Sections Above and Below This Page:

how tired he was and how she was the only one. He gave her the keys to the truck and the list of names and addresses with the number of people in each of the families written in a circle alongside every name.

"It's Tuesday, so today's vegetables. You've done it with me, 'n you know how it's all supposed to go. Get a couple of sisters to help you, 'n maybe even one of our brothers who's not too busy doin' his own goddamn thing! You don't have to do everyone on the list, just those with the asterisks next to their addresses. They need it the most, and our Collective. Okay?! Hurry up, 'cause if you don't get to the Produce and Farmers market quick, Synanon 'n them nuns'll beat you 'n cop everything. Thanks, sweetheart. Thank you."

For the rest of the week and from then on until the city and state governments put a stop to it, most of the women like Natural Suzanne, Lacey Pines, Fyllis, Nana Nina, Vicki Sparks, House Jane, Almond Judith, to name a few, and some of the Free City men, Slim Minnaux, Little Robert, Clearwater, Coyote, Butcher Brooks, House-Be-Nimble, G. G. Davey, Tumble, Strong Vinnie, to name a few, took over the Free Food Home Delivery Service and kept it happening for as many as they could. After a while, however, it became impossible for them to complete the entire route for a whole lot of obvious reasons, such as their lack of familiarity with it, and they condensed it to those families who were part of the Free City Collective or close to the work they were doing. At least some of the people were still eating. But even that ended in the spring, when most of the Free City Collective, in an attempt to stretch the long, dull winter out of their systems and to demand that the city and state do what they had been doing, began to perform a daily guerrilla theater production of poetry readings, agit-prop skits and song singing at lunch hour on the front steps of City Hall.

It went on every day for weeks and was called "City Hall Noon Forever!"--thoroughly entertaining the civil servants who came out to spend their lunch hours in the sunshine of the adjacent park. It ended abruptly however when the Hun and several others demanded to read a not unreasonable proposal to Mayor Alioto or his assistant, Michael McCone. The cops moved in, clubs swinging, and arrested forty of the male and female participants in the joyous Free City Collective event on the insistence of Municipal Judge Albert Axelrod who accused one of the Thelin brothers, owners of the thenclosed Psychedelic Shop, of violating California Penal Code 650-A, [end page 464]

 

Creative Commons License
The Digger Archives is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Cite As: The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0