Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan

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The Barnes & Noble Review

From street-smart New York punk to West Coast hippie prankster: that’s how Emmett Grogan, who died in 1978, would like readers of his self-aggrandizing autobiography to remember him. But in the age of James Frey, we’re more likely to wonder how much of this wild tale is actually true. The first half of Grogan’s fantastic account -- the childhood tale of Kenny Wisdom -- beggars belief. Born in postwar Brooklyn in a tough neighborhood, he becomes a heroin addict at age 11, a Park Avenue burglar at 13, a runaway to Europe at 14, a murderer at 15, and, to cap it off, an IRA terrorist at 16. Women everywhere fall for his freckle-faced good looks, and jail time simply strengthens his will to get over. A scholarship to an elite Manhattan school helps him sharpen his wits, hone his basketball skills, and once again prove what a tough customer he can be. Along the way, Kenny picks up a stack of hip paperbacks and evolves into the legendary Emmett Grogan, best known among cultural historians as a co-founder of the Diggers, a quasi-anarchistic group who tried to undermine the System by giving stuff away for free -- food, clothing, and lots of drugs. They accompanied this with disruptive of street theater, and often to the live soundtrack of the emerging San Francisco sound: the Dead, Janis, and Jefferson Airplane. This half of Grogan’s romp includes appearances by a full cast of '60s characters, some celebrated (Dylan, Brautigan, leftover Beats), others mocked (Abbie Hoffman, Leary and Ram Dass, Jerry Rubin). In true post-Salinger fashion, Grogan reserves his harshest criticism for “the phonies,” all those who exploit the scene for commercial gain. Whatever you feel about Grogan or the '60s, his semi-apocryphal account is an unforgettable portrait of a strange time, an essential document of a tumultuous era. --Thomas DePietro

Synopsis

Ringolevio is a classic American story of self-invention by one of the more mysterious and alluring figures to emerge in the 1960s. Emmett Grogan grew up on New York City’s mean streets, getting hooked on heroin before he was in his teens, kicking the habit and winning a scholarship to a swanky Manhattan private school, pursuing a highly profitable sideline as a Park Avenue burglar, then skipping town to enjoy the dolce vita in Italy. It’s a hard-boiled, sometimes hard-to-believe, wildly entertaining tale that takes a totally unexpected turn when Grogan washes up in sixties San Francisco and becomes a leader of the anarchist group known as the Diggers. The Diggers, devoted to street theater, direct action, and distributing free food, were in the thick of the legendary Summer of Love, and soon Grogan is struggling with the naive narcissism of the hippies, the marketing of revolution as a brand, dogmatic radicals, and false prophets like tripster Timothy Leary. Above all, however, he struggles with himself.

Ringolevio is an enigmatic portrait of a man and his times to set beside Hunter S. Thompson’s stories of fear and loathing, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, or the recent Chronicles of Bob Dylan, who dedicated his 1978 album Street Legal to the memory of Emmett Grogan.

Biography

Emmett Grogan (c.1943—1978) was born Eugene Grogan in Brooklyn, New York. Called a “Superman of the Underground” by The Times (London), he was the founder of the Diggers, a legendary anarchistic group in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s that supplied free food, housing, and medical aid to runaways. On April 6, 1978, the thirty-five-year-old Grogan was found dead on a subway car in New York City, possibly of a drug overdose. Besides his autobiography, Grogan was the author of Final Score, a fictional crime novel.

Peter Coyote is an actor, activist, novelist, songwriter, and Emmy-winning voice-over artist. After a short apprenticeship at the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he became a prominent member of the San Francisco counterculture community and a founding member of the Diggers. His memoir is entitled Sleeping Where I Fall.