Bigger! Better! More Wit! Funnier! More-laughs-per-paragraph! Who wouldn’t want to read Gerrytales?! I hope and wish any of these descriptions were true about the new additions to the Gerrytales blog pages.  The truth is that only you the reader can make those claims. I’m just giving a test run for a potential author marketing campaign.  I was in New York this past weekend and I was reflecting back on being stuck first at LaGuardia Airport and then a hotel in Newark waiting out the Big Black Out of 2003. That’s another story I’ll have to post….I was just six people from the security screener in LaGuardia when the grid went down and from that bad stroke of luck, I found myself in a pink gypsy cab headed for Newark.

I landed up in hotel blessed with a working generator and at 4 a.m. I woke up and unable to get back to sleep, I turned on the television which was tuned to a channel that was broadcasting a half hour infomercial dedicated solely to penile enlargement.  At first I thought I was dreaming as I watched the earnest, bespectacled spokesman look into the camera and inquire, “Who wouldn’t want to be bigger?!”

Who indeed! As the infomercial continued, a series of increasingly enthusiastic testimonials from  wives, girlfriends, mistresses, athletes, senior citizens, big people, little people, even a clergyman and a rabbi, all who finished their pitches with the same refrain, “Who wouldn’t want to be bigger?!”  To even consider answering that question in the negative was sheer folly according to these television persuaders. At the end of the commercial, the entire group gathered together and in unison shouted the question together, “Who wouldn’t want to be bigger!? 

Of course, even though they demanded an answer, we all know the silent and brilliant truth!

If only my writing was able to focus that luminescence on my readers so that the answer was the same to: “Who wouldn’t want to read more of Gerry’s stories?!”  Hey, it’s something to shoot for!

I’ve added an additional section to the blog called Family Matters and I understand certain members of my family may openly refute these stories. I stand by my versions! Three additional chapters of The Lost Soul novel have been added along with new business stories.  I have also responded to all of you who were kind enough to comment on the stories…..I’ve just figured out how to properly respond, so you have to scroll down the comments page. 

Also, there is one anonymous responder who has questioned why their comments aren’t being posted, wondering if their audacious comments were being edited. Au contraire! (Which I believe means “that’s horseshit!” in French)  Contrary comments are welcome and embraced!  I’m not sure what the problem was and for a while, the entire blog.com universe disappeared. So please, be persistent and let me know if your comments are not being posted and give me a return email address to respond.

That’s all for now….I need to get back to work thinking of new variations on the Who wouldn’t Want To Be….theme: Who wouldn’t want to be a genius? Who wouldn’t want to be taller? Who wouldn’t want to have cojones of steel?  I think the marketing possibilities may be endless!  

Kathy swears that the look on my face was akin to finding out that Santa Claus didn’t exist when it finally dawned on me that I was now the owner of preppy sweater vest.  I wore the sweater vest once, at our Annual Caroling Party and two pictures were taken of me to memorialize the event, this one and another using the croque-em-bouche (the conical creampuff pastry) as a hat. I’m kinda glad that one didn’t make the cut. So here I am, preppy writer guy! gb

Road for a Lost Soul     

A Novel by Gerry Boylan  

I stood on the highway poised like a matador. One foot touched the solid white line that separated the highway from the road’s shoulder, my arm and thumb stretched outward with a purpose, both beckoning and taunting the cars as they flew past.  

In 1973, Luke Moore is twenty-years old and a survivor of a family lain to ruins by fire and murder. His escape is cross country hitch-hiking on the 1500 miles of I-75 between Sault St. Marie in northern Michigan and the Everglades of Florida, where he finds a mélange of characters that help guide him on a mission seeking reconciliation and redemption  

Road for a Lost Soul is a 1970’s coming-of-age novel wound around a road story.  As Luke hitch-hikes away from his troubled past he hurtles into the lost-and-found lives of the characters he meets on and off the highway.  And does he meet characters! On the menu are giant cops, twin nuns in a Checker cab, gun-toting drug dealers, predators, an ex-police chief, lonesome salesmen and vintage hippies; a brew of scary, caring and ethereal lost souls in their own right. Some are guides for his mission, while others embody the demons and malevolence of his past. His adventures lead to a violent climax that brings the confluence of events and characters of Luke’s story into a surprising denouement.     

Luke finds road life irresistible because he can re-invent himself with every new ride as he rummages to replace all he has lost. He invents new names and personas for every ride. He’s Mortimer Molesky, Pierre Ouellette and William Fitwilly among others.  And while the road is Luke’s escape, he always finds his way back home as his story intertwines with his band of friends and what remains of his family. They are his safe harbor, but share the turbulence of the mad dash to adulthood.    

The chapters alternate with a now 50 year-old Luke Moore retracing his 1-75 adventures with his wife as they drive their only child to her first year at college. The reformed middle-aged Luke provides the same contrast today’s baby-boomers face as they square their own wild youth as they watch their own children struggle and lurch toward becoming young adults. I’m one of those millions of middle aged baby boomers who lived and survived the turbulent post-1960’s. I sinned spectacularly as I hitchhiked over 100,000 miles in the early 1970’s, before finally finding my feet.  Like my contemporaries, I struggle between wanting to shield my children from my past, but also warn them about the devils that lurk out there in the world!  In this novel, readers can retrace the struggle of their youth and their era and compare notes with Luke on how to handle the present.   

As the Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, by Tom Wolfe, presents the beginnings of the anything-goes-drug culture, Lost Soul illustrates what happened next, when drugs were widely available, used and abused by initiates not ready for the consequences, but making it through to other side because they didn’t have guidebook.   

As the story Stand By Me, by Stephen King, captures the joy and angst of the boyhood friendships in the 1950’s, Lost Soul captures wildness and exuberance of being a young adult in the early 1970’s and the cost of pushing too much, to  too fast, too soon.   

I’m not Stephen King or Tom Wolfe, even in my own imagination. A more egalitarian comparison might be On the Road meets That 70’s Show.  For baby boomers that have left the 70’s behind, Lost Soul is a white-knuckle flight back to who we were and a poignant reflection on the family men and women we’ve become.