Eric Hofferman
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By the author of Feel the System, Evolution for the Halibut, and Woodstock, Non-Sovereign Inhabited Territory.
Free-Toes
If food be the absence of stomach pains, RIGHT ONI You don’t have to be a too-early brother bird or sister bird to cash in on all the liberated eats. But 7:30 mass is an outasite start. But be sure it’s a solemn high mass with a small congregation because they usually give out wine with the communion. (If the crowd’s too large, they skip the wine.) Since it's not a whole lot, you might want to hype the experience by scarfing the Host while you’re in the state of grace. It's a rush! (Conversion’s a hassle, but it's worth it for the high.) After mass, you’ll only have to wait about an hour for the rip-off supermarkets to open. Before you go in, though, check the ads on the front window. They usually list that week’s sale items. It's stuff they've overstocked the past week, but don’t ignore it. The best times to cash in on these are the weeks after Thanksgiving and Christmas. Turkeys go for 8 to 12 cents off, per pound, which can be a dynamite savings on a twenty-pound bird. Another way tn beat the system is to check the newspapers nr a cool mail-box for price-off coupons. Clip them and bring them to the store with you. You may not dig the garbage you have to buy, but it sure as hell beats brown rice. Always shop at stores that carry trading stamps. (Don’t believe that shit about how you pay for it with higher food prices. You don't.) You can get a free catalogue for your stamps that has all sorts of crap in it. Most of the stuff you can get is bullshit, but they do have baseball ...
Free Years Before the Mast
In the main post office of most cities there are places where you can get free clothing, food, lodging, and almost everything else (including some dynamite weapons) from several different U.S. Government organizations.
These people are on their own weird trip, hut if you can deal with their jive you can really make a killing. The clothes you get this way are especially together— sturdy and far-out looking and outasite-functional for those heavy vamp scenes.
And if you're really into living for free, almost all cities have their own local riff, too—places with good security where you can hold your cell meetings and crash as long as a year for only a minor charge. You'll get down on it with a lot of really heavy brothers this way, too. Particularly if you're little and good-looking.
Rut the best way to groove for free in amerikkka is still for the brothers anti sisters to live collectively in families that form a together unit in one house or pad. There's lots of ways to organize your family and every group has to work out its own internal political structure, but usually dad holds down a steady job while mom docs the cooking and housework. Then the brothers will take out the garbage and mow the lawn while the sisters help out with the sowing and cleaning, etc. Lots of times these collectives don’t work out, but if you can communicate with your family there's likely to be a lot of togetherness. It's hard to beat this ...
Free Coins in a Fountain
They weren’t kidding in that movie, man. It's heavy and it’s true. Lot of straight people, even, are so disgusted by the imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation represented by every piece of neocolonialist amerikkkan money that they’re performing the revolutionary act of throwing it in fountains and dropping it down sewer gratings.
Fountains are best, and you can rip them off in broad daylight if you’re together. And if anybody says anything, just tell them that you won the Congressional Medal of Honor for being a POW and it dropped off and fell in the water and you have to take all these coins home to look through them and see if any of them might be your medal and, gosh, but standing around in this fountain reminds you of the rice paddies back in Nam in fact it was in a rice paddy just like this that Charley cut you and your buddy Ed off from the platoon and your buddy’s iron jammed in the fire fight when he caught it in the side of the head from a mortar shell so your best buddy’s blood splatters all over your jungle fatigues right when you run out of ammo with dinks closing in carrying punji sticks smeared with pig shit while you’re calling napalm down on your own position and Ed’s lying in the water going “Mother, I didn’t mean it” with what’s left of his mouth, and start to cry.
Sewer gratings are tougher, but try this scheme used by the Weather People during the Chicago Days of Rage. Steal a piece of string. Chew up some bubble gum, put it right on the end of the string, and drop it between the grating bars. The gum will act as an adhesive and coins will stick tight with just a little bit of practice. Be sure and use the buddy system to keep a cool lookout.
A lot of the big grocery chains pay return deposits on the empty bottles of their fat-cat customers. You can usually find lots of bottles in empty lots or garbage cans, and if you wash them off carefully, the pig checkout clerks will never know you didn’t buy them in their store. This works really well if you’re kind of straight-looking.
Another good way to get cash is to play off all the fucked-up things that the system has done to straight people’s heads (especially middle-aged amerikkkan pig businessmen’s) about sex in amerikkka. You and the woman you’re having a liberated interpersonal relationship with can work this riff together. She should go out and walk up and down a street in the business section at night. Weekends are the best. She should be sure to wear some really sexist threads that she can easily rip off in one of those boutiques or so-called head shops that suck the blood of our Woodstock Nation culture. It won’t be long before some sexist pig businessman will start viewing her as a sex object. When he does, she should smile a smile of joyful unity with all the oppressed workers, women, and people of color and say, “How about it, capitalist jackal, want to get your ashes hauled?” This will really blow his mind. ...
Free Sheets to the Wind
This land may be my land and this land may be your land, but if you want to go visit our south forty, you better know what the hell you’re doing. The rip-off pig transportation industries make it as difficult as possible, but there are ways around it. For instance, more and more airlines are using what they call “Triangle Flights.” It means you buy a round-trip ticket from New York to Los Angeles. On the way back, they’ll fly you to Miami for only $10 extra. Or you can do New York to San Francisco and they’ll give you a week in Los Angeles for the $10 charge. We know a brother who’s done both these “Triangle Flights” fifteen times, and it’s only cost him $150. And it doesn’t cost him anything to live in each place, because he stays with relatives or in veterans’ hospitals.
If you don’t want to pay at all, you can try what another brother did and hide in the landing-gear carriage. But be careful, because you might freeze to death if the plane goes over 14,000 feet.
For short-distance runs, trains are the best. Most stations now offer ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-ride commuter tickets. The more rides you buy, the bigger the discount. And usually they never ask if you’re holding a job. If you buy the top twenty-trip ticket, you can save as much as 12 percent. And, depending on the distance, it could be a lot—and that’s money you could be spending on dope, paper, and pipes.
Don’t be put off by the oh-bus-stations-smell-like- ...
Free Musketeers
When it comes to self-defense, it’s our brains against the pig’s brawn.
Here’s one trick our black brothers and sisters have been using for years when they get vamped on: if a pig or a red-neck catches you, particularly by any part of the foot, just holler real loud. He’ll let you go every time. Nobody seems to know exactly why this works, but it really does.
Lots of bust scenes call for heavier shit, though. Especially if they’ve got ahold of you by more than just your foot. Try buddying up to the pigs. They’ll never believe you can actually outsmart them. Challenge their machismo. Tell one that you bet you can hit him softer than he can hit you. Let him go first. Then smash him one on the jaw, yell, “You win!” and run like hell. Or ask the pig this riddle: “Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who was saved?” When he says, “Pinch-me,” do it where it hurts.
When you’re fighting hand-to-hand, try grabbing the pig’s head with your left arm and rubbing your knuckles back and forth across his hair really fast. Or grip his wrist with both hands and twist one hand one way and one the other to give him an incapacitating Indian rope burn.
If you get a chance for a sneak attack, you can stick a pack of matches under his shoe and light it when he isn’t looking. But it’s always easier to deal with The ...
Free Blind Mice
Trashing is when we destroy the bullshit materialism of the straight world. It’s our way of expressing rage against poverty.
Our determination to crush amerikkkan imperialism really shows when trashing is combined with street theatre to educate the People. Putting a cow up in the top of a steeple can make it clear to workers and students how the masses have been misled by fascist religious leaders. And tipping over outhouses is a far-out way of saying "we’re not taking any more shit.”
For raising consciousness on a one-to-one level, try calling people up at random and say that you’re taking a survey. Ask them if one of their capitalist kitchen appliances, built by exploiting the labor of the working class and people of color with natural resources ripped-off from our third-world brothers and sisters by the forces of neocolonialism, is running. When they say yes, yell, “Then you’d better go catch it!” and hang up.
Ordinary soap can be used to print revolutionary messages on windows, and you can make a powerful Bronx cheer by cupping your hand over your mouth, placing your tongue into the empty palm, and blowing hard.
Teach imperialist warmongers the bitterness and frustration of life in puppet fascist dictatorship South Vietnam by putting salt in the sugar bowl and shortsheeting the bed: and bring the reality of suffering in devastated Haiphong home to them by tying tin cans to their dogs’ tails.
Fight sexism by rubbing indelible ink onto the eyepiece of a miniature “French postcard” viewer and instruct your brothers and sisters in the Movement to express their solidarity with the power-to-the-people handshake by wearing a small electric hand-buzzer.
Fascists who want nothing more than to stamp out the world revolution can be vamped on by filling a paper bag with dog excrement and squirting lighter fluid on it. Set the bag on a fascist’s front porch and light it, then ring the doorbell and run away. When he comes outside, all he’ll see is a flaming paper bag, so he’ll stomp on it much the way that he would like to
Free's a Crowd
The revolution is our ability to organize the New Nation without structure, and communication is the only real organization among free individuals working the collective will.
Posters are right-on when you involve the people in the revolutionary act of pasting them up.
Go out and start pasting up posters. Lots of freeks will be trying to dig on why you’re working. Just look really into it, and every time they want to rap, say, “It’s too heavy, man,” and they’ll keep asking questions, but you just keep pasting until they’re about tn freek out, then sort of let it slip how the Weather People drew all these posters by hand but couldn’t put them up because they’re all wanted by the pigs, so Bernadine Dohrn cast the I Ching, which told her to have you do it, and you shouldn’t even be really talking about it because you're about the only person that they'd trust .with this important action. All the freeks'll try to tell you is how heavy and revolutionary they are and how you should let them get into pasting up posters too but you say they’re just on ego trips and might get busted or something and they’ll insist that they're really right-on and cool and not nares and just to show you how cool they are and everything they’ll lay a nickel of Michoacan or a couple of tabs of sunshine on you so you’ll know they’re together and you’ll let them in on the heavy action with the Weather People and you say^you don't know for sure
Free Wise Men
Appliances
If your commune is flat in the appliance department (toasters, waffle irons, blenders, electric blankets, alarm clocks, etc.), the pig banker-power brokers give them out free with deposits of $500 to $5,000 in two- year savings certificates which accrue interest at the top 6 1/4-percent rate. The $5,000 deposit usually can get you a complete set of radial tires or a quadraphonic car-stereo. Far-out.
Highs
Try running in the Boston Marathon. Really. Your body can only take about twenty miles before it begins vamping its own liver. And when that starts, you have a full six miles of otherworldliness ahead of you. How fast you run the last six miles will determine the length of the rush, hut you can be sure of a dynamite two or three hours. Quite heavy.
Rides
Elevators and escalators never charge anything.
Restaurants
Most restaurants have two prices on their menus. One is dinner and one is a la carte. Don t be put off by the higher dinner price. You get more with it. Usually potatoes, vegetables, salad, coffee, and dessert. With a la carte, you don't get shit.
Fuck Romania
More and more, very together tour operators are including Romania in their packages. It’s about the size of Britain, with a varied landscape of impressive grandeur. Its horizons, from the majestic Black Sea to the snow-crowned Alpine peaks, seem boundless. But that's a hype; they're not. There’s Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Russia all around it. Romania's elegantly modern cities are richly colored by the many treasures of medieval and formal Roman architecture. This artistic blending of today with yesterday makes unique the charm of this “country within a country." Long a favorite vacation spot for Europeans and others alike, Romania offers pastoral bliss combined with accessible facilities for all who would venture her way.
Romanian food is usually served in the mornings, at midday, and then again in the evenings. Inbetween- meal snacks arc not uncommon and often serve as a quick pick-up for the energy burning revolutionary on the go. Breakfast usually consists of tea, milk, coffee, cocoa, soda, fruit juice, butter, jam, marmalade, jelly, and a large piece of boiled beef wrapped in cabbage leaves. A simple lunch of mamaligutza (corn mush) has become a traditional favorite among tourists and natives alike. Dinners are usually lavish and often begin with Turkish cakes soaked in egg syrup, and then the individual has the choice of having the dessert with the salad or in the salad. It is considered very ...