You Can Make It Up: Brokeback Mountain Alternate Ending
Gabe loves fan fiction. You Can Make It Up features his own personal alternate adventures starring some of our favorite characters.
Dear Annie Proulx,
I know that you have been having a lot of trouble finishing your story Brokeback Mountain, so I wanted to help you out. I'm really a huge fan, so you don't have to pay me, but if you do decide to use my ending in future editions of Close Range or if you decide to use it as the basis for a sequel, please just give me a small credit in the acknowledgments. Knowing that the great writer Annie Proulx read and enjoyed my work and felt that it was equal to her own would be all the payment I'd need.
Thank you, and ENJOY.
Brokeback Mountain: The Lost Ending
By Gabriel Delahaye
Ennis Del Mar hung the shirts one inside the other on a hanger suspended from a nail in the closet. He thought of Jack Twist, his one true friend. Their love had been a sacred bond, beset on all sides not just by an unwelcoming world, but by their own fears and demons. He thought of Jack Twist putting his penis inside his butt and having sex with his butt and them being two gay guys together for hours. Tears welled at the corner of Ennis's eyes at the thought of that sex. He slapped his hands together, knowing what he had to do.
All night, Ennis Del Mar sat at a rough hewn table of raw pine, working on a design. By morning, eyes dark ringed with exhaustion, he knew that he had struck upon it. There was a shed out back behind his house wherein he found the parts he needed, and within a fortnight, Ennis Del Mar had completed his construction. "What is it?" a towheaded neighbor boy asked. Ennis looked out over the darkening plains. "It's a machine what bring back my friend," he said, and spat into the dirt.
Late at night, Ennis Del Mar drove to the graveyard where Jack Twist was buried and exhumed the body of his lover. By the dim glow of a single candle, he laid the corpse out on the card table where he ate his solitary dinners, and affixed the nodes where they was designed to be affixed. He closed his eyes and turned on the machine, praying to a God he wasn't even sure he believed in for a miracle of his own design. There was an electric spark, and a noisome odor. Ennis looked down, and there was old Jack Twist, blinking up at him.
"Ennis, what're you doin'?"
Ennis didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Nothin'," he said. And then they had crazy gay anal sex for hours. [NOTE: Annie, maybe this scene needs to be fleshed out more, but I kind of thought that the sparse description of "crazy gay anal sex" was more romantic and in keeping with the private love these two men shared.]
The next week was a blur to Ennis as he experienced a joy he didn't know possible. Him and Jack would talk for hours and do it for hours and then talk for hours more. If they got tired, they drank gritty coffee from tin cups, and when the sun went down they watched it go down in each other's arms, and then one of them would go down, too.
One night, over a peasant's meal of stewed meat and biscuits, Ennis looked up at Jack Twist, who sat naked. "All my life I've been thinking I wasn't made for this world," Ennis said, taking a sip of whiskey. "But now I'm starting to realize that maybe this world wasn't made for me."
"What're you getting' on about now, Ennis?" Jack asked, taking a sip of whiskey.
That night, Ennis was restless and excited. He didn't sleep, but spent the whole moon bent over that little card table, scribbling and scratching away at a homemade sheaf of mismatched paper. In the morning, he roused Jack Twist not in their usual way (blowjobs), but with a fistful of schematics. Jack Twist rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to make sense of what he was looking at. But before he could even focus, Ennis had snatched the papers back and was pacing in the living room.
"I always figured it were possible, but couldn't have built it alone. But there's two of us now. You and me, Jack. Together we can do this."
"Do what, Ennis?" Jack rattled the empty coffee tin in frustrated petulance.
"Build a spaceship."
With more parts from the shed, Ennis began work on his spaceship, ignoring Jack's skepticism. Jack sat on an old apple crate near the door, kicking out his heels, chewing on a stalk of wheat, and handing Ennis tools as he was asked. So he was as surprised as a cow in a henhouse when Ennis gently punched his arm just three days later and said "it's done." Ennis and Jack both spit dark spots onto the parched dirt.
"You think it'll work?" Jack asked. Ennis nodded. "What's it for?"
Ennis pulled out more drawings. They were star maps. "We're going here," he said, dropping a work-calloused finger onto a tiny bright dot in a field of dark.
"Where's here?" Jack asked, lifting off his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow.
"You'll see," Ennis said.
The next morning was gray and cool. The towheaded neighbor boy stood near the spaceship, poking at frogs with a stick. Jack and Ennis climbed in to the ship. Jack waved to the boy, but he didn't wave back. Ennis pulled the hatch down and gunned the engines. The ship lifted slowly at first, and then Ennis pushed the throttle forward and the ship jetted out into the sky. When the ship landed, they were on a planet very far away. Ennis opened the hatch carefully, and oxygen rushed in. "Come on, Jack Twist," he said. They jumped out of the ship and found themselves on a crazy sex planet.
An alien walked up to them. "Hey guys, you can have all the gay sex you want on our planet, free from bigotry. It's awesome."
Jack and Ennis went to a sex planet hotel and had so much sex forever with their penises and their butts.
The End.
Posted by Gabe at 5:45 PM in You Can Make It Up
Tags: Annie Proulx | Brokeback Mountain
Is it too early to just hand over this year's Pulitzer? This is your masterwork.
Score = 1
I had to use a dictionary to look up the definition of the word noisome- that's probably why I don't truly like that part of this story. Hoewever the spaceship and the crazy sex planet- those are totally real and I didn't have to look up their definitions.
It's like you're amalgamating The Astronaut Farmer, Frankenstein (the shitty one with Robert Deniro), and The Spice Channel (but like the spice channel done Emril style- because, with so much butt and penis sex, you kicked it up a notch- BAM! ) with Broke Back Mountain. In other words your lost ending is....Art
Score = 1
Hey Gabe can you write my life story thnx get back to me.
Score = -1
I can't believe you simply didn't call the crazy sex planet "Uranus".
Gabe, a man of true restraint.
Score = 3
I hope you're actually sending this to Annie Proulx, I just know she'll see the error in her original ending and rewrite everything to accommodate your masterpiece.
Score = 3
Too bad you didn't get to write this before it was released. There's no way the Academy would have passed over it with this heartwarming coda.
Score = 1
this takes it to a whole new level. i'm beyond amazed. i think floored is a good word for how i feel. thanks for sharing. the love scenes were especially gripping. :)
Score = 0
Imagine this stuff happening while that quiet guitar music from the soundtrack played.
Score = 0