Dreams That Never Were by Greg Messel @gregmessel #historical #fiction

DREAMS THAT NEVER WERE by Greg Messel, Historical Fiction

Title: DREAMS THAT NEVER WERE
Author: Greg Messel
Publisher: Sunbreaks Publishing
Pages: 296
Genre: Historical Fiction

“Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why? I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?" -- Robert F. Kennedy

June 5, 1968:  Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then a candidate for President and victorious in the California primary, was mortally wounded by assassin Sirhan Sirhan as he exited the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.  Innocent bystanders were also wounded, including young and idealistic Alex Hurley, a San Francisco reporter.

Swept up in the turbulent events of 1968, Alex is captivated both by the Presidential race and by Vietnam, where he had recently been a war correspondent.  His time in Vietnam had cost him his marriage and bitterly separated him from his own family.

Recovering from his wounds—physical and emotional—a new and surprising love restores his hope.
Part political thriller, part romance, Alex Hurley’s story in “Dreams That Never Were,” captures the turmoil of the day, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and America's wrenching response to it. This novel is the latest historical fiction from award winning author Greg Messel.

 

 

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Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy was leaving a victory party after winning the California Primary in June of 1968. Sirhan continued to fire his gun as the crowd tried to subdue him. Five additional people were wounded by the stray bullets. I have one of those wounded be my fictional character, Alex Hurley. This excerpt is when Alex wakes up in the hospital and is unaware of what has occurred. Here’s the excerpt: 

I heard unfamiliar voices talking.

“He’s starting to open his eyes,” someone said.

“That’s a great sign,” commented another.

I detected a pain in my side, just below my rib cage. I tried to open my eyes, but they seemed to be glued shut. The voices resumed—talking about me as if I wasn’t there. Finally, I blinked my eyes, trying to focus, and soon realized  I was in a hospital bed. Standing by me, with concerned looks etched on their faces, was an odd collection of people from my life. 

Through my bleary eyes, I saw my ex-wife Brenda; John Greer, my photographer pal from San Francisco; and Darlene Harvey, the reporter from the Los Angeles Times, I’d been admiring from afar since I had arrived in Southern California. 

Brenda moved forward and tenderly gripped my hand in a way that she had not done for a long time. 

“How are you, Alex?” she asked softly. 

I gave a weak shake of my head. “I dunno. What happened?” 

“Don’t you remember, mate?” John jumped in. 

“Remember what?” I mumbled blankly, as my weak voice tailed off into nothing.

“He’s still coming out of the drugs. Give him a minute,” Brenda pleaded. “They’ve been keeping him kind of doped up since the surgery. This is the first time I’ve been able to talk to him.”

“Surgery?” I asked. 

Brenda shushed me and gently ran her long, slender fingers through my hair. “Take it easy. Don't try to talk right now. Take your time. Then we’ll help you understand what happened.”

I groggily attempted to get my bearings. “We were at the hotel. Everyone was celebrating Bobby’s victory. I was following him out of the ballroom, and there was like a riot. I was suddenly on the floor and couldn’t get up. It was strange. All of these people kept stepping on me—on my arm and on my legs.” 

I glanced at my right hand which was heavily bandaged. “I got knocked down. I’m sorry. Everything is a little hazy. I’m having trouble getting my brain to work.”

The three people hovering over me could not have been more different—two beautiful women and John, with his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and a scruffy beard covering his face. The trio exchanged concerned glances, whispered, and nodded at one another. I started to shift in my bed and was met with a jolts of pain in my side and my leg. 

Brenda attempted to lighten the mood. “I was afraid you’d wake up in your hospital bed, see your ex-wife standing over you, and think you’d died and gone to hell.”

I gave her a weak smile, while the others chuckled to break the tension. 

Brenda was trying to make sure my re-entry was a slow descent, but that strategy was quickly dashed when John started blurting out all the details of the last 14 hours. “Take it easy, Alexander. You’ve had surgery. You were shot, man. They removed the bullet. The doc says you’re going to be fine. Some people from San Francisco are on their way down here, including our boss. Everyone’s been worried about you after they saw the news.”

“The news? I was shot?”

Brenda glared at John. “Way to go slow, John. Senator Kennedy was shot. You and some other people were also wounded by the assassin.”

“No, no, no!” I yelled. “Bobby was shot? No, not this time! This wasn’t supposed to happen! Assassin? Is Senator Kennedy going to be all right?” 

John moved closer. “Bobby’s just down the hall. He’s still alive, but he’s not doing very well.”

“Not doing very well?” I snapped with rapidly accelerating alarm.

John blundered ahead. “This place is like a fortress. It was hard to get in here especially onto this floor. Cops are everywhere.”

“Maybe we should go,” Darlene said shooting a glance at John. “We’ll come back later, Alex. We just had to see you. We were so worried.” 

“No, no, don’t leave right now,” I pleaded. I repeated what I had been told to try to take in the enormity of the news. “Senator Kennedy was shot. How could… how did it happen?”

Brenda nodded to John and Darlene. “I’ll stay with him. I know you must be very busy.”

Darlene leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. She was dabbing tears from her eyes. “It’s been a long night. We’re all living in a nightmare. I’m so sorry, Alexander. It’s good to see you awake.”

Darlene grabbed John by the elbow and pushed him towards the door. John flashed a peace sign. “Peace, my brother. I’ll see you a little later. Take it easy and get better. I’ve got to call San Francisco. Everyone’s anxious to hear about you.”

 

Greg Messel grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives on the Puget Sound in Edmonds, Washington, with his wife, Jean DeFond. Dreams That Never Were is his 11^th novel and is a historical fiction account of a young reporter caught up in the events surrounding the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Greg has also written a series of mystery novels set in San Francisco in the 1950s. He has lived in Oregon, Washington, California, Wyoming and Utah and has always loved writing, including stints as a reporter, columnist and news editor for a daily newspaper. Greg won a Wyoming Press Association Award as a colunist and has contributed articles to various magazines.

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Off Shore Secrets by Maya Berger @maya_berger #chicklit

OFF SHORE SECRETS by Maya Berger, ChickLit, 252 pp.

Title: OFF SHORE SECRETS
Author: Maya Berger
Publisher: Independent
Pages: 252
Genre: Chick Lit

Single again, Maya and her bestie, Una, make plans to sail around the beautiful Adriatic Coast on board a luxury yacht. Fun in the sun with friends is just what these two need this summer.
Maya shouldn’t be attracted to Adrian—the cocky, handsome Spaniard on board—especially when after a passionate night, he calls out another girl’s name in his sleep.

Una, who is supposed to be in a long distance relationship, hooks up with a stranger and sneaks him on board. The next day, the stranger is gone and so is some very expensive jewelry. When Una goes missing too, Maya wants to help her, but what is Una’s involvement?

And who is the mysterious girl Adrian mumbles about in his sleep? Perhaps it is something to do with Una’s secretive and reckless behavior. Maya has a lot of questions, but no one seems ready to give her the answers.

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______________________

“Finally, I can’t believe we have started our adventure!” Maya was driving with Una next to her and Daria lounging in the backseat. She had positioned herself in the middle of the backseat so she could push her head forward to be almost in line with theirs.

Their trip to Krk was supposed to be a short one—only two hours or three if the traffic was bad—and they planned to be in Malinska by noon. They had a friend there who had offered them a room to sleep, but they didn’t plan to stay in Malinska for more than one night. It was a place that was getting wilder and bigger by the minute, and it didn’t really have a charming old center like some of the other towns and villages on the coast of the Adriatic Sea did.

“Can we stop so I can smoke a cigarette?” Though Una smoked in her car, Maya didn’t allow it as she didn’t want her car to constantly smell of smoke—she didn’t consider herself a real smoker anyway. She smoked when she drank and these days, though she went out a lot and consequently smoked almost every day, it wasn’t the same in the winter when she didn't go out as often. She could go for days without smoking and wouldn’t miss it.

“We’re almost there. Can’t you endure just a bit longer without the cigarette?” Maya asked imploringly.

“Why? We’re on holiday, why should I have to endure anything? Let’s stop and have a coffee and a smoke.” Una was persistent, and Maya gave up and pulled off at the nearest gas station.

Una and Daria sat on bar stools, drank their coffee, and smoked while Maya ate the croissant she bought at the café. It was filled with peach jam and still warm, and Maya thought she was eating one of the best croissants she’d ever had.

“Have you heard from Helena yet? Are they on their way?” Daria was curiously peering at Maya and Una while simultaneously stirring her coffee. “Who’s on the boat?” She raised her eyebrows and continued, “I can’t wait to embark it. We had the greatest time last year, didn’t we?”

“We did,” Maya confirmed, looking at Una for consent. She looked like she was enjoying her second cigarette and was blowing out a cloud of smoke, which made Maya feel sick.

 “I last heard from her a week ago, and they weren’t on their way yet,” Una informed them while Maya waved away the cloud of smoke. “But we still have like five or six days before our meeting in Split.”

While Una was talking, Maya wondered how come she was bothered by the smoke of the cigarette. She knew that a few hours later when they would drink alcohol, she’d be ready to smoke, too. Then she remembered that Helena called her two days ago and left a message on her secretary, so she shared her intel. “She said they’re on their way and that we’ll see each other soon.”

“Why didn’t you call her back?” Daria insisted. When she wanted to know something, she didn’t let it go. “Now we don’t know who’s on the boat.”

 “Why do you care anyway? It’s Juan’s boat, he can invite whoever he wants, and we have to be okay with it, right? I hope you don’t make some drama again this year; I wish for a less turbulent holiday,” Una snapped.

Daria’s face contorted with offense, and she looked like she was ready to launch a stream of words at Una. Before things could get awkward between her friends, Maya stepped in. “All right, that’s enough. Last year was last year. I don’t know who’s going to be on the yacht, but isn’t that what makes everything more interesting and appealing?” This was enough to make everyone quiet and relaxed again. Still, it reminded Maya what a peculiar character Daria was and wondered if they made the right choice by inviting her on the trip again after the last one ended in disaster. Although Una was too harsh with Daria, it was only because Daria could drive them both crazy. The best explanation was that they invited her because she was fun to be around—most of the time—and she was always keen for any kind of action—dancing, flirting, drinking, playing games, you name it, she was for it.

 

Maya Berger is the author of a memoir focusing on women’s personal growth called Luna Tree and its sequel In the Pursuit of Change. She took a break from writing about life and personal growth to write adventure stories about two young women just out of university trying to make important decisions in their life like who to date, who to socialise with, how to travel with no money and how to act in potentially dangerous situations. The most important lessons they learn are how to depend on each other and rely on themselves.

Maya is a 44-year-old living in Zagreb, Croatia with her husband and their three-year- old daughter. She is a marketing graduate, pilates instructor, she promotes Croatia as a tourist destination and she loves to read and write.

Website: www.mayabergerauthor.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maya___berger
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MayaBergerTheAuthor/

Misfits and Supermen by Steve Starger #memoir

MISFITS AND SUPERMEN by Steve Starger, Memoir, 178 pp.

Title: MISFITS AND SUPERMEN: TWO BROTHERS’ JOURNEY ALONG THE SPECTRUM.
Author: Steve Starger
Publisher: Friesen Press
Pages: 178
Genre: Memoir

The bond of brotherhood is hard to break, but a lifetime of dealing with familial expectation, bitterness, and psychological disorders can bend and warp it into something nearly unrecognizable. This story tells the tale of two brothers: Melvyn, the elder, whose amalgamation of disorders leave him completely unable to function within society; and Stephen, the younger, whose own emotional and psychological issues are overshadowed to the point where he becomes little more than a pale and twisted reflection of his brother.

On different ends of the same spectrum, Melvyn is blissfully unaware of their troubling connection (or so his brother can only assume), but for Stephen, it is undeniable. He lives with it every day, sensing his own otherness in every twitch, outburst, and inability of his brother to overcome his inner demons. Left largely on his own to deal with his peculiarities-while carrying the burden of being “the normal one,” of whom much is expected- Stephen begins a complicated and unpredictable journey, one which will take him as far from his brother as he can manage to get, even as it brings them inexorably closer.

A portion of proceeds from this book will go toward the Camp Cuheca Scholarship – Melvyn D. Starger fund at Waterford Country School, Quaker Hill, CT., to help fund a two-week summer residency at the camp. For more information about Waterford Country School, please email development@waterforddcs.org.

“A finely crafted, affecting memoir of two brothers.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“If you want an honest book about life with mental illness in the family, this is it. Great writing. Brutally honest. Hard to put it down. Great stories about CT, NY and CA from the 1940s to 2000.”
–Amazon Reviewer

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______________________

On a clear, cool night early in the spring of 1967, I lay on a stone wall fronting Long Island Sound, waiting for the acid to come on. I was in the back yard of a mansion in Stamford, Connecticut, staring into the star-filled sky, listening to the small waves gurgling against the shoreline. My mind was serene, but I was nervous, as always when I took acid or some other psychedelic substance. The unpredictability of the drug both thrilled me and made me anxious. Where will I go? What will I see? What will happen? Will I survive? If I lose myself on this plane of existence, what will come next?

My expectation and anxiety were more intense than usual this night. I had dropped what I had been told was two-hundred-fifty micrograms of pure Sandoz LSD-25, the Holy Grail of psychedelics. Or something very much like it.

I had no idea who obtained this rare specimen of a heralded consciousness-altering substance or who manufactured it, but it showed up at the house where my band, NGC 4594, had camped to rehearse. The sprawling home was a prime example of a southern Connecticut Gold Coast mansion; it belonged to the family of our flute and mouth-harp player.

The tablet I had swallowed, about the size and color of an adult dose of aspirin, purportedly had the purity and power of LSD-25, the legendary psychedelic accidentally discovered at Sandoz Laboratories, in Basel, Switzerland, by a chemist named Albert Hoffman, in 1938. Dr. Hoffman’s cosmic experience was decades in the past, but this dose was supposed to be light-years beyond any acid I had previously taken.

The pitch that accompanied this acid could have been lifted from a used-car salesman’s book, but if the claim was correct, I was in for a journey to the center of consciousness, where “clear light” waited to bathe me in its cleansing glow. I had taken other “clean” acid trips, uncut with amphetamines to make the trip come on faster, and free of other additives favored by the street “acid men” to stretch their product for maximum profits.

As the acid slowly insinuated itself into my nervous system (one test of purity is the length of time it takes for uncut LSD to start working, about forty-five minutes to an hour), I felt the heightened combination of exhilaration and anxiety that signals the acid beginning to work its magic.

A gentle nudging began to assert itself at the edges of my consciousness. I gave myself over to the Sandoz simulacrum and let it take me where it would.

Over the course of what seemed like millennia, the acid took me far away, into the vast field of stars above me, and into the water, where I imprinted my image on the surface over and over, until I became an armada of insubstantial clones breaking on the shore. In a quick burst of rational thought, I thought, so, this is what the shouting is all about over Sandoz. Well ... let it come down!

Inside the house, NGC was playing to a group of local day trippers who showed up every Friday night to get high and listen to us. We had moved into the mansion from Storrs, Connecticut a couple of months before and had become the latest attraction for the local sensation seekers.

As I lay wrapped in ecstasy in Stamford, my brother, Melvyn Starger, lay on his small bed in his small cell of a room on the opposite side of the state, at Norwich State Hospital. He too had taken drugs, ones very different from what I had consumed by choice. He was not given a choice in the matter; his drugs were prescribed and mandatory. His meds probably were benzodiazepines, psychoactive medications that produced sedative, hypnotic, anti-convulsive, and muscle relaxant effects. In other words, they were used to control patients’ behaviors, which could be explosive and unpredictable.

Someone meeting Melvyn for the first time would wonder why it was necessary to give him medicine designed to pacify him. He seemed so calm and diffident to most people. But he had a temper that could get way out of hand, and it could explode in seconds. He was too thin and under-muscled to do any physical damage to people, but he could be scary. He could yell at the top of his range for a long time.

I can’t presume to know where Melvyn’s mind went when he was on his meds. His inner workings had been a mystery to me and my parents for many years. I did my best to hold off thoughts of him as I peaked on the acid. Had I thought of him in this blissful state, I thought I would freak out (as we used to say). That would have been a shame, because this trip was one of a kind. Nothing should be allowed to ruin it. Not that I hadn’t thought of my brother over the years since we were kids, but there were times when it just wouldn’t have been fair to let reality intrude on my experience.

My efforts to keep my brother at bay have never worked. He was always there, ready and waiting—my constant Virgil on our travels together. He had appeared to me many times over the years, a stoop-shouldered wraith shambling through my thoughts, not so subtly reminding me that our bond would never be broken, least of all by changing locations and doing drugs.

Even in the middle of my cosmic dance on Long Island Sound, I occasionally felt the sorrow generated by my brother’s presence creep in, slowly and inexorably. This time, my altered perceptions absorbed Melvyn and his aura with barely a whimper. I didn’t panic; no ambulances had to be called. I simply rode the whirlwind to its conclusion: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

By then I had learned enough about how to guide myself through a psychedelic experience to understand that walking the Via Dolorosa (“the way of grief”) can be an important part of the experience. After all, the language we used to describe an acid trip or some other mind-altering experience employed such phrases as “ego death,” states of being one must travel through to reach the true center of consciousness, where the pain and suffering brought on by human folly melts into divine nothingness.

Our perceptions of the power of psychedelic drugs came from our readings of Buddhist philosophy and certain practices found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which had been appropriated by the Harvard psychedelic guru Timothy Leary for his own usages. In terms of getting high on psychedelics, it probably amounted to nonsense, but if that got us through bad experiences, what was the harm? In fact, the truest thing I had learned about acid, peyote, mescaline, magic mushrooms, and even things like lowly marijuana was how strong these substances were. One could believe anything behind their power to distort the senses and disrupt the orderly flow of one’s mind.

In my brother’s case, he walked the Via Dolorosa his entire life.

In some societies, my brother might have been revered as a holy man, treated with respect and deference. In our world, he was crazy. A looney-tune. A moron. No one in polite society called him those terrible names, of course, at least not in public. I called him those names, in private and in public.

Divorced from the rest of “normal” society by his multiplicity of psychiatric afflictions, my brother grew up inside his own life. It was not a life that anyone would have chosen, but it was his, thrust on him by nature. His world was rigidly self-contained. He was the only permanent resident. He could relate to the “outside” when he chose to, but those were rare moments. My parents and I had to do the work required to enter his world. It was a hard, frustrating task, but there were occasional payoffs, if one worked hard enough. Small flickers of light would dance in his eyes on those rare moments when he was able or willing to enter the world of the others—our world.

This brief description of my perception of Melvyn’s affect and demeanor may remind some of the classic symptoms of autism, or as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) terms it, “Autistic Disorder.” The DSM’s list of symptoms includes: Marked lack of awareness of the existence or feelings of others; no or abnormal seeking of comfort at times of distress; no or impaired imitation (e.g., does not wave bye-bye, does not copy mother’s domestic activities, mechanical imitation of others’ actions out of context); no or abnormal social play; and gross impairment in ability to make peer friendships.

Melvyn did display some or all of these manifestations at various times throughout his life, sometimes all of them at once. The diagnosis of autism was not generally heard during the time of Melvyn’s development, and even if it had been, the tagging of Melvyn as autistic, or “on the spectrum,” may not have made a difference in my parents’ comprehension of their son’s many aberrant behaviors. In retrospect, the gap that existed between Melvyn and the rest of the world would surely have remained—in fact, did remain—for his entire life.

But Melvyn did not live in a vacuum, despite all of the obstacles that separated us. Melvyn—the fact of Melvyn—exerted a profound influence on everyone who came into his world. My parents struggled for their entire marriage under the weight of Melvyn’s conditions.

Some families, when faced with crippling mental disabilities in a family member, bond together and face their futures in some kind of harmony. Other families fall apart, unable to face the fact of a terrible intruder in their midst. My family went the latter route.

When Melvyn’s strangeness could no longer be ignored or explained away, my parents’ reactions took very different forms. Over the long term, my father grew more distant and depressed, and he began to blame my mother more and more for Melvyn’s problems. My mother adopted the pose of a martyr, taking verbal abuse from my father that increased with passing years. My mother became “Long-Suffering Elsie” in the eyes of friends and family. The perception wasn’t entirely fair. She could still laugh and socialize and have fun playing the piano, but there was no doubt that something deep and sad had possessed her. One can argue that we all affect each other simply by being in each other’s lives, but living so closely with someone of Melvyn’s uniqueness takes that rather obvious observation to a very different place.

As Melvyn’s wrongness became more and more pronounced, my parents turned their gazes on him and never looked away. My developing antisocial behavior and rock-bottom self-image took a backseat to Melvyn’s much bigger problems. My parents missed the danger signs in my young life early on. Their concentration on Melvyn bored like drilling tools into Melvyn’s being, as if my parents could mine information from him about his strangeness. They watched in mounting horror as he transformed from a seemingly normal child into an alien creature lurching toward entropy. They reacted to the early years of Melvyn’s thwarted development with shock, disbelief, denial, increasing pain, depression, and cruelty.

The fact that it took years for Melvyn’s first symptoms of psychiatric disorder to appear—holding out hope for my parents where none really existed—exacerbated a situation that eventually flowered into a force that destroyed the fabric of my family.

This may sound like melodrama, but I watched it happen. My mother, refusing to believe the evidence of her eyes, would swear at times that Melvyn was reading full sentences when he was 2 years old, which proved to her that what was clearly happening to him was beyond her comprehension. She was indulging in magical thinking to save her own sanity.

 

Steve Starger is a journalist, author, and musician. His 2006 book, “Wally’s World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Wally Wood, the World’s Second-Best Comic-Book Artist,” was short-listed for the Will Eisner Industry Award for Best Comics Related Book of 2006.

His latest book is a memoir titled MISFITS AND SUPERMEN: TWO BROTHERS’ JOURNEY ALONG THE SPECTRUM.

Website: www.misfitsandsupermen.com.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Steve-Starger-2222670174658438/

Guns, Drugs, or Wealth by Jerry Ford @realjerryford

GUNS, DRUGS OR WEALTH by Jerry Ford, Nonfiction, 164 pp.

Title: GUNS, DRUGS, OR WEALTH: THE THREE-INCOME SECRET TO SUCCESS THAT TOOK ME FROM THE STREETS OF DETROIT TO THE TOP OF MY GAME
Author: Jerry Ford
Publisher: Beast Publications
Pages: 164
Genre: Nonfiction/Motivational

Author and Celebrity Personal Trainer Jerry Ford has authored a powerful, painfully honest book entitled GUNS, DRUGS, OR WEALTH as a help and inspiration to others who also seek personal wealth and independence.

Said Jerry Ford: “ ‘Guns, Drugs, or Wealth’ is about how I went from the hard streets of Detroit to building wealth through stocks, real estate and smart spending. I share with my readers how I began to build my wealth as a personal trainer. As I wrote this book, I imagined myself having a front porch casual conversation with my readers. This how-to guide on building wealth will not only teach people how to build wealth, but it’s written in layman’s terms. The genres of this book are business, inspiration, and self-help.”

Mr. Ford’s book tells all that he has learned, offering readers specific, tried-and-true tools for building wealth by creating three streams of income: (1) passive income (through real-estate investing), (2) portfolio income (through stock market investing), and (3) earned income (through hard work and smart spending).

As a personal trainer, Jerry Ford has worked with many, many “big name” clients, including rapper Big Sean to musical artist MoBeatz. One special trip led to Ford becoming an author. “I was traveling with Big Sean and MoBeatz and decided to journal a few hours a day on the trip. A few hours turned into many…and two months later I had created the manuscript for my book.”

A tragedy earlier in his life also drove Jerry to pull himself up from a hard life in his native Detroit and build a life for himself as a personal wealth coach and trainer. “My brother Sam was murdered…I miss him every day. He inspires me to get out of bed and go as hard as possible in life every day…I feel like I am living for two people instead of just one, myself.”

“Being an author was never a plan,” asserted Jerry. “I knew I needed to figure out a way to help the eighty percent of America who are poor or middle class. I knew that I needed to help the three billion people on the planet who are really poor. Of course this book doesn’t make up for the world’s educational flaws, but it’s a start. Schools don’t teach people how to build wealth.”

Praise for Jerry Ford and His Method

“Jerry traveled across the globe to train me. He goes hard in fitness and in life!”
—Alisha Boe, actress best known for 13 Reasons Why on Netflix

“I am inspired by Jerry’s principles of building wealth through real estate and stock market investments as well as entrepreneurship. With multiple streams of income, the sky is the limit when it comes to potential earning power. This book is here to help!”
—Adrienne C. Moore, actress best known for Orange Is the New Black on Netflix

“Jerry is a beast, and I can totally understand why. Coming from our city, it’s life or death.”
—Dj Mo Beatz, best known as Big Sean’s official DJ

“Jerry is not only a trainer; he’s an entrepreneur. He has come up with incredibly creative ways to service his high-end clientele. Not only do I enjoy working with Jerry–he’s great to hang out with.”
—Marc Webb, film and television producer

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______________________

When I was twenty-six, I woke up one day and decided to move to LA. I don’t know why I felt this urge to move. I would be leaving amazing personal training clients, friends, my mentor, and a great business that I had worked so hard to build.

But I have always been a risk-taker, so I left. After giving everyone two months’ notice, I moved from New York to Los Angeles with no job and no connections.

By the end of my first week in LA, I had landed a job as a personal trainer at Equinox. I quickly became one of the top trainers at Equinox and started to do some damage.

Within six months I had the best clients, including celebrities, more high-net-worth people, and even members of the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Just like in New York, I found myself feeling unstoppable and living the life on the west coast.

However, it began to bother me that I was still working long hours for another person’s company. Not only that: Equinox was ripping me off, as all gyms do with their trainers.

Have you ever felt that way? It sure doesn’t feel like financial freedom.

Sure, I had a job and I was making a lot of money, but this was not the answer. It was time to make some changes in order to really be free financially. I wanted to be wealthy.

I loved what I did, but my goal was to become a billionaire and I knew there was no way I could there if I kept training sixteen people a day for the rest of my life.

There was only one problem: I had no idea where to start.

My mind was occupied with selling personal training sessions for Equinox, to make sure they hit their monthly goals. I was training so many people each day that there was no time to think about new strategies that would put me on the billionaire track.

I prayed about this. I thought about it whenever I could. And — sure enough — shortly after I began praying and thinking about my future, I was fired from Equinox.

Equinox fired me for working out with one of my clients, even though they had given me permission to do so multiple times. After firing me, they quickly realized that 99% of my clients had left Equinox to follow me to a private training gym.

Their response was to ban me from Equinox worldwide.

To this day, anytime I walk into one of their gyms, somebody kicks me right out. Maybe you think this makes me mad, but I totally understand. If I were in their position, and somebody posed a threat to my business, I’d probably do the same thing.

As upset as I was, I now feel that Equinox did me a favor. This was God answering my prayers. This was what I needed to shake me out of my comfortable routine.

By firing me, they forced me to get on the billionaire track instead of straddling the fence. I believe that the illusion of security stifles ambition. When we feel too safe and secure, we end up settling for what we have instead of striving for what we want.

I had been spending sixteen hours a day, seven days a week at Equinox. Although I had income coming in from investments, I was still tied to the gym as long as I knew that there would always be a new client or lead from the PT manager.

I was playing it safe.

But when I left Equinox, I was motivated to push above and beyond what I’d been capable of. What doesn’t kill you makes you a survivor, and you have to decide to get stronger. I left Equinox and soared as an independent trainer, making four times as much per client as I had at Equinox. Not only that, I was my own boss and loving it.

Now that I had quadrupled my income from training and had investment income coming in, it was time to take my financial freedom to the next level. I reinvested all of my profits from my investments because I knew that would put me on the billionaire track.

The illusion of security at Equinox had stifled my ambition and kept me from truly going after financial freedom. I’m not a billionaire yet, but I know I’m on the right track now.

 

Jerry Ford is a Detroit native who grew up in the ghetto. He has been involved in and witnessed everything from gun violence to drug trafficking and addiction, jail, gang life, and murder. At age fourteen, Jerry’s brother, Sam, was murdered on their mother’s birthday. At age seventeen, Jerry’s best friend, Steven, was also murdered. The list goes on. One of the ways Jerry channeled his anger was through martial arts; he became a black belt in multiple styles and received gold medals in the Junior Olympics and other world-respected tournaments.

Jerry received his Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University. Immediately after college, he started his career as a personal-fitness trainer at New York Health & Racquet Clubs, and soon became one of the company’s top trainers. Having established himself as a fitness professional in New York City, Jerry moved Los Angeles, where he became a top trainer at Equinox. After mastering the science of human engineering, Jerry parted ways with Equinox to launch his own private training business. His clients currently include high-net-worth individuals, celebrities, royal family members, fighters, and a variety of other tastemakers. While still based in Los Angeles, he travels nationally and internationally to train clients.

Jerry is also an investor in stocks, real estate, television and film properties, and anything else he believes to be worth the risk. This is his first book, and he wrote it to help others walk their own paths to success.

Visit him at Twitter at www.twitter.com/realjerryford.