American Fun (42 page)

On September 27, 1966, in the African-American neighborhood of Hunter’s Point, cops chased
Matthew Johnson, a black teenager suspected of stealing a car, trapped him against a chain-link fence, and shot him in the back. This murder—and its immediate dismissal by city government—touched off two days of riots and vandalism and a military-style retaliation from the
National Guard, 1,200 of whom had been mustered in
Candlestick Park. An unseasonable heat wave elevated tensions. The Guard marched and drove tanks down Third Street, soon shooting into buildings with automatic weapons and drawing gunfire, rocks, and bottles from the locals. In the end, 44 were injured, 146 arrested; $100,000 in damage was done, and a citywide curfew was enforced. Just as the hippie community was starting to thrive, the San Francisco black community—like so many others in late 1960s America—was plunged into devastation that would plague it for decades.

In the aftermath of the
Hunter’s Point riots, SDS and other activist groups staged protests outside the Mission Street Armory. They also marched their cause down Haight Street, waving signs reaching out to the “
Psychedelic Community,” some of whom heckled their own messages in return: “
Go back to school where you belong!”
Emmett Grogan, a twenty-two-year-old
Duke University dropout from Brooklyn (a Mime Trouper who spuriously claimed the army had discharged him for clinical schizophrenia), was amused to see activists butting heads with Haight-Ashbury merchants over the correct response to the curfew. The activists wanted to make it a cause; the merchants wanted to keep the peace. Grogan, along with Mime Troupers
Billy Landout and
Peter Berg, preferred to stir up the conflict itself. Letting themselves into the SDS offices to liberate the mimeograph machine, they ran off a series of nose-thumbing screeds that have since been known as the
Digger Papers. Maintaining their anonymity (like the Sons of Liberty); pulling pranks
in the spirit of Holland’s anarchistic Provos and
Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”; naming themselves after seventeenth-century English rebels who “defied the landlords” and “defied the laws” (as the traditional song about them goes) and redistributed food among the poor, these new Diggers deplored private property and reveled in nonviolent disruption. The Digger Papers accosted the general public from telephone poles and storefronts; they called bullshit, usually with excellent humor, on everyone from the Learyites’
Oracle
to the Berkeley-based radical activists. The most commonly reproduced Digger Paper, called
“Take a Cop to Dinner,” burlesqued a campaign by Haight Street’s commercial association (HIP) urging hippies to sit down and eat with the cops. It accused all of society—“Pimps,” “Racketeers,” drug dealers, the “Catholic Church,” “Establishment newspapers,” et cetera—of pandering to the police. Its joke was built on parallel structure:

All of the Haight (especially the ridiculed merchants and leaders) wanted to know who the Diggers were, so the Diggers responded in their papers and by personal telegram: “
Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts of the DIGGERS: We are happy to report that the DIGGERS are not that.”

Within a week the Diggers were backing up their papers with bold community action. Most notably, they tapped San Francisco’s food surplus (some stolen, some donated, some day-old leftovers) and prepared ten-gallon milk cans of hot stew and wooden crates of green salad to
serve to the rising numbers of street people. It was called “Free Food Theatre,” it was passed through a one-story-tall yellow “Frame of Reference,” and it happened every day at 4 p.m. under a eucalyptus in the Panhandle. “It’s free because it’s yours!” pamphlets announced. A hundred or so customers appeared every day, recognizable by their bowls and spoons. Grogan and the others spent their days foraging, and a group of women (some of them
Antioch College dropouts) ran the primitive kitchens, in keeping with hippies’ typically retrograde gender roles. The
Berkeley Barb,
one of the Bay Area’s new radical newspapers, followed the Diggers’ operations closely and saw their high spirits and irreverence rub off on the patrons. When a reporter asked who the Diggers were, a girl smiled and responded: “
Are you a digger?” Another kid shouted “ ‘FUCK THE DIGGERS!!!’… and everybody laughed and repeated it.” They horsed around with apples and stew, shouting “Food as Medium!” But mostly the people got their fill, then passed around their cigarettes. Free food could be counted on every day at four, despite occasional meddling by cops and the Health Department (who were told it was just a “picnic”), but as the numbers of patrons doubled and quadrupled, the Diggers made the hungry work for it—making them chase down their famous gold bus (known around town as the Yellow Submarine) or pry their own dinner from the hot, hammered-shut milk cans. For at bottom these liberators were Mime Troupers, pranksters.

Throughout the fall of 1966, as capitalist horse sense took root in the Haight, the Diggers waged war on private property. Disgusted by condescending “
charity,” insisting they weren’t “helping anybody” but only “doing [their] individual thing,” they stepped up their free food efforts; they worked with the
Human Switchboard to find free “crash-pads” for the homeless, and they turned a six-car garage on Page Street into the first of their “
free stores.” Named for the empty picture frames left behind in the garage, which they painted and nailed into a puzzling mosaic,
The Free Frame of Reference, as the first store was called, posted a surprising policy: Everything is free, and “you’re in charge.” Everything: kitchen supplies, furniture, knickknacks, books, a surplus of white oxfords that the Diggers tie-dyed, even a box of “free money” in place of a cash register. It was impossible to shoplift; those who tried were
instructed to take more.
Peter Coyote, who managed the Cole Street free store, called A Trip Without a Ticket, described the Diggers’ stores and stunts as effects of their “
life acting” philosophy. Their message was unequivocal activity: “The Diggers attracted actors (trained or not) who wanted to employ these skills in their everyday lives, constructing events outside the theater that were ‘free,’ financially and structurally, so that they might exist outside of conventional expectations and defenses.” Any American had to be shocked by their willful anti-consumerism. But
Roy Ballard, the twenty-seven-year-old civil rights activist who managed the Fillmore’s Black Man’s Free Store, took a more practical stance: explaining the hippies’ fantastical ideas for restarting their parents’ game from scratch, he said “
the white kids are more advanced but also less realistic.” Of all their theories, pranks, and pipe dreams, only free merchandise made sense to him.

The Free Frame of Reference was the operating base for the Diggers’ wild ideas. That Halloween, they moved their yellow frame up the block and staged a show with two nine-foot-tall
puppets by the sculptor
La Mortadella. Five hundred spectators spilled out into traffic. When the cops failed to break up the crowd, they mirthlessly tried negotiating with the puppets and inadvertently “
tickled the people silly.” In the end the cops seized the Diggers (their first arrest) and couldn’t quite get over the puppets—assuming that they were made to “hurt people.” “Will you look at how fuckin’ big they are!” Five performers were booked for “creating a public nuisance,” but Grogan remembered it as a “fun bust.” When the charges were dropped two days later, Grogan, Berg, La Mortadella, and the others were pictured pulling
Marx Brothers antics (ass-kicks, obscene European hand gestures) above the fold in the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

On Thanksgiving the Diggers opened their garage doors for a public “
Meatfest,” and on December 16 they held their
Death of Money
Parade, a lugubriously fun, full-participation charade in which Mime Troupers (without
R. G. Davis’s blessing) dressed like reapers, dwarves, and lepers; in which girls in togas passed out pennywhistles and hand signs (reading “Now!”) and pallbearers shouldered a black-draped coffin. The
Hell’s Angels—who had become Haight Street’s sometime protectors
since the
Pranksters had turned them on to acid—provided a rumbling escort. Competing groups led the crowd in nonsense call-and-response: “
Oooo!” and “Aaahhh!”; “Ssssh!” and “Be cool!” “A Munibus driver,” Grogan remembered, “got out of his coach and danced in the street with a girl, and his passengers disembarked to mix in the fun.” And despite the lack of a parade permit, the cops wisely honored the chants of four thousand insistent revelers: “The streets belong to the people! The streets belong to the people!” In the milling aftermath, however, when they busted Angels Hairy Henry and Chocolate George for ostensible parole violations, the crowd marched a noisy candlelight vigil in their favor (“
We want Hairy Henry! We want Chocolate George!”) and filled the Death of Money casket with bail. Two weeks later, Hell’s Angels showed their appreciation by hosting a “
New Year’s Wail” in the Panhandle—free music, free beer, the first free party of 1967.

Most of the Diggers hailed from New York, but like the forty-niners they administered a California education. For all of their disruptions and childish absurdity, the Diggers were a force for civic good in a generally outlaw society—a subculture of runaways and distracted idealists who exposed themselves to rampant hepatitis, VD, meth addiction, poverty, drug wars, rape, and frequent abuse by pimps (who seized on “free love” teenyboppers), Hell’s Angels (who treated weak hippies like servants), the Mafia (who bullied dealers into their drug trade), and, constantly, cops and Feds. Unlike the self-interested Merry Pranksters, the Diggers fought for community values in a rough and improvised society. They organized free food and shelter and arranged for free medical and legal services. “
The
Digger Papers” offered free ideas on starting everything from free banks and automotive garages to “Balls, Happenings, Theatre, Dance, and spontaneous experiments in joy.”

This Haight-Ashbury ethos, this Port Huron–style democracy played out in real time with “spontaneous experiments in joy,” metastasized throughout the country during the middle 1960s. More than popular music, itinerant teens, and alarmed reporting from the mainstream media, the “
underground press” deserves recognition for disseminating the exciting news. The underground press gave unguarded voice to the ethics, pleasures, habits, styles, and generally leftist politics of the era’s urban and
college-town youth cultures. Sold by mail or in the nation’s newsstands, cafés, and head shops (which likewise boomed, not coincidentally, after America bombed Vietnam), the undergrounds mixed radical politics with the hip new formulas for public pleasure: folk, rock, free love, gathering, and all the modern ways to get high. Originating in L.A. and the San Francisco Bay Area but soon spreading to most mid-sized American towns, cheaply produced and distributed by amateurs—indeed, often identifying their publications with revolutionary-era broadsheets—these typically mimeographed “newssheets,” as the historian John McMillian has convincingly argued, espoused an SDS-influenced “
participatory democracy.” Their tone, like that of the rude and bawdy “underground comix” with which they shared a readership, was decidedly irreverent, reflecting the youth culture from which they sprang. They mimicked the scrappiness of
Mad Magazine,
one of the 1950s’ few mainstream outlets for biting
satire and cynicism, and of the lavishly offensive
Realist,
a perfectly obscene New York magazine that gleefully skewered America’s sacred cows—and whose founder,
Paul Krassner, “demand[ed] a blood test” when accused of fathering the underground press. But even as they
took root in many regions and “scenes,” Virginia City’s
Territorial Enterprise
was the dominant code in their DNA.

Haight District denizens help
Diggers celebrate the “Death of Money,” December 17, 1966. (Courtesy of Gene Anthony, © Wolfgang’s Vault.)

For they made reporting an instrument of fun. More than just satirical opinion papers, they mixed the community-building populism of the 1830s “penny papers” with the out-group pride of the 1860s Washoe papers and supported local countercultural activity; they became what McMillian calls “
community switchboards.” They fostered the Diggers’ lifestyle of “Free.” They helped hard-up folks in their teens and twenties track down food, clothing, shelter, wheels, health care, and lawyers. They also provided an open forum for the pursuit of drugs, music, protest, street theater, and all the bare facts of a purely groovy life. The underground papers were crucial to off-the-grid living, and in the summer of 1966 they expanded their reach by forming an “
anarchistic organization” called the Underground Press Syndicate, or UPS. This national organ for the “Fuck Censorship press” allowed the undergrounds to swap their materials, inspired twenty-five new newssheets in just half a year, and led to a total national circulation of 250,000 by the start of 1967. The undergrounds aligned themselves with the Sons of Liberty, and they proved to have a similar effect. They helped lefties, hippies, dropouts, and heads form thriving “scenes” across the country.