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Street, 35-year-old Hells Angel, Chocolate George, died in a collision with a car right in the middle of the block and in front of the very people who really liked him for his Cossack general's appearance, his Russian fur hat, and his overall fearless, friendly attitude toward everyone, except would-be tough guys or bullies whom he crushed. His funeral-parlor wake was attended by truckloads of street people, and he was buried with an impressive honor guard of two hundred of his Angel brothers from all over the state on their bikes, and with two quarts of chocolate milk in his coffin, so he wouldn't get thirsty wherever he went. Afterwards, the people had a party in Golden Gate Park where ten thousand gathered to wail Chocolate George goodbye, and a memorial band composed of members of all the rock groups played "Didn't He Ramble!" Emmett arrived with the Free Food pickup truck full of a half ton of shaved snow ice covering a thousand cans of beer. The beer was drunk and the ice used for a snowball fight in August. Then it was over, and he was gone, and it wasn't ever gonna be the same again.

Soon after that, another important Haight Street figure and friend of Emmett's was reported missing until his body was found in a sleeping bag beneath a cliff by the Point Reyes lighthouse where it was thrown by the person or persons who murdered him with a 9mm., P-38, automatic pistol for the rnoney in his pocket. Super Spade was known to carry a lot of bread around, and that night he supposedly was holding onto $so,ooo to pay for a load of grass. But the simple armed-robbery-murder theory wasn't the way most people who knew him thought Super Spade died. They preferred to think he'd been snuffed by Eastern Mafia hit men who were sent out by the syndicate to get rid of anybody who could be an obstacle to their eventual takeover of the Haight-Ashbury territory. The only thing wrong with that bit of speculation was that the Mafia doesn't sell marijuana, and that's all Super Spade ever did. His murder, however, and the subsequent rumors of imminent mob control of the Haight caused a whole, new emigration of older hipsters to the countryside in search of some utopian dream that wasn't there.

There followed a whole string of senseless murders which usually involved some form of torture or bodily mutilation. The first of these was naturally headlined in the press as the "Psychedelic Murder," and the killer was caught driving a car with the cleanly severed, trimly stitched arm of the victim Iying in the luggage area behind the back seat. Another was described by the papers as a Sadistic Orgy Killing," and it was. A nineteen-year-old girl was [end page 444]