Gerard Jones

That's the seventeenth most absurd notion I've ever heard. G.

I had a friend in the Special Forces who went to Vietnam in January of 1963. Here's a bit of a description of him when he came back: "He also knew stuff not many people were in a position to know at the time. He’d been at the front lines of a war everyone in the country was getting curiouser and curiouser about. According to him, the U.S. Army had no business in Southeast Asia, period. The war was a racket. The South Vietnamese Government was nothing but a bunch of money-grubbing thugs. Elliot knew who killed that Diem guy, for example, and why—to get him the hell out of the way so the USA could run the war its way, that’s why. He told me flat-out to stay out of the draft no matter what I had to do, but by then I’d pretty much figured that out all on my own. The way Elliot saw it was that the only thing the people in Vietnam wanted was to feed their families—to grow their rice, to fix their fishing nets, to ride their bicycles—and that Ho Chi Minh was one tough son of a bitch who wouldn’t ever make any concessions to anyone about anything. The war would go on forever. Ho Chi Minh couldn’t lose. He wouldn’t lose. He didn’t. Ha! Most of the time Elliot was in Vietnam, however, he was actually in Thailand—smoking Thai sticks and living in rickety houses on bright sandy beaches with well-paid Thai chicks. It sounded like a kind of polygamous religious community, like paradise, like heaven on earth, like something Brigham Young might have dreamed up. Elliot fit right in. I was probably a little jealous. It didn’t help matters much that Ginny was enthralled by the stories he told. She’d never known a bona fide war hero before. Elliot and his buddies had it made. They shared everything and ate mangos off trees. It was utterly ephemeral and serene and lavishly financed by the bottomless pockets of the U. S. taxpayers." I'm no history expert, I was just around and have a knack for remembering things. G.

Anyone who was over the age of six at the time remembers what he or she was doing the day Kennedy got shot. I was having lunch with Ralph Wood in Farmer’s Market, the food court at Hillsdale Mall. We were over by the Mexican food concession. Ralph was drinking a cup of black coffee. I was scraping the last of a scrumptious side order of shell macaroni in tomato sauce into a warm, buttered tortilla when we heard the news. A pimply-faced kid in a SF Giants baseball cap at the table next to us turned the volume up on his transistor radio. Other radios went on. A crowd gathered around the portable TV at the Bavarian Hof Brau. Ralph and I just sat there. Ralph was tall and skinny and ten years older than everyone. He looked like a bird. He was a thief. The bones around his temples stuck out. He cocked his head, trying to hear the news above the crackles of static coming from the kid’s cheap black and yellow radio. “…earlier this morning, in Dallas, Texas…” “Is he dead?” I asked. “They don’t know, man. Shut up and listen.” He snapped at me, biting the words between his bad teeth... Back when black coffee was still his drug of choice, Ralph Wood was just the guy you wanted to be hanging out with when you heard the news that Kennedy got shot, however. Not because he could put it into perspective, no, anyone could put it into perspective—what Ralph knew was how to capitalize on it. He was deep in thought, biting the inside of his cheek. “You know what this means?” He looked over the rims of his glasses at me and slicked down his quivering coxcomb. “Johnson’s President? Jackie’s a widow? John-John’s an orphan?” “No, man. Jesus.” His eyes popped farther out of their sockets. “Get serious. It means it’s going to be a good time to pick up chicks, that’s what.” “You think?” I said. “Sure. Chicks are gonna be sad that Kennedy got shot, man. Sad chicks get all vulnerable and xxxx. They want someone to come along and comfort them.” So we went off to do that. We roamed the wide ceramic tiled walkways of the Hillsdale Shopping Center stopping sad, vulnerable chicks to see if they might want to be comforted. We didn’t actually succeed in picking up a single sad, vulnerable chick, but we did try. Ralph thought Henry Miller would have done the same thing under the circumstances. Guys are idiots. Chicks are idiots. Henry Miller’s an idiot. How the human race continues to thrive is beyond my ability to comprehend. Y'all can read the whole chapter (Eleven) of Ginny Good, which you can find out more about here: http://everyonewhosanyone.com