Chapter Eighteen: Golden Gate Park

January 18, 2005

Okay, after five years and except for the first few paragraphs of each chapter, I'm taking Dead Ginny off the net. I got out of it everything I wanted to get out of it. If you want to get a copy of the final, way better book which is now called Ginny Good, like one that has a pretty cover on it that you can sit down in front of a fire in the fireplace or take to the beach or with you in the car or on a bus or a plane or a train and read like a normal human being, click this:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn.html

If you want to read a bunch of reviews, click this:

http://janmag.com/biography/ginnygood.html

Or this:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggrev.html

If you want to see more about all the other stuff I've been up to, poke around among the pages here:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com

Thanks.

Gerard Jones
everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com

Chapter Eighteen

Golden Gate Park

Haight-Ashbury filled up with more and more hippies every day. You had to step over their outstretched legs on the sidewalk in front of the stationery store that had become the Psychedelic Shop and dodge their outstretched hands asking for spare change in front of every nook and cranny on the street. They danced around like dervishes, smiling the smiles they'd seen others smiling, wearing the sorts of clothes they'd seen others wearing, smoking joints they'd sometimes been given instead of spare change. They were pretty new to the neighborhood. Kids, mostly. We were getting old and wise and weary. Suddenly somehow it had become the Summer of 1967, the Summer of Love—which had just as suddenly turned to the Late Summer of Love, perhaps even the Early Autumn of Love.
It was around then that Ginny got herself thrown in jail. The guards squirted mace in her face. She was temporarily blinded. The skin peeled away from around her eyes. She looked like a raccoon. It started out innocently enough. We were on our way back to Shrader Street after a rock concert at Speedway Meadows. Ginny and Kirk were drinking champagne. Kirk was the guy who'd been the preacher at Thulin's wedding. Gold glasses? Wandering eye? Yeah, yeah, that's the guy. 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. The whole Haight Street thing was winding down. There had already been troop transport trucks and tear gas canisters—like Elliot had said there would be. The Summer of Love was over. Haight Street was over. I forget whether the famous funeral procession had taken place yet or not, the one where everyone marched down the street proclaiming the death of hippies or the death of Haight-Ashbury or whatever, but, if it hadn't, it was about to. How it all happened that Ginny got thrown in jail, still ain't exactly clear. Maybe I better go back and start from the beginning. It was the first week of September or so. A Sunday. Ginny and I had, for some reason, gone our separate ways that day. We frequently went our separate ways by then.

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