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handle every day at four in the afternoon. He did the Free Foodwork mostly by himself, but whenever he did have a partner to help him with the operation, it was usually a woman. Women who weren't on the make to become "Emmett Grogan's old lady" or looking for a chance to play a role in a romantic, Robin Hood-adventure trip--rather, women who were strong, sincere, loyal and brave in their determination to serve the people and help liberate them from the oppression of their poverty.

These women were only girls to most men because the majority of them were still in their middle or late teens or had just turned twenty. To Emmett, however, they were always women and will always be women--every one of them more beautiful than the rest. It wasn't long before he came to trust them more, much more, than he did most men who claimed to be his brothers.

The Hun was involved only in the theater of the Trip Without A Ticket free store and spent the rest of his time developing the guerrilla theater possibilities of the streets. Tumble managed as many trucks as he could get hold of and used them to deliver goods to the free store, transport garbage from the crash pads to the dumpj bus people around the city, and every other conceivable usage he could think of. Coyote kept himself busy performing with the San Francisco Mime Troupe for what he promised would be the rest of the summer. Billy Landout split from the city and never came back there to live or work again, just to stop on his way to someplace else.

Emmett seldom regularly saw anyone but the women, and he would only get together with the rest on special occasions, as when they'd all work with each other to stage a celebration for something like the summer solstice or the Fourth of July. His job, which he usually did with Tumble during the production of each of these freefor-all extravaganzas, was always the same: to arrange with the leaders of the rock groups, like Janis Joplin or Jerry Garcia, for them to play; to get enough eighteen-foot, flatbed trucks to use, coupled back to back, as stages for the bands--of which seldom less than two were ever set up in one of the expansive meadows of Golden Gate Park; to supply the meat or poultry and to make a deal with a special group of elderly black men from the Fillmore district to prepare a huge vat of barbecue sauce with which they'd baste the meat they cooked over an open charcoal pit all morning and afternoon of the day's event, giving each piece away to the hungry crowd [end page 410]

 

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