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that personally--very personally, 'n fuck knows what'll happen! Now I gotta go see that they get set straight about what I'm into before they get the wrong idea about why I'm here, 'n do something I'll be sorry for--so, if anybody asks you about this article about me, you just tell 'em it was a mistake, 'n it's bullshit, because that's all that it is--bullshit! An' don't print anything else about me, either, understand. I don't need, want, or care for my name being in newspapers. So do me, and in the long run yourselves, a favor 'n don't write anything about me because you'll only interfere with what we're trying to do for the hip community, 'n I'm sure you wouldn't want to do that. Good! So we understand one another. Be seein' you." And he shook their hands again and left before they could reply or even say anything.

Later that night Paul Krassner, the lampoon editor of the satirical, leftist periodical newsprint magazine catcalled The Realist, which government authorities continually contended was blatantly pornographic, told Candy Sand about a community meeting being held that night in a Lower East Side loft to discuss the problems facing the "hip community of the East Village." Emmett had met Krassner in San Francisco when he was taking a VIP tour of the Haight-Ashbury with some of the HIP hierarchy, and he was impressed at how a man of such tiny physical stature could be such a gross smart-alec. He burned some of Krassner's money in response to a series of journalistic inquiries and also gave him some free acid, the mere giving of which had, for some cryptic reason blown Krassner's mind. So Emmett went to the community meeting with Candy Sand and Paul Krassner, where he was introduced to the East Coast's version of HIP. They weren't united under the same or any other name but were certainly uniform in their "hippie" manner and style, affecting a similar and possibly weightier identification with the psychedelic experience.

Most of the thirty-some-odd persons present at the meet were in their twenties, had been raised in upper-middle-class environments, had finished college and had dropped out of their establishment futures because they were bored and wanted a chance to put creativity back into their lives, to make an art out of living. They were more wordy and less spaced out than their San Francisco peers, and since the Lower East Side didn't exactly border any spectacular woodland or rolling green hills, they were more concerned with community politics than with the ecology of their environment. Even though they tried to dress up their surroundings by constantly [end page 321]