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that personally--very personally, 'n fuck knows what'll
happen! Now I gotta go see that they get set straight about what
I'm into before they get the wrong idea about why I'm here, 'n do
something I'll be sorry for--so, if anybody asks you about this
article about me, you just tell 'em it was a mistake, 'n it's
bullshit, because that's all that it is--bullshit! An' don't
print anything else about me, either, understand. I don't need,
want, or care for my name being in newspapers. So do me, and in
the long run yourselves, a favor 'n don't write anything about me
because you'll only interfere with what we're trying to do for
the hip community, 'n I'm sure you wouldn't want to do that.
Good! So we understand one another. Be seein' you." And he
shook their hands again and left before they could reply or even
say anything.
Later that night Paul Krassner, the lampoon editor of the
satirical, leftist periodical newsprint magazine catcalled The
Realist, which government authorities continually contended
was blatantly pornographic, told Candy Sand about a community
meeting being held that night in a Lower East Side loft to
discuss the problems facing the "hip community of the East
Village." Emmett had met Krassner in San Francisco when he
was taking a VIP tour of the Haight-Ashbury with some of the HIP
hierarchy, and he was impressed at how a man of such tiny
physical stature could be such a gross smart-alec. He burned some
of Krassner's money in response to a series of journalistic
inquiries and also gave him some free acid, the mere giving of
which had, for some cryptic reason blown Krassner's mind. So
Emmett went to the community meeting with Candy Sand and Paul
Krassner, where he was introduced to the East Coast's version of
HIP. They weren't united under the same or any other name but
were certainly uniform in their "hippie" manner and
style, affecting a similar and possibly weightier identification
with the psychedelic experience.
Most of the thirty-some-odd persons present at the meet were
in their twenties, had been raised in upper-middle-class
environments, had finished college and had dropped out of their
establishment futures because they were bored and wanted a chance
to put creativity back into their lives, to make an art out of
living. They were more wordy and less spaced out than their San
Francisco peers, and since the Lower East Side didn't exactly
border any spectacular woodland or rolling green hills, they were
more concerned with community politics than with the ecology of
their environment. Even though they tried to dress up their
surroundings by constantly [end page 321]
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