Awake in Hell (2 page)

Chapter
Two

Here
comes the part you’ve been waiting for, the part where I tell you how I got
here. See, the note that is now sitting quietly in my pocket is screaming in my
mind. Do I belong here? I can’t honestly say I know, without a doubt, that I
deserved to go to Hell. However, I do know that I didn’t in any way, shape, or
form earn a ticket to Heaven either. I didn’t do anything. And I don’t mean
that as an indignant “I was framed” kind of defense. I mean I didn’t do
anything with my time, with my talent, with my life. I was born Louise May
Patterson. All things considered, I had a normal childhood and a very nice set
of parents. I was in my mid-forties when I bit it, but I was still acting like
a teenager. I lived at home with the aforementioned parents, or on the street,
or with the occasional lover. I was always managing to never pay a single dime
in rent, ate for free, and never reached the mentality of a true adult. I used
to joke with Linda, back when she was still partying, that if I ever got a job
she should shoot me in the head and put me out of my misery. We would laugh at
all the “rats running the maze” every day, going to work at ‘
o’dark
thirty’ in the morning to try and screw the other
rats out of the title of “assistant manager of paper clip requisitions”, or
something equally meaningless. Wake up, rush through a cup of coffee, spend
nine to five at a job they all hated, go home and go to bed just to do it again
the next day. That was never me, and never would have been me. I mean, really,
what’s the point?

So,
every day was a holiday for me and those in my circle at the time. This circle
I speak of was always changing. My “lost boys and girls”, because everyone else
grew up and left me. It didn’t bother me much. They all thought they were
smarter than me, and I knew I was smarter than all of them. I would move on
just as they moved on. I’d take on the newly single, the addicts, the newcomers
to town, the young ones... Occasionally I’d find a sugar daddy, usually a
married one, to take me away from the small, one-horse town, where I grew up
and still lived.

But
I always came back. It might have been the charm of my home town that drew me
back, but I sincerely doubt it. More likely, my adulterer and I just got bored
with each other. I’d tell you the name of that town, where it is on a map, what
great state it sits smack dab in the middle of, if it mattered. But it doesn’t.
Just suffice it to say, “
it’s
a heap of shit filled
with a bunch of smaller, less significant pieces of shit walking around in it.”
Believe me, if you lived there, you would want to be wasted all the time too.

My
only saving grace in that town was Linda. She was my
bestie
from the moment we met. We were 19 years old and she was living with a group of
guys who were dealing blow in the club where I hung out.  I was one of
their best customers. The night they finally invited me back to their place I
had the adult version of sugar plum dreams. I had visions of being gang-banged
and free coke dancing in my head. When I got there and saw her lying back on
the sofa while some random guy was cutting a line on her stomach my heart
lurched. Whoa, I’ve finally found a cosmic sister! She looked me right in the eye
and gave me a dreamy smile. She had a barely noticeable overbite unless (as I
came to learn later) she was giving you her “this is my dreamy smile” face.
It’s a surprisingly effective face... then she scowled at Len (the leader of
this particular pack) and said “Who’s the new bitch?”

I
actually let out a small squeal, like I did as a kid whenever I opened up the
Christmas gift that I’d been wading through socks, underwear, and school
supplies to get to. That night there was no orgy. There was no sex at all. It
was just me and Linda, up all night, jazzed up on cocaine and letting every
detail of our lives spill out all over each other like an overflowing
milkshake. Indeed, I stained her with my strawberry, and her chocolate is still
imprinted on me. We talked faster than the speed of light until our voices were
hoarse and the boys had given up all hope of getting laid. By morning we knew
everything about one another. I still remember watching the sun coming up and
actually feeling different. Like today, I was a new person because today I had
a friend who was going to change my life.  I guess that is kind of like
how falling in love would have felt, if I’d ever fallen in love. But for me it
was always Linda. From that point on I didn’t need to fall in love, or get a
job, or buy a house... as long as I had Linda, I was complete.

I
know what you’re probably thinking. That I died of a drug overdose or an
accident involving drunk driving or something. Well,
neener
neener
neener
  —
  NOTHING like that. In fact, my death was sort
of valiant. I died of breast cancer, which, by the way, pisses me off beyond
all reason. I was never very good about going to the doctor. First of all, I
hated the fact that you had to have a blood test or a pee test and I’m sure
they test for drugs even if they say they don’t. I know that hippopotamus
thingy is supposed to protect you, but I OBVIOUSLY have a problem trusting
people in authority positions, so I never really bought that either. I hardly
ever got sick anyway. Besides it’s not like I just had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield
card hanging out of my purse. One trip to the emergency room would mean
avoiding calls from bill collectors for at least 6 months after. That was all
more trouble than it’s worth. The only preventative care I took of my breasts
was the fact that every other guy in the tri-county area had felt me up or had
them in his mouth. Don’t you think at least ONE of those guys would have told
me if he felt a lump? Nope. So by the time I noticed it, (I never claimed to be
the sharpest tool in the drawer, you know) it was full blown Stage 4,
“bend-over-and-kiss-your-ass-goodbye” cancer.

There
were some good things about it. It was the first and only time anyone other
than Linda called me “brave.” I went from junkie-whore to hero. Everyone kept
looking at me with tears building up in their eyes and they’d say some greeting
card platitude bullshit like “everything happens for a reason” or “the One
above works in mysterious ways”. As if that would make me feel better. But then
they’d all say the word “BRAVE.” I was hardly signing up to be the new Buffy or
running into a burning building or anything. It wasn’t like I had a
choice.  Dying of old age in my sleep, or getting murdered very slowly, in
front of the whole town by an invisible killer. I couldn’t protect myself or
stop it from happening. It’s truly weird how having cancer, a disease that’s
not contagious or discriminative, will all of a sudden make someone a good
person.

I
use the term junky-whore loosely, and mostly out of jest. I was never really a
junkie, in the real sense of the word. Sure, I did plenty of drugs and even
more men, but I was never paid to have sex. I never crawled around on my knees
searching for a crack rock. I never stuck a needle full of heroin into my arm. I
guess you could say I was classier than your average party slut. That’s a
better term, not “junky-whore,” rather, “party slut.” I always looked amazing,
had beautiful skin, great legs and a kick-ass wardrobe. The greatest asset I’d
ever been given, I would assume by a higher power, but since getting here I
can’t say that definitively, was my rack. I had the tits of a 25 year old even
after I’d hit the big 4-0. You know the pencil test? The one where you take a
pencil and put it under your boob and let go of it, and if it stays put then
it’s time to see a plastic surgeon. My D-cups were still dropping pencils on
the last day they were on earth. This, by the way, preceded my last day on
earth by seven and a half months.

After
my initial diagnosis, everything just sort of slowed down for me. Not because I
was immobilized by being sick, but I felt the need to take a step back and
become an observer in my own life. I remember reading the occasional book or
article in a magazine, or seeing someone on Oprah or the Today Show who said
that it took finding out that they were going to die before they started living
in the moment. It was just the opposite for me. I had always lived in the
moment. Figuring the future would work itself out, or maybe on some level I always
knew I didn’t have a future. Living in the present is fast, because a moment is
gone the instant it arrives. So, to truly live in the moment is to be a bit
crazed, a little manic, a frenzied, harried, hapless person who, like the Fool
in the tarot deck, is walking blindly toward a cliff with a smile and a song.
This day was much different. The day that I went into the doctor’s office, sat
down, and played with my prosthetic bra so that I could scratch the scars
underneath without it being too noticeable. The doctor told my mom that she
might want to wait outside while he discussed some important new information
with me privately. Everything just kind of paused. The universe took a deep
breath, drew back, and punched me right in the gut.

From
the moment the doctor said “Terminal” to me, I never, ever caught my breath
again.

From
that point on, everything started moving frame by frame. I could finally stop
and see my surroundings. I could hear my own heartbeat. I could smell the fear
in everyone around me. I wasn’t living in the moment anymore, I was trying to
survive it. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

So,
anyway, that’s how I died. I do not recommend it. I suggest that if you are
shopping for a way to die, pick during a nap when you’re old and gray,
something tragic and sudden like getting hit by a train, or spontaneous
combustion. But of course, very few of us get a chance to pick how to shuffle
off the mortal coil.

Speaking
of choosing how you die, the whole “suicide guarantees you a ticket to the lake
of fire” myth? Is just that — a myth. From what I understand, everyone that
ends up here is here because of how they lived, not how they died. Oh, and I
haven’t seen anything that looks even remotely like a lake since I got here.
Just a little piece of FYI to make the price of admission worthwhile.

Chapter
Three

All
right, so I said I would not go home until I had secured employment somewhere.
However, this is, quite literally, Hell and job hunting sucks ass in the best
of circumstances. It stands to be concluded that down here it is outright
torture. It’s not even noon yet and I’m already over it. I stood at the counter
and filled out an application at all three coffee shops. Primarily because I
wanted to go check the bulletin boards at the other two shops for one of those
temp agency slips. The other two did not have one on their boards, which leads
me to believe that the one that was on mine might be old. Hopefully, they still
have some placements left. I looked into the distant skyline and saw the
government buildings where just the commute itself would take up half my day.
Then I turned around and looked behind me at the mammoth chain stores, filled
with discount crap that usually falls apart from the strain of taking it out of
its packaging. I can’t work at these places. Especially now that I know that
there might be some sort of redemption clause that I hadn’t heard about before.
How can anyone sit in front of a luncheonette that serves cat food on toast,
with a small tin cup, begging from people who didn’t give a damn about
humankind when they were alive, after they find out that there might be a
remote chance of getting out of here? But, since openings at a place like that
get filled as soon as they are vacant, and since there’s always way more people
in Hell than jobs, I’m starting to sweat for reasons other than the temperature
outside. Good jobs are always at a premium. I mean, that’s part of the problem
with working in the afterlife -- no one retires, no one dies, and no one
moves....at least not anyone I’ve ever met.

Not
that I’ve met a whole lot of people here.

Quite
frankly, despite my incredibly full social calendar in life...I’ve been a bit of
a wallflower in death. I haven’t adjusted well. Even though, I’m pretty sure
(like I said, time means nothing here, especially when you’re facing
eternity...) that I’ve been here for a while. I’m sorry, but does it matter if
I’ve been here for a year or 100 years? I can take my sweet old time to get
used to the idea that I was apparently such a turd-monkey that I warranted
going straight to Hell for the rest of time itself!

When
I first got here I thought I was still alive. See, I don’t remember the actual
act of dying. I remember the whole cancer thing, and I remember my Mom and Dad
at the kitchen table with Power of Attorney papers and other legal shit that
they kept shoving in front of me and I kept signing. They could have handed me
a million dollar check and I’d have just signed it and pushed it back across
the table to them at that point. I was still numb.

I
remember the Doctor saying that my cancer has metastasized despite the
mastectomy and had now invaded several lymph nodes and a few other required
organs. He said I had six months to a year, and I remember the day that marked
the 6 month anniversary of that meeting. I don’t remember what we did, but I do
remember going to bed that night thinking “From this point on I’m on borrowed
time.”

I
remember lying in a hospital bed surrounded by people. I can’t really remember
who was there, and I find it fascinating that my mind has the impression that
there were a lot of people around me. I mean, how many people are you planning
to have at your death bed? Even today, I’m thinking three people tops, and I
was young and quite popular (if I do say so myself). Yet my cloudy brain won’t
show me faces but gives me the impression that there were more. I see my Mom
standing over me, and she’s talking but I can’t hear what she saying. Then
“fade to black”, as the movie people say.

And,
sorry if this part ruins some great fantasy, but there was no tunnel, or
doorway, or bright light. There was no floating above my body or watching my
own funeral. There was no giant pearly gates (for obvious reasons), nor was
there a trial, a judgment, or a sentence. Just dark and quiet for a while, then
I woke up here. Not in my apartment, though. I woke up under an overpass
outside of town. I had to walk for what seemed like forever and the whole time
I was thinking “who in the fuck lets a dying girl fall asleep outside on the
side of a road?”

What’s
weird is that I can remember every single detail of some random Saturday when I
was 20 years old, and I can remember every single gift I received for my 30th
birthday. I know that I was 43 years old when I died, but I can’t remember
turning 43. It seems the closer I got to my doom the more my brain started to
purge important details. Either that or I had successfully killed enough brain cells
at that point to be legally retarded.

Once
I reached town I knew I wasn’t in Kansas (or any other state) anymore. There
were huge skyscrapers, and it was all glass, and the heat was intolerable.
Everyone around me looked like they were leaving or on their way to the worst
costume party ever thrown.

I
walked until I was about to buckle from heat stroke (or so I thought... again,
still thinking I’m alive...) that’s when I came upon the gargantuan IP&FW
building. I looked across the street and the opposing glass facade reflected
the entire IP&FW building, so much so that it obscured the reflective
building’s identity. I entered the officious building and was offered
employment, after being told I was dead.

Oh
yeah, and after that, they let me in on that I was naked and issued me a mohair
spa robe infested with body lice.

Funny
enough, they never actually had to tell me where I was. Even the dullest knife
in my mother’s entire baby-proofed kitchen would have figured that one out.

So,
I have no idea how crowded the church was when they laid me to rest. I will
never know if Matt, the guy that once kidnapped me and held me hostage in his
house for three days begging me to marry him showed up. Or my high school
sweetheart Bo, who once took a possession rap for me when we were caught
smoking weed behind the gym and yelled “WAIT FOR ME, DARLING! NO MATTER HOW
LONG IT TAKES!” as they were carting him off to
Juvey
.
He was only there for like twelve hours and when he got out there was a line of
little gangster groupies waiting to suck his dick. So other than the occasional
Christmas card in later years, I never heard from him again. That was the first
of a long line of men in my life who never learned how to turn down strange.

Anyway,
back to the funeral. See, I’m lying in bed, totally nude since the heat is so
oppressive I can’t even stand a sheet on me, and even if the magic closet
provided pajamas who would want to wear them? I don’t care what anyone from
Nevada, or New Mexico, or Florida says...you can’t get used to the heat when
it’s 198 degrees outside. But, lying in bed, naked as a jaybird, covered in
sweat, smack dab in the middle of Hell is NOT the place to start reminiscing
about men, so I had to cut the whole “hall of fame” thinking short. See,
masturbation is not possible down here. I don’t know what they do to us; drug
our food, lobotomize us while we are in the void, or maybe it’s because our
bodies aren’t real...they are just constructs our minds create so that we can
walk around and touch stuff. But some things, you can’t touch... not
effectively anyway.

So,
I spend most evenings waiting for sleep to overcome me by imagining my funeral
one more time. Sometimes it’s in a church, sometimes by the gravesite,
sometimes it’s weird and futuristic and I’m in a spaceship airlock getting
jettisoned into the starry night. Once I imagined a funeral pyre and every
asshole that ever walked out on me was forced to throw his ass on it. Now that
was a great funeral.

In
reality, I’m sure my parents did a quiet service at the local Methodist church,
where they were members and I was not. The ladies auxiliary down at the fire
hall probably made fried chicken and the Methodist women brought cucumbers and
onions, and ambrosia, and green bean casserole. My dad always said that Methodists
believe you can’t get into heaven unless you bring a covered dish. Maybe that
was it, maybe if I’d just shredded a few carrots into some lime
Jello
, I’d be playing poker with St. Peter right now. But I
don’t think it’s really that simple.

I’m
sure my mom cried buckets of tears at the service. Rev. Dawson used his solemn
voice, and told a few stories that sounded very personal, like we were old
buddies. Then he’d tell a few lies, about what a good heart I had, and how much
I loved Jesus, and now I was dancing with angels. My dad might have even shed a
tear at that reference, since it would have reminded him of my 4th grade dance
recital. I was supposed to skip across the stage behind Mary Conway, but Mary
stopped short because she was so nervous she thought she was going to throw up.
So I ran into her and she turned around and was facing me with a greenish look
on her face. I screamed to the top of my lungs “Don’t you dare puke on me
bitch!” My mom was mortified. Mary was so stunned that she turned and ran off
the stage. The principal was scowling while other parents were mumbling under
their breath...and in the middle of it all was my Dad...laughing his ass off.
To this day, every time anyone says anything about not feeling well or dancing,
my dad has the same retort. “Don’t you dare puke on me bitch!” followed by
gales of laughter. Whenever he does that bit, my mom does the “my-husband-is-a-
doofus
” eye roll, which makes her resemble an Armand
Marseille doll.

Linda
and Hank were surely sitting with Mom and Dad. Hank is Linda’s husband, and the
source of every major fight Linda and I have ever had where drugs and alcohol
were not involved. But to be honest, Hank is a nice enough guy and he was
probably very handy to have around, what with all the blubbering and stuff. I
can’t see Hank crying over my death. Not that we didn’t like each other well
enough, but Hank is probably the only person in my life who could see the
bright side to my dying. I don’t think he was dancing on my grave, mind you...
but he probably was not inconsolable either. Linda and I, on the other hand,
have not gone a single day since we were 19-years-old without talking, at least
on the phone. Of course, by now she’s probably used to the fact that I’m gone,
and who knows? Maybe she even has a new best friend. But, on the day of my
funeral, which is every day for me, Linda is still sobbing over my grave and
putting a flower on my casket.

Suddenly,
I get a flash of a face very quickly in my mind. It’s a man. Is he handsome? Is
he angry? Concerned? I try to grab onto it, try to focus in on him, who he is,
but then it’s gone. Like when you hear a car go by and for a split second you
hear their radio blasting a song that you love, and you realize that even
though the car has been passed, for several minutes the song is still going on
in your head. It was weird, like a memory, but not. Like something familiar,
but new. It filled me with a sense of panic and, strangely enough, a pang of
longing. My construct of a heart starts beating faster, and I suddenly have the
urge to either laugh or cry, and I won’t know which until it starts.

Maybe
I should stop thinking now. Since my mind is creating men out of thin air, and
my fake body is obviously reacting, it’s probably best to just try and get some
sleep.

Tonight
there are no happy dreams. Like of Linda and I driving down a highway in her
Mustang, windows down and the radio blaring something that we’d be humiliated
if anyone we knew caught us listening to (read: Air Supply or REO
Speedwagon
). Tonight my dreams were directed by Andy
Warhol— all existential and hard to follow.

There’s
this adorable blond child, a little girl with ringlets, stepping straight out
of a 1940’s casting room. She’s wearing a blue taffeta dress that has a sash
with flowers on it, Blue Bells I think they are called. She’s running away from
me in patent leather Mary
Janes
.  She stops
every few feet to let me catch up, giggling her adorable little girl
giggle.  We are obviously playing a game.

Suddenly
I look to my left and there’s a bush with tiny flowers on it that are exactly
like the ones on the girl’s sash. I walk over to get a closer look, maybe try
and catch the scent of the flowers. Under the bush is a pastel blue egg. But it
doesn’t belong there. It wasn’t put there by the bird who laid it. It’s an
Easter egg! We are at an Easter Egg Hunt! I look for the little girl and now
she’s carrying a basket with several other colored eggs in it. “Look” I say,
“Here’s one!”

She
bounces over and picks it up, placing it gently in her basket. Then she looks
at me and gives me the cutest little kid scowl and says “Stop helping me!” I
laugh and say “Okay, I’m sorry.”

Suddenly,
we are in the hospital where I passed away. I feel the heavy starched sheets
under my hands, and I smell that horrible antiseptic hospital smell. She is by
my bed, still in her Easter dress. She looks at me and says, “Answer the phone,
Louise.”

“What
phone?” I respond groggily

Now
she’s making a phone noise.

“What?”
I’m confused.

Every
time she opens her mouth now, it rings like an antique phone.

I
open my eyes and realize I’ve been dreaming. I also suddenly discover that my
face is wet. Why was I crying in my sleep? I try to remember, to hold onto the
image of the sweet little girl, but it’s so hard to keep anything in my head
with that incessant ringing. The dream begins to fade away, and I try to
mentally chase it, but...