Final Score

by Emmett Grogan

The second, and last, book by the author of Ringolevio. This is a crime fiction novel deeply informed by Grogan's street-wise knowledge and with quite a bit of sardonic humor.

Mass Market Paperback

Published October 12, 1977

About the author

Eugene Leo "Emmett" Grogan was a founder of the Diggers in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers (1649-1650), a radical movement opposed to feudalism, the Church of England and the British Crown.

The San Francisco Diggers were a legendary group that evolved out of two radical traditions that thrived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement.

The Diggers combined street theater, direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing free food ("Free because it's yours!") every day in the park, and distributing "surplus energy" at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.)

The Diggers coined various slogans that worked their way into the counterculture and even into the larger society — "Do your own thing" and "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" being the most recognizable.

The Diggers inspired Abbie Hoffman to undertake a similar venture on the Lower East Side of New York City during the mid-1960s (although Grogan ultimately saw Abbie Hoffman as a lifestyle poseur, as described in Emmett's memoir of the late 1960s).

Grogan's penchant for personal myth-making and distrust of the mainstream media resulted in few details of his life being reliably recorded. His 1972 autobiography, RINGOLEVIO (A LIFE PLAYED FOR KEEPS), is filled with embellishments and large portions of his pre-Digger life appear to be outright fabrications.

This flexibility with the truth was part of Grogan's larger social and political agenda, and was meant to further Digger ideals, to whit, the use of his name (alternately, "Emma Grogan") as a community pseudonym, in pursuit of social justice activities as a member of the Diggers: "Emmett Grogan" is code for anti-establishment; the outlaw ethos in literary and other artistic endeavors.

Emmett Grogan sang back-up with Ramblin' Jack Elliott on "Mr. Tambourine Man" written by Bob Dylan. Dylan dedicated his 1978 album Street Legal to Grogan. After the success of RINGOLEVIO, Grogan was also the author of FINAL SCORE, a (not very good) crime thriller.

On April 6, 1978, 35-year-old Emmett Grogan was found dead on an F Train subway car in New York City, the victim of a heart attack possibly induced by chronic heroin use. This has been disputed and alternative theories exist.

On April 6, 2018, an announcement was made regarding the forthcoming publication of a new novel, TWELVE STORIES. Released October 23, 2018, the privately-published work has gone on to sell over 3000 copies in Canada.

October 17, 2025 will see the publication of a companion volume to TWELVE STORIES, the novel DIFFERENT TIMES, for fans of Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Mordecai Richler, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and other legendary literary authors, the type of which who are no longer being supported by contemporary publishing.

A celebration of Emmett Grogan’s 80th birthday, alongside the 80th birthday of Jimi Hendrix, was observed on November 28, 2022.

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

review of
Emmett Grogan's Final Score
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 27, 2023

I read Grogan's Ringolevio long ago, probably in the 1980s, & had great admiration for it & for its author & his friends. It made it to my "Top 100 Books" online list: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100B... . Recently, I was doing some research for a review I was writing about Peter Werbe's Summer on Fire, A Detroit Novel ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW... ) & for that review I wrote:

"I move on to checking Grogan's Ringolevio (1969-1972) on the Digger Archives ( https://www.diggers.org/ringolevio.htm ). Instead, I watched the TV program called "To Tell the Truth" w/ Emmett Grogan on it. Oh. My. Fucking. God. Even tho I stopped watching TV in 1969 or 1970 I highly recommend checking this out. On the show Grogan makes a quick plug for a bk he's writing: "I'm also writing a book on the impossibility of fair play in democratic society because of loneliness." Wow. I'm intrigued, I'd like to read an elaboration of that b/c it resonates w/ me. The only other bk of his that I found online is a novel called Final Score so I bought a copy."

I was hoping that Final Score wd be Grogan's bk "on the impossibility of fair play in democratic society because of loneliness." As far as I can tell, it isn't that bk - unless one abstracts that msg from the plot, wch I didn't. Alas, while I liked this bk, if I hadn't known Grogan's intense background I wdn't've necessarily found this to be that intriguing - after all, there're plenty of heist novels out & about & most of them are probably written by people who, at least, (sortof) know what they're writing about - as Grogan does here. If anyone out there knows of Grogan's ms for his bk "on the impossibility of fair play in democratic society" existing I'd be interested in publishing it.

There're several main characters in Final Score: a quartet of 'anti-heros', hardened criminals skilled at their trades, & a religious nut serial killer whose path crosses theirs.

""Shot dead right through the back of her head, Poley."

""Like Ulric?"

""Like I said, it's funny. Ain't it?"

""Hey, Cobez! They shot Bertha May, too!"

""Who's they?"" - p 6

The killer, Billy Jamaic, picks his victims based on whether they seem down & out to him. He considers it a mercy killing.

"After one of his bullets introduced an unfortunate to his Maker, Billy tried his best to see that the meeting would be cordial. He did this through the application of the holy oil to the organs of sense and a recital of prayer over the newly departed." - p 9

Grogan does seem to have substantial knowledge of criminal trades, presumably gleaned from direct experience & information given to him by trusted associates.

"Pete Man wasn't anybody's name. It was slang for safe-cracker. A professional who just leaves word because it's the other guy's prerogative to respond. Leo Warren was out and the caper was on. It was only up to Terry whether or not he himself was in." - p 18

"Leo was wise to what the LA police do when they come upon a crime in progress. They shoot to kill. His only chance was his nakedness. It's relatively easy for officials to explain away the death of an unarmed man as justifiable homicide. But they'd be hard put to find an excuse for the shotgunning of a nude male. Unless the cops swore they mistook his penis for a pistol." - p 24

There's plenty of dark humor in Final Score & that might be what distinguishes it the most from other 'hard-boiled' crime fiction.

Final Score is copyrighted 1976, 2 yrs after the February 4, 1974, kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the SLA; & 2 yrs before Grogan's death on April 6, 1978.

"Since the Hearst girl had been kidnapped, the whole Bay area was burning with heat. There was no way Leo could have arranged for a set of papers through normally simple channels without the possibility of a rumble. Every cop's mind was like a dogcatcher's." - p 46

The dark humor is probably most evident in the descriptions of Jamaic, whose clumsiness is of slapstick proportions.

"He would have murmured a pleasant "alleluia" if the steam hadn't misted him from the mirror, nor the bath overflowed. Instead, he yelped and charged the tub, plunging his hand into the hot water to unplug the drain. Unfortunately, the hand he chose for the task was the same which held the .32 automatic, and the instant the fingers of that hand merged with the scalding water, they flinched and the trigger jerked off a round. Hand and weapon recoiled simultaneously from the bath. The bullet mushroomed in the rubber stopper, popping it from the mouth of the drain." - p 64

It was a mild surprise to see a bit of Dickens appear. "Fagin", of course, was a villain in Dickens's Oliver Twist who taught young boys to commit crime & then lived off their spoils. Dickens's novel having been written in 1838, the perseverance of "fagin" as a term shows that his sense of the 'bad guy' is still one many can identify w/.

"A shrewd, shifty, unpleasant little nickle-nurser of an old gink entered as if he was about to begin scattering pennies around the barroom. He was a small-time fagin who set up marks for others to score. By always speaking in a creaky undertone, he acquired the name Squeaker. The greed in his aging, hollow eyes brought a grin of recognition to Leo Warren's face. He stood up, stretched his arms, and said, "There's one thing I'm sure about that saloon."

""What's that?" Terry said.

""I sure enuf ain't never going in there," Leo said. "Specially with lying sacks of shit like Squeaker around. He'd make me in a second and trade me in a minute. That cocksucker's been dropping dimes on people fro twenty years. Beats me how the fuckin' snitch is still alive. Why they let him work outta there in the first place?"" - p 69

More dark humor:

"After the passengers had fallen over each other and spilled into the street, heads began popping out of windows and doorways and peering from slowly moving cars to observe the riotous mass that was spreading and swelling around the Flatbush Avenue bus whose driver was enduring more nausea crawling around his stomach, until the corner cop entered and poked him with his club and pulled him from his seat and told him to come on outside which he did, after heaving his guts up on the nape of the cop's neck, splashing it chicken-noodle-soup warm, with the frostbitten cop stiffening as the warmth trickled down his spine so smoothly that it relaxed his bladder completely and he took a throughly comfortable piss in his pants beneath his closed rain slicker." - p 75

"A bus! Yessir, the contract on Doctor David Leigh Rabinovitch aka Arthur Skidmore was filled today by our man from Teamsters Local 007. A perfect hit, sir. He used a bus. Hit him with a plain old city bus, Splat!" - p 76

The details about deactivating alarms & robbing safes seem accurate to me - although I imagine things have changed these 47 yrs later.

"The Ford sided to the curb and Terry walked over to the telephone. He dropped in a dime, dialed a number, and listened to it ring a few times. He then jammed a celluloid splinter beneath the cradle to prevent an accidental disconnection and cut the coiled wire from the side of the box, tossing the receiver into some shrubbery. He returned to the car and they drove off.

"The number was one of two at the plumbing supply company. The line was used as an inexpensive alarm system, known as a "dialer." When the alarm was activated by an intrusion, it was set to automatically ring a secret precoded telephone number at both partners' nearby homes with a recording stating that a burglary was occurring on their premises. Terry had easily deactivated the system by occupying the only free line on which the dialer could operate." - p 86

"Leo was behind the building, kneeling over a utility grate. A combination padlock lay open on the ground beside him. It was opened because a few weeks earlier, DayDream had copied the serial numbers stamped on its exterior and Terry located them in his locksmith's reference books, then cross-indexed the numbers to find the factory-set combination which Leo simply dialed to unlock the grate and get at the alarm's self-contained switch enclosed in a small weatherproof housing unit." - p 98

Even tho the novel's basically crime fiction, a subtext of socio-political observation peeks thru from time-to-time.

""Ninety seconds, all he said was how glad he was to be back on the air to tell everybody what Esso wanted the country to know and he never says. But on the next commercial break, he's back with all sorts of visual aids and on-and-on reasons about why Esso's changing its name to Exxon. The third segment, he mourns the passing of Esso for obvious sentimental reasons, but times are changing and sentiment can't stand in the way of progress, so remember, 'Exxon.' In the final part, the animated tiger wraps it all up with some futuristic nonsense about why it has to be Exxon. To further illustrate this point, the tiger says he's gonna stay around for as long as it takes to drum it into our heads.

""The tiger wasn't kidding. That month, month and a half, I drove over seven, eight thousand miles of road. Everywhere I went, Esso was being changed to Exxon. Service stations, as part of America as the corner drugstore, changed into abstract symbols. Esso meant gas and oil. Exxon means power.["]" - p 184

&, yet, at the same time, the character who's giving this speech is just being manipulated by Terry - who's pretending to be an environmental activist to get the speaker's cooperation.

""Well, the nonsense was stopped is all," Terry said. "Hard and quick. Made the survival of the environment into an unpopular cause with the phony energy crisis routine's going on. Put ecology down, same way any interference always gets put down. With power.["]" - p 186

"The Arab oil embargo of 1973 put the United States economy on the back foot, causing fuel shortages, a quadrupling of oil prices and long lines at gas stations." - https://www.history.com/news/energy-c...

It's funny for me to remember those days in retrospect. The 'gas crisis' wd've been fairly contemporary as of the time of the writing of this bk. I was alive at the time, 19 & 20 yrs old, I had my driver's license, & I lived w/ my mom & stepdad. Being the youngest in the family getting gas devolved to me at least once during this time. The gas-lines stretched out of the gas stn lot to the street for 50 or 60 cars. I remember gas being as cheap as 25¢ a gallon in 1972 so I reckon it went up to a dollar or so by this time. People were outaged then but, now, a dollar wd seem incredibly cheap.

Terry creates a distraction & a false lead to direct attn away from where he & Leo are about to perpetrate their next theft.

"From the case, he took a piece of cardboard with letters cut out and taped it to a wall, spraying it with the paint. The stencil read WOBBLIES UNDERGROUND. He peeled it off and, holding it by the strip of tape, ran with the case to the far end of the floor, where he repeated the procedure in the space by the freight elevator.

"With the television lenses sprayed and the stencil lettered on a wall and the last flare burning atop the elevator button, Terry tossed the paint can aside and pulled the pins on three more smoke bombs, exploding them in different directions on the floor. he checked his watch. It was 5:13:25." - p 205

Grogan is positively sardonic. Terry & Leo & DayDream are shown to have a genius for their respective crafts, the heist is pulled off - &, yet?

[Smtolkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Ringolevio and am fascinated by Grogan's life in general but this book was a hard climb to get through, even at its relatively low page count. I realized about half way through what the problem was: no stakes whatsoever had been established for any of the characters. The quartet of amiable grifters are after a big score, but apart from wanting money, which all of us do, what are the personal emotional risks and rewards on the table? The narrative doesn't even gesture in the direction of an answer, leaving us to page impatiently through one tension-free safe-cracking and break-in after another. The intertwining of a serial killer plot with the heist story is un-resonant and coincidence-laden. A wonderfully drawn decaying alcoholic nuclear scientist, whose fate I actually came to care about, earns this two stars rather than one. Fortunately, we will always have the awesome Ringolevio.

[S Cearley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast easy read that manages to keep the pace churning without the trap of introducing too many new characters.

[Gilles Douaire · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult read; some parts were really good, others painful. The begining is a drag, very difficult to focus on these new characters, but it gets better afterwards.

[Bill Sullivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

shits and giggles

[Jerry Symons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not up to Ringolevio standard, but an interesting and entertaining read