Readers and writers blog

This is going to be shortest entry I’ve written for this weblog because I’m going to let Gerard Jones write most of it. And he’s not going to have to work too hard because he’s already done it.

It’s Chapter 19: La Honda of his nonfiction novel Ginny Good, and it contains the best description of an LSD trip I’ve ever read. Now I’m not recommending drugs to anyone — not caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana and certainly not LSD. What I’m recommending is the words.

Jones is a careful writer. His book, which we’ve been serializing by chapters since April 6, has a straightforward, conversational, almost casual style that reads easily, comfortably, simply. It’s been my experience that achieving those qualities while telling a complex story requires a lot of work and talent.

Chapter 19 is barely halfway through the 35-chapter novel and yet is one of its zeniths. In this chapter, Jones gives us a peek at his considerable talent with words, building a simple narrative into progressively ornate images that to me border on poetry.

It was late afternoon. The sun was about to go down. Nothing happened for a while. The bed in the cabin was soft and springy. We lay down next to each other. She put her head on my chest. I put my arm around her. She was contrite. We didn’t talk. The first thing I noticed was a tingling little itch in my throat, but deeper, like somewhere down inside the autonomic nervous system of my esophagus. We got up and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at each other again. She must have been feeling the same tingling itch. Then not much else happened for another little while.

We went outside. When we got to the edge of the steamy blacktop road, we stopped, looked and listened — then we held hands and ran as fast as we could across the street and deep into the redwood forest. It was still warm, the tail end of a day that had gotten up into the mid-eighties. Insects had started to become more noticeable, I noticed. That was about it. Flies and gnats had always left little vapor trails in the air, but the vapor trails I was beginning to see seemed to be lasting slightly longer than usual.

The itch in my esophagus had extended into my chest and was working its way down into the pit of my stomach. The last of the sun’s rays showed spiders’ webs covering everything. That wasn’t particularly unusual, either. In the woods, just before the sun goes down, spiders’ webs do cover everything, but these spider webs were thicker than usual. They were, like, replicating themselves as I watched — and pretty soon the whole forest floor was half-an-inch deep with spider webs, sparkling like snow. That was unusual. The floor of a forest on a warm day in May doesn’t sparkle like snow. Something was definitely going on.

The tingling itch had settled in my groin. I could taste the fillings in my teeth. A fly circled my head, but slowly — so slowly, he almost stopped in midair. His huge hairy body was luminous green. The veins in his wings had black insect blood coursing through them. Then he flew away, leaving a bright, phosphorescent green stream of light behind him in the air. The stream of light stayed in the fly’s wake until it began to sort of . . . melt. Another bright fresh trail from a smaller insect cut through the air and stayed there, then another and another. Insects were leaving bright vapor trails everywhere. . .

That’s just the beginning of a strange odyssey in which all sorts of life, hitherto unseen, open to the narrator. Check it out. It won’t make you want to take drugs, but it will make you want to read on.

Also today:

• Another short story, ‘Pennies from Hell,’ from James L. Fox. This time, the Mojave Hermit tells of a man who learns about his friends — and enemies — by handing them a penny.

• Chapter Seven of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess Dyer and Brian LaChance share another television-and-beer night in which she learns more about this attractive younger man with sad and earnest eyes.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is a design by an artist named zero blade (zero-blade@demonnet.org) found in the art section of the website ouim.org, which describes itself as a ‘psychedelic activation portal.’