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remembered that this was the writer-poet-genius man who got his wife to place an apple or avocado on her head at a stoned-tequiladrunken party in Mexico, because his marksmanship was challenged by one of his pals or somebody. Then he carefully aimed the .45 pistol or whatever it was, firing a slug point-blank into the center of his wife's forehead which made her cerebrum hemorrhage and the police gasp. But they quickly called it an "accidental homicide," and everybody else said, "Wow!" except Bill Burroughs, who just sat there, like he was sitting there now, knowing full well that no one was ever going to know the secret that lies hidden in his brain.

Bill Burroughs and the rest of the audience were going to have to wait until the following evening to be impressed by Emmett, because he was too tiredly stoned to say what he wanted. What he did do, therefore, was to open his speech with "Today is the first day of the rest of your life!" which was a line he either made up or picked up somewhere during the last year. Shortly after he said it that night, it began appearing on posters and postcards and everywhere, not as a quote attributed to anyone, but just as a simple, declarative sentence to be sold by persons who never had an original thought in their dollar-billed lives.

He kept his speech short and to the point, which was to say, he refuted all of Carmichael's screamed remarks, not by giving away any secrets about himself or the people with whom he worked, but by simply explaining that the work they did together wasn't any Salvation Army trip, and concluding that neither he nor any of his people were so-called flower children, because they'd known ever since they were little boys and girls that ". . . flowers die too easy, even when they have thorns!"

Then he left. He walked off the stage and down into the audience where he sat and spoke with Michael X, a London black man whom he'd known when he was in London the first time around. Michael X was also the West Indian black leader who was going to end up paying for Stokely Carmichael's bottomless rabble-rousing against "whitey." Michael X was going to pay by being arrested for Carmichael's inciting the residents to riot in the streets of London's black ghetto of Brixton after the conference, creating hysteria and then immediately splitting the country with the promise that he'd be right back, knowing that he'd never return and thereby leaving Michael X to hold the bag which he was to do, for over a year in prison.

Emmett talked solely and briefly with Michael X about money [end page 431]