Index/Site Map

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

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.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8960459

Arizona Republic
200 E. Van Buren St.
Phoenix, AZ 85004

https://www.azcentral.com

News & Observer
421 Fayetteville Street, Ste. 104
Raleigh, NC 27601

https://www.newsobserver.com

The Charlotte Observer
9140 Research Drive
Charlotte, NC 28262

https://www.charlotteobserver.com

Las Vegas Review-Journal
1111 W. Bonanza Road
Las Vegas, NV 89106

https://www.reviewjournal.com

Saint Louis Post-Dispatch
901 N. 10th St.
St. Louis, MO 63101

https://www.stltoday.com

Kansas City Star
1601 McGee St.
Kansas City, MO 64108

https://www.kansascity.com

Oregonian
1500 SW First Avenue
Portland, OR 97201

http://www.oregonian.com

I'm happy. If I had to explain why, I couldn't do it in a million years—all I know is that after telling Ginny that I was going to write a book about her someday, after threatening to write a book about her for longer than I can remember, I finally just sat down and wrote the fucker. Now I can go get that job at McDonald's in peace. I'm excited about it. I'm looking forward to it. I hope I can start first thing tomorrow morning. In fact, if you're ever on I-5 going through Medford, Oregon, stop by the McDonald's on Biddle Road and say, "Hi." Tell me you read my book on the Internet and I'll see to it that you get extra pickles on your Big Mac—anything you want, relish, onions, ketchup, say the word. I'll be the shift supervisor. It'll say so on my nametag. The high school kids will hop to it when I tell them to.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8939383

Detroit Free Press
160 W. Fort St.
Detroit, MI 48226

https://www.freep.com

I broke my collarbone is how it all started. I was playing football on Tommy Malden's front lawn. Paul Grey and Jimmy Mattern were tackling me. I was trying to gain an extra yard or two, as if so much depended on it. I heard the bone break. It was a muffled crack, like sitting on a couch with a pencil in your back pocket. Dr. Steinberg put a figure-eight cast under my arms and around the back of my neck and referred to my broken collarbone as a "fractured clavicle." When the cast was ready to come off, Donna McKechnie and her mother happened to be in the doctor's office. Donna and I were both sixteen. I was six months older than her. We were in the same homeroom. And if you think she was hot as Cassie in "A Chorus Line," you should have seen Donna McKechnie when she'd just turned sixteen, and was wearing a modest red plaid skirt and a lacy white blouse buttoned up to the indentation at the base of her throat and dangling a dusty black penny-loafer off the ends of her toes in the waiting room of the only orthopedist in town. Her calves rippled under a pair of white tights. Muscular thighs. Sparkly brown eyes. Dimples. Waist like a wasp. Her breasts were small but not so small that they didn't cause the tiny translucent buttons to have to strain some against the buttonholes up the front of her blouse.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964490

Detroit News
160 W. Fort St.
Detroit, MI 48226

https://www.detroitnews.com

After I was as convinced as much as it was possible to be convinced that Donna had definitively dumped me forever, I drowned my sorrows by writing the senior play. I've always drowned my sorrows by writing stuff. If I had no sorrows I wouldn't ever write diddly. Writing the senior play was my big claim to fame. The high school in Michigan didn't have the money to buy the rights to a real play, so I said I'd write one. I stuck in a scene about a guy who had recently had his heart utterly crushed and broken forever. Then I played the part of the brokenhearted guy and gave myself lots of good advice. Ha! I was the student director, too. I did it all. The play was a big success. I had to take a bunch of bows. People kept clapping. And all of a sudden all kinds of new chicks started coming up to me in the hallways, batting their eyelashes, bumping their breasts into my bare arms—cheerleaders, actresses, smart chicks with glasses. Then, right in the middle of all that, Mrs. Miller flunked my ass and I didn't graduate. What chick's going to want to mess with some guy who flunked out of high school? No chick, that's what chick. No wonder I had a chip on my shoulder. I've still got a chip on my shoulder. I'll always have a chip on my shoulder. Talk about completely fucking up a person's life forever. Oh, well. My life probably would have gotten fucked up forever somehow or other anyway.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964199

The Salt Lake Tribune
90 S. 400 West, Suite 600
Salt Lake City, Utah, 84111

https://www.sltrib.com

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. The color of copper glinted in her hair. She wet her lips and there was a sad, baffled, smoldering sexual look in her eyes, like if I could come up with the right answer, she'd be grateful beyond words.

"No," I said. "What did he say?"

"He asked me...he said, 'Are you my mother?'"

"Most kids wonder about stupid stuff like that," I said.

"Sometimes I don't feel like I've been a good mother."

"He never says anything bad about you."

"I was so young."

"You must have been," I said.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8964061

Indianapolis Star
130 South Meridian Street
Indianapolis, IN 46225

https://www.indystar.com

Hartford Courant
PO Box 569
Hartford, CT 06141

https://www.courant.com

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
PO Box 371
Milwaukee, WI 53201

https://www.jsonline.com

Louisville Courier-Journal
525 W. Broadway
Louisville, KY 40201

https://www.courier-journal.com

Albuquerque Journal
7777 Jefferson St. NE
Albuquerque, NM 87109

https://www.abqjournal.com

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. When I first met him over at Ralph Wood's place by the railroad tracks in San Mateo, the first thing I mentioned was his eye. "What's wrong with your eye?" I nodded toward it.

"This?" He reached up, plucked out his left eye, held it between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it with his other eye. Then he flipped the eye over in his hand, got his thumb behind it and acted like he was going to shoot it at me like a marble. "Nothing, man." He smiled. "It's glass. It's a glass eye."

My own left eye squinted sympathetically as Thulin popped the eye back into its socket, and I felt a wave of empathy toward him. He pulled the same stunt on chicks. It worked like a charm. He'd meet a new chick, take out his eye and pretend to shoot it at her like a marble—always with the same goat-like grin and with his face glowing with simple-minded mischief and irresistible charm—and she'd melt. It must have aroused them in some visceral way, reaching down into some forgotten sexual, psychological mechanism left over from when men gave women the choicest tidbits of freshly killed animals as tokens of affection and desire. Whatever it was, Thulin fucked more chicks than anyone I ever knew. That was what the whole Haight Street thing was all about to him. That was what it was all about to lots of people, including, no doubt, all the chicks who were getting themselves fucked fourteen times a minute.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8957329