Ringolevio

If half this book is true, Emmett Grogan lived one of the wildest lives of the last century. If only some of this book is true, Grogan was one of that century’s wildest writers—a mythmaker of 1960s San Francisco second to none. The facts are, fittingly, difficult to pin down, even though Grogan made it to national, and FBI, attention as cofounder of the Diggers, Haight-Ashbury’s quintessential anarchist collective. Born in Brooklyn circa 1943, Grogan grew up in the subways: Uptown was where he’d score drugs, and downtown was where he honed his toughness playing rounds of Ringolevio—the game that gives his finally reissued 1972 memoir its name.

Ringolevio was a variant of cops-and-robbers that Grogan’s team of Jews and Irish played against Harlem blacks for money and local respect. The objective was to turn a street into one’s own ludic world—imagining neighborhood butcher shops as “hideouts,” and fire hydrants as “jails” for the capturing of others. This became a model for the Diggers’ goofy, revolutionary Free City ethos. Founded upon his 1965 arrival in San Francisco, Grogan’s group was concerned with the youthful subversion of daily reality.

The Diggers—the name came from the 17th-century radical agrarian Diggers, who opposed British feudalism, and dug wherever they pleased—were fond of the free; they were best known for distributing free food, drugs, medical care, cash and “free energy,” in happenings featuring security from the Hells Angels and music by the Dead. Ringolevio narrates the scene’s descent from early hippie optimism to wised-up yippie pranks, advising its readers to both “do your own thing”—originally Grogan’s slogan—and “take a cop to dinner.” What Grogan omits in his exuberance is the endgame darkness, especially his heroin addiction. He died of an overdose, on the F train at the end of the line, in Coney Island, on April 6, 1978. Some, however, still insist that it was April 1, All Fools’ Day.

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