The Adventures of The Great Willie Young: The Battle of Castle Ford

 Invaders from Ohio

The chronicles will say that the Detroit Lions lost to the Cleveland Browns on the tenth of August in the Year Of Our Lord 2012 (27 AW (After Willie) ) and history will claim it as a mere footnote, a quiet preseason game, the first of the year, a mere prelude to the Lions magical Super Bowl winning season of 2012, but as usual history is full of shit (not about the Super Bowl part – hopefully anyway) and the chronicles will be written by heretics and vicious sex freaks who spend all their time furiously jacking off to grotesque porn and beating each other with wooden paddles in steamy saunas, wearing masks and worshipping goat gods with monstrous erections, and who therefore miss the subtle buds of truth which flower, fragile yet perfect, in the cracks of time.  And so, as usual, it falls upon me, a lone prophet, drowning in an ocean of the obscene and the false, to swim to the surface and deliver unto you all the Truth.  Though a delicate bud, a crushed flower smelling of regret and what might have been, a single pedal shall be plucked from the . . .

[At this point, Neil’s friends staged an intervention for him and took away his ether and urged him to get on with it.  One of them even slapped him, the vicious cur, and told him to stick to the facts and stop gibbering about flowers.  Neil wept and reached for the ether and upon finding it empty burned the building down.  After a month in rehab (don’t ask how a month went by when the game just ended or you will melt your own brain), he returned, eyes wide, shining with the Truth, and proceeded to tell this tale, the tale of how The Great Willie Young saved the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and all of its noble inhabitants.  No . . . he found the ether again!  Goddammit, someone tackle him!  Someone . . .]

The peoples of Michigan and Ohio have always hated one another.  This is an undeniable truth.  They have fought wars and they have viciously slandered one another whenever the mood takes them, and it takes them often.  But after more than a century and a half of rancor and bloodshed, one beautiful being decided it was time for a Great Reckoning, and this . . . this is his tale.

An ugly haze drifted across Lake Erie and with it came a terrible stench.  It sickened the people of Michigan and as they vomited they wept for they knew that terrible beasts approached.  The scent was unmistakable, the smell of failure, rust and feces, the smell of Ohio.

Mayor Bing put down his crack-pipe and made a frantic phone call to his top general, a weary and underappreciated military genius, tasked with leading a group of soldiers who spent their down-time getting shitfaced and wandering in and out of the city’s jails.  This general went by the singular name Schwartz and when he received the phone call from the Mayor, he was able to interpret the Mayor’s cracked gibberish and rushed to the window of the Lake Erie fortress he was tasked with defending.  His jaw set and a grim hatred took his heart as he witnessed the boats sailing through the haze, adorned with shit-stained banners depicting scenes from Ohio’s history – a man pooping in a cooler in a parking lot, a shameful looking chap furtively masturbating in a library, and several others too grotesque to describe here.  As the ships neared, General Schwartz peered through the haze and sneered with disgust.  Already he could see the vile charlatans, the cousin fuckers and the obscene orc-like beasts that passed for women in Ohio as they cavorted and mated like beasts under the sun.  It was too late to stop them from landing but by God, General Schwartz would not let them defile the land and the people he was charged with protecting.

Immediately, the General rallied his troops, dragging some out of taverns and whorehouses.  They were half-drunk to a man and smelled of cheap sex and old blood.  The soldier named Suh was found shirtless, pissing on a corpse so badly mauled that the only thing that identified it was a cheap tin badge that read “Sheriff Goo . . .”  Schwartz wasn’t interested in Sheriff Goo though.  He knew his boys specialized in rough trade but when it came time to fight, they were always ready.  Songs would never be sung about them in church but that was appropriate in some strange and savage way because the things that they did were not fit for a house of God.  They were bedeviled men, vagrants and reprobates whose existence allowed the sheep who lived behind their walls to roam the fields safely and freely.  No, their deeds and names would never be sung about in church but this was best, for their deeds were decidedly unholy.  But when the earth finally opens up and takes us all, God and these men will have a grand reckoning and they will stand before Him and they will say “We existed because we had to.  We were the righteous sword of Truth, and we tread in the dark places your beloved would not.  We slayed the forces of evil, not for you nor for your flock but for the sheer joy of it.  We belong to neither heaven nor hell but to Detroit, to Michigan and if that is enough, then so be it.  If it is not, then so be it.”

Indeed, these men answered the General’s call, just as they always did.  They arrived missing clothes and teeth, armed with spiked clubs and their own fists.  Corporal Gun wandered shirtless amongst his pack, whipping them and calling them dogs.  They grumbled and spit at him but deep down they loved the old Corporal, who had whored and killed with the best back in his day, and they slowly all fell in line, stacked like spiked iron behind the walls of Castle Ford, waiting for the heathen hordes of Ohioans to crash against those walls.  They knew from experience that those beasts would do everything from fling shit to the bodies of their own dead – that is when they weren’t eating or fucking them – in an effort to penetrate the noble walls of Castle Ford.  They knew that some of them would lope towards the walls on all fours, like degenerate beasts and would howl and snarl as they threw their idiot bodies against the fortress, dying by the thousands while still more piled in behind them, disgusting wretches with no appreciation for life.  They knew this and yet they looked out over the approaching mass with grim smiles on their faces and bloodlust in their hearts.  Fuck Ohio.  That was their rallying cry and the men knew it well.

But on that day, the beasts from Ohio brought with them a secret weapon, a terrible weapon too awful for a mortal man to face and live to tell about it.  They brought with them great tankards filled with the sludge collected from the Cuyahoga River, and attached to these tankards were great hoses, hoses wielded by the giant ugly vicious trolls they called their cheerleaders.  These vile beasts, more animal than woman, each grabbed hold of a hose, and moving like syphilitic elephants with a bad case of the gout, they approached the walls of Castle Ford, their thick leathery hide seemingly unaffected by the arrows fired at them from the battlements high above.  And with a mighty roar they stopped, aimed their hoses and began spraying the sludge from the Cuyahoga – less water than a collection of shit, urine, spit, motor oil, acid and failure – over the walls.  The men known as Lions did their best to fight back but soon found themselves vomiting.  These were hard men, men who had seen – and done – the nastiest of nasty shit, but this was too much for even them.  To the people of Ohio, this water was as pristine as the water they drank – when they weren’t drinking each other’s semen and sweat anyway – but to the noble people of Michigan, this was worse than the worst sewage and it was only a matter of time before the Lions were reeling under the stench of the filthy Brown onslaught.

In the Ohioan camp that day was a warrior, an old man who had failed in every other endeavor in life, a villain known simply as Weeden.  He was a vicious and terrible beast, who ate the flesh of his fellow man and fornicated with livestock, which was enough to earn him adoration and worship from the vile scum with which he kept company.  Yes, the Ohioans declared such a pig their savior and carried him around on a giant litter, from which he shit and pissed all over everyone he passed.  The litter was carried by a horde of slaves harvested from the hills of Kentucky to the south, simple men who couldn’t comprehend in their hearts the sort of evil the Ohioans visited upon them when they conquered them years before.  They lived in perpetual misery and were barely human anymore.  They just trudged, day after day, year after year, carrying Weeden’s litter.  Their minds were gone and they were as oxen, beasts which Weeden violated on moonless nights, terrible nights which caused all of nature to shudder.

These slaves carried Weeden behind the trolls with their hoses filled with poop and despair and when they arrived at the walls of Castle Ford, Weeden disembarked and just for fun, cruelly ran his sword through the nearest Kentucky slave.  He then laughed as a horde of Ohioan scum descended upon the fallen body like vultures, tearing at it with their teeth.  He stared at the walls of Castle Ford and felt a sick surge of satisfaction as he listened to the cries of anguish, as the noble Lions tried to keep from drowning in the fell waters of the Cuyahoga which had poisoned their land.

Behind the walls the men reeled and General Schwartz turned to his friend, a noble warrior clothed in gold, his armor shining so brightly that even the angels averted their eyes when he strode in their presence, and he said “Willie, we need you.  We need you more than we’ve ever needed anything.  You are our only hope, our savior.”  The warrior known as Willie merely nodded, put down his fishing pole and picked up his flaming sword, a sword which was said to have been forged in heaven itself.

The gates of Castle Ford opened and Weeden laughed a monstrous laugh, horrible and profane.  The men behind the walls reeled and covered their ears.  Weeden staggered forward like an ogre from some horrifying and ugly nightmare, assuming that Castle Ford was capitulating, but he was wrong.  Oh, was he ever wrong.

For from behind those gates, when all seemed lost, strode The Great Willie Young, hero of a thousand battles, subject of a thousand epics, savior of a thousand ages.  He shone like the sun and before him the Ohioan hordes disintegrated into the vast nothingness which is at the core of their being, and he strode valiantly to Weeden and pimp slapped that motherfucker.  Weeden cried out in agony, and fell to his knees.  The Great Willie Young then took his flaming sword and lopped Weeden’s grotesque head from his body. 

And with that the Ohioans fled in fear from the battle, back to their homes where they made love to shame and to their pets and family members.  History will record that they won the battle, for Castle Ford was invaded by their foul sludge and was overrun by their beasts and hill-trolls, and it’s been estimated that it will take 50 years and hundreds of trillions of dollars just to get the place clean again, but they were driven from the land, and they will not come back again, for they now know that amongst those brave warriors known as Lions lives The Great Willie Young. 

After the battle, The Great Willie Young led the Lions to the border separating heaven from hell, also known as the Michigan/Ohio border, where he placed the head of the monster Weeden on a pike, a warning to all those fell beasts that they will get more of the same should they ever cross into his land again.  Upon mounting the head on the pike, The Great Willie Young turned to the men – and to the thousands upon thousands of grateful Michigan residents who had followed them on the journey (it’s said that the women who followed the Lions in this celebratory train walked bowlegged for months afterward and that several babies of unusual size and hue were later born, including several with a deep love for fishing) The Great Willie Young turned and he said the following:

“My people, my friends, I have journeyed far, from the ends of the earth to the ends of time.  I have fought pirates, Vikings, Nazis, hippies, Indians, old Chinese mystics, Rex Ryan and all manner of dangerous and fell beasts.  I have fished off of the shoulder of Orion, laughed in the face of a supernova and even entered a few black holes if you know what I mean, but nowhere and in no time have I ever encountered such a villainous horde of scum as these wretched Ohioans.  Let this severed head be both a warning to them and a reminder to all of you that as long as there is breath in my body, as long as the earth turns and the sun rises, as long as the stars shine and existence, uh, exists, I will be here, guarding you and haunting them, for I am The Great Willie Young and you, the people of Detroit, the citizens of Michigan, from Sturgis in the South to Copper Harbor in the great North – with the exception of those filthy Packer fans up there – are all my people and together we shall create a golden age, one in which every man has a steak on the table, a whore in the bedroom and a goddamn mustang in his garage and every woman has, well, they have me.  Sure, this all sounds like a paternalistic nightmare for you women but I am not here to argue social philosophy with you, I am simply here to guide you into a golden age of the human spirit, into the age . . . of the Lion.”

And with that the crowd roared its approval.  The men were satisfied, the women realized they had vaginas and thus all the power, and the Ohioans were left to try to refill the now dry river bed of the Cuyahoga and my god, you do not want to know what fluids they used.  But most of all, the Detroit Lions were happy because they knew that they were still the Detroit Lions, and that meant something amazing now, while the Cleveland Browns were still the Cleveland Browns and all the sorrow that that meant, and besides they still had Suh, they had Matthew Stafford (seriously, can we get him a nickname?), they had St. Calvin, they had General Schwartz and most importantly, they still had The Great Willie Young, and who gives a shit about the result of a goddamn preseason game?  In the end, I think we can all agree on one thing: fuck Ohio.  Amen.