I’ve wanted to read Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps for close to fifty years. Having now done so I can attest the wait was worth it, but not in the way I expected.
Every UK teenager knew something was happening in San Francisco during those Mid-60s’ Summers, but it wasn’t exactly clear to us what it was. Drugs and music sure, but we had those ourselves. What we definitely didn’t have were hundreds of thousands of “flower children,” apparently descending on a single street corner. The arresting images the straight media provided only contributed more perplexity. In retrospect the underground press wasn’t much better. A litany of names, Be-ins, and drug busts meant little without context. Emmett Grogan’s was one of those names but never more than that hence, to me, especially fascinating.
Grogan was, almost everyone present agrees, a key figure in that place at that time. He was also a consummate liar. By his own account, he’d been a heroin addict at 14, a convict at 15, then attended a prestigious prep-school, become a cat-burglar on NY’s West Side, climbed the Matterhorn, attended film school in Rome, and gone on bombing runs in Northern Ireland with the Provos. This covers the first half of the book and, while entertaining, clearly suggests a steaming pile of bullshit. But, as fellow Digger Peter Coyote, writes in his introduction: “Don’t believe everything you read, but don’t be too quick to doubt it either. Whether or not he actually did everything he claimed in exactly the way he claimed is immaterial. As Emmett disclaims in his Author’s Note, ‘This book is true.’ But that doesn’t mean it all actually happened. Which sounds like a cop out to me but, perhaps unintentionally, does perhaps get close to the heart of who Grogan was.
The San Francisco Diggers were an obscure organisation at a time when every other radical group in town found it easy to get yards of copy. Referred to variously as street anarchists or a secular Salvation Army, they took it on themselves to feed, clothe, house and otherwise supply with essentials the innumerable kids who wandered into the Haight at that time. Based on the little I knew about them at the time, to me they appeared to embody what the hippie counter-culture was supposed to be about. It turns out I was wrong, the Diggers wanted no part of that at all. Says Grogan:
“The Summer of Love was mainly the result of... a lie. The Haight Independent Proprietors’ Human Be-In lie and its result bore witness to what would be in store for a nation that allowed its children to be lied to by comical, fake-radical politicos whose masquerade they nurtured by giving them profitable access to mass media. The adventure of poverty by young white people in love ghettos throughout the country, like the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side, was pleasant fakery for most of them. But in the same way that real poverty has always given birth to real revolution, this feigned poverty would breed a false bottomed, jerry-built revolution in which the the adventurers would continue their make-believe and be followed by the rock-concert lumpen, tired of their own voyeurism.”
Grogan despised the counter culture political celebs even more than the hip entrepreneurs. The Learys, Hoffmans, Rubins and the coffee shop campus radicals were, he believed, building personal fame on the backs the poor. Anonymity was fundamental to the Diggers. In part this was pragmatic, much of what they redistributed was stolen or obtained otherwise illicitly. However fear of becoming media generated personality cult was an equal concern, particularly for Grogan. It’s clear he was an articulate and charismatic personality, and his struggle against visibility became simultaneously both a fear and obsession. Yet the more he struggled the more that role pursued him, to the extent that he became to be distrusted by the other Diggers. Ultimately his solution was to walk away.
This book was published in 1972. Six years later Emmett Grogan was found dead of a heroin overdose in a subway train at Coney Island. His testament begs as many questions as it answers, yet it’s still the best subjective account of the period I’ve read. I expected an autobiography, what I got was not that. The first half of this book is mostly fabrication and the second a good part exaggeration. Yet in spite of that, on its own terms, it’s never less than honest.
Every UK teenager knew something was happening in San Francisco during those Mid-60s’ Summers, but it wasn’t exactly clear to us what it was. Drugs and music sure, but we had those ourselves. What we definitely didn’t have were hundreds of thousands of “flower children,” apparently descending on a single street corner. The arresting images the straight media provided only contributed more perplexity. In retrospect the underground press wasn’t much better. A litany of names, Be-ins, and drug busts meant little without context. Emmett Grogan’s was one of those names but never more than that hence, to me, especially fascinating.
Grogan was, almost everyone present agrees, a key figure in that place at that time. He was also a consummate liar. By his own account, he’d been a heroin addict at 14, a convict at 15, then attended a prestigious prep-school, become a cat-burglar on NY’s West Side, climbed the Matterhorn, attended film school in Rome, and gone on bombing runs in Northern Ireland with the Provos. This covers the first half of the book and, while entertaining, clearly suggests a steaming pile of bullshit. But, as fellow Digger Peter Coyote, writes in his introduction: “Don’t believe everything you read, but don’t be too quick to doubt it either. Whether or not he actually did everything he claimed in exactly the way he claimed is immaterial. As Emmett disclaims in his Author’s Note, ‘This book is true.’ But that doesn’t mean it all actually happened. Which sounds like a cop out to me but, perhaps unintentionally, does perhaps get close to the heart of who Grogan was.
The San Francisco Diggers were an obscure organisation at a time when every other radical group in town found it easy to get yards of copy. Referred to variously as street anarchists or a secular Salvation Army, they took it on themselves to feed, clothe, house and otherwise supply with essentials the innumerable kids who wandered into the Haight at that time. Based on the little I knew about them at the time, to me they appeared to embody what the hippie counter-culture was supposed to be about. It turns out I was wrong, the Diggers wanted no part of that at all. Says Grogan:
“The Summer of Love was mainly the result of... a lie. The Haight Independent Proprietors’ Human Be-In lie and its result bore witness to what would be in store for a nation that allowed its children to be lied to by comical, fake-radical politicos whose masquerade they nurtured by giving them profitable access to mass media. The adventure of poverty by young white people in love ghettos throughout the country, like the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side, was pleasant fakery for most of them. But in the same way that real poverty has always given birth to real revolution, this feigned poverty would breed a false bottomed, jerry-built revolution in which the the adventurers would continue their make-believe and be followed by the rock-concert lumpen, tired of their own voyeurism.”
Grogan despised the counter culture political celebs even more than the hip entrepreneurs. The Learys, Hoffmans, Rubins and the coffee shop campus radicals were, he believed, building personal fame on the backs the poor. Anonymity was fundamental to the Diggers. In part this was pragmatic, much of what they redistributed was stolen or obtained otherwise illicitly. However fear of becoming media generated personality cult was an equal concern, particularly for Grogan. It’s clear he was an articulate and charismatic personality, and his struggle against visibility became simultaneously both a fear and obsession. Yet the more he struggled the more that role pursued him, to the extent that he became to be distrusted by the other Diggers. Ultimately his solution was to walk away.
This book was published in 1972. Six years later Emmett Grogan was found dead of a heroin overdose in a subway train at Coney Island. His testament begs as many questions as it answers, yet it’s still the best subjective account of the period I’ve read. I expected an autobiography, what I got was not that. The first half of this book is mostly fabrication and the second a good part exaggeration. Yet in spite of that, on its own terms, it’s never less than honest.
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