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It was the nearest Emmett has ever come to making himself insane, remaining lonely in a way that few men ever have a chance to be lonely.

He not only had to ride with the fact that most of the people to whom he delivered the food thought of him as just a hired driver; he also had to contend with the incredible phenomenon of having his own Free City brothers put him down, bad-mouthing him, and begrudging him even the slightest bit of credit for having accomplished anything, much less acknowledging that he put the food on their table over which they discussed his shortcomings! It had him crazy! Crazy, because he knew he was doing it to himself. He didn't have to continue the Free Food. He didn't have to do any of those things! But he did, and that made it a matter of choice. Though he really didn't need the food himself, he somehow, deep inside himself, needed to free the food for those people who needed it. And in that sense, he probably needed it more than they did. He definitely needed it more than he ever needed anything else.

And so, Emmett remained an anonym to most people and allowed those close to him to drive him nearly out of his mind with their maddening insults to his sense of brotherhood. Some members of the Free City Collective resented his rigid insistence that everything be carried out anonymously, while anyone who wanted to could and was taking credit for "free" things they'd never done and words they'd never spoken or written or thought.

The Summer of Love was mainly the result of such a lie. The Haight Independent Proprietors' Human Be-In lie and its result bore witness to what would be in store for a nation that allowed its children to be lied to by comical, fake-radical politicos whose masquerade they nurtured by giving them profitable access to the mass media. The adventure of poverty by young white people in love ghettos throughout the country, like the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side, was pleasant fakery for most of them. But in the same way that real poverty has always given birth to real revolution, this feigned poverty of the adventurous would breed a false-bottomed, jerry-built revolution in which the adventurers would continue their make-believe and be followed by the rock-concert lumpen, tired of their own voyeurism.

Of course, the "Summer" really ended before it ever started, but the sound of the tolling bell only began being heard in that last week of August when one of the most beloved men on Haight [end page 443]