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Ginny Good, A Mostly True Story:

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After you write your book, get an agent and get it published, then (if your agent didn't sell it to some big, bullshit publisher with a heavy-duty hype department, in which case you do whatever dumb-ass thing they tell you to do), you have to somehow get someone to read the sucker...and review it. That's close to impossible. The pages with this notification have thousands of media boys and girls listed, one of whom may hype your book. They have to justify their existence somehow, right? G.

July 3, 2023

"On or before July 14, 2023" the host of my website is bagging it for lots of exquisite reasons. So am I. You can see the last 20 years or so here:

https://web.archive.org (stick everyonewhosanyone.com in the box).

They're getting rid of my email address, too. Use this:

gerardjones@proton.me

If you want to read my written stuff, click this:

https://gerardjones.medium.com/lists

If you want to see or listen to my video/audio books, click these or this and look around:

https://vimeo.com/showcase/9864586

https://vimeo.com/showcase/9862816

https://vimeo.com/user41893142

If you want to know how to write, click this:

https://gerardjones.substack.com

Thanks. G.

Gerard Jones
gerardjones@proton.me

His mother worried about Elliot. She was proud of him, but she thought he was odd. Quirky. She didn't think he fit in. We talked about him in their kitchen one afternoon. We were looking out the window at Elliot sitting under his Indian blanket. She was wearing a pair of tight white tennis shorts. Her legs were tan. Sunlight sparkled through pretty red highlights in her hair. "Elliot's always been...exceptional," she said.

"Everyone's exceptional," I told her.

"Yeah, but he's always been so—I don't know...difficult, I guess—even when he was little. He thought he could do things nobody can do. He thought he brought a bird back to life. It was just a sparrow, a little fluff of a thing." She stopped and seemed to be picturing him as a curly-headed little three-year-old with his baseball cap on sideways, then went on in a faraway voice: "It flew into the screen door of our house in Salt Lake—probably the first time the poor thing had ever been out of its nest. I'm sure it was only stunned, but Elliot thought it was dead. He picked it up and cupped his hands around it and blew into his hands and pretty soon the sparrow started chirping. He was so proud. He beamed up at me. His eyes were happier than anything I've ever seen. I said something silly, like, 'Now it thinks you're its mother.' And do you know what he said then?" she asked.

Ginny Good, Chapter Six, (San Mateo)

Six months later, around Christmas of 1962, Elliot came home on leave. He'd just finished basic training and some other hush-hush CIA sponsored school at Ft. Bragg and was going to be on his way to Vietnam the morning of New Year's Day. His head was shaved. His ears stuck out. The leather band around the edge of his green beret made a red, painful-looking groove in his scalp. His face was tan. His nails were clipped. He had a few crisp, new ribbons above his shirt pocket and had already earned himself something of a reputation. The guys he'd been in boot camp with called him "Deacon Felton" or "The Deacon" or "Deak." He was the only Mormon in the elite, newly created branch of the military they called "Special Forces." None of the big Bible belt Baptist bruisers who were his comrades in arms had ever known anyone who belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Elliot talked to them fearlessly about The Book of Mormon. He told them the whole story of how this Moroni guy, this sort of angelic fellow who glowed and walked a foot or two off the floor, told some New England dirt farmer by the name of Joseph Smith where to find some gold tablets hidden under a rock, along with a secret magic decoder device, and that the tablets explained how, shortly after the resurrection, Jesus came to North America and turned a bunch of naked savages into Christians. Elliot's army buddies took kindly to him the way people take kindly to the incurably insane.

Ginny Good, Chapter Seven, (North Beach)

By the fall of 1966, our apartment on Shrader Street had become a crash pad for all the people we knew who didn't live in Haight-Ashbury—Thulin practically lived there, that fucker. He and Wanda got married there. Holy smokes, was that ever a surprise. Well, he and Wanda got married in Golden Gate Park, actually, but we all came back to Shrader Street when the wedding was over. I've mentioned Thulin, right? One-Eyed Jon? The guy who gave Ralph Wood his first marijuana that time in the elevator of the Navarre Guest House? He had just the one eye, see. That was why we called him One-Eyed Jon. He ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone as one of the acid cowboys of Taos, New Mexico, but back then Thulin's main claim to fame was chicks. He fucked more chicks than you could shake a stick at. I think it had something to do with his eye.

Ginny Good, Chapter Twenty, (Shrader Street)

Not long after our conversation at the donut shop, four or five months before the baby was born, Thulin dumped Wanda and moved back to San Mateo. That was the last I ever saw of him. The next thing I heard was that he went to New Mexico and got his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone, and later I heard from Dick Joseph that he was killed in a drug deal that didn't work out.

Ginny Good, Chapter Twenty-One, (Foghorn Fish-and-Chips)

I liked being on my own, being free—having no money and only what clothes I was wearing, standing in a hot desert as it was starting to cool off, with no cars coming from either direction and a huge orange moon rising above the horizon. The sun went down. The moon came up. A prairie dog barked. Nobody expected anything. I had no one to worry about but myself.

In Yuma, Arizona, I shoveled horseshit from one pile of horseshit to another pile of horseshit to make some money to get something to eat. In Texas, a trucker put his hand on my dick. I was asleep. I'd been having a dream about this cute little Mexican chick at the diner where I'd spent most of the money I'd made shoveling horseshit. She was going to come with me to New Orleans, but didn't. Whether that was worth writing about or not, I didn't know. Maybe so.

Ginny Good, Chapter Thirteen, (Stockton Street)