Godless Goddess- Wiccan Adventure in Hawaii

Mark Plimsoll's

Godless

Goddess

A Wiccan Adventure in Hawaii

(a novel)

Copyright information for Godless Goddess by Mark Plimsoll

Published by Mark Plimsoll, LLC

ISBN 097677951X

EAN 9780976779513

Print version published August 29, 2016

Smashwords Edition, Published by Mark Plimsoll at Smashwords!

e Book

ISBN 0976779579

EAN 9780976779575

Other works published by Mark Plimsoll on Smashwords:

WMD Machete

Dr. Brinkley, A Man and His Calling

Havana Ball

Godless Goddess

Cell U.R. Tales from the Script

The Innocent Mermaid - 3 books

All contents, cover design, or other artwork,

© 2009, 2021 Mark Plimsoll, LLC

All rights reserved.

(Back Cover)

Women who read romances feel worthless.

Sluts watch porn and feel perfect.

The bigger a man's ego, the smaller his

you-know-what. Men with tiny thingees

overcompensate. They become muscle builders,

or drive sports cars, and indulge in risky behavior.

Women see that, they nod and lower the head, raise the

eyebrows, roll the eyes, and say, I knew it, no ding-a-ling.

All the two-ton, gonad-dangling ball-and-socket hitched pickups

in the world can't make up for a limp spaghetti or a puckered raisin.

God made a mistake; Adam's rib wasn't a boner, it was a womb.

God gave man a penis and a brain, and enough blood for one.

Men get excited, the blood runs south, the tongue

comes out, and a doglike brain takes over.

That's why a man will stick his nose

where it doesn't belong, and try to bury his bone

by humping your leg while dancing. Men will do anything

if they think it's foreplay. My last ex-boyfriend whined

"I feel insecure. I can't stop thinking that you don't need

me." He came the closest to being right. I appreciate

a man who tells me what he wants or needs from me,

so I can tell him to learn to get along without it.

If you want to give me advice, ask, and I will

tell you what to say. If a man can afford me,

I might tolerate him. If you love me, I will

take advantage of you. If you hurt me,

I will destroy you. I think, therefore

I am single. I don't want to be

divorced. I want to be

a widow."

Sincerely,

Your Next Girlfriend

Chapter 1: Pacific Bellybutton

I feel awake, but it took a while to recognize the interior of my old van, and remember I almost killed myself last night, falling asleep at the wheel while driving at sixty miles per hour down the interstate. Lucky the small old slant-six engine can't push this square metal box faster, or the rough shoulder might have sent me air-born into the staked plains before I jerked myself awake.

I pull back the curtain and look through the windshield at a dark dawn that lit the parched mown lawns and cement picnic tables of a rest area in the Texas desert.

I say to myself Well, Lance, not much hope of finding a wife here.

Nearby, a garbage truck's hydraulic arms whine as it lifts a military-green dumpster with its dinosaur arms. Outlined under the streetlight, the dinosaur shakes the square tank over a maw that opens up in its back. It sets the dumpster down and drives on with the metallic roar of gears that grind their iron teeth against the high rev of a thousand horsepower motor.

I pulled on some clothes, opened up the side door, and got out to stretch and smoke a cigarette before using the facilities.

A couple of days ago, a fellow traveler suggested I eat at a restaurant run by hippies in an under-populated West Texas ghost town.

The blotchy gray of weathered stone and wood glimpsed behind the dusty green of sparse, bushy vegetation startles, as would a bone on a carpet.

Traces of lives, long dead, linger to influence the living, a legacy of influences that we can't see, feel or touch, and yet inhabit and moderate our lives. On occasions, we feel controlled by their energy, a dim recollection of the familiar in places unknown.

Sunk in a great gonadal bulge of what's called West Texas, lies the badlands of the Big Bend country, and this ghost town named Terlingua. Abandoned mines yawn with hot bad breath, some covered, some unmarked, hidden by creosote bush and stunted mesquite trees. Deep in the earth, waters polluted with mercury and other metals slap against the black wounds of mine shafts.

The Terlingua Hotel lingers on with it's new management, and a clientele of long-hair pseudo-hippies, new-age cowboys with a philosophy that encompasses both Jesus' and Buddha's noble path, a complete abandonment of the mainstream to live what you love most- in this case, nature, unparalleled in the harsh, untamed and parched beauty of the Big Bend country.

Old dogs lie in the shady porch and pant, while the young dogs beg for a dog-to-dog lick of camaraderie, with a wary eye toward the cruelest of Terlingua's denizens who might kick them, or shoot them.

Far across the distant scrub land, a cloud of yellow dust draws the lazy attention of the few people who sit on the porch's sun bleached, wind-blasted wood benches. Something new to talk about. A van, silver and barely visible against the bright dust, grows a little with each mile, and takes forever to pull up and stop in front of the hotel with a final puff of dust. A young man jumps out. The Wild-West fringe of leather strips dangle from his open deer hide jacket and slap against his bare chest, frantic in the motor's hot wind as he pops open the hood.

What's wrong, she overheating? comes the question from inside the screen door. A man steps out, the hinges screech and threaten to break off to send the door in a cart-wheel adventure across the tumbleweed prairie. Lot a folks overheat coming up this way. They don't realize it's all uphill, it looks so straight they thinks it's all level. Better to put it in a lower gear and drive a little slower. You respect the lay of the land, or it gits you in trouble every time.

Yeah, ain't that the truth. No, I don't think it's over-heated. But I hear some strange noise, especially when we turn a corner.

There ain't a corner from here to Camel worth turning. How do you know you'll still hear it?

I don't. It's intermittent.

Another long-hair man, with a guitar in hand, gets up off the porch bench to amble slow down the weathered steps, knock-kneed in cut-off blue jeans that trail the long threads of the fabric's woof. He saunters towards the car, gently shoos the young dogs away. Mind if I look? His muscular arm gestures palm up toward the Van from a loose and dusty black tank-top.

Your welcome. It sounds like it's coming from over here, on the driver's side.

He looks into the engine, Start her up, and I'll listen from here. The engine starts, oily fumes and heat blast upward with the accelerated fan to blow the long hair off his unshaven face to reveal a strong boned Germanic youth, in his twenties, face fried red by the elements and when the wind blows, framed by a pale hairline.

Does it sound like this? and the guitar player moves something, and the clattering sound wells up through the fire wall.

Yes! That's it! What is it?

Turn her off, and I'll show you,. The engine dies down, then diesels for a few sputtering seconds. Sounds like she's running a bit hot. Does it always diesel like that? Anyhow, this here is your trouble. and he pulls a slender hose out and into the sunlight. This is the hose to your windshield washer, I think. Since it hasn't rained out here much the last two months, no telling when it fell off. But sometimes it swings over here, in a wind or when you corner left, let's say, and it bounces off the fan, makin' that racket like. Oh yeah, see here, this is where it fell off of, I bet. Sure, goes right back on. Ain't too chewed up, so I guess we caught it early. The man pushes the hose back onto it's little silver nipple, then lets the hood fall back into place.

That's great, it's been bugging me for a couple hundred miles. How much do I owe ya?

A dollar per mile would be fine, the man laughs,

No really. You helped me out, now let me help you out. Would ten bucks be OK?

Tell you what, you keep your money, but since I did you a favor, you do me a favor. You listen to this song I wrote, yeah, it's one of my songs, and we'll call it even.

If you say so. Thanks.

This song is about these spacemen that come down to earth. You heard of the Marfa Lights? Well Marfa's up the road, and everyone sees the Marfa lights if they live around here. Nobody knows what they are, nobody except me, I suppose. See they're supposed to be UFOs. Let me sing you my song.

And there. as the Texas sun settled itself down into a red haze over the mountains, the strains of a lone guitar player bared the intergalactic soul of these extra-terrestrials that happened to enjoy vacationing on Earth to eat drug addicted junkies to get high. But with the bad luck to land in Texas, once their women feasted and gorged on Longhorn Barbecues and baby goat stews, they learned how to get too drunk to remember clearly. so they cured their hangovers with oily bowls of cow-stomach menudo soup after those all-nighters, when they woke up with the evidence they'd been rode hard and put up wet by some thick log of tasty hard-tack Texas jerked beef. They pledged allegiance to this earthy lifestyle of animal husbandry, and they forgot their home, their planet, their species. They yearned to awaken late most mornings, and smell the plains-brewed coffee. They lived on meals of West Texas fajitas, strips of goat meat roasted over mesquite coals heated red-hot in portable camp grills made of oil drums welded end to end. They followed those cookers from hoedown to hoedown, and not only for the free beer. They changed shape and swelled, meaty, rippled with muscle, sun-bleached hair, and bovine rotundities. Most ranch-hands gave them a ride as they dragged the cookers from ranch to ranch in pickup trucks that also looked swollen by steroids. These alien women, according to this song, forsook their life of interplanetary discipline for one of idleness, debauchery and aimless self analysis. They abandoned ship to stay in Texas, to room and roam with the last of the true cowboys. They, too, learned to un-bull the young male steers, not with a knife, but in the traditional way, ripping open the scrotum with their teeth and cleanly biting off the testicles. For hundreds, maybe thousands of years the Marfa lights continue to call out for other Alien Cowgirls, to lure them from the safety of space to surrender to the crusty entanglements of lariat-encircled campfires. Railroad men claim Alien Cowgirls pull men from fast-moving trains on the long straight stretches past Sanderson to El Paso. The song suggests that the piles of bones below the cliffs along the Rio Grande, the old bison kills of the prehistoric Indians, show evidence of prehistoric Alien Cowgirl Picnics. There they danced naked before great bonfires in Panchangas defied the Cucuis, the Marfa UFO lights, and the elder Indian zombies that shuffle along in the darkness as soulless mercenaries created by the spaceships who wanted to convince the alien Cowgirls return to their husbands.

Great song, great. It's really long though. You have it recorded anywhere? I'd like a copy of that to listen to again.

Nope. Don't believe in recorded music. Music is meant to share person to person, from soul to soul and to be sung along with, from one heart to many. I trust in the Lord that my music makes people smile, that they remember it in their head, and receive the holy message within, and someday, there will be a reckoning and the faithful will shed happy tears of triumph.

Well I'm happy to meet you. What's your name?

Leonard Van de Camp. Folks call me Lennie, and that's good enough for me.

In the multi-level steel and glass airport of Honolulu, Hawaii, the tropical sunlight floods across the floor in a blinding glare. A young woman stands silhouetted in a simple loose muumuu, her muscular body cocooned within the gauzy transparency of the fabric.

She peers into a huge purse to pull out a letter. She rips open the letter and pulls out one sheet of lined paper. She looks inside the envelope for more, then crumples the envelope with one hand while opening the folded note paper to reveal a hand-written poem.

As she reads it, her long, dark, wavy hair cascades loosely forward, and each time she flings it back with one hand and an upward shake of her head, it reveals a pretty face with huge eyes and a tall, powerful forehead.

Motionless, she becomes part of the architecture, while passengers scurry along around her. Some drag wheeled suitcases by extendible handles, or shoulder duffel bags, musical instruments, backpacks, or push luggage carriers piled high with suitcases and roped boxes

She reads the note, and faintly moves her head right and left as her big eyes widen.

She reads:

LOVE SOME FISH

See the Sea Anemone grab

They love some fish

Others they sting

Moon glow hints on the silver water

And something pulls me away.

Frothy water sprays in rainbow drops

A cloudburst in my brain

Low moans distant thunder

I call out your name.

Lora.

Lead me on

my lover.

The palms watch my approach

Big bird

Over the burnt umber desert.

Moonlight breaks

On the dwarf forest

Creosote bush and mesquite

I am far from the coast

Far from my fishing hole

God wants us to swim together.

Lennie

She un-crumples the envelope and peers once more inside, then says to herself, That's all? Her hand with the letter drops to her waist. She exclaims loudly to no one, When will that jerk learn I don't like to be called his 'fish'?

She stuffs the letter back into the rumpled envelope. Her voice causes a passerby, a tall young man in a shirt and tie, possibly a Mormon missionary here in Hawaii, to look at her.

Here, she hands him the letter. Something to read in the Taxi. It's from Texas. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

She grabs his arm and looks earnestly into his face.

He looks into her face, puzzled, then takes the note with reluctance.

She walks away, turns and tilts her head to flirtatiously wave good-bye.

Her face, frozen in contemplation of the distance, ignores her hand that searches her purse for the familiar feel of a string attached to the sign she will put around her neck to publicly identify her as a tour guide.

The overhead tele-monitors print out the information of each plane that arrives with a new load of elderly Americans from Illinois, Alabama, Georgia, where ever.

In a few minutes, she will put on her smile and project her voice to gather her brood.

A half-day flight earlier, I lived in California, and prostrated myself before the Great Aztec God Prozac, who, in his omniscient benevolence, pardoned me after a six month walk through a dull and colorless world where sleep does not refresh and life has no dreams. Free at last, free at last, the Devil of depression abandons me, out of my heart, unsuccessful in his attempt to chew away the rest of me, starting at the edges of the hole left by my previous life. Now, almost without possessions, I celebrate an ex-wife, joblessness, forgotten friends, and invalidated beliefs. I walk carefully now, as if nude and bleeding a thousand wounds of forty oddly odd years hoping for a full life and living imprisoned. I am stripped of my stripes now, relieved to start anew, to relive life in the second half and take advantage of the lessons learned from the mistakes of the first half, if I'm lucky enough to live so long.

Now I am alone, just Lance, again, after almost twenty years in a long term relationship, if not exactly a marriage. My name signifies many things; the intrusive masculine urge to live and procreate, to point at windmills, to charge in a useless and reckless attempt to make the Universe a better place, motivated by a pure, God-given, genetically programmed lust to procreate.

My brother's family treated me graciously, put up with me as houseguest, or garage guest, and hoped I might recover my sense of balance. By virtue of mid-American architecture, I lived independent in their pole-barn two-and-a-half stall garage, with my own primitive kitchen, a simple bathroom, and a private doorway out.

I want to become a reasonably happy old person. I recognized that I needed something meaningful to pull me forward each day. I would reshape myself, to make my life worth living, to belong, to feel like a significant part of God or Nature's plan, and replace all the qualities of the good life I overlooked, or missed, in the first misspent half of my life.

Should I marry and start a family?

A few innocent lives to coddle and form, to receive one's love and the best of one's best intentions, to bask in the love and mutual concern of parents and children, all desperately in love, unconditional, and best of all, genetically related?

I take stock and throw away what I now know doesn't work for me, what rarely worked, and hope to recognize the dreams that maintain my interest by virtue of a magic resonance, a quiet song of promise, a vague hum built upon the wreckage in my overcrowded skull. Old dreams that refused to bequeath anything beyond pleasure in the task, now withered for lack of monetary reward. Life's pastures, that once appeared so lush, green and inviting, now over-trod, brown and bare, at best fallow. This time around, I cannot avoid the necessity of a career that earns money, instead of the overly optimistic belief that monetary success automatically follows when you leap into what you love while clutching an imaginary colored parachute.

I make a list of priorities, a framework that I hope will avoid some of the contusions, confusions, and detours of the past. The ideological impasse of utopian ideals from the sixties that carried me thus far now awakened with a vengeance, ironically after decades of daily recreational drug use, to rebirth yesterday's preoccupations with saving the world.

Marijuana condemn my recent short-term memories of interpersonal failures to the same dark pit of oblivion that I fell into so easily, one small step beyond despair and disillusionment. My depression became a minor memory of the longest of my bipolar plummets, about six months of all night swims across the warm seas of my own sobs and tears.

Priority number one: Health, and for that, I swim. Not like some people who go to the beach and sit in the sun to swim when they get hot. I stay out of the sun and swim for miles with a long sleeve white dress shirt as sunscreen. I snorkel alone, with mask, tube, and fins, for hours across the surface of deep ocean, and punctuate it with forays down to depths up to thirty feet at most, suspended like a tiny fetus in the amniotic sack of mother Earth. I grew up on a lake, and water rejuvenates me, the sub-aquatic realm my church where my human worries disappear and I become one with nature. I must live near snorkelable water.

Number two: Pass on something of myself, as a good parent, teacher, or mentor. Several acquaintances have remarked that I might be a good parent, simply based on how I am around their children. Children sometimes become good investments. They grow up into people that might act like responsible adults, and I find responsible adults interesting, sometimes.

It bothers me that if I father a child today, the kid's sixteenth birthday will occur when I'm in my sixties. Most of my grandparents lived into their nineties, so perhaps I can get away with it. If I can find a good woman, which brings me to a fundamental truth in this lonely Universe:

Number Three: Find my Soul Mate, companion, partner, significant other, my motivation, my guide, my apprentice, my adviser, my kindly mentor to correct my repressed, misshapen need for love and inter generational connection. Is it too much to ask for a speedy answer to my personal newspaper ad to arrive stapled to a Speed swim bikini? Only sincere, swimming, would-be-moms need apply, with preference given to young, intelligent, curious, adventurous women who don't get turned off by an older man who appreciates her big boobs.

I wanted to find a happy woman, strong in body and spirit, able to appreciate the immature boyish side of me, which I took great pains to protect from the stultification of academic cultivation. I prayed for a woman who would appreciate a teasing, hunting, strong and silent guy's guy kind of a loner who needs a good woman to come home to, even at three AM after an unexplained three-day absence.

She must act caring and maternal, able to put family first, wear long dark or preferably black hair, with long black eyelashes that don't need much makeup to show off her dark eyes, a bronze tan (preferably blemish-free) skin, a body I can sexually respond to.

To my embarrassment or pride, I'm not restricted to this list of prerequisites. Friends complain that I'm not selective at all.

I too often allow women to select me.

A woman who wants a traditional family (which tradition, I don't care) and maybe, most important for prolonged marital bliss, not too pretty, not so attractive that she attracts unwanted attention from men where ever she goes. Lately, I've met too many abused older women who openly brag about being irresistible to men, preferably married, and demonstrate an incessant urge to prove it.

A friend found his wife by mountain biking.

He told me I got tired of dating women who couldn't stand to get dirty, or do work that put their nail polish in danger. So I invite them to go mountain biking. If a girl can get all sweaty and dirty, frustrated with hill climbing and bouncing along rocky trails, and still be in a good mood, have a good time, she's marriage material.

Sounds like a good idea.

Or so I thought.

Where, and how, could I find my dusky baby-making biker?

I have no home. The little I own languishes in storage, including my old van. I some savings which allow me to live like a pauper and look for a place to live near swimming and black-hair maidens, before I need to accept any job and get stuck in some urban canyon of high rent and higher debt again.

Where will I find this watery Kingdom? Southern California's waters hovered between fifty and seventy degrees, most of the time too chilly to swim without a wet suit.

Hawaii or Miami?

I lived in Miami for a while, too far from the Florida Keys and great swimming, and the solar ovens of the Keys too far from employment.

Never been to Hawaii.

So without hesitation, from this small town near Sacramento California, I bid my brother's family good-bye and take the Amtrak train to LA Union station, shuttle to LAX, fly out at five twenty-five PM.

I find the phone number of a Honolulu Youth Hostel on the plane from an article in the airline's magazine, land at eight PM Honolulu time, eleven at night in California. Outside it's still bright, still hot and humid.

As the sun sets, I wait for bus with a woman and her father, both missionaries, recently back from Brazil.

Get a berth at the International Youth Hostel in deep Waikiki, one block from the beach.

I walk the nighttime streets between groups of Japanese tourists carrying shopping bags, unable to discern which Asians faces belong here and which arrive as tourists. Across the street, I see a bar sign flash purple neon with the promise of illicit excitement, a striptease joint called Platinum, guarded by a plywood sandwich sign on the sidewalk that says 'Topless bar.' The barker tries to tempt me inside, offers me a free admission worth fifteen dollars, but I will still have to pay for the two drink minimum, so they will get their ten dollars from me no matter what.

Inside, I stumble through a labyrinthine, split-level nightmare of red lights and 'totally nude' female bodies writhing around vertical metal fire station poles fixed to several small stages interspersed amongst the tiny round tables and bar stools. A petite Asian dancer holds my attention, although my eyes feel out of focus with all the red light. I breathe slow, and notice the odors of tobacco, alcohol, cheap perfume, and the dirty-sock rancidity of spilt beer, an atmosphere of vulgar beauty and illicit lust. As if to signal the end of their dance, each beautiful young woman puts on her stringy lingerie bra not to walk amongst us patrons to hit us up for cash, but to strut off the runways and table tops with garters and bikini bottom sprouting the greenbacks earned during her dance.

Towards the back of the bar, men receive lap dances from three abundantly endowed young women with serpentine spines that enable them to slide or rub their breasts, buttocks, under-thighs, and whatever across the crotches of seated men. These women wear metallic bikinis and high heels, sometimes a flower behind the ear in Polynesian fashion. I lean over a railing and look down into the level below, tucked away in deep shadows, and see a series of booths where naked women dance behind a small counter, to counter the masculine urge to grope.

A waitress clarifies the situation for me. Either of these professional dance services, scantily dressed or un-dressed, will cost twenty dollars. They serve alcoholic drinks on the upper level, so I go up an open flight of stairs and through a door to find a small room with a bar and one central stage, with a smaller couch-size stage in the back along the glass wall composed of several internal picture windows that look down into the main room. They do not restrict drinks to this room. They allow minors to enter the establishment, although the waitresses try to prohibit their access to alcohol to sell them expensive non-alcoholic soft drinks.

The lower level, theoretically non-alcoholic, darkly beckons to voyeurs of all ages, a mostly-male crowd decorated with a couple lesbian dyke machos. I pick out a couple of lesbians in glam-rock Gothic dress with purple-streaked hair, silver jewelry on black clothing, pierced ornaments in their ears, nose, and eyebrows. One wears a shiny silver metal ball bearing that floats on the middle of her tongue.

I return to the main floor and fall in love with a girl who obviously has some Hawaiian or Polynesian blood, in spite of her reddish hair. She calls herself Jade, a sweet, simple girl, the incongruity of her in these surroundings makes one want to rescue her, but a girl in a place like this probably has a personality that would demand a man to give her everything she wants, or she will find someone else who will. Unfortunately, she really enjoys her work, enjoys being looked at appreciatively. She tells me so. Maybe her father, tortured by his own attraction to her, made her life hell by being un-supportive and too demanding, leaving her emotionally needy, vulnerable to bask in this superficial adulation. Maybe he molested her when she was very young, and now she thirsts for a non-sexual adoration of her beauty. Her innocence, real or contrived, made me feel guilty.

Over-excited by my first night in Hawaii, I'm not sleepy. Across the street, snuggled in the armpit of a brightly lit strip mall, squats a one-story bar that relies on another A-frame sandwich sign on the sidewalk to announce its furtive presence. It's called 'Scroodles' bar, owned by some dude with pictures of himself and former Presidents on the walls. Looks like