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brothers that Emmett was on a "star trip," and he would cop all the glory for himself once they got to New York. This conclusion of his brothers was legitimate in terms of Emmett's powerful monster ego, but it had no validity at all in point of fact. He had completely honored his vow of anonymity. That wasn't what bothered them, however. What had them always on edge about Emmett was that he had the power to make himself a public hero any time he wanted to, and they just didn't want to believe that he wouldn't.

Apparently, Tumble thought seriously about those same things which were torturing Emmett's mind to insanity, and he decided to go to New York with him. The deal was that they would both watch each other's back and share the burden of doing what had to be done there. The only mistake they made was in bringing along a gun. They should've brought two.

Jerome Rubin, the Cleveland sportswriter turned Berkeley radical, had already joined up with Abbot Hoffman in New York to form the fabulous duo that was going to get them both top billing on the radical vaudeville circuit. About the same time Rubin arrived in the East, Hoffman received a phone call from Emmett telling him to stop using the name "Diggers" as the title of his act and advising him to find another one, which he did with Rubin, Krassner and their wives, and with the help of a camp, memory lane, Eddie Cantor-Busby Berkeley film called Making Whoopee!

The decision to telephone wasn't Emmett's alone, but was reached by most of the people in the Free City Collective. It was based on an outrageously selfish, thirty-page pamphlet that Hoffman had written while he was employed as one of Mayor Lindsay's aides. The pamphlet was entitled Fuck the System, and Abbot was enormously proud of himself for having tricked the city into printing it.

The contents listed the various places where and how adventurers in poverty could have gotten anything from free vegetables and meat to free buffaloes, if the pamphlet hadn't been written. You see, instead of actually doing any of these things to get something for nothing, which he heard about like anyone else who lives in a poor district, Hoffman wrote them down on paper for his own self-aggrandizement as a "Oh, look how hip he is!" hipster. He wrote down the addresses of all the places that poor people in New York City had been hitting for food and other stuff, ever since they existed, and he made it all into a joke. He made a joke out of the way people who didn't choose to be poor got what they needed once in a while to [end page 455]

make their lives a little easier. He made a joke out of what Emmett and his brothers and sisters took seriously and actually did sixteen hours a day, every day for two years, working to serve the people, of whom they were a part. He made a joke, and those who didn't need any of the things he listed thought it was all very funny, and they laughed and gave Abbot the applause he was searching for. But if he had written a pamphlet like that about where and how people in San Francisco got what they needed for free, the joke would have been on Abbot Hoffman, and he would have been killed just like any other snitch.

Since they were given some money to cover their expenses by those people who wanted their advice, Tumble and Emmett decided to get a large double room at the Chelsea Hotel instead of flopping at someone's pad. They no sooner checked in and entered their room, when the phone rang. The voice on the other end told them that there was a meeting scheduled for later that afternoon in a loft on the Lower East Side, and that everyone whose names the two of them had previously suggested to the man would be there, as well as a few others. After they hung up, Emmett and Tumble went to sleep. It was only eight o'clock in the morning, and they had been up all night on the plane, discussing what would be the best solution for the problem of directing financial energy into the East Village.

At 3 P.M. they arrived at the Second Avenue loft and were greeted by a Methodist minister from San Francisco's Glide Church who showed them upstairs and into a very big room filled with many men and a few women, most of whom didn't like the idea of the two of them coming from the West Coast to tell them how to take care of their business at all. Others remembered Emmett from his last visit East and didn't like him very much. And he didn't like them a whole lot either.

Emmett spoke first and flatly stated that whatever money eventually came into the hip community should be used for "popular," rather than "public," events. "The money should be thought of as energy, and used to create popular alternatives, such as changing the slum environment by getting it cleaned up and painting visuals on the vacant sides of buildings. Now, the point of a popular alternative is that, if there are enough of them around, they will turn the people of the neighborhood on to their own power, and they'll begin to fight for the right to live, instead of quietly dying!"

Tumble said that the money, however it's put to use by the hip [end page 456]