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newsmen from the national mass media swooped down on the Trip Without a Ticket looking for a story. They all wanted to interview the "longhaired hippie" who scoffed at his generation's talk of "love" as being merely a bullshit shuck, and who claimed that the Haight-Ashbury was nothing but a "Love Ghetto" populated by middle-class kids who were having "an adventure of poverty" and whom he fed from his Digger free soup kitchen. He was handsome with "the aquilined nose of a leader" and he had a good, jaunty, rebellious image about him, with that bold cap of his, and most of all, he wasn't Jewish! Yes, he had definite qualities and was good "star" material, but "where'd he go?"

When anyone inquired about him at the Trip Without A Ticket or any place in the Haight-Ashbury for that matter, they were laughed at and told "Emmett Grogan" was just a myth and didn't exist. The FBI eventually came around and took the Hun back to their offices for "routine questioning" about the Diggers, their Free Food and free store operations, and about the whereabouts of "Emmett Grogan." The Hun was careful to maintain the Salvation Army-Goodwill cover line, while expounding on his ideas for new wave theater, and claiming that the Diggers had simply made up "Emmett Grogan" as a mythical, nonexistent, heroic figure to fool the press. As for the photo in Ramparts, the Hun offered that it was a picture of an actor who had been a member of the Mime Troupe a while back, and had played a small part in an adaptation of Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy. The eight-by-ten glossy, he said, had been given to the radical magazine as a lark to perpetuate the legend of the nonexistent "Emmett Grogan." The FBI regarded the longhaired, shaggy Hun with such contempt and ridicule that they unquestionably fell for his "myth-making" line, and they dropped the "Emmett Grogan issue," filing it away as a prank.

Emmett returned to New York City on a Sunday. He always seemed to travel from place to place on Sundays because there were fewer people around, and it had become a habit when he was in Europe. He seldom if ever made any moves on a Saturday, which he considered a wrong time of the week for him, a jinxed day, for no other reason than that he was born on a Saturday, whatever the fuck that had to do with anything. But it did.

On the plane, he sat across the aisle from a young college student type dressed in a conservative suit and vest which he tried to academically liberalize with a wide-knot, cotton tie that had Day-Glo [end page 316]