Damned

II

If my version of Hell fails to impress you, please consider that to be my own shortcoming. I mean, what do I know? Probably any grown-up would pee herself silly, seeing the flying vampire bats and majestic, cascading waterfalls of smelly poop. No doubt the fault is entirely my own, because if I'd ever imagined Hell it was as a fiery version of that classic Hollywood masterpiece The Breakfast Club, populated, let's remember, by a hypersocial, pretty cheerleader, a rebel stoner type, a dumb football jock, a brainy geek, and a misanthropic psycho, all locked together in their high school library doing detention on an otherwise ordinary Saturday except with every book and chair being blazing on fire.

Yes, you might be alive and Gay or Old or a Mexican, lording that over me, but consider that I've had the actual experience of waking up on my first day in Hell, and you'll just have to take my word for what all this is like. No, it's not fair, but you can forget about the fabled tunnel of bright, spectral-white light and being greeted by the open arms of your long-deceased grandma and grandpa; maybe other people have reported that blissful process, but consider that those people are currently alive, or they remained living for sufficient time to report on their encounter. My point is: Those people enjoyed what's clearly labeled a "near-death experience." I, on the other hand, am dead, with my blood long ago pumped out and worms munching on me. In my book that makes me the higher authority. Other people, like famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri, I'm sorry to say, simply hoisted a generous helping of campy make-believe on the reading public.

Thus, disregard my account of Hell at your own peril.

First off, you wake up lying on the stone floor inside a fairly dismal cell composed of iron bars; and take my stern advice — don't touch anything. The prison cell bars are filthy dirty. If by accident you DO touch the bars, which look a tad slimy with mold and someone else's blood, do NOT touch your face — or your clothes — not if you have any aspiration to stay looking nice until Judgment Day.

And do NOT eat the candy you'll see scattered everywhere on the ground.

The exact means by which I arrived in the underworld remain a little unclear. I recall a chauffeur standing curb-side somewhere, next to a parked black Lincoln Town Car, holding a white placard with my name written on it, MADISON SPENCER, in all-caps terrible handwriting. The chauffeur — those people never speak English — had on mirrored sunglasses and a visored chauffeur cap, so most of his face was hidden. I remember him opening the rear door so I could step inside; after that was a way-long drive with the windows tinted so dark I couldn't quite see out, but what I've just described could've been any one of ten bazillion rides I've taken between airports and cities. Whether that Town Car delivered me to Hell, I can't swear, but the next thing is I woke up in this filthy cell.

Probably I woke up because someone was screaming; in Hell, someone is always screaming. Anyone who's ever flown London to Sydney, seated next to or anywhere in the proximity of a fussy baby, you'll no doubt fall right into the swing of things in Hell. What with the strangers and crowding and seemingly endless hours of waiting for nothing to happen, for you Hell will feel like one long, nostalgic hit of déjà vu. Especially if your in-flight movie was The English Patient. In Hell, whenever the demons announce they're going to treat everyone to a big-name Hollywood movie, don't get too excited because it's always The English Patient or, unfortunately, The Piano. It's never The Breakfast Club.

In regard to the smell, Hell comes nowhere near as bad as Naples in the summertime during a garbage strike.

If you ask me, people in Hell just scream to hear their own voice and to pass the time. Still, complaining about Hell occurs to me as a tad bit obvious and self-indulgent. Like so many experiences you venture into knowing full well that they'll be terrible, in fact the core pleasure resides in their very innate badness, like eating Swanson frozen chicken potpies at boarding school or a Banquet frozen Salisbury steak on the cook's night out. Or eating really anything in Scotland. Allow me to venture that the sole reason we enjoy certain pastimes such as watching the film version of Valley of the Dolls arises from the comfort and familiarity of its very inherent poor quality.

In contrast, The English Patient tries desperately to be profound and only succeeds in being painfully boring.

If you'll forgive the redundancy: What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Hell is Hell. Now, stop with the whining and caterwauling.

On that basis, it does seem clichéd and obvious to arrive in Hell and then weep and gnash and rend your garments because you find yourself immersed in raw sewage or plopped down atop a bed of white-hot razor blades. To scream and thrash seems… hypocritical, as if you've bought a ticket and seated yourself to watch Jean de Florette and then complain loudly, resentful of the fact that all the actors are speaking French. Or like the people who travel to Las Vegas only to harp about how it's so tacky. Of course, even the casinos that take a stab at elegance with crystal chandeliers and stained glass, even those are crowded with the din and cacophony of plastic slot machines flashing strobe lights to seize your attention. In such a situation the people who whine and moan might imagine they're making a contribution but really they're just being another petty annoyance.

The other most important rule worth repeating is: Don't eat the candy. Not that you'll be even remotely tempted, because it's scattered on the dirty ground, AND it's the candy even fat people and heroin junkies won't eat: rock candy, rock-hard Bazooka bubble gum, Sen-Sen, saltwater taffy, black Crows, and popcorn balls.

Given the fact that you, yourself, are still alive and Black or a Jew or whatever — bully for you, you just keep eating those bran muffins — you'll have to take my word for all of these details, so listen up and pay close attention.

Flanking your cell, other cells stretch to the horizon in both directions, most containing a single person, most of those people screaming. Even as my eyes flutter open, I hear a girl's voice say, "Don't touch the bars…." Standing in the next cell, a teenage girl displays both her hands, spreading the fingers wide to show her palms smeared with smut. There really is the most dreadful mildew problem in Hell. It's like an entire underworld with sick building syndrome.

My neighbor I'd wager is a high school junior, because she has the hip development to hold up a straight-line skirt and she has breasts instead of just frills or smocking to fill out the front of her blouse. Even with smoke clouding the air and the occasional vampire bat fluttering through my line of vision I can see her Manolo Blahnik shoes are counterfeit, the kind you might buy sight unseen over the Internet from a pirate operation in Singapore for five dollars. If you can stomach yet another piece of advice: Do NOT die while wearing cheap shoes. Hell is… well, hell on shoes; anything plastic melts, and you don't want to walk barefoot over broken glass for the rest of eternity. When it comes your time, when the proverbial bell tolls for thee, seriously consider wearing a basic low-heel Bass Weejun penny loafer in a dark color that won't show dirt.

This teenage girl in the next cell calls over, asking, "What are you damned for?"

Getting to my feet, stretching my arms, and dusting off the legs of my skort, I reply, "Smoking marijuana, I guess."

Out of courtesy rather than genuine interest I ask the girl about her own cardinal sin.

The girl shrugs her shoulders; pointing one stained, smutty finger toward her feet, she says, "White shoes after Labor Day." Her sad shoes — the ersatz leather is white and already scuffed, and you can never actually polish counterfeit Manolo Blahniks.

"Beautiful shoes," I lie, nodding my head toward her feet. "Are those Manolo Blahniks?"

"Yes," she lies in return, "they are. They cost a fortune."

Another detail to remember about Hell… whenever you ask why anyone is damned for all eternity, she'll tell you "jaywalking" or "carrying a black purse with brown shoes" or some such petty nonsense. In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.

The girl in the next cell takes a step closer and, still looking at me, she says, "You know, you're really pretty."

That statement exposes her as a super, all-out, major-league liar, but I don't say anything in response.

"No, I mean it," she says. "All you need is more eyeliner and some mascara." Already she's digging in her shoulder bag — also white, fake Coach, plastic — picking out tubes of mascara and compacts of turquoise Avon eye shadow. With one dirty hand, the girl waves for me to lean my face between the bars.

It's my experience that girls tend to be terrifically smart until they grow breasts. You may dismiss this observation as my personal prejudice, based on my own tender age, but thirteen years seems to be when human beings reach their fullest flower of intelligence, personality, and pluck. Both girls and boys. Not to boast, but I believe a person is her most truly exceptional at the age of thirteen — look at Pippi Longstocking, Pollyanna, Tom Sawyer, and Dennis the Menace — before she finds herself conflicted and steered by hormones and crushing gender expectations. Let girls get their menstruation or boys have their first wet dream, and they instantly forget their own brilliance and talent. Again, here's a reference to my Influences of Western History textbook — for a long time after puberty, it's like the dark ages that fell between the Athenian Enlightenment and the Italian Renaissance. Girls get their boobs and forget they were ever so gutsy and smart. Boys, too, can display their own brand of clever and funny behavior, but let them get that first erection and they go complete moron for the next sixty years. For both genders, adolescence occurs as a kind of Ice Age of Dumbness.

And, yes, I know the word gender. Ye gods! I may be pudgy and flat-chested and nearsighted and dead, but I am NOT a moron.

Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive "let them eat cake" type of chauvinism.

Either that, or the attractive older girl is a lesbian. Either way, I don't offer my face even as she stands ready, brandishing a gloppy mascara brush like a fairy godmother's magic wand, to turn me into some floozy Cinderella. To be honest, whenever I watch the classic John Hughes film The Breakfast Club, and Molly Ringwald leads poor Ally Sheedy into the girl's bathroom, then brings her out with those hideous 1980s smears of rouge under each cheekbone and Ally's hair tied back with that preppy ribbon and her lips painted that dated red-red like a cheap China doll version of Ringwald's own sellout Whorey Vanderwhore Vogue magazine conformity, poor Ally reduced to a kind of living, breathing Nagel print, I always yell at the television, "Run, Ally!" Really, I scream, "Wash your face, Ally, and just run!"

Instead of submitting my face, I say, "I'd better not, not until my eczema clears up some."

At this, the magic mascara wand jerks back. The Avon eye shadows and lipsticks all clatter back into the fake Coach bag even as her eyes squint, searching my face for signs of inflamed, red, flaky skin and open sores.

It's like my mom will tell you: "Every new maid wants to fold your underwear a different way." Meaning: You have to stay smart and not let yourself be pushed around.

Other cells cluster around our two, some cells empty, others occupied by lone people. No doubt the football jock, the rebel stoner, the brainy geek, the psycho, all serving detention here, forever.

No, it's not fair, but chances are good that I'll be in this cell for centuries to come, pretending to suffer psoriasis even while hypocrite people scream and complain about the humidity and the smell, and my Whorey Vanderwhore neighbor squats down to try to spit-shine her cheapo, white plastic shoes with a crumpled wad of Kleenex. Even against the stink of poop and smoke and sulfur, you can smell her dime-store perfume like a mixed-fruit flavor of chewing gum or instant grape drink. To be honest, I'd rather smell poop, but who can hold their breath for a million-plus years? So, simply out of courtesy I say, "Thanks anyway, about offering the makeover, I mean." Out of sheer politeness, I force myself to smile and say, "I'm Madison."

At this, the teenage girl almost lunges toward the bars which separate us. All breasts and hips and high-heeled shoes, now obviously, pathetically grateful for my companionship, she grins to show me her every mass-produced, porcelain-veneered incisor. In her pierced earlobes, she's even wearing diamond earrings — so very Claire Standish of her — only vulgar, dime-size, dazzle-cut cubic zirconium. Saying, "I'm Babette," dropping the wad of tissue, she thrusts a smutty, stained hand between the bars for me to shake.