Horton-Scorton
Bluelighter
Warning: this story I wrote is disturbing and sexually explicit. It's also written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and I must stress that the narrator of this story is in no way, shape, or form related to my outlook on life. I share none of his opinions. If it matters, I wrote this under the influence of amphetamine and you can tell. The rambling paragraphs are intended. Here goes.
I'm the best goddamn preacher in West Virginia. But, you'd not believe it, when I was a young man I didn't take much to God. Bible studies was the same thing as your other studies, practically. Bible lessons the same as arithmetic lessons, grammar lessons, and all the other branches of knowing they tell you about in the schools. They'd say, I didn't have a calling, not for God. Not for Him. But look at me now. I dress in fine dress not to show my pride and my vanity but to show people what they ought to aspire to. Being like God means looking the part. Usually hideous people are hideous on the inside. Just as Satan's grotesque horns and tail are the outward projection of his ruined soul. I didn't need no calling from the beginning to be blessed with the favor of the Lord. His plan was to reveal Himself to me when I was thirteen years of age. And to show how the Biblical lessons did indeed surpass in truth the lessons of history, the lessons of mathematics. I do not pretend to be a true prophet, for God himself did not speak to me. Rather, an angel of the Lord spoke to me and stirred up the fire inside. The angel said I was to spread the word of God to the others in my town and the towns surrounding it. I said, but they already have such faith in the Lord. The angel said that the faith was false. I said, it is true faith, because we live in a mining town, and so many of the men die in the mines that you must have true faith, for some hope. The angel said, so many of the men die in the mines that they cannot possibly have true faith. I said, but where do I speak from? The angel said to speak from my heart, for therein lies the Lord and his ways. Then the angel disappeared and I just about impossibly quick quit my job cleaning and getting bloodied up at the butcher's, and I knew right then I would spread the Lord's word.
I would speak to the widows of deceased miners and their children. I would say, I offer a word and a way and a path that is different from that offered by the church that already stands in this town. I'd say that an angel spoke to me, delivering to me the will of God. And usually they'd believe me. I'd tell them that their husbands were most unfortunately hell-bound, for they had not known God. They had not been men of God. The widows would turn angry and spit at me and curse me. But I would tell them that I could save their souls and their children's' souls, if they but listened. I'd remind them that an angel spoke to me, and their anger would invariably turn to a sadness. They'd cry like old hound-dogs for their dead husbands, who were damned. I'd comfort them and offer the protection of the Lord. I spoke with great authority and learned to alter my voice. I learned of posture. I studied statues of great men and their stances, which I replicated in order to spread the word of God. I began to read. I read the Good Book, and with my godly intuition I perceived which words were true and which false. I read military writings and the sermons of Jonathan Edwards. I read law books and the Constitution and learned the grammar of my language.
Eventually, when I was 18 the mayor of the town heard my sermon, which I delivered on the street, on my soapbox, to the people. I had by this point (it was 1942) amassed a good deal of regular followers. I knew that if I was impressive, the mayor would set aside money for a church of my own and I would finally be in possession of the property I deserved, not by birthright, but by Godright. So I began to say that the people could speak in tongues if they allowed the Holy Spirit to flow through them like the steady, unstoppable flow of a river. Speak it! Speak! Speak! Say what English cannot express. This was the first time I had ever tried to get my audience to speak in tongues, and this wasn't just an effort to please the mayor. I felt compelled to do so by some intense passion in my innards. I commanded them: speak the language of your Lord, speak it! Oh God! For you must! You must! I was screaming and pulling at my own hair, watching the mayor at the back of the crowd. He was unimpressed. So I began shaking at little girls and altering the pitch of my voice until the audience seemed fixed in a trance. I shook one girl, about fourteen, fifteen, if memory permits, and I screamed at her until she began speaking in tongues. A hush fell about the crowd as they looked at her, disturbed, in ecstasy, full of competing and strange passions. Unexplainable joys and sorrows. She spoke in such a strange language, and soon I joined her, without a hint of intent. I felt the Spirit flow through me. Others joined and ran about in their ecstasy. I came out of my trance and started to praise God and those outside of trances repeated my chants. The mayor was shocked and impressed. He knew that within me, there dwelt God.
That performance got me the church I wanted. It got me the respect of the mayor, and it got me the popularity I had sought. Finally they saw in me what I had told them was in me. The Lord in my breast. The several men faithful to my cause had expanded to a good portion of the small town, and soon word of mouth converted everyone else except for those whose experiences in the mines and elsewhere instilled in their hearts a drunken atheism. I was handsome in those days, and I felt the flesh of a woman the first time shortly after the aforementioned sermon. She had no parents but worked as a waitress in the town steakhouse, where she also took her quarters. She paid rent to the owner and knew no comfort nor a satisfying bed on which to retire. She told me after a sermon that I excited in her some sort of lust, which she did not believe was sinful because it felt like a lust which God intended. I shared her belief, and so I took her to my living quarters, adjacent to my new church, and looked upon her young nude body before mounting her, fucking the bejesus out of her young cunt. I fucked her until she bled and I bit at her cheek and groped at her tits. When I finished, having filled her with my seed, I told her to dress and leave me to my own silent thought. And I only saw her several times since then. Her name was Sally, and she eventually died of tuberculosis, if memory permits. One day she said that she had given birth to my child, but I knew she had been a whore and sodomite, the filthy bitch, and I saw with the eyes of God behind my own that this baby was not mine. I had her made a pariah, I recall. A whore and a lover of man's genitals. So the poor girl was in misery long before her death. It must have been difficult not having parents. She was practically unschooled.
I had other women too. I never fucked them in lust. But through me God conveyed his power and wrath. I forcefully fucked women of all ages and felt God punishing them for the Original Sin. I would sometimes sodomize them, but not in a lustful way, once again, but rather to demonstrate the power of the Lord. They would often feel pain and leave my living quarters in humiliation. If they enjoyed my violent and rapid thrusts I would ensure pain still, perhaps by hitting them. Sometimes I would feel sad about hurting young girls but I knew God desired it. Rarely I would have girls as young as ten or so, and after I fucked them they bore the scars of my brutalization like Eve bore the shame of her sin. In all these young bitches I saw the sin of Eve, in their eyes and tits and asses. They sometimes pretended to be innocent, and this sometimes made me sympathetic, but then I remembered they were all sinners, all murderers, idolaters, adulterers, whores in the most unspeakably disgusting ways. Sometimes I wanted to mutilate their tits and cunts and tight little asses till they died from it. But I always stopped before that point and instead they bore my mark and walked bout the town in shame. I was not allowed by the Lord to spill my seed by my own hand so I had women most every day except for some periods when I for months desired no women. These months I gave boring sermons and slept too often.
So I continued my preaching in relative stagnancy until 1959, when there was a new mayor and I was practically his equal in power. The people of the town and the surrounding towns loved me and I preached all the time and warned them of hell and gave them the fear of God. I riled them up. But now I move on to my 35th year, in '59.
The old mayor that gave me my church had died of a cardiac arrest, I heard. He had in his later years become quite gluttonous, and in his hedonistic state he amassed such a belly of lard that he was no longer fit for the small-time politics he had entered into by popular demand. He was a womanizer, but unlike myself. For he had women in lust. Once I slept with a woman who admitted that she had been with the mayor, for money of course. And then God showed me an image before my eyes of me killing the bitch for lying about her virginal status. In this vision, I chopped her up good and proper, slowly and bloodily. But I knew this vision was not to be made into reality by some emotional understanding in my chest. It was a powerful vision, and I could not immediately remember if I'd killed the woman or not. But I saw her running out of my house, still naked and I laughed as I imagined shooting her mid-run with a crossbow, perhaps impaling her in the small of her back, through her lower innards, through her grotesque, spoilt genitals. Urine and feces would permanently stain the ground where the bitch lay, dead or dying. But I let her go of course, and later I started crying, I think, when I realized it would have been wrong to kill her. This sent me into a small confusion. But anyway, I just meant to say that the mayor died.
And, as I said, a new mayor was elected. I could have run, but I cannot get involved in worldly affairs such as the dreaded township politics. I cannot by God's request. I thought for sure the former mayor's son would win the vote, and keep me and my church nourished with the vitamins of state. But he did not, despite my appeals to the populace. The man that won, the man that was elected mayor, was and is so foreign to my cause, so alien to my sense of righteousness, that even now I feel sick. His name was Davie Michigan. He had a catchy last name, like Pontius Pilate. And if Michigan was (and is, damnit) Pilate, then the entire condition of United States politics mirrored the corruption of ancient Rome. And Eisenhower, I suppose, was TIberius. The bastard! A fondler of young children. Tiberius had his little minnows, small children in his bath that he could perform acts of lustful perversion on. Homosexuality is a sin of the highest measure. Only once did I sodomize a boy, and that was a boy that was convicted of rape and murder. Many people thought he didn't do it, but I knew he did. So I had him taken to my church before he was executed for his crime. He was only thirteen or so, if memory permits. I allowed no one else in my church. I kept his handcuffs on, and I sodomized him, but without any pleasure. I had to punish him, with the help of God's wrath, which was transmitted through my cock. I had difficultly maintaining a hard-on with this boy because I was no fag, but I would soon get hard when I stopped concentrating on how queer the situation was and started to understand the intent of an angry God using me as a worldly, physical medium. A vehicle through which God showed his wrath. Even though the boy cried, cried like a she-wolf that sees its young die before her, or like a father abandoned by his own son, cried cried and fucking cried and soon I cried too, over his bare naked back, even though he cried, I delivered him from sin. I absolved him, if not of his worldly crime, then of his eternal crime. I made him accept Christ as I came. He ejaculated appeals for forgiveness from God as I ejaculated into his young ass. I felt dirty for some reason, despite the fact that I had exercised God's will. Later I watched as the boy stood before the firing squad and cried, and I watched as his body became a rag-doll suspended midair by the stream of bullets and finally fell, limp and bloody. He looked like a sack filled with the guts of some animal killed in the hunt. It was not a clean execution. But anyway, a new mayor was elected, Davie Michigan. By the way, my name is Samuel Godwin.
And Michigan was no friend to me. He feigned to be, but I knew he was no sympathizer to my beliefs and my spiritual superiority. He had a young daughter, a subservient wife, and a hardworking son. He talked about improving mining conditions, modernizing the town, etc, etc. Trying to educate people who didn't want to be educated, and further could not be educated. They didn't have the fucking brains. I felt betrayed that my own people had chosen this man, against my will, and thus the will of the Lord, their Creator. For a while, I got into the drink. Got liquored up like a man ought to. But this I gave up when I found the superior substance. Complaining of a recent tiredness, the town apothecary, pharmacist, whatever the hell you call it, he gave me a bottle of pills called methedrine. Methamphetamine, he said it was, 5 mg a tablet and pure. I took three that very day and it stirred up my bodily passions something proper, and stimulated the spiritual centers right well. I felt like a youth again, not the youth I had been before 13, but the motivated and spiritual youth I turned into in the years following the contact with the angel of the Lord. The passion of those years when I first amassed a following returned, and returned even stronger. My intellect increased when I ate those God-pills of amphetamine bliss, my spiritual vessels allowing the flow of angelic knowledge into my human brain. I began taking them a lot, and now I needed sleep only intermittently and for short periods. I now was constantly awake and able to write and deliver fabulous sermons. But my anger towards Davie Michigan, the new mayor, well it increased right steady. And rightly so, for it was God's anger.
I started to ask people at my church, why did you elect Michigan as your mayor? And they gave varying responses. Some said they did not, that they had listened to me in my sermons. This pleased me, and I knew these pious followers would enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But some said, for various shit reasons, that they elected Michigan mayor and they did not regret it. Some mouthy fuckers even said that not everything I said was true, that I was not God himself but a mere man. A man that has flaws. Well, I said then and there at the pulpit, well I said to that mustached mouthy fuck in the front, thinking he's brave the bastard, I said, well if I have flaws like you say then name 'em. I contorted my face to intimidate him. He said, well, for one, you're wrong about Michigan. He's a fine mayor. This made the rest of my cursed and blessed congregation laugh. This man fancied himself some sort of charismatic Napoleon, some Alexander the Great. Well, I replied, to say I am flawed is to say the same of the Lord. For I am God's vessel. And if you contradict me, there is nothing I can do (I could have killed him though, and slowly), but I assure you God will send you to Hell, and you shan't be permitted into the KIngdom. Some claps. Some amens. Some murmurs of disapproval. I spread my arms like a bold statue and widened my eyes. The man said, you take us to be an unlearned bunch. What do you know, he continued, you haven't learned anything since you were 13 and preaching the same tired lies. And your lies, he said, your lies depend on your audience being dumb and uneducated. But times are changing, and the town is being modernized, and the schools are teaching, and your medieval, hypocritical lies ain't gonna cut it no more, Samuel. And with that he left, with some others following him. As they left I yelled from my pulpit that they were hell-bound, and warned them to stay, and said that the man they followed was Satan in disguise. A serpent come to seduce you with his lies and eventually cause your ruination, your descent from the golden bliss of salvation. And this rhetoric caused some to stay, looking confused and anxious, but many still left. I thrust my fist down and commanded the remaining faithful folk to pray in harmony as I withdrew into a secluded area. I consumed several methedrine tablets and waited for them to kick in. When they did I returned and the faithful prayed before me. Many nights following this I sat confused in my house, my darkened and morose chambers, filled with God, filled with the Lord God. I had my head in my hands, and I rocked in the rocking chair which screamed in damnation, and I would get up sometimes and pace and my skull would tingle and I would sweat and I would ask God to speak to me directly with his own tongue so that from my strange confusion I could be delivered. God declined, but eventually I felt an evil presence. And before me stood Lucifer. He took his angelic form, not his ruined form. He said that I was a false preacher, that I would burn in his domain. And he smiled as he said this. I tried to speak but could not. I was fixed in a demonic catatonia. I felt inanimate and stripped of free will as Lucifer stood across from me and judged me, communicated purely evil thoughts without uttering a word. Thoughts so evil they cannot be written in English. I tried to summon up God in my breast to get rid of this form of Satan. Satan showed his true colors to me, his winged, ruined appearance, as I finally felt the warmth of God's strength and stood before him fearlessly, screaming, begone! By Christ Himself, begone! He screamed and was gone, and I knew by this encounter that the time of my death was soon. But my faith was reaffirmed and I became more certain in many a way.
I have a young cousin that lives in California and plays rock 'n roll music. His name is Jerry Godwin, and he's practically famous. He has his sinful habits that I would never have; his base love of amphetamines, his lust over young women. But still, he's Heaven-bound, and his heart is true. Around this time, summer of '59, he came to visit with his thirteen-year-old lover. He was being followed by the media-folk out in California, criticized for his like of young girls. So he came to where he knew he'd be welcome. And I gladly let him in. Time started moving fast around when Jerry moved in.
We both shared his young lover. She was so pretty I almost felt lust for her at times, but I got rid of it as I fucked her. She was a real whore, that girl. Jesus, she was, let me tell ya what. And I seen whores. But she knew how to use her cunt, her ass, her legs, etc, etc. Heaven-bound, still, just by her relation to me. She ain't just a whore to abuse for Eve's sin, but she was Jerry's lover, his one-and-only. So she was different. Jerry liked my sermons, said he "dug" them. I got a real kick out of his rock 'n roll talk, and I've even adopted some of his terms unconsciously. Jerry's real good for a laugh. I understand how he got famous out in Hollywood. He's got my blood in him. We both know how to lead the people, like Moses. But he's just not the chosen one.
Anyway, before long, Jerry said, let's the three of us, you me and my girl here, let's go get a car and rob a pharmacy in some big city. Let's rob 'em and get all their dope, huh? Let's get benny, methedrine, dex, morphine shots, maybe cocaine if they got that, I don't know if they do. And maybe some valium, some phenobarbital, whatever they got and more. And then rob a bank shortly thereafter, and get money. I mean, you're a holy man. God would welcome this, right? So I thought about what Jerry said and responded: yeah, God would welcome it. But let's just rob the bank in this here town and then go to my respected apothecary and we'll get all those things you want for cheap. No use going to a big city. Jerry agreed. He stole a motor car anyway, and we drove a short way to the bank. Time was flying. I did not have time to make complicated plans. We acquired guns from some source Jerry had, I did not understand. Again, I was confused. Oh, God. God? My time was near and I knew it.
We walked into the bank and pulled out our weapons and said this is a stick-up, the whole business. Right? Well Jerry got to beating down some man in a brute fashion. We got our money eventually, and I drove around like a melancholic bastard as Jerry fucked his girl, me I'm just insane, sometimes I would yell without meaning to. The police got us soon. Roman soldiers. Jerry tried to shoot 'em so he got a bullet in his head. That's one for the national news. Put this tiny town on the goddamn map. His lover she ran. I don't know where she went, or if she escaped. I don't care. But the police (Roman soldiers) arrested me, and took me to the jail. The mayor, Michigan, came in to observe me in my cell. And he shook his head and expressed his disappointment. But disappointment from Pontius Pilate is good, a good thing, a God thing, a good thing, a God thing. And MIchigan was (is) Pontius Pilate and his cops are Roman soldiers.
And as I write this my final word, my final declaration of intent, my official biography, I Samuel Godwin, do sit in this selfsame cell. I brood. Michigan comes to visit. He is Pontius Pilate, though he doesn't know it. I don' t tell him, because if I tell him he'll resign from his mayoral role and God's plan will not unfold. I sit unresponsive and in silence, so different from my usual sermon-giving self. It's God's plan. My time is near. The clock strikes loudly. The hour fast approaching. Roman soldiers are talking about how crazy I am. They are talking about how crazy Jesus Christ is. I feel God in me. His warmth. His wrath. I sense my demise. I sense Pilate's more eternal demise. I will feel the Kingdom, he shan't. Christ will enter the Kingdom. From cell, to execution, etc, etc. God's plan. The alignment is perfect. Beautiful. Like clockwork. God is everywhere, yet at this moment confined to my breast, apparent within every beat of my heart.
Michigan talks about how crazy I am. I laugh, think the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. And right now Michigan is a fool. He is no man of God.
I am a man of God. Amen.
A Man of GodI'm the best goddamn preacher in West Virginia. But, you'd not believe it, when I was a young man I didn't take much to God. Bible studies was the same thing as your other studies, practically. Bible lessons the same as arithmetic lessons, grammar lessons, and all the other branches of knowing they tell you about in the schools. They'd say, I didn't have a calling, not for God. Not for Him. But look at me now. I dress in fine dress not to show my pride and my vanity but to show people what they ought to aspire to. Being like God means looking the part. Usually hideous people are hideous on the inside. Just as Satan's grotesque horns and tail are the outward projection of his ruined soul. I didn't need no calling from the beginning to be blessed with the favor of the Lord. His plan was to reveal Himself to me when I was thirteen years of age. And to show how the Biblical lessons did indeed surpass in truth the lessons of history, the lessons of mathematics. I do not pretend to be a true prophet, for God himself did not speak to me. Rather, an angel of the Lord spoke to me and stirred up the fire inside. The angel said I was to spread the word of God to the others in my town and the towns surrounding it. I said, but they already have such faith in the Lord. The angel said that the faith was false. I said, it is true faith, because we live in a mining town, and so many of the men die in the mines that you must have true faith, for some hope. The angel said, so many of the men die in the mines that they cannot possibly have true faith. I said, but where do I speak from? The angel said to speak from my heart, for therein lies the Lord and his ways. Then the angel disappeared and I just about impossibly quick quit my job cleaning and getting bloodied up at the butcher's, and I knew right then I would spread the Lord's word.
I would speak to the widows of deceased miners and their children. I would say, I offer a word and a way and a path that is different from that offered by the church that already stands in this town. I'd say that an angel spoke to me, delivering to me the will of God. And usually they'd believe me. I'd tell them that their husbands were most unfortunately hell-bound, for they had not known God. They had not been men of God. The widows would turn angry and spit at me and curse me. But I would tell them that I could save their souls and their children's' souls, if they but listened. I'd remind them that an angel spoke to me, and their anger would invariably turn to a sadness. They'd cry like old hound-dogs for their dead husbands, who were damned. I'd comfort them and offer the protection of the Lord. I spoke with great authority and learned to alter my voice. I learned of posture. I studied statues of great men and their stances, which I replicated in order to spread the word of God. I began to read. I read the Good Book, and with my godly intuition I perceived which words were true and which false. I read military writings and the sermons of Jonathan Edwards. I read law books and the Constitution and learned the grammar of my language.
Eventually, when I was 18 the mayor of the town heard my sermon, which I delivered on the street, on my soapbox, to the people. I had by this point (it was 1942) amassed a good deal of regular followers. I knew that if I was impressive, the mayor would set aside money for a church of my own and I would finally be in possession of the property I deserved, not by birthright, but by Godright. So I began to say that the people could speak in tongues if they allowed the Holy Spirit to flow through them like the steady, unstoppable flow of a river. Speak it! Speak! Speak! Say what English cannot express. This was the first time I had ever tried to get my audience to speak in tongues, and this wasn't just an effort to please the mayor. I felt compelled to do so by some intense passion in my innards. I commanded them: speak the language of your Lord, speak it! Oh God! For you must! You must! I was screaming and pulling at my own hair, watching the mayor at the back of the crowd. He was unimpressed. So I began shaking at little girls and altering the pitch of my voice until the audience seemed fixed in a trance. I shook one girl, about fourteen, fifteen, if memory permits, and I screamed at her until she began speaking in tongues. A hush fell about the crowd as they looked at her, disturbed, in ecstasy, full of competing and strange passions. Unexplainable joys and sorrows. She spoke in such a strange language, and soon I joined her, without a hint of intent. I felt the Spirit flow through me. Others joined and ran about in their ecstasy. I came out of my trance and started to praise God and those outside of trances repeated my chants. The mayor was shocked and impressed. He knew that within me, there dwelt God.
That performance got me the church I wanted. It got me the respect of the mayor, and it got me the popularity I had sought. Finally they saw in me what I had told them was in me. The Lord in my breast. The several men faithful to my cause had expanded to a good portion of the small town, and soon word of mouth converted everyone else except for those whose experiences in the mines and elsewhere instilled in their hearts a drunken atheism. I was handsome in those days, and I felt the flesh of a woman the first time shortly after the aforementioned sermon. She had no parents but worked as a waitress in the town steakhouse, where she also took her quarters. She paid rent to the owner and knew no comfort nor a satisfying bed on which to retire. She told me after a sermon that I excited in her some sort of lust, which she did not believe was sinful because it felt like a lust which God intended. I shared her belief, and so I took her to my living quarters, adjacent to my new church, and looked upon her young nude body before mounting her, fucking the bejesus out of her young cunt. I fucked her until she bled and I bit at her cheek and groped at her tits. When I finished, having filled her with my seed, I told her to dress and leave me to my own silent thought. And I only saw her several times since then. Her name was Sally, and she eventually died of tuberculosis, if memory permits. One day she said that she had given birth to my child, but I knew she had been a whore and sodomite, the filthy bitch, and I saw with the eyes of God behind my own that this baby was not mine. I had her made a pariah, I recall. A whore and a lover of man's genitals. So the poor girl was in misery long before her death. It must have been difficult not having parents. She was practically unschooled.
I had other women too. I never fucked them in lust. But through me God conveyed his power and wrath. I forcefully fucked women of all ages and felt God punishing them for the Original Sin. I would sometimes sodomize them, but not in a lustful way, once again, but rather to demonstrate the power of the Lord. They would often feel pain and leave my living quarters in humiliation. If they enjoyed my violent and rapid thrusts I would ensure pain still, perhaps by hitting them. Sometimes I would feel sad about hurting young girls but I knew God desired it. Rarely I would have girls as young as ten or so, and after I fucked them they bore the scars of my brutalization like Eve bore the shame of her sin. In all these young bitches I saw the sin of Eve, in their eyes and tits and asses. They sometimes pretended to be innocent, and this sometimes made me sympathetic, but then I remembered they were all sinners, all murderers, idolaters, adulterers, whores in the most unspeakably disgusting ways. Sometimes I wanted to mutilate their tits and cunts and tight little asses till they died from it. But I always stopped before that point and instead they bore my mark and walked bout the town in shame. I was not allowed by the Lord to spill my seed by my own hand so I had women most every day except for some periods when I for months desired no women. These months I gave boring sermons and slept too often.
So I continued my preaching in relative stagnancy until 1959, when there was a new mayor and I was practically his equal in power. The people of the town and the surrounding towns loved me and I preached all the time and warned them of hell and gave them the fear of God. I riled them up. But now I move on to my 35th year, in '59.
The old mayor that gave me my church had died of a cardiac arrest, I heard. He had in his later years become quite gluttonous, and in his hedonistic state he amassed such a belly of lard that he was no longer fit for the small-time politics he had entered into by popular demand. He was a womanizer, but unlike myself. For he had women in lust. Once I slept with a woman who admitted that she had been with the mayor, for money of course. And then God showed me an image before my eyes of me killing the bitch for lying about her virginal status. In this vision, I chopped her up good and proper, slowly and bloodily. But I knew this vision was not to be made into reality by some emotional understanding in my chest. It was a powerful vision, and I could not immediately remember if I'd killed the woman or not. But I saw her running out of my house, still naked and I laughed as I imagined shooting her mid-run with a crossbow, perhaps impaling her in the small of her back, through her lower innards, through her grotesque, spoilt genitals. Urine and feces would permanently stain the ground where the bitch lay, dead or dying. But I let her go of course, and later I started crying, I think, when I realized it would have been wrong to kill her. This sent me into a small confusion. But anyway, I just meant to say that the mayor died.
And, as I said, a new mayor was elected. I could have run, but I cannot get involved in worldly affairs such as the dreaded township politics. I cannot by God's request. I thought for sure the former mayor's son would win the vote, and keep me and my church nourished with the vitamins of state. But he did not, despite my appeals to the populace. The man that won, the man that was elected mayor, was and is so foreign to my cause, so alien to my sense of righteousness, that even now I feel sick. His name was Davie Michigan. He had a catchy last name, like Pontius Pilate. And if Michigan was (and is, damnit) Pilate, then the entire condition of United States politics mirrored the corruption of ancient Rome. And Eisenhower, I suppose, was TIberius. The bastard! A fondler of young children. Tiberius had his little minnows, small children in his bath that he could perform acts of lustful perversion on. Homosexuality is a sin of the highest measure. Only once did I sodomize a boy, and that was a boy that was convicted of rape and murder. Many people thought he didn't do it, but I knew he did. So I had him taken to my church before he was executed for his crime. He was only thirteen or so, if memory permits. I allowed no one else in my church. I kept his handcuffs on, and I sodomized him, but without any pleasure. I had to punish him, with the help of God's wrath, which was transmitted through my cock. I had difficultly maintaining a hard-on with this boy because I was no fag, but I would soon get hard when I stopped concentrating on how queer the situation was and started to understand the intent of an angry God using me as a worldly, physical medium. A vehicle through which God showed his wrath. Even though the boy cried, cried like a she-wolf that sees its young die before her, or like a father abandoned by his own son, cried cried and fucking cried and soon I cried too, over his bare naked back, even though he cried, I delivered him from sin. I absolved him, if not of his worldly crime, then of his eternal crime. I made him accept Christ as I came. He ejaculated appeals for forgiveness from God as I ejaculated into his young ass. I felt dirty for some reason, despite the fact that I had exercised God's will. Later I watched as the boy stood before the firing squad and cried, and I watched as his body became a rag-doll suspended midair by the stream of bullets and finally fell, limp and bloody. He looked like a sack filled with the guts of some animal killed in the hunt. It was not a clean execution. But anyway, a new mayor was elected, Davie Michigan. By the way, my name is Samuel Godwin.
And Michigan was no friend to me. He feigned to be, but I knew he was no sympathizer to my beliefs and my spiritual superiority. He had a young daughter, a subservient wife, and a hardworking son. He talked about improving mining conditions, modernizing the town, etc, etc. Trying to educate people who didn't want to be educated, and further could not be educated. They didn't have the fucking brains. I felt betrayed that my own people had chosen this man, against my will, and thus the will of the Lord, their Creator. For a while, I got into the drink. Got liquored up like a man ought to. But this I gave up when I found the superior substance. Complaining of a recent tiredness, the town apothecary, pharmacist, whatever the hell you call it, he gave me a bottle of pills called methedrine. Methamphetamine, he said it was, 5 mg a tablet and pure. I took three that very day and it stirred up my bodily passions something proper, and stimulated the spiritual centers right well. I felt like a youth again, not the youth I had been before 13, but the motivated and spiritual youth I turned into in the years following the contact with the angel of the Lord. The passion of those years when I first amassed a following returned, and returned even stronger. My intellect increased when I ate those God-pills of amphetamine bliss, my spiritual vessels allowing the flow of angelic knowledge into my human brain. I began taking them a lot, and now I needed sleep only intermittently and for short periods. I now was constantly awake and able to write and deliver fabulous sermons. But my anger towards Davie Michigan, the new mayor, well it increased right steady. And rightly so, for it was God's anger.
I started to ask people at my church, why did you elect Michigan as your mayor? And they gave varying responses. Some said they did not, that they had listened to me in my sermons. This pleased me, and I knew these pious followers would enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But some said, for various shit reasons, that they elected Michigan mayor and they did not regret it. Some mouthy fuckers even said that not everything I said was true, that I was not God himself but a mere man. A man that has flaws. Well, I said then and there at the pulpit, well I said to that mustached mouthy fuck in the front, thinking he's brave the bastard, I said, well if I have flaws like you say then name 'em. I contorted my face to intimidate him. He said, well, for one, you're wrong about Michigan. He's a fine mayor. This made the rest of my cursed and blessed congregation laugh. This man fancied himself some sort of charismatic Napoleon, some Alexander the Great. Well, I replied, to say I am flawed is to say the same of the Lord. For I am God's vessel. And if you contradict me, there is nothing I can do (I could have killed him though, and slowly), but I assure you God will send you to Hell, and you shan't be permitted into the KIngdom. Some claps. Some amens. Some murmurs of disapproval. I spread my arms like a bold statue and widened my eyes. The man said, you take us to be an unlearned bunch. What do you know, he continued, you haven't learned anything since you were 13 and preaching the same tired lies. And your lies, he said, your lies depend on your audience being dumb and uneducated. But times are changing, and the town is being modernized, and the schools are teaching, and your medieval, hypocritical lies ain't gonna cut it no more, Samuel. And with that he left, with some others following him. As they left I yelled from my pulpit that they were hell-bound, and warned them to stay, and said that the man they followed was Satan in disguise. A serpent come to seduce you with his lies and eventually cause your ruination, your descent from the golden bliss of salvation. And this rhetoric caused some to stay, looking confused and anxious, but many still left. I thrust my fist down and commanded the remaining faithful folk to pray in harmony as I withdrew into a secluded area. I consumed several methedrine tablets and waited for them to kick in. When they did I returned and the faithful prayed before me. Many nights following this I sat confused in my house, my darkened and morose chambers, filled with God, filled with the Lord God. I had my head in my hands, and I rocked in the rocking chair which screamed in damnation, and I would get up sometimes and pace and my skull would tingle and I would sweat and I would ask God to speak to me directly with his own tongue so that from my strange confusion I could be delivered. God declined, but eventually I felt an evil presence. And before me stood Lucifer. He took his angelic form, not his ruined form. He said that I was a false preacher, that I would burn in his domain. And he smiled as he said this. I tried to speak but could not. I was fixed in a demonic catatonia. I felt inanimate and stripped of free will as Lucifer stood across from me and judged me, communicated purely evil thoughts without uttering a word. Thoughts so evil they cannot be written in English. I tried to summon up God in my breast to get rid of this form of Satan. Satan showed his true colors to me, his winged, ruined appearance, as I finally felt the warmth of God's strength and stood before him fearlessly, screaming, begone! By Christ Himself, begone! He screamed and was gone, and I knew by this encounter that the time of my death was soon. But my faith was reaffirmed and I became more certain in many a way.
I have a young cousin that lives in California and plays rock 'n roll music. His name is Jerry Godwin, and he's practically famous. He has his sinful habits that I would never have; his base love of amphetamines, his lust over young women. But still, he's Heaven-bound, and his heart is true. Around this time, summer of '59, he came to visit with his thirteen-year-old lover. He was being followed by the media-folk out in California, criticized for his like of young girls. So he came to where he knew he'd be welcome. And I gladly let him in. Time started moving fast around when Jerry moved in.
We both shared his young lover. She was so pretty I almost felt lust for her at times, but I got rid of it as I fucked her. She was a real whore, that girl. Jesus, she was, let me tell ya what. And I seen whores. But she knew how to use her cunt, her ass, her legs, etc, etc. Heaven-bound, still, just by her relation to me. She ain't just a whore to abuse for Eve's sin, but she was Jerry's lover, his one-and-only. So she was different. Jerry liked my sermons, said he "dug" them. I got a real kick out of his rock 'n roll talk, and I've even adopted some of his terms unconsciously. Jerry's real good for a laugh. I understand how he got famous out in Hollywood. He's got my blood in him. We both know how to lead the people, like Moses. But he's just not the chosen one.
Anyway, before long, Jerry said, let's the three of us, you me and my girl here, let's go get a car and rob a pharmacy in some big city. Let's rob 'em and get all their dope, huh? Let's get benny, methedrine, dex, morphine shots, maybe cocaine if they got that, I don't know if they do. And maybe some valium, some phenobarbital, whatever they got and more. And then rob a bank shortly thereafter, and get money. I mean, you're a holy man. God would welcome this, right? So I thought about what Jerry said and responded: yeah, God would welcome it. But let's just rob the bank in this here town and then go to my respected apothecary and we'll get all those things you want for cheap. No use going to a big city. Jerry agreed. He stole a motor car anyway, and we drove a short way to the bank. Time was flying. I did not have time to make complicated plans. We acquired guns from some source Jerry had, I did not understand. Again, I was confused. Oh, God. God? My time was near and I knew it.
We walked into the bank and pulled out our weapons and said this is a stick-up, the whole business. Right? Well Jerry got to beating down some man in a brute fashion. We got our money eventually, and I drove around like a melancholic bastard as Jerry fucked his girl, me I'm just insane, sometimes I would yell without meaning to. The police got us soon. Roman soldiers. Jerry tried to shoot 'em so he got a bullet in his head. That's one for the national news. Put this tiny town on the goddamn map. His lover she ran. I don't know where she went, or if she escaped. I don't care. But the police (Roman soldiers) arrested me, and took me to the jail. The mayor, Michigan, came in to observe me in my cell. And he shook his head and expressed his disappointment. But disappointment from Pontius Pilate is good, a good thing, a God thing, a good thing, a God thing. And MIchigan was (is) Pontius Pilate and his cops are Roman soldiers.
And as I write this my final word, my final declaration of intent, my official biography, I Samuel Godwin, do sit in this selfsame cell. I brood. Michigan comes to visit. He is Pontius Pilate, though he doesn't know it. I don' t tell him, because if I tell him he'll resign from his mayoral role and God's plan will not unfold. I sit unresponsive and in silence, so different from my usual sermon-giving self. It's God's plan. My time is near. The clock strikes loudly. The hour fast approaching. Roman soldiers are talking about how crazy I am. They are talking about how crazy Jesus Christ is. I feel God in me. His warmth. His wrath. I sense my demise. I sense Pilate's more eternal demise. I will feel the Kingdom, he shan't. Christ will enter the Kingdom. From cell, to execution, etc, etc. God's plan. The alignment is perfect. Beautiful. Like clockwork. God is everywhere, yet at this moment confined to my breast, apparent within every beat of my heart.
Michigan talks about how crazy I am. I laugh, think the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. And right now Michigan is a fool. He is no man of God.
I am a man of God. Amen.
