Sections Above and Below This Page:

Emmett Grogan Please Stand Up!" It got to a point on the West Coast where no one would even believe Emmett was Emmett, until he got corroboration from someone he knew personally. He was even able to identify himself to reporters--especially in California--and not be believed. Even the San Francisco Chronicle ran a paragraph in one of its stories on the Haight-Ashbury that said, "Whenever a Digger identifies himself as 'Emmett Grogan,' it means nothing since all Diggers call themselves Emmett Grogan on the general principle that anything which confuses the straight world can't be all bad." It was a fantastic success.

However, when it was all over and his name seldom if ever appeared in the media and everything got private once again, Emmett felt a strange uneasiness about the thorough success of his feigned nonexistence, a feeling that maybe he'd been too successful in convincing the media he was only a myth and the name "Emmett Grogan" nothing but a hoax.

He didn't exactly understand why he felt this way. He just did, that was all. But after a while, he decided that it was probably because he was just disappointed in how easy it was to accomplish; bitter at how incredibly easy it had been to dupe the media, and resentful at how quickly they accepted the lie. Emmett finally concluded that he was basically upset about all of it because his ego was insulted. His two cents apparently meant very little to the world.

The Hun returned to San Francisco ten days before, having spent only a few days in New York and leaving right after his appearance on the Alan Burke show. Emmett didn't understand why he came East in the first place, but decided that the Hun had gotten himself a round-trip ticket somewhere and just felt like taking off for a while. The girls, on the other hand, had come to visit their folks. Fyllis' mother had been ailing and Lacey Pines hadn't seen her sisters for what seemed like a long time to a girl just turned eighteen. Natural Suzanne, of course, had wanted to be with Emmett, stopping to see her family on the way to New York. She had been Emmett's old lady now for nearly six months and had grown much older than her eighteen years. She was a tall, beautifully proud-featured girl with a deep-felt shyness which stemmed from a tragic accident that occurred when she was a child.

It happened on her ninth birthday toward the end of a party her family gave her. She was all dressed up in a colorful, chiflfon birthday dress and had pinned the tail on a donkey, had dunked for apples, and had popped some balloons, happily enjoying her party, [end page 361]