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crowd wished aloud, "Peace, brother. Peace." Emmett stopped, turned a quarter of the way around toward the direction from where the voice had come, and answered the farewell: "Peace? Listen fella, there's very few people that have peace on this planet, why should we?"

Then the Diggers left, and Tumble remarked as they walked up the stairs, "That's one room we forgot to include in the Invisible Circus. They're talkin' up more fantasies in there right now, than a lot of the people carried out that night in the church next door!"

Unknown to Emmett and the others, there were several reporters in the crowd during the rap session, and that weekend the underground weeklies hit the streets with news of the Glide Church meeting spread all over them. One was headlined CLASS WAR IN THE HAIGHT, and detailed a story about a battle that was being waged between the street people led by the Diggers, and the monied, hippie class headed by the Haight Independent Proprietors. In several different newspaper accounts of the Glide meet, the name Emmett Grogan was connected with a description of a "demanding spokesman who had the aquiline nose of a leader" and he was spot-quoted and misquoted.

In one version which appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press, and was written for that paper's three hundred thousand readers by Jerry Hopkins, Emmett was said to have actually threatened the HIP merchants with the bombing of their stores, unless they gave over a percentage of their profits to the community. It even further alleged that he inferred a bombing had already occurred, and would be followed by another, if the shopkeepers didn't comply with his demands for the distribution of a part of their wealth to the people.

Needless to say, Emmett was flipped out by the generally false coverage, and in the case of the "bombing threat" story, at least one instance of vicious, deceitful reporting. He wanted to choke every one of those lying, yellow-journalist throats, bend all their fingers back until the bones of their knuckles snapped, rip their snide tongues out of their smug faces. That's what really got him crazy about these small-time reporters who took cheap shots at people-- their petty self-regard for their own minor self-importance. "Who the fuck do they think they are? Making up all that shit that never happened, putting words in my mouth that no one ever said? Everybody who reads those fuckin' lies is gonna believe we're all just another bunch of punk anarchists who want a piece of the pie, a bunch of lames who're just jealous of the bread the HIP merchants [end page 295]