Sections Above and Below This Page:

trip to happen for "free" by blocking most of the financial possibilities. Years later they would cop the idea and make an obnoxious film with a fat disc jockey and a bunch of no-account, lame panhandlers, entitled Medicine Ball Caravan which, as one reviewer put it, "added up to no experience."

Emmett returned to San Francisco sick and tired of having been so long away from the city where he belonged. But very few things were happening to increase his gladness at being back among familiar faces doing his work with the Free Food. One thing did happen, however, that was enough to make him think that things weren't all that bad and even gave him a bit of optimism. Coyote had finally gotten down off the fence, resigning from the Mime Troupe to actively join the Free City Collective as a full-time brother, instead of simply remaining a part-time, lend-a-hand man. What made him decide to choose to play for keeps, only he knows. But when he'd made his decision, he didn't just come around. He came full around, and Emmett was back in time to embrace him.

Coyote had found a middle-aged woman who'd inherited an old hotel that she didn't know what to do with. It was a fifty-year-old, 482-room, huge place that used to cater mostly to prizefighters, like Jack Dempsey, but now was a waterfront flophouse for itinerants called the Reno Hotel. Coyote knew exactly what to do with it, as did his partner at the time, Golden Gloves Davey, a college-graduate boxer and stout worker: they were going to make a free hotel out of it. They intended to renovate the rundown building and redecorate it all in a modern, funky style including in it a free theater, movie house, restaurant and hospital. The woman who owned the hotel was thrilled with the idea and set her lawyers to draw up a nonprofit corporation to cover the turnover of the Reno to the Free City Collective. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm about the possibility of a well-run, free dwelling was not at all shared by the city hall bureaucrats and various police agencies who denounced the planned project as a "bed of evil" and pressured the fine woman into boarding up the hotel and terminating her role in the "free" venture.

It was a heavy disappointment for everyone connected with the Free City Collective, but especially for Coyote and Golden Davey, who thought they'd succeeded in solving at least a portion of the overcrowding dilemma of the Haight-hipster community. They both worked extremely hard to get the undertaking going and gathered large crews of carpenters, electricians and all sorts of skilled [end page 439]