Heaven or Hell

by Roni Teson

  Oddly enough, during that week for those few days, for brief spells here and there I had moments of clarity. I was so clearheaded that I knew exactly what to save and put aside for Teresa. I believe to some extent I was guided or bossed around by Marion. I didn’t hear her voice again, for a while, but I believe she was working inside of me. Here I was out of my mind, falling down drunk, and then for a while I pulled it together, getting the house in order simply to lose it.

  I wasn’t completely finished when they came for the house, but I was definitely intoxicated. As sick as it sounds, I thought I’d hit pay dirt when I found some cash in one of the dresser drawers in the master bedroom. We bought a bunch of whiskey and beer, enough to last throughout the ordeal of sifting through my dead wife’s things. Vinnie was with me at the time—he had a beater of a pickup truck. I remember when we made our last pass from the house to the storage unit. We’d loaded up his truck and we were backing out of the driveway when some suits showed up with the sheriff.

  Vinnie freaked when he saw the official car, and what he called “the Man.” But they weren’t there to bug us in the least. I told him they only wanted the house. I kept telling him that, but he refused to stop. We drove off with what became our final load, and I never returned. I did, however, go back to the storage area many times. In fact, I lived in it—off and on for several years.

  After Vinnie dropped me off with the load of stuff and what was left of my booze, I put the key to the unit on a chain around my neck. I carried my suspended driver’s license and any dollar cash I had in the bottom of my shoes. My change was put in a small bag I tied to my belt loop and kept inside my pants. Oh yeah, I was good at being homeless.

  When I first went to stay in our house, I had to throw out the clothes I was wearing at the time. My goodness, I lived with myself for so long I had no idea how smelly I was until I took that cold shower. Because of that experience, afterward, over the years, I made every attempt to keep somewhat clean. You do get used to your own smell and lose track of time going for weeks without a shower, unless you make an effort to think about it. Later on, I often used the water hose on the far end of the storage unit, hidden behind other units and cold as hell … But, it worked. Some of the homeless shelters had showers, it’s true, but too many rules.

  After that, my life, my behavior, didn’t get any better. I was picked up for loitering, being drunk in public, and a few other things. I went to AA meetings off and on and tried to get sober. I’ve woken up in so many godforsaken places, yet somehow I’m still here today.

  Throughout my ordeal, or more specifically my trip to hell with my demons in tow, one thing remained constant—Marion’s voice. My wife was really pissed off at me. Not a little, but a lot. At first I heard words from far away, and it’d be pieces of sentences. She wasn’t whispering at all, it sounded like she’d been yelling from a far away place.

  One night—I think I was under the bridge warming up by some guy’s fire and lit up from some homemade beverage he’d made from potatoes—the voice started in on me, and it sounded like a radio with a broken-down frequency. Marion’s voice was coming through to me in my head and I couldn’t quite get dialed in properly.

  I heard sporadic words, just enough to know what she meant, “… your fault … daughters … sober up … jackass.”

  I asked my friend if he heard the voice and he just laughed. I remember how pissed I got at the noise in my head or near my ears. It was weird. The sound, her voice, was coming at me from around my head, but sometimes in my head. I grabbed that crappy old moonshine and guzzled it down, anything to shut her up.

  My friend laughed more when I told him I thought it was my wife. He said, “Keep drinking, she’ll shut up. If that don’t work, focus on the fire, and maybe you’ll pass out.”

  That was some bad advice, and it’s exactly what I did. Not one of my proudest moments at all. But my gawd, I kept at it, over and over again, and Marion wasn’t nothing if she wasn’t persistent—she kept at me. Eventually the sound waves must have cleared up or gotten better—who knows, maybe all of her practice at communicating had started to pay off. I could hear her clearer and better over the years.

  When I sobered up completely, sometimes for weeks at a time, the voice would go away during the day, but then my wife would haunt me in my dreams.

  It started with these beautiful cloud dreams. My daughter Angela would be floating in the clouds, peaceful and serene. Then Marion’s voice would come in like a bad voiceover in a B-movie. She’d say something like, “… you see what you’ve done to our youngest daughter. Put the booze down and fix the mess you created. This is not what we planned …” She’d go on and on. So I’d wake up and hit the bottle, because I refused to face my life.

  At one point I believed I was schizophrenic, but eventually I learned this was not so. I lived through that voice crap. Oh, she’d stop for a while and then as if the mute button would come off, it’d start up again for days at a time. And at one point, about ten years in, I began talking back to the voice. That worked out well for me when it came to street cred. Those badasses all thought I was nuts and not one of them would come near me. “Shut up, woman. Leave me alone!” I’d yell to my right side and then to my left.

  One time I helped an older woman on the streets. She was shaking real bad and most folks stayed clear of her. I can’t remember her name, or maybe she didn’t tell me, but she was in a real bad state. I helped her with her things and actually walked her to a shelter. I shared some cocktails with her, which seemed to help her shake a little less.

  When her head cleared up she freaked me out. She said I was haunted and the female who was tied to me would never leave me alone until I set right the error of my ways. Man, that was weird. The old woman told me the dreams would never stop and the voice would keep on talking until I fixed it, though she wouldn’t tell me what “it” was. Also, I never told her about the dreams and the voice.

  Then the old lady told me to get away from her. She said she didn’t like my energy and that I was tied to some “bad shit.” She rambled on about how I had a lot to do to make it right with the world. She affected me a little because she knew things that no other living being could’ve known. I had a chill going up my spine for a while after I met that woman, and I never saw her again.

  After that episode I tried to clean up. I went to some meetings and worked hard at staying sober. I was scared. God, I wish I could say at that time I held it together, but I didn’t. Like I said, my demons were some bad boys, and they refused to let me go about my business.

  What’s so odd about this comment now is that as I sit and write about it, I’m not the least bit triggered. Used to be … speaking about it, or thinking about drinking would set me off. Now, the thought of drinking, or smoking crack, or partaking in any substance abuse makes me sick to my stomach. It’s unfortunate that for me to reach this state of being has taken so long. But I am grateful that I have no desire or need to take a sip of alcohol or ingest any other mind-altering substance.

  I’m still not sure how I survived that crazy time. And that is all I want to say on the subject. I’m sorry about those I hurt, because the list is long.

  So, how did I get from street slug, mood-elevator connoisseur to sober saver of the free world? Ha, ha, ha … or LOL as the kids would say these days. Over five years ago I had some heartburn that turned into radiating pain. I walked around for a few days with it and when I couldn’t stand it any longer I went to the hospital.

  The nurses made me wait, and for hours I was doubled up in pain, groaning in the waiting room. I had my own corner because nobody would come anywhere near me. I thought I was going to die—in fact, I wanted to die. I whispered to the voice to take me away, get me the hell out of this world. As you can imagine, the people in the hospital thought I was crazy. I think I heard somebody say that nobody wanted to tend to the crazy homeless guy in the waiting room. But that could’v
e been me being paranoid.

  I know I reeked of street gunk and alcohol. I just wanted a shot to put me down like the tired old sick dog I was. Youth in Asia (I don’t know how to spell it). Put me out of my misery, please. And although I was talking to the voice, she was gone now, in my darkest hour. And it served me right, because I was gone in her darkest hour. But for some reason, as much as that voice drove me crazy over the years, I was less lonely because of it. Strange as it now sounds, it’s true. Probably at some point I drank to hear the voice instead of get rid of it. What a mess I’d become.

  Okay, so I’m doubled over, talking to myself, and stinking up the hospital. I’m ready to die and of all the things that could happen at this moment, a frigging priest somehow approached me, or snuck up on me (and it’s not easy to approach a homeless guy without him noticing unless he’s drunk). I never saw the priest coming at all. I felt a hand on my shoulder and then I see the guy in my face practically. The guy tells me he knows me from some meetings gone by. All I could think was, “frigging priest, get away from me.” And I’ll be damned (probably for sure) if I didn’t say it out loud.

  “Joe, it’s me. Father Benjamin,” he says to me. “You know who I am, from the Washington Street meetings.”

  I don’t remember what happened in that hospital waiting room after that. I woke up about a month of Sundays later and I was cleaned up in a bed with monitors attached everywhere. My gallbladder was gone and I was sober, really sober.

  Father Benjamin told me he raised “Cain” to get me some medical attention. He said I was in the hospital for more than a week before I woke up. I went through withdrawal and I was a real handful for that first week, all in my sleep. I guess I was in like an alcohol- or toxin-induced coma. I don’t know how it works. But I really got cleaned out and that’s when they found the cirrhosis and Hep C. I sure had done a number on this body of mine. And apparently it was touch and go for a while there. They didn’t think I was going to make it.

  You ever wonder what happens when somebody is in a coma or hanging on for dear life? I had an experience, I truly did. I don’t think it was a typical experience, but I had one. It wasn’t good, either. No white light, no beautiful music … But then, I guess at that time I wasn’t ready for anything pretty. For several days, I was told, I appeared to be hallucinating and sometimes, in my sleepy state, I would become hysterical. The nurse, Willa, who also became a friend of mine, told me I was covered in perspiration and ranting about things she didn’t understand. She said the devil was purged from my system that week, and that’s why I never wanted to drink again.

  “Joe, it was like an exorcism. One that you had all on your own,” Willa said to me a few years later.

  At the time, I didn’t talk to her or anyone about what had happened. The experience had been too weird to discuss. I’d heard about people dying and coming back to life, but everything I’d ever heard was positive. The words serene, beautiful, peaceful, and such were always used to describe those experiences—but they wouldn’t be used to talk about what I went through. My experience was dark, dreadful, ugly, reprehensible, and downright terrifying.

  I can’t come up with a timeline for what happened to me, but I can give some kind of order for what I underwent. As I sit and think about this now, I believe I created this episode, or my wife did. To be clear, I sometimes waffle on my understanding of the voice and her involvement. This entire process could all be explained away as hallucinations, and occasionally I feel that way, or I want it to be a hallucination. Yet, in all reality, I have to say it’s not just something that my brain made up—this was real, and it’s a bit scary to look that fact in the eye.

  Imagine a dream in which you’re falling, and you have no control except for at the very end when you wake up. I began my journey in this falling manner. As I said, the timeline is sketchy, but I know that this happened some point after the waiting room fiasco.

  I fall in a fast downward motion where I have no control, and I’m going down, down, down. The falling seems to take forever, but soon I feel as if I’m in a well, or a dark tunnel somewhere. A chill is in the air, not as in cold but as in eerie—in fact, my spine tingles at the thought of this now. I’m still falling downward until the tunnel narrows, and I land hard in some nasty tar-like substance. My senses seem heightened, and this muck smells worse than the gutter, or the street in South Los Angeles.

  I stood up and was ankle deep in real crap.

  I begin wiping the gunk off of me, a natural reaction, right? A low-level hum filled my ears, and I saw figures rising up through the muck. Arms and bodies, people covered in this putrid mess, reaching up to my legs trying to pull me down to suffer the identical fate. I screamed at them—it was like the Night of the Living Dead, a woman’s shape to my left rising up, and arms, a lot of arms pulling and tugging on me.

  I knew then if they pulled me in, I’d drown, and not only be dead forevermore, really dead, but I’d be one of the anonymous dead, suffering in Hell for the life I’d lived, suffering in the sludge, unable to breathe, unable to rise, and with no identity except for my suffering. That would be it, for all eternity, and that’s exactly the definition that I would give today of Hell.

  I didn’t know where these people-like things were coming from, as I was on firm ground, ankle deep in the gunk and standing on something. The zombies rose around me as though they were a part of the floor. I thought if I moved I would land in their sinking, stinking world and never return to the “normal” world—that is, the world in which I had my quite abnormal human existence.

  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t calm. I was scared to death, petrified, frozen in place, about to throw up with the stomach-wrenching fear, and no longer wiping off the muck. My heart raced, and regardless of the chill in the air, I was dripping with sweat. I think I was literally almost scared to death.

  “Get back,” I yelled at the freaky things clinging to my legs as I shook them off. “Back away from me or I’ll kill you.” A funny kind of threat to make in Hell.

  The episode was disgustingly real, but yet I still hoped I’d wake up and see that this event was only a nightmare. It felt as if hours were going by as I kicked off the hands and stood in the one spot I knew was on solid ground—but for how long would it remain that way? I thrust the bodies back and tapped my bare toe on the ground in front of me. Ugh, I finally realized I was standing in that crap with bare feet. Gross, even for someone like me, who’d woken up in some of the vilest circumstances imaginable—in human excrement and garbage of every possible kind.

  I continued to kick and tap my way to the wall, where I had to feel my way around the edges of this circular, clammy, cavelike arrangement. When I looked up in the darkness, I observed the rest of this structure, which appeared to have no ceiling to it—but it did have a smell that’s best described as the bowels of Hell. Maybe that sounds a bit melodramatic, but those words still don’t capture the essence of this odor—and maybe this place really was what the ancients called Hell. Hell, or the pit, was where God threw the rejects, those who refused to turn His way.

  I slowly made my way around the outermost perimeter of this place. The wall was smooth and felt like cement, or something equally cold and solid. I leaned my cheek and my body up against it and inched around it by tapping my toe. I wasn’t going to fall into the pit, wherever the pit might be, to join the bodies from the underworld. My mind wasn’t working very well at that time, but I knew if I fell in with the others, I was lost. I would have no chance at all of redemption, and I was scared. Maybe what my elders had said when I was a child was true—maybe the priests actually had it all right. If I didn’t repent, this was where I was bound to wind up.

  It could’ve taken only minutes, but hours seemed to pass before my hands finally came upon a hinge to a door. I scooted past the hinge and groped around until I discovered the handle to the exit. I panted hard while sweat dripped off of my brow, and my body shook. Th
e feeling of nausea, too, had never left me.

  A low-level hum rang in my ears and the bodies, with extended arms, continued their writhing in the pool of muck. It appeared to be a pool now, with absolutely no floor. Where, then, had I been standing?

  The cylinder we were in was dark, but not pitch black, so I could see the zombies freaking as I stood at the door, as if they didn’t want me to open it. The entire pool was full of them now and they were coming closer to me. I wanted to pray, but my mind hadn’t the habit, and I didn’t know how. A man’s hand grabbed my ankle and the outline of his head lifted from the pool. He looked like he was trying to speak, but I knew the words would be inhuman ones. So I put my foot on his head and shoved him back.

  “Get off,” I yelled.

  This action created a ruckus in the pool of muck, and within seconds I had slimy hands tugging at my bare feet, reaching up my legs, all trying to get a grip but slipping back down. I grabbed the knob on the door, pulled it open, and jumped. No time to check out the other side since the creatures were gaining ground on me and I had to get away. Sure enough, they slipped off and the humming of their cries turned into murmurs. I thought I heard the words “Wait, don’t go …” and “You’ll regret this …” and “You bastard …” as the door shut behind me.

  I landed in another dark but silent space. The area was dry, giving off only a slight stale odor. I took a moment to catch my breath and slap my face to wake myself up, still hoping this was a bad trip or something explainable. However, deep down I knew what I was going through was real enough, because it felt realer than this moment in which I sit here writing.

  For quite some time I stood, unable to move, in the spot where I’d landed. I wiped my feet on the floor, which had the texture of a gravelly type of cement. After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see I stood in an immense vacant area that appeared to have no walls, but only a ceiling, about nine feet above.