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the key to explaining how everything he did was theater--brilliant, guerrilla theater in the streets.

Emmett hopped into a cab and was knocking on the door of Hoffman's ground-floor apartment at St. Mark's Place within ten minutes. His wife, Anita, answered and was glad to see Emmett, but told him Abbot was in Boston giving a lecture and trying his best to get himself arrested for some misdemeanor or another. Emmett decided to play it cool and try to find the papers that had to be somewhere in the railroad flat. He rapped for a moment with Anita whom he didn't dislike in the least, when the phone rang. It was her husband.

When she finished talking, Emmett took the receiver and asked Abbot how everything was going and listened to the childish enthusiasm of a lightweight who could hardly wait to get himself arrested for jumping over the turnstile in the subway or something.

Emmett was seething, but didn't let on to Abbot. "Oh, by the way, man. You remember those papers I gave you early last spring? Well, I want to give them to Carol what's-her-name, so she can reprint them for the Angry Arts folks. You still got them. Where are they?"

The reply he heard he half expected. Abbot told him that he didn't have them anymore. Somebody took them home to read one night and never brought them back, and he couldn't remember who it was. He went on to say that Emmett could look around the pad if he wanted, but they really weren't there any longer.

Then Emmett blew it and laid it on the line. "Listen, Hoffman, I've been hearin' that you're writing some sort of a book, and I wanna tell you, if you print or paraphrase any of those pieces, especially the Hun's stuff on theater, without saying that you didn't write those words, we're gonna make you answer for it plenty, unnerstand. And we're not going to consider it a misdemeanor either!"

Hoffman came back with words to the effect that it was all "free", wasn't it? So how could he or anyone else steal "free"? Emmett explained as calmly as he could that guys like Abbot could steal "free" and had been doing that ever since he was given those papers, because he made believe that he was what they represented, and what the people who wrote them worked at all the time--"Free!" Abbot answered by saying that he was "free" and that everything he had was "free" and nobody could steal anything from him, because it was all free!

Emmett knew by now that the papers were safely tucked away someplace else and that he wasn't going to get them away from [end page 459]