Greg Jaynes is a very funny guy. He is also a good writer. So how come I'd never heard of him? I found his book, Sketches from a Dirt Road, at a garage sale a couple weeks ago. I was slightly put off by the slight mildew stains along the edges of the cover, so I stood there and read a few pages. The first chapter, called simply "Past" told about various jobs he'd had in his youth. He cut brush along the Mississippi (remember how you learned to spell that in grade school, in that sing-song rhythm? "Em-Eye-ess-ess-Eye-ess-ess-Eye-pee-pee-eye") for a riverboat line one summer, which was a sweaty crappy job but he got to sleep on board and even had his own bunk on deck -

"In the night the water and the sky were black as used motor oil. A hundred watt bulb in the ceiling above the bunk shed light on Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, Profiles in Courage, Moby Dick, The Naked and the Dead, and Candy. I particularly liked Candy."

After reading that passage, I was hooked. 'Cause hey, I read all those books too. And what teenage boy doesn't remember first discovering the forbidden delights of that porn classic, Candy.
And if that wasn't enough to hook me, on the very next page he tells of heading off to NYC to seek his fortune -

"I had a two-tone blue (and rust) 1950 Plymouth and I had forty-five dollars. I shared a garret with an unsuccessful actor and I slept on a lawn chair I bought at a five-and-dime. In the days I worked in the mailroom at Decca Records. In the nights I went to dirty movies."

And probably thought about Candy. And while working at Decca he actually met Ricky Nelson. Hey, man, if that had happened to me when I was 18, I probably never would have left Decca.

So I bought the mildewy old book. I think it mighta cost me fifty cents. But that night I was already chuckling and snorting over yet more witticisms, voiced in such a dry, perfect delivery that I literally scarfed this book up at a breakneck pace. The book is actually about a later time in Jaynes' life, when he moved his family from Atlanta to a rural Georgia farm, where he worked as a freelance writer and cultivated his natural aversion to jobs and work. And this guy knew virtually nothing about farming or rural stuff of any kind for that matter. He didn't even seem to know much about dogs, fer cripesakes, as evidenced in an hilarious anecdote about his chicken-chasing, chicken-killing dog, whom he tried to cure of these habits by tying a dead chicken around the dog's neck (a neighbor's suggested rustic rememdy).

"The dog grew dotty after a few days. He would come around the house and one or the other of us would say, 'Phew! Get that dog away from here!'"

Then the dog started chasing cars, until he caught one. "I took him in and spread him before the hearth and removed the smelly chicken. In two days the dog was up and about with a slight limp. Now he chases neither chickens nor cars. However, he is pregnant."

Funny? Hell, yes! And it just keeps getting better, with more stories, most only 3-5 pages long, about deer hunting, firewood, bike trips, Thanksgiving, buying a pony for his son, enjoying "quality time" with his wife (until she takes a job in town), and making a vacation trip back home to Memphis - a particularly hilarious segment in which Jaynes attends a kind of convention for old B-western buffs, where he meets Lash LaRue and Sunset Carson, and also tells of the ratty theater where he went to see all those old movies as a kid, until adolescence. "Then we learned there was a drive-in across the Mississippi River that was showing nudie movies. And we abandoned the Bristol Theater and its Westerns in favor of t*ts. And we never turned back."

It's not all funny stuff though. There are a few surprisingly sensitive stories, like on tender little tale about an aging farm couple called "Story, Made Up."

But why go on? Here's a book that's been out of print for over thirty years, so who's gonna seek it out and read it? Which I find kinda sad. But I'll say it again anyway. This guy is Funny. And as my old army sergeant might have said, "He writes real good." I'll probably tell people about this book, and how much I enjoyed it. And they'll probably say, "From 1977?!" Yeah, old stuff, I know. But still ... ( )