Author Jay Dubya presents an adult humorous version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic story Young Goodman Brown.
“Nathaniel Hawthorne” (1804-1864)
For many years Nathaniel Hawthorne had attempted to become an established popular fiction writer. After a decent New England college education, Hawthorne soon returned to familiar Salem, Massachusetts where the aspiring author lived with his mother and sisters for twelve years, staying secluded in a lonely room writing short stories and novel manuscripts. In 1837, his first work titled Twice-Told Tales was successfully published.
Hawthorne was chummy with some of the more famous New England literary writers of his time including Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Two of Hawthorne''s better known works are the novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Great Stone Face” and “Rappaccini''s Daughter” are three of the author''s best known short stories.
Most of Hawthorne’s retelling of classic stories from mythology had been published in his work Tanglewood Tales. Another famous Nathaniel Hawthorne short story collection is Twice Told Tales, which includes the selections “The Minister’s Black Veil”, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and “The Great Carbuncle”.
The story Young Goodman Brown is the first Nathaniel Hawthorne tale in Jay Dubya''s latest e-book, Hawthorne: Hazed Hooked Hammered & Hijacked, now available at Amazon Kindle and also at Smashwords.
Contents (Adult Lit)
Hawthorne: Hazed Hooked Hammered & Hijacked
“Young Goodman Brown”
“The Great Stone Face”
“The Three Golden Apples”
“The Minister’s Black Veil”
“Rappaccini’s Daughter”
‘Feathertop”
“The Golden Fleece”
“The Great Carbuncle”
“Perseus and Medusa”
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”
“Theseus and the Minotaur”
“The Birthmark”
(255 book pages)
Google: Jay Dubya Books
“Young Goodman Brown”
Young Goodman Brown was a good man who stridently stepped forth at sunset into the main cobblestone street at Salem Village. After crossing the threshold, the gentleman put his head back and exchanged a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap while she whispered an imperative instruction to Goodman Brown. “When you’re away on ‘husband’s night out’, don’t you dare try screwing my promiscuous, nymphomaniac sisters Hope and Charity!” Faith commanded. “After all Goodman, we’re prudish Puritans through-and-through. Don’t ya’ get it!”
“I’m not going into the forest to get laid,” Goodman replied. “I just want to get some orange marmalade instead!”
"Dearest Heart," the newly married wife again whispered, softly and rather sadly, when her warm lips were quite close to his cauliflower ear, "Please put-off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed tonight. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams of infidelity and such filthy thoughts of group sex that she''s afraid of herself sometimes. Pray tarry with me this night, dear Husband, of all nights in the year. I’m hornier than Hell and I’m now over having my bloody period! And you can play your guitar and be my personal minstrel after my annoying menstrual!"
"My love and my Faith," replied young Goodman Brown, "of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away south in the direction of Tarrytown from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, needs to be occurring ''twixt now and sunrise. What now? My sweet, pretty wife doubts my integrity already, and we being but three months married? I mean, I’ve only cheated on you ninety-seven times!"
"Then God bless you and safeguard your admirable penis and testicles!" Faith prayed, with the pink ribbons of her black bonnet blowing directly into Goodman’s face. "And may you find all well when you come back and discover your three naughty younger brothers in the fuckin’ sack with me."
"Amen my ‘fairly pretty’ one!" answered Goodman Brown. "Say thy prayers this evening, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and I’m fairly pretty certain no harm will come to thee with my three strong, post-pubescent, punk brothers playing doctor under the linen bedcovers with you."
So the newlyweds parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to turn the corner by the meeting-house where souls were cured, right next to the meat-house where meat was cured, Goodman Brown looked back and noticed the head of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy expression evident upon her rosy countenance, in spite of her pink ribbons and hidden wet pink pussy.
"Poor little Faith!" thought the traveler, for his heavy heart smote his sensibilities like the sword of Perseus had decapitated Medusa. "What a wretch I am to leave her just to embark on such a dumb-ass errand as mine is! She talks of dreams, too. I thought as Faith spoke there was trouble upon her face, as if a dream had warned her of what oddball work is to be performed tonight. But no, no; it would kill my dear wife to even contemplate it. Well,” the ambler said to himself’ as was his bad public habit, “she''s a blessed angel on Earth who just has to wing-it for this evening; and after this one night I''ll cling to her skirts and follow her from the outskirts of Salem Village all the way to Heaven’s Gate or to Hell’s Door if need be."
With this excellent resolve for the anticipated future marital reunion, Goodman felt himself compelled and justified in making more haste on his present ‘evil force purpose’ before his erratic bowels completely emptied fecal matter into his clean pants. The fearful fellow had taken a rather dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the expansive forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through its very ominous interior.
''Ah yes,'' Goodman thought. ''Whenever I see tall evergreen trees in the forest, I fully realize how my lonely heart pines for my wonderful Faith!''
And then young Brown hastened his pace and ambitiously accelerated his chubby behind into a mild trot. The meandering trail was all as lonely as could be, and a distinct peculiarity prevailed in such a quiet dark solitude, a weird silence that the paranoid traveler knows not who or what might be concealed by the innumerable trunks and by the thick tree boughs precariously suspended overhead. With measured lonely footsteps, the worried, wary trekker may yet be passing through an unseen multitude of hidden dangers that would make Goodman Brown more than an endangered species.
"There may be a devilish Indian, maybe a Brave from Atlanta or perhaps a Black-hawk from Chicago lurking behind every tree," stammered Goodman Brown to himself. And then the nervous asshole glanced fearfully behind and added, "What if the Devil himself should be at my very elbow! I’m a strong son-of-a-bitch, but certainly no match for that barbaric supernatural fuck-head, ubiquitous Satan!"
Goodman’s head now being turned back south again, young Mr. Brown passed a crook of the road and with his keen eyes looking forward again for potential human crooks, beheld the figure of a man, clad in grave-but-decent attire, comfortably seated at the foot of an old oak tree. The waiting eight-foot-tall giant arose at Goodman Brown''s approach and then walked onward side by side with him.
"You’re late for our secret rendezvous, Goodman Brown," said the phantom tall fellow. "The clock of the Old South was striking incessantly as I came through Boston, and that was a full three hundred and fifteen minutes and eighteen and a half seconds ago."
"Faith kept me back a while," metaphorically replied the young romantic, with a tremor denoted in his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his obscure companion, though not wholly unexpected. ‘If I had gotten laid like I had wished, I’d be less nervous now after releasing all of that pent-up energy during sex!’ Goodman speculated as the unlikely pair entered deeper into the dark woods.
It was now late dusk in the deciduous forest, and deepest yet in that part of the woods where these two simpleton fuck-heads were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned by Goodman, the companion traveler was about fifty-to-sixty years of age, apparently in the same social rank of life as Goodman Brown, another lowly lowlife, nondescript, unhappy asshole, and the odd fellow ‘bearing’ a considerable resemblance to him, both weirdos looking somewhat like discontented pandas.
Still the two, having nothing better to do at midnight than to saunter and bullshit in the dark forest, the pair might have been mistaken for tall father and short son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner, including speech and idiocy too, the older jerk-off had an indescribable air of one who knew plenty about the world, and who now thought the world of Goodman Brown, the young man possibly collaborating in a gay relationship, which might be started during an unexpected nocturnal eclipse brownout on that ominous-looking Salem, Massachusetts night.
The fairly well-dressed forest stranger (not ranger) would not have felt abashed at the governor''s dinner table or in King William''s Court playing basketball, tennis, badminton or lawyer, were it possible that his bisexual affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about the anonymous tall asshole that could be fixed-upon as remarkable was his fabulous walking staff, which could marvelously walk around without him ever holding it.
The long thick stick, longer and thicker than Zeus’s fabled dick, bore the likeness of a great and curiously wrought black snake. The viper might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent, even when neither Goodman Brown nor any other male (including trans-gender ones) could see his own limp pecker when taking a long half-hour piss. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain New Moon’s light.
"Come, Goodman Brown," insisted his fellow-traveler, "this is a dull pace for the beginning of an arduous forest journey. Take my staff, the long one I am holding and not the short erect one between my legs, if you are so soon weary."
"Friend," said Goodman, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, "having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou are currently bullshitting, for by reputation, I am a mere Salem dumb-ass and you’re an important Salem smart-ass!"
"Sayest thou so?" replied the keeper of the serpent, smiling apart from his monologue. "I am presently only a keeper of the serpent and not a full-fledged keeper of all reptiles in the Salem Zoo House. Let us walk on Goodman, for we have no horses, mules or donkeys to transport our tender asses. Nevertheless,” the dark stranger continued his verbal rambling, “reasoning and discussing as we go, all about morality, immorality and other religious Puritanical nonsense, too. And if I convince thee not about my horse crap ideas, thou shalt in good judgment turn back toward Salem. We are but a little way into the forest yet, so naturally Goodman, I maintain that you can’t see the fuckin’ forest for the trees."
"Too far! Too damned far into the dark interior! I wish I had four balls!" exclaimed the young good man, unconsciously resuming his gait because he had been afraid of ‘striking out’. "My cowardly father never ambled at midnight into the woods on such an obscure errand, nor did his craven father before him. We have been a race of honest Puritan men and good Christians ever since the days of the New Testament martyrs and the years of the Koran’s suicide bombers; and shall I be the first of the name of Brown that ever took this path and kept it, for I’ve no special peripheral desire to ever become a fucked-up path collector!"
"Such company, thou wouldst say," observed and stated the elder person, interpreting his current pause. "Well said, Goodman Brown! I’ve been as well-acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the impure and pure Puritans; and that''s no trifle for me to say. I had helped your grandfather, the constipated constable, when he had lashed the adulterous Quaker woman for wearing fake eyelashes. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip''s War,” the phantom stranger reminded Goodman. “I had taught your old man how to be a constructive, destructive arsonist.”
“Yes, pop and grand-pop always said you liked to start fires and that you had evolved into an excellent pyro-manic,” young Brown attested. “You really know how to turn the heat up a notch, that’s for damned sure.”
“Your pop and old grand-dad really loved moonshine whiskey,” the dark stranger disclosed to his prospective new disciple. “Both undistinguished snot-noses were my good friends; and many a pleasant walks did we have along this familiar path, and returned merrily back to Salem like gay homosexuals after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake. Let’s now take a long stroll in the dark down Memory Lane!"
"I’m only trying to distill the truth. If it be as thou sayest," replied Goodman Brown, "I marvel that pop and old grand-dad never spoke of these moonshine or forest trek matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would’ve driven them from New England all the way to Tim-Buck-Tooth’s house back in downtown Salem. We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide by no such immoral wickedness such as committing sin and debauchery."
"Wickedness or not," evaluated and said the dark traveler with the twisted snake staff, "I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine laced with delicious moonshine liquor with me; the selectmen of divers towns proudly have made me their swimming instructor and chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my deviant interests also,” the dark-shadowed phantom bragged. “The governor and I too play canasta and blackjack together, and when we get it on, we play stud poker. But these are state secrets I’m now sharing with you, that is Goodman Brown, I’m confidentially advising you that if you play your cards right, you’ll advance to a high level in Salem society."
"Can this be done so outside a casino?" cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement directed toward his undisturbed companion. "Howbeit, that presently I have nothing to do with the governor and council and now you suddenly want me to play strip poker with them, possibly in the nude; those faggots that run Salem politics have their own naked ways, and the connivers are no rule of example for a simple straight ordinary husband like me. But, were I to go on with thee Stubborn Stranger, who had been a close intimate friend with pop and with old grand-dad, how should I meet the eye of that good old man, our suspected faggot minister at Salem village?” Goodman rhetorically asked the phantom. “Oh, his high-pitched staccato voice would make me tremble both on Sabbath Day and on Saturday lecture day. The son-of-a-bitch sounds like a Castrati choir boy when the gay shithead talks. Thank goodness I’ve never heard the ugly faggot cocksucker sing!"
Thus far the down-to-earth elder traveler had patiently listened to his fledgling associate with due gravity; but now the deviate one burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself worse than a Quaker, quivering so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.
"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted the mysterious fuck-head again and again; and then composing himself said, "Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, please, don''t kill me with your naïve humor, or else I might die laughing from it, ha, ha, ha!"
"Well then, for me to end the matter abruptly at once," answered flustered Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, "there is the salient issue of my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart if I were to leave her for a gay male partner; and I''d rather break my own balls with a sledgehammer if I were forced to abandon her and her magnificent furry pleasure garden."
"Nay, if that be the sole case for objection," answered the other forest trekker, "then go thy separate way, Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women substitute the elderly bitch hobbling before us. I promise you that your Faith will not be coming to any risk or harm."
As the peculiar-minded stranger spoke, the garrulous asshole pointed his irregular-shaped staff at the aged female figure ahead on the dusky path, of whom Goodman Brown recognized to be a very pious and exemplary-looking dame, who had in his youth taught him his catechism and his breast-sucking, and who was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the Salem Minister and Deacon Gookin, who also was taught serious breast-sucking by “the popular tit woman.”
"A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far into the wilderness sharing her bountiful goodies at nightfall," Goodman determined and remarked. "But with your leave, Friend, I shall take a long-cut through the woods until we have left this promiscuous Christian woman and her nice firm behind, behind. Being a stranger to you,” young Brown vociferated and then cleared his throat, “she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I was going. I don’t need that jealous old bitch biting my dick off while giving me intense fellatio. I heard it from the vineyard’s grapevine, yes from another sinister gay stranger just like yourself named Marvin, that Goody Cloyse’s sharp teeth had once administered a vicious bite to the minister’s limp erection!”
"Be it so young Goodman," commented the young fellow’s fellow-traveler. "That sort of S and M dandy dick bite you’ve just mentioned sounds quite goody-goody to me. Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the path clear."
Accordingly, the young man turned aside, but took care to suspiciously watch his new-found companion, who advanced softly along the road until the itinerant pervert had come within a staff''s length of the old expert dame proficient at administering fellatio to ministers and to non-ministers alike.
Goody Cloyse, meanwhile, was making the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged a wrinkled woman, and mumbling some indistinct words, sounding something like a Neo-Christian Satanic prayer, doubtless, as she demonstratively wiggled her firm ass to and fro along the dark path. The phantom traveler, dressed in black just like Puritan Reverend Jonathan Cache, put forth his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed to be the serpent''s tail.
"The Devil!" screamed the pious old lady. “That diabolical viper’s tail is a replica of the Devil’s dick!”
"Then Goody Cloyse knows her old Friend, doesn’t she?" observed and spoke the dark traveler, directly confronting her countenance and leaning on his writhing stick while admiring the open-mouthed woman’s sharp incisors. “Old Bitch, let’s just not have verbal intercourse!”
"Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed I’m confronting?" cried the good old dame from Notre Dame. "Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is my first dead victim. But would your worship ever believe it? My magical flying broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen as I suspect, by that un-hanged witch, Goody Cory. And all that stealthy pilfering shit happened when my face and mouth were being anointed with the minister’s hot sperm juice and with his favorite pet’s wolf''s bane! It’s really hard being a sex-crazed vampire nowadays yes it is, especially at my age!"
"Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe," cryptically replied the dark shape of old Goodman Brown, the queer scary voice originating from the mouth of the obscure forest stranger. “Goody Cloyse, your terrific fellatio therapy just blew me away, right into the fuckin’ afterlife!”
"Ah, your worship knows the secret sperm juice and wolf’s bane recipe," screamed the delighted old lady, cackling aloud. "So, as I was saying, being all ready for the slated spiritual revival meeting, and having no horse or zebra to ride upon, I made up my mind to hoof it into the woods; for the Salem big-butted scuttle-butters tell me there is a nice young man to be taken into unholy communion tonight. First, I presume, communion with nature as Thoreau thoroughly suggests, and then, communion with me, ha, ha, ha! But now," Goody Cloyse closed her eloquent oratory while still wearing clothes, “your good worship will kindly lend me your arm, and we shall be there at the tent-less soul revival in a twinkling of an eye or in the sparkle of a night star."
"That can hardly be," answered her sinister Friend. "I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff if you wish to expedite your journey by flying non-stop first class to your destination, if you will."
So saying those pathetic prophetic words, the sinister stranger threw his snake-decorated staff down at her swollen feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi before the wise men had quickly died of advanced “staff infections.”
Of this suspect fact, however, Goodman Brown’s pea-sized brain could not take sufficient cognizance. The one night forest trekker (looking for a one-nighter) had cast-up his eyes in astonishment, and then peering-down again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the abominable serpentine staff, but his pupils only perceived his fellow-traveler standing there alone, who had prudently waited for his attention as calmly as if nothing had ever happened to Goody Cloyse, who incidentally was not wearing vanishing cream, but only a little minister’s sperm juice upon her wrinkled face.
"That old woman taught me my catechism and my breast-sucking exercises, and her chest flesh was colder than a witch’s tit!" indicated the young married man to his fellow forest ambler; and there was indeed a world of relevant meaning in the mere utterance of that simple comment.
“Yes, Goody Cloyse isn’t exactly a Miss Goody-Goody Two-slippers,” the mysterious phantom stranger informed Goodman. “She sort of reminds me of the flying aviator wife of the Wizard of Og featured in the Old Testament Book V, The Wholly Book of Doo-Doo-Rot-on-Me.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The oddball forest pair continued walking onward along the Path of Ignorance towards nowhere, while the provocative elder traveler exhorted his callow shallow companion to make good speed and persevere along the darkened trail, discoursing so aptly that his infallible arguments seemed rather to spring-up like ideological jackrabbits into the bosom of his auditor, rather than to be actually suggested by himself.
As the duo ambled-on to nowhere, the Grimy Reaper in minister’s attire plucked a maple tree branch to now serve as Goodman’s convenient walking stick, and the morbid personage began to strip it of the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew and with some wild dog doo-doo, too.
The moment that Mr. Brown’s fingers touched the improvised “Moses staff”, the pole became strangely withered and dried-up as if being exposed to a summer week''s sunshine. Thus the disparate pair proceeded southward, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy sleepy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down upon the stump of a tree and refused to go any farther because his addled brain had then become especially stumped.
"Friend," said young Brown, stubbornly giving his non-political stump speech, "my Puritan mind is made up. Not another step will I budge on this eccentric errand into the suburban wilderness. What if a wretched old woman with a dried-up lice-infested cunt does choose to go visit the Devil when I thought she was instead going to Heaven to be on Cloud Nine making-out with a horny rebellious archangel? Is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her, the raunchy disappearing old witch bitch with the dried-up lice-infested cunt?"
"You will think better of this recent phenomenon you had just witnessed by and by," said his alter-ego acquaintance rather composedly. "Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like moving your ass forward again, I suggest that you take a goddamned hike, Goodman! There is always my trusty staff to help you along the Path of Knowledge, er, I mean along the Path of Puritanical Ignorance."
Without any more words being enunciated, the foreboding dark trekker threw his vernal companion the aforementioned maple stick, and soon the phantom was as speedily out of sight (no, he was not blind) as if the bizarre asshole had supernaturally vanished directly into the deepening gloom through some mystical occult sort of environmental osmosis, amazingly duplicating the disappearance of old retired hooker, Goody Cloyse.
The young man sat a few moments by the dismal roadside, applauding himself’ greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the gay LBGT minister in his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin, whom Goodman had theorized the dusky stranger was (or had been) impersonating.
And what calm sleep would be his own that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Wife Faith, or perhaps Sister Hope, or maybe even Mother Superior Charity! Amidst these particular pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown’s ears heard the distant tramp of horses’ hoofs along the road, and the neurotic dumb fuck deemed it advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the forest, conscious of the guilt-laden purpose that had brought him thither, though now so happily turned away from baneful temptation and equally baneful Puritanical sin.
On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the militant riders, two grave old voices, conversing soberly as their powerful steeds drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man''s makeshift hiding-place; but owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that specific forest spot, neither the travelers nor their steeds were visible to Goodman’s inferior eyesight.
The on-a-mission figures’ dangling legs brushed against the small boughs along the wayside, and it could not be seen that they had intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the strip of the dull sky’s brief opening through the trees, a view which the riders must have just passed by.
Goodman Brown alternately crouched as if taking a healthy crap and then stood on tiptoes as if taking a short piss, pulling aside the branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he could without discerning so much as a fleeting shadow.
The new encounter vexed Mr. Brown the more, because unemployed Goodman could have sworn, were such an honest thing possible, that he had recognized the unique voices of the faggot minister and believed-to-be-gay Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly on their stallions, as they were wont to do, when bound as companions by necessity in the direction of some sacramental ordination or of some irrelevant ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing distance, one of the religious rough riders stopped to pluck a birch switch.
“Of the two events, Reverend Sir," said the voice sounding like that of the theoretically gay church deacon, "I’d rather miss an ordination dinner than miss tonight''s hastily scheduled impromptu revival meeting. They tell me that some members of our LBGT community are to be assembled here from Falmouth, from Foul Mouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut (Cunt Etiquette) and also a few radical Biblical scholars from Rhode Island, besides several of the local Indian powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us demented LBGT Puritan Christians do. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion during our imaginative newly-written group sex sacrament."
"Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!" replied the solemn old tones of the influential faggot minister. "Spur up my Aide, or we shall be late for our spurious activities, ha, ha, ha. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on the ground and get attacked by devout, aroused LBGT followers in my congregation."
The horses’ hoofs clattered again and the voices, talking so strangely in the night’s empty air, passed-on through the dense forest, where no church had ever before been gathered or solitary Christian prayer ever practiced. Whither then, could these fucked-up sanctimonious holy men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness?
Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support while finally taking a long healthy piss, making the ground so soggy that his feet were ready to sink-down into the wet earth. Feeling faint and dizzy, Goodman’s bloodshot eyes stared-up to the night sky’s constellations, doubting whether there really was an inspirational Divine Heaven existing above him. Yet there was the deep blue Arch of Paradise, and the surrounding stars brightening around it.
"With Heaven above and with Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the Devil’s trickery!" cried Goodman Brown. “I’m fuckin’ straight, and I refuse to be gay! I’m definitely not a fellow fellatio to either the faggot minister or the supposedly gay deacon!”
While Young Mr. Brown still gazed upward into the deep Arch of the Firmament and then lifted his hands to pray to his Deity, though no apparent wind was stirring, a low cloud hurried across the zenith and ominously obscured the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass (here: not a religious ceremony for African Americans) of clouds was sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the inexplicable cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of gibberish-sounding voices.
Once the avid astute listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people of his own place and time, fucked-up Salem resident men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met both at the communion and ex-communication tables, and had seen in the past other rowdy revelers possessing similar voices rioting for free beer and liquor at the town tavern.
The next hallucinating moment, so indistinct were the queer sounds, Goodman doubted whether he had heard nothing except the murmur of the old forest, whispering softly without a wind, conversing with the nearby babbling brook.
Then blasting through the eerie air had wafted a stronger swell of those same familiar Puritan church tones. The myriad altos and sopranos along with the male bass and baritones were akin to the musical notes and octaves heard daily at Salem village; but never until now originating from a dark cloud of night.
There was one special voice of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet saturated with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, sexual in desire of course, which perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain any satisfaction in fucked-up Puritan pre-colonial days where inflexible Taliban-type rules prevailed. And then all of the vague and nebulous two-dimensional assembled multitude, both saints and sinners’ alike, all producing prolific shouts and shrieks, all voices seeming to encourage and invoke the disturbed girl’s excessive spirit-consuming lust for sex to heighten.
"Faith!" shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation. “I wanted to get laid too before our wedding!” And the echoes of the enchanted forest egregiously mocked the lost fellow, his voice again crying, "Faith! Faith!" as if the gathered bewildered wretches were seeking his virgin wife’s frightened attention all through the whole pristine wilderness.
The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night air, when the unhappy husband held his breath in order to organize a satisfactory response to what Goodman had been witnessing. There was a definite scream emitted, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of quarreling fucked-up voices, fading into far-off fucked-up laughter, as the dark cloud slowly swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky doming above Goodman Brown’s vulnerable, easily influenced noggin.
But then something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught upon the branch of a tree. The young man seized the cotton material, and his eyes beheld a pink ribbon, which Young Mr. Brown intelligently and sagaciously conjectured symbolized Faith’s luscious wet pink snatcheroo.
"My Faith is gone!" cried the puzzled idiot, after enduring one stupefied moment of reflection without the aid of a hand-held pocket mirror. "There is no good man on Earth; and sin is but a lousy immaterial name. Come, Devil; for to thee is this world given. I would prefer to live forever in Hell in pleasurable sin than for all eternity in Heaven being denied all the things that bring me primitive biological satisfaction and gratification. Why is mortal life such a fucked-up travesty?"
And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long at his moral and immoral folly, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate of speed that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run its length. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and soon vanished at a distance, leaving the petrified flyer in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the base instinct that guides mortal men to evil.
“I can now understand how Goody Cloyse uses her flying broomstick to sweep a good man like me off his feet!” Young Brown realized and muttered to the various trees he had been speeding by. “Wow! This experience is truly me owning a really neat fly-by-night business operation! And now Goodman," the tragic fool commenced singing, "so ya’ met someone and now you know how it feels, Goody, Goody!”
The whole forest was currently peopled with frightful sounds like the creaking of the tall trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yells of fanatical drunken Indians. Sometimes the swirling wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes the intense breeze gave a broad roar circulating around the swift-moving airborne traveler, as if all Nature was personally laughing Brown and his fast forest passage to mocking scorn.
But now Goodman comprehended that he himself was the chief horror of the dangerous scene, and the moral high-velocity traffic violator shrank not from its other enveloping horrors in total terror.
"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the sarcastic wind laughed at him. “Ventilate my balls but don’t break them! I still must orgasm with my lawful wife Faith to further dispel this horrendous immoral experience! Let us hear which Asshole, either supernatural or human, will laugh loudest,” the broomstick rider yelled to the blurring forest like an obsessed maniac. “Think not to frighten me with your pretentious deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come drunken Indian powwow, come Devil himself, and come ya-hoo asshole forest voices, here comes dependable Goodman Brown to the rescue. You may as well fear me as I fear you, anonymous asshole voices!"
In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown going absolutely berserk upon the converted flying staff. Onward the fearless navigator flew among the majestic tall pines, brandishing his new-found black magical staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now again shouting forth such laughter as to set all the moral and immoral echoes of the forest laughing like hyperactive demons all around him.
Thus sped the demoniac on his extravagant esoteric course, until, quivering in sheer excitement among the trees, the merry jockey noticed a red light beaming before him, a glow similar to when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire and then chillingly, the flames throw-up their lurid blaze against the sky at the precise hour of midnight.
Goodman paused with his euphoria, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and his ears then heard the swell of what seemed a contemptible hymn, weird-sounding lyrics rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many fucked-up voices. Young Brown knew the tune well; it was a familiar one often sung in the choir of the gay village people’s meeting-house.
The verse soon died heavily away, and the reprise was quickly lengthened by a boisterous chorus’ ascension, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried-out, and his plea was lost to his own ear by its unison with the fruitless cry of the desert wolf.
“I never ‘met-a physical’ straight woman I didn’t like,” Goodman lowly declared to himself’. “I need to read the Koran more often in order to learn exactly how the hell I should treat Good Faith more tenderly!”
In the interval of silence that ensued, now-psychotic Mr. Goodman Brown stole forward until the light glared fully upon his disbelieving eyes. At one extremity of an open space vista, hemmed-in by the dark wall of the formidable forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit. The huge rock (which slightly resembled St. Peter) was surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops all aflame, their stems untouched, relentlessly flickering like lit votive candles at an evening prayer meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the boulder’s summit was all on fire, blazing high into the night sky, and the immense conflagration was seen as fitfully illuminating and enveloping the whole open field.
Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a red blaze. As the intense light arose and then fell in rhythmic yo-yo fashion, a combination straight and gay church congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the utter darkness, populating the entire heart of the solitary woods all at once.
"A grave and dark-clad company has indeed mustered," stuttered Goodman Brown. “Where the hell is the Singing Nun anxiously intoning the melodic lyrics of ‘Stairway to Heaven’?”
Among the corralled chorus, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared the frowning faces that would be seen next day at the province council board, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, including the eerie members of Black Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignly over the imagined crowded pews, where an abundance of farts from kneeling repentant sinners were rising in putrid succession and thus permeating and neutralizing the heavily incensed holy air.
Some tale-tellers affirm that the governor’s kinky mistress was in attendance at the forest fiasco, masturbating like crazy. At least there were high society lesbian dames well-known to her there too, and bisexual wives of honored husbands also, along with a bevy of widows, but no representation of African black widows.
Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure open field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or the naïve trespasser recognized a score of the church members of Salem Village, all famous for their especial sanctity. Good old pledged-to-be-gay Deacon Gookin had arrived on the scene, and the pompous asshole waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered openly out-of-the-cupboard gay pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, disreputable, and phony impious people, these holier-than-thou elders of the Puritan Church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were vile men of dissolute lives along with prostitute women of spotted fame, desirable attractive wretches given over to all mean and filthy vices, and suspected even of horrid Puritan crimes like kissing, touching and showing their ankles in public.
It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the dumb-ass sinners abashed by the dumb-ass saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced enemies were the drunken Indian priests and shamans, or powwows, all barbaric savages who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any fucked-up chants known to imported English witchcraft.
"But where is Faith?" thought Goodman Brown; and as the memory of numerous sexual encounters with Hope and Charity came into his overburdened heart, the penitent fellow trembled, his mind finally fathoming the true fact that dead saints and living sinners alike were all fucked-up assholes. “Lord, give me sanctuary from all of this Hell on Earth!”
Verse after verse was crudely sung by the heterogeneous chorus (which obviously included homos’ and lesbians as well); and still the collective chorus’s voices swelled between the deepest tone of a central mighty organ, a twelve-foot-high massive circumcised erection shaped exactly like an Iroquois totem-pole.
And with the final peal of that dreadful forest anthem there was a thunderous sound, as if the roaring wind had suddenly gone amok. Then the loud noise of rushing streams, the howling of wild beasts, along with every other voice of the un-concerted devil-may-care wilderness was religiously mingling, and according with the voice of guilty and not-guilty man, the erratic voices were together participating in spiritual homage to either the Prince of Peace or the Prince of Darkness.
The four blazing pines threw-up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror upon the smoke wreaths floating above the impious assembly. At the same moment, the fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a self-appointed figure. With reverence be it spoken, the two-dimensional human form bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine personage of the Salem, New England church.
"Bring forth the converts!" cried a voice that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest. “Bring them forth!”
At the stern command, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the queer-sounding Tower of Babel congregation, with whom the visitor felt a loathsome brotherhood by virtue of the sympathy of all that was understood as being humanly and immorally wicked inside his grieving heart.
The forest intruder could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father was sternly beckoning him to advance forward, austerely looking-downward from an overhead drifting smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn the forest revival guest to move back.
‘Is this Mother?’ Goodman wondered in awe. ‘It could be Mother. She was a woman, just like this disturbing manifestation is!’
But young Brown had no power within his being to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when the grim-faced Minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms and led Goodman directly to the blazing rock.
‘Holy shit!’ imagined Young Goodman. ‘I hope I’m not being sacrificed for the sake of this fucked-up forest congregation! And I don’t see any trace of my fuckin’ psychiatrist or guidance counselor anywhere in the whole dumb-shit crowd to give me sage advice!’
Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse, that pious breast-milk giving teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, the popular Salem hooker who had often arrogantly claimed that she had received the Devil''s promise to be the exclusive Prom Queen of Hell. A rampant hag was she, but a good fuck nevertheless. And there stood the proselytes and the accompanying acolytes beneath the canopy of raging fire.
"Welcome, my Children," announced the mysterious phantom dark figure, "yes, welcome to the joyful communion of your human race. Ye confused mortals have found thus young your nature along with your individual abstract destinies. My Children, alertly turn your fat and skinny asses and look right behind you!"
The obedient worshipers turned their indoctrinated heads around like a tame flock of herded sheep. And flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of roaring flames, the fiend worshipers were astonishingly seen mingling with the pious moral churchgoers; the smile of accepted welcome gleamed darkly upon every fucked-up visage.
"There," resumed the anonymous sable form at the makeshift podium, "are all whom ye have reverenced and despised from youth. Ye deemed them either holier or less desirable than yourselves, and then shrank from your own sin, contrasting that human-created criterion with their separate lives of righteousness and of prayerful aspirations. Yet here are they all gathered together as one mankind, yes, one harmonious humanity with each person united for a single common purpose, all present inside my worshiping assembly.”
The ominous figure paused for a moment so that all present mentally and emotionally connected with his extended litany. “This night it shall be granted you to know their wholly unholy secret deeds: how hoary-bearded church elders have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households before screwing the innocent virgins into soft mattresses; how many a woman, eager for widows'' weeds, has given her husband a foul drink at bedtime and let him sleep with the poison in his stomach upon his deathbed; how beardless brazen youths have made haste to inherit their fathers'' wealth by poisoning their mothers after their aberrant mothers had successfully poisoned their fathers; and how fair damsels, blush not, sweet ones too, have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant''s funeral because the rest of you stupid assholes would instinctively stone her to death if the teen mother revealed that she had become pregnant before entering blessed sacred wedlock. Rejoice now brethren, for all the world’s mortals, both good and bad, are now one splendid unified chorus!”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The assholes, both straight and LBGT, did so unite, holding hands; and by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched newly converted man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, both afflicted mortal souls trembling before that unhallowed altar.
"Lo, there ye stand, my Children," preached the alien figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost melancholy with its despairing awfulness, as if the speaker’s once angelic nature could yet mourn for our entire miserable race. "Depending upon one another''s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a gullible poet’s dream. Now are ye un-deceived by virtue of my enlightening sermon. Evil is the nature of mankind. The words ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ and ‘religion’ are simply hollow language terms grotesquely contrived by ancient, greedy scholars. Evil along with pleasure must be your only happiness. For good and evil are tonight and forever but one entity! Welcome again, my Salem Children, to the essential communion of your inferior race."
"Welcome Brethren," repeated the fiend worshipers, in one contrasting cry of bitter despair and sweet triumph. “Welcome!” the disingenuous assembled shit-heads reiterated.
‘This is positively great news!’ Goodman pragmatically reckoned. ‘Now I can screw every straight and bisexual doll in Salem without the anchor of guilt shackled around my non-existent soul and thus, slowing-down my sexual prowess!’
The next morning young Goodman Brown approached slowly into the main street of Salem Village, staring around him like a still-befuddled and addled man. The good old gay Minister was taking a pleasant walk along the town graveyard to develop an appetite for breakfast and to also meditate upon his impending sermon, and the self-righteous asshole casually bestowed a blessing on Goodman Brown as he nonchalantly passed.
Unemployed Brown, who was aspiring to found a profitable local parcel delivery service, shrank from the venerable passing faggot as if to avoid an anathema. The perplexed fellow had never before dealt with the plague known as internal conflict. Goodman’s very sustenance was being ferociously challenged by everyday Salem reality. Mental turmoil (along with emotional chaos) was now negatively dominating his rapidly disintegrating spirit.
Later that morning, old out-of-the-closet Deacon Gookin was present at domestic worship, and the holy words of his lethargic prayer were heard through the open window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. “It doesn’t really matter if one is straight, bisexual, gay or trans-gender! Priest, minister, rabbi, bishop, pope, imam or deacon! Fucked-up charlatans all! Providence does not reside in Providence, or in Heaven, or in any place else. The Minister, the Deacon, the politician and the judge, they are the true heretics and the real agnostics who daily deluge and manipulate us with their dumb-ass propaganda!’
Goody Cloyse, that most excellent old Christian whore, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice fence, catechizing a little girl who had kindly brought the wench a pint of fresh morning moonshine. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as if she had been in the grasp of the Minister fiend himself.
Turning the corner by the Salem meeting-house, the resident apostate spied the head of Faith, with her pink bonnet ribbons blowing in the breeze, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at the sight of Goodman that the happy wife skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole insane village could ever criticize her display of public affection.
But recently converted Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her loving and caring face, and beheld Faith’s smile, and then the louse of a spouse passed-on without even offering either a polite hand wave or a sarcastic oral greeting.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild nightmare of a spooky witch-meeting? Which bitch was a true witch: Goody Goody Two-Slippers Goody Cloyse or voluptuous Faith Brown?
Be it so if you will, but alas, it indeed was a most necessary forest dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown to experience. A distraught, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate old man did the troubled fellow eventually become, ever since the night of that dreadful forest clearing encounter.
On the Sabbath day, when the solemn congregation was indulgently singing a holy psalm, Goodman could not listen because a contradictory anthem of venial and mortal sin was rushing loudly upon his ears and drowning-out all the blessed vocal strains. And when the gay Minister spoke from the bully pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his right hand pressed upon the open Bible, making phony invalid proclamations affirming the sacred truths of Puritan religion and of Puritan sin, and of saint-like Salem lives, and of triumphant Salem deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale and vomit upon the faggot Deacon’s expensive lost big-wig left lying in the church’s side-bushes.
And in his marital bed, often waking suddenly, precisely at midnight, harrowed Goodman Brown shrank from Faith’s embrace and desperately wished for a quenching sample of Goody Cloyse’s rich mother’s breast-milk; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, the converted disbeliever scowled and muttered to himself, and Mr. Brown gazed sternly at his appalled wife, and instantly turned-away from her pretty face, her enticing tits and also her firm ass.
And when Goodman had lived and further suffered long over a century’s time, and right before the Forest Victim had been borne by pallbearers to his grave as a hoary corpse, outliving Faith by nearly three decades, on his deathbed old Brown lustily craved for the wrinkled body of the retired and buried whorey Goody Cloyse.
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