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the Diggers are going to be exploited because of the fantastic capacity of this country to absorb new ideas and attitudes! Macy's will soon be selling Digger dresses and some company'll put out a candy bar named after you people before long, and they'll put up promotion posters proclaiming, "Eat a Digger!"

The audience laughed and applauded. Paul Goodman, the sixtyyear-old author and self-professed "community anarchist," tried to gavel the meeting back to order by declaring, "I'm a Roman senator, not a Digger!" And Emmett got up to leave with Natural Suzanne. There was just no use in wasting energy, and he walked out of the Theater for Ideas, remarking to the crowd that "There are eight million stories in this Naked City, and you people know every goddamn one of them!"

Two days or so later, an article about the meeting appeared in the Village Voice under the headline, "A View from the Left," and described him as a "tall, lean and scraggy twenty-three-year-old exBrooklynite," and went on to say that " 'The Diggers,' according to Grogan, collect free food from merchants or grow it themselves and dispense it free to whoever desires it. They also collect used clothes and give them away,' he said."

It was a good thing Emmett was at the airport when he read the news story, because as soon as he saw that "he said" crap about collecting free food from merchants, he wanted to go and commit some mayhem on the person who wrote the lie. " 'He said!' The guy who wrote this bunk has been reading too much of the Daily News!" And he tossed the paper with its "Eat a Digger!" quotes and radical-liberal gibberish into a waste can as his flight was called.

Before he finally left the city, however, he had done one very important thing which he felt he had to do if he really wanted his name to be erased from the files of the mass media. He gave it away. Gave away his name in the same manner he gave his identity to Natural Suzanne for her appearance on the Alan Burke show. He didn't change his name, he just gave it away to whoever wanted to use it, whenever, as had been advertised in Realist magazine by Paul Krassner: "The leader of the Diggers doesn't exist, and his name is Emmett Grogan, a hoax unwittingly played upon you by the underground press and the establishment press. Even Ramparts was tricked into using the photo of a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Emmett Grogan is the generic term for an existential hero of our time." The name quickly found popular usage among the street kids who started a make-believe game called "Will the Real [end page 360]