Bluecloud preparing the Bear Dance grounds,
the time we took water to Pyramid Lake where Bluecloud gawked lecherously
at Jane Fonda who was trying to interview him about the new Indian radical
leadership, the thanksgiving trip through Briceland with 3 truckloads of
food to Black Bear where we narrowly escaped the entrapment of the winter
snows, piling up a mountain of garbage and scrap metal in the town square
at Forest Knolls (now our family could clean all the scrap metal out of
Lower East Side ourselves!), my 2 weeks with Rolling Thunder in Nevada,
running a free garage and parts supply in Forest Knolls, building up 17
trucks for the caravan, my present aches and pains from the daily farm
work here; all of it is part of some kind of long development. The end of
that story is years away and impossible to imagine. What you’ve done is
lay out part of that development and righteously name the enemies. Much of
the detail is wrong, but it needs to be, else we’d be carting around an
unreadable 4000 page tome full of footnotes and addenda. The main punch
was well delivered, the exposure of Rubin and Hoffman and the beads and
incense crowd was stone right.
When do we get to see you here? Do you not want to pull big rocks out
of the ground, drive tractors in the hot dust and buck bales of hay? The
people would like to touch you and smell you for a while.
Whenever,
Yr brother,
Kent |
