JG's Bio | Chasing the Fitz

John Gorelski (JG) Bio

Question: How can you write a bio that isn’t full of self-serving B.S.?

Answer: You can’t.

Instead, here are a bunch of facts.

I was born at Grace Hospital in Detroit immediately before the world changed. When I was learning to crawl, Kennedy was assassinated. A few months after that, the Beatles invaded America.

My parents were raised in a then-Polish enclave of Detroit, called Hamtramck. My mom was a high-school beauty queen who tossed the opening ball at a Pistons game as Wilt Chamberlain towered over her.

I grew up in a 940 square-foot house with my six brothers and sisters and a Greek Orthodox Church in the basement, located in Westland, MI, where I thought we were the only non-Irish-Catholics on the planet.

The elementary school I attended has been long boarded up because it was built on a toxic waste dump.

Before I had hair on my privates, Child Protective Services asked me and my brothers in front of my stepfather who we’d rather live with, my father or my stepfather, creating in me a lifelong distrust of authority.

I spent three proud years in the U.S. Army travelling the world as a military news correspondent and documentary filmmaker.

Due to a hangover, I threw up over Tokyo harbor in a helicopter.

Sam Donaldson called me “a smartass.”

On the Korean DMZ, Ronald Reagan left me scrambling for things to say live on the air because he turned around at the last second and disappeared for ten minutes. Later I heard he had to take a dump. It was the longest ten minutes of my life.

I lived in the DC area for 25 years, back when a Republican could live next door to a Democrat and meet after work for a two-hour round of beers, conversation and laughs.

I worked at Focus: Hope in Detroit, where I marched with Rosa Parks before she died.

As a defense contractor, I had goat’s blood thrown at me while walking up the front steps to my job at the Pentagon.

My liberal friends think I’m conservative. My conservative friends think I’m liberal.

I have a love-hate relationship with water. I’m a Pisces, the fish sign. But water tried to kill me several times, starting as a baby when I fell out of a canoe on Belle Isle and sank to the bottom in murky water.

I was married for 20 years, have a teenage daughter, worked in management at a Fortune 20 company and lived the suburban “dream” for over a decade, H.O.A. and all.

On my bookshelf, I have a dinosaur fossil I brought back from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

I’ve been called brusque more times than I can recall, especially since moving to the south.

I curse like a dockworker and love the “f” word but can sing “Christ is Risen” in Greek and recite Shakespeare for several minutes straight.

Most of my life, I drank too much.

I’ve hunted and eaten squirrel (for breakfast). Overseas I’ve eaten horse, monkey and slimy things. None of them tasted like chicken.

I’ve photographed Robert Plant, Def Leppard, and Tori Amos in small studio settings. I’ve interviewed Foster Brooks, Claude Pepper, Tom Jones and Ludicris.

I never finished my degree. I assumed the mantle of autodidact the moment I ran across the word.

A new diagnosis and Adderall are helping me produce with focus and efficiency what was never before possible.

I’m not proud of everything I’ve done but I admit that I’ve done them, face the consequences and try to do better.

This is all just some shit about me. It don’t mean nothing. If you can make sense of it, you’re doing better than I am.

Have a great f’n day!

Special thanks to my writing, artistic and intellectual influences: Milan Kundera, John Irving, Ernest Hemingway, comic-book superheroes, the Dadaists and Existentialists (especially Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Camu, Julio Cortázar), Dostoyesvsky, Kafka, Louis L'Amour, Richard Stark, Richard Stark, Richard Stark (yes, that’s intentional), Muhammad Ali, Ayn Rand, Picasso, Jackson Pollack, Lucian Freud, Julian Schnabel, Tony Soprano, Martin Scorcese, Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman, Bruce Willis, Q Tarantino, John Malkovich, and then also Robert McKee, Syd Snyder, Christopher Vogler, and Stephen Wilbers (who has written the best writing books from a technical perspective EVER!). And many more not at the top of my head. So many…. THANK YOU!