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The night of the Invisible Circus, the officials and ministers
of Glide Church began to get rather nervous, wondering what they
had gotten themselves into. They had accepted all the lies and
halftruths liaisoned to them by Quaker Fish, but it was difficult
to be deceived about what they saw with their own eyes. There was
an elevator that ran from the street level entrance of the church
to a large hall in the basement below, and Emmett had filled that
hall with literally tons of shredded plastic he had spent days
trucking over from a plastics factory. When people descended to
the hall in the elevator, they stepped out into three feet of
plastic strips and it was quite a struggle for them to move
around, falling all over themselves as their feet got tied up in
the strewn cord. Once they made it through the plastic jungle,
they were confronted with a crush of people feeling each other up
inside a low-ceilinged, cramped rec room that was sweltering hot
because of its proximity to the boiler, and blustering with
outrageous noise from a rock band whose amplified sound was so
loud in that tiny space that it brought many to tears. The barren
Formica church cafeteria took up the rest of the basement, and it
had been turned into an R and R center, with a huge punch bowl on
one of the tables filled with Tang spiked with salutary doses of
acid. Upstairs, a row of a dozen separate offices had been
redecorated as "love-making salons" with candles,
incense, floor-mattresses covered with colorful spreads made in
India, bottles of oils, perfumes and lubricants, doors with locks
on their insides and all the light bulbs removed. Down the
corridor from "love alley," Richard Brautigan, working
with Claude and Chester, had set up "The John Dillinger
Computer Service." Using the machinery from the
Communication Company, they printed Flash! bulletins and news
items, notifying everyone about what was going on where and how
to get there and also telling them the news right after it
happened. This was done by dispatching reporters all over the
church to cover various events and report back to
"Dillinger" headquarters to type their stories on
stencils. With these stencils several hundred releases were
immediately mimeographed and rapidly distributed to the crowd.
One reporter even went across the street to a
"Tenderloin" bar, bought a beer, and eavesdropped on a
heated argument between the bartender and some of his patrons,
while also jotting notes. Then he went back to the church, typed
it all up, had it run off on the Gestetner, and returned to the
bar with copies of the word-for-word report of the argument,
which correctly [end page 283]
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