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Ginny Good, A Mostly True Story:

Read and/or Watch

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

San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

http://www.sfchronicle.com

She might have been the first hippie, but Ginny drew the line at not shaving her armpits. Part of being the definitive hippie chick was not doing the things all the other hippie chicks did — and she had the most perfect armpits ever. Strong arms. Muscular shoulders. When she stretched her arms over her head, the veins in her armpits showed up like veins in leaves. She was beautiful — vital, alive. She was just a regular chick, too. She got her feelings hurt and had sibling rivalries and liked to drink coffee and read the pink section in The Chronicle and go to movies. She wanted to make something of herself. She wanted to have kids, to get a house, to cook, to sew, to plant vegetables, to sing in a choir, to sit on a porch swing somewhere and watch the sun go down. She wanted to make something of me. She wanted to get me rich and famous and educated so we could do all those things with each other. I didn't get rich. I didn't get famous. I didn't get educated. We didn't do those things with each other. We did other things, different things.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8958116

SF Gate
901 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

http://www.sfgate.com

Then it was the summer of 1967, "The Summer of Love." Scott McKenzie sang his dork song about how everybody ought to go to San Francisco and wear some fucking flowers in their hair. It was far out. It was groovy. It was over. Then it was early October, the Fall of Love. All the hippies gave Haight Street a funeral and Ginny got her ass thrown in jail. The guards squirted mace in her face. The skin peeled away from around her eyes. She looked like a raccoon.

It all started out innocently enough. The three of us—Kirk, the preacher from Thulin's wedding, Ginny and I—were on our way home after a rock concert at Speedway Meadows. Ginny and Kirk were drinking champagne. It was on the verge of the Christmas craziness again. I was a little fed up. Officer Garrens was the cop who arrested her. He was a notorious asshole—The Oracle and The Berkeley Barb wrote articles about what a notorious asshole Officer Garrens was. I'm getting ahead of myself again, however—as is my wont. I'll start from the beginning.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8956309

Los Angeles Times
2300 E. Imperial Highway
El Segundo, CA 90245

https://www.latimes.com

The day after our disastrous trip to see "The Snow Queen," I got the hell out of the house in Pacifica and hitchhiked down along the coast highway until I came to the California I'd had in mind back in Michigan. It started just past Malibu. I didn't have any money. I ate food out of garbage cans, slept on beaches and feasted my eyes on sun-bleached blond girls in bikini bathing suits from dawn to dusk—until having no money and a third-degree sunburn had me heading back up toward Pacifica again. That was when I got the job on that yacht I was talking about.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964199

The San Diego Union-Tribune
600 B Street, Ste. 1201
San Diego, CA 92101

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Virginia Dixon Good was born on March 5, 1941. She spent her childhood in one or another of those sleepy little seaside communities down along the Southern California coast, north of San Diego. Her mother was too busy for kids. She had three daughters. Ginny was her second daughter. Sandy was her third. I forget the first daughter's name. I can't remember Ginny's mother's name, either. I might've blanked it out. Her father's name was George. George F. Good. I never knew what the "F." stood for. There were so many things I never knew. Ginny's mother couldn't have said for sure why she'd even had kids except that having kids was what one did. Kids were annoying. She couldn't understand what the hell they were talking about, for one thing. She didn't know what the Salvadoran maid was jabbering about half the time either, but at least the maid understood what she was saying: "Rosalie! God damn it! If I find one more grain of sand in this kitchen, I'm going to kill you! Do you understand?"

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964731

The Sacramento Bee
1601 Alhambra Blvd., Ste. 100
Sacramento, CA 95816

https://www.sacbee.com

It's hot in Sacramento in the summer. Even at night. You don't need blankets. You don't need clothes. Even a sheet's too much. The two of them were lying in her big bed with no clothes on. It was like Nashville Skyline, like Lay Lady Lay. The window was open. There were a few candles burning on the windowsill. There wasn't any breeze. The flames didn't flicker. They flared up when the wax overflowed and left a new piece of the wick exposed, but the flames didn't waver. The guy was propped up in a pile of pillows pushed against the wall. His arm was under Melanie's head. Her face was nuzzled into the side of his neck. Her hand was lying limply on his chest. His clothes were hung neatly over the arm of the couch. Melanie's white nightgown and the black panties with bunches of cherries on them were on the floor.

I took off my clothes and got into bed with them. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking, hey, Melanie had tried things my way, the least I could do was to try things her way. Her way was that she wanted to be with this guy. Okay. That was all right. I'd just go ahead and be with the son of a bitch, too. I couldn't imagine that she didn't want to be with me, period. I couldn't imagine that she only wanted to be with this guy. I was deluded. Her way was that she didn't want me there. I refused to believe it. She was absolutely in love with me and always had been and always would be. She couldn't help herself. Why the hell else would she have been killing herself all that time? Because she couldn't help being absolutely in love with me forever no matter what, that's why. I couldn't conceive of it being otherwise. That's what deluded is — if you know you are, you're not. I was deluded. I stayed. I stayed the whole night.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8945839

San Jose Mercury News
75 E. Santa Clara St., Ste. 1100
San Jose, CA 95113

https://www.mercurynews.com

My own parents, by way of contrast, had bought a house in San Mateo Village, like I may have mentioned, down in the flatlands by the bay, with the same floor plan as all the other houses in the flatlands; the same hard grass yards, with short, newly planted trees. Instead of carpet, we had rugs. Nothing matched. Nothing was new. And the only remarkable thing in the refrigerator was maybe a bowl of browned potatoes left over from one of my mother's pot roasts. There was nothing in the world my father liked better for breakfast than leftover potatoes from one of my mother's pot roasts, sliced razor thin and fried in sizzling bacon grease along with his eggs—two, sunny-side up. I adore my dad. He's dead. As I've said.

The other thing I liked about going up to Elliot's house was his mother. She used to get a kick out of wearing skimpy clothes around the house. There was this one sheer white silk robe I remember in particular, with a sash she always had trouble keeping tied when she answered the door.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964061

Orange County Register
1920 Main Street, Suite 225
Irvine, CA 92614

https://www.ocregister.com

Toward the end of the summer, when we were just about through renovating the whole huge boat from stem to stern, the captain told me that I could stay on as part of the crew when they took it on a trip around the world. I had it all pictured. Hawaii. Fiji. Bali. Bangkok! Then I don't know what the hell happened. Well, I got fired, is what happened—for going for a ride on the Ferris Wheel on Balboa Island with the owner's son's girlfriend. Her name was Paris. She had long blond hair, freckly thighs and zinc oxide across the bridge of her nose. I didn't know she was anyone's girlfriend. She didn't say she was anyone's girlfriend—and she sure didn't act like she was anyone's girlfriend. But she was. And the owner's son told the owner to tell the captain to tell the foreman that I was fired and that was that—no trip around the world, no job, no money, no place to live, no nothing. I hitchhiked back up to my parents' house.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964199