Raising Hell

by Norman Spinrad

  The factory was surrounded by rolls of razor wire, and a single gate flanked by two more goons armed with pitchforks was the only way in. His own red goon kicked DiAngelo through it and then through what seemed to be the only entrance to the building itself, a cast-iron bank-vault door without the locking mechanism, and into a darkness that smelled like a flooded and long-abandoned subway station, then down onto a moist stone staircase, where he immediately lost his balance and did not recover until he landed at the bottom, shrieking in pain and terror.

  Some kind of cellar boiler room, as big as the entire footprint of the building or actually somehow even bigger. Naked steel beams and pillars supporting the claustrophobically low bare concrete ceiling. A pile of coal all the way along one wall, with more of it continuously rumbling down a series of coal chutes and filling the air with choking black dust in the process. The opposing wall was a black iron curved tube, like the boiler belly of an enormous steam locomotive, atop a long line of open fire-box gates, the red glows of which within were the only lighting.

  Naked men with shovels, cloaked only in robes of soot, scuttled like crabs back and forth between the coal pile and the fire-box gates, feeding the flames, which flared and fell, flared and fell, with every shovelful. Each fire-box gate was presided over by its own flame-red demon, and more of Satan’s goons sat atop the coal pile.

  It was, of course, as hot as hell.

  The closest demon climbed down, yanked Dirty Jimmy to his feet by his hair, and handed him a heavy shovel which arrived from nowhere, then prodded him with his pitchfork over to the line of fire-box gates, where a new gate magically appeared between two others where their stokers were hard at work.

  “Get to work!” his demon ordered, reinforcing it with a gentle prod of his pitchfork.

  The stoker to the right shoveled his load into his fire-box. When it flared up, Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo could recognize who it was even beneath the coal dust coating.

  It was none other than the onetime bad-ass president of the United Mine Workers union, John L. Lewis.

  The stoker on DiAngelo’s left did likewise.

  It was Jimmy Hoffa.

  Mark Twain, Lawrence Cuttler once read, had built a primitive signature machine to do this coolie labor; and the President of the United States surely must have used a modern version of the same to sign all those pieces of legislation, appointment notices, findings, letters, and so forth, for otherwise he would not have had time to do anything but sign his name 24/7.

  Cuttler knew this all too well, for that was what he himself had been condemned to do—for all eternity.

  Not his signature, Lawrence Warren Cuttler, but the official signature of Satan, “The Devil, Chief, and Only Executive Officer of Hell.”

  Over, and over, and over again. On parchment. With a vulture feather quill pen. Sitting atop a backless wooden stool, hunched over a battered wooden desk in a dank, doorless, and windowless stone cell about the size of a pay toilet lit by a naked fluorescent tube on the ceiling.

  Above his desk a cast-iron chute spat out documents at a rate that Cuttler estimated as one every forty-five seconds. At his feet was another chute leading down to who-knew-where-or-cared. He thus had forty-five seconds to sign the official signature of the Devil and drop the signed document down the lower chute before the next one was dropped on his desk. Behind him stood a demon with a pitchfork who gave him a taser-jolt every time a document landed on his desk before he had signed and delivered the one before.

  Time had no meaning because there was nothing to measure it by. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He didn’t even shit or piss. Nor did the demon behind him, as far as he could tell.

  Cuttler had read news stories about the hired lackeys that had signed and approved dodgy mortgage contracts as fast as they could, and indeed he himself had hired firms who hired firms who hired them to do it. But they worked eight-hour days five days a week with forty-five minutes for lunch and a ten-minute toilet break every two hours. Or so at least he was told, having never met one of them or verified the working rules.

  Cuttler estimated that he was required to sign at least twice as fast with no days or hours off, or breaks of any kind at all, and when he inquired of his demon supervisor as to what he was actually signing in the name of the Devil, all he got was another pitchfork jolt and “None of your business, and none of mine. You’re just his scribe and I’m just his muscle.”

  For want of any other thought to fill his otherwise totally vacant mind, Cuttler at length decided to try to learn what he was signing piecemeal by reading a fleeting sentence here and there while signing. He finally put the pieces of the puzzle together when he began to notice that they came down the chute already signed by diverse hands other than that of the Devil.

  In blood.

  They were contracts.

  Seven-year contracts.

  The famous satanic seven-year contracts.

  They were strangely familiar. He had never signed any such thing himself but he had certainly trafficked in something rather similar, however indirectly, and done quite handsomely at it too.

  Balloon mortgages. Five years of interest only. Seven years of Satan’s services.

  After which payment in full of the principal became due.

  How long had he been here shoveling coal in Hell?

  Since nothing ever changed and he never did anything else, it was impossible for Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo, coated with enough black soot outside and inside his lungs as well to pass as one of John L’s coal miners, to tell. But Lewis and Hoffa had died long before he had, so they had already been down here feeding the hellfire furnace for decades before he had arrived. This was not exactly encouraging.

  The only means of communication among the damned in this fucking boiler room was by timing their dashes back and forth between the coal pile and the firebox gates so that adjacent shovelers could exchange a few words as their paths crossed without arousing the ire or the suspicion of Satan’s demon goons, and by this method some information could be passed up and down the line.

  This circle of Hell seemed to be reserved for bad-assed and hardnosed labor leaders. Jimmy Hoffa, who had made the Teamsters a power to be reckoned with even by the likes of Tricky Dick Nixon before the Mafia decided he was getting too big for his boots and fitted him with a new concrete pair. John L. Lewis, whose long struggle to organize the coal miners included exchanges of gunfire with the company goon squads. Harry Bridges, whose International Longshoremen’s Association was so notoriously effective that the powers-that-be tried to deport him by branding him a Communist. George Meany, who had lived up to his name as longtime president of the AFL. Mike Quill, head of the New York City Transit Workers, whose favorite tactic was having contracts expire at midnight on New Year’s Eve so that millions of drunks would have to walk home or fight for cabs unless the city caved. Jerry Wurf, president of the State, County and Municipal Workers’ Union, most of whose chapters were legally forbidden to strike, but who regularly struck anyway, and whose first demand was always that all legal sanctions would have to be waived before he would even begin to negotiate anything else.

  This might be Hell, but Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo deemed it an honor to be damned among such company, and did indeed believe that he deserved it.

  Unlike these guys, he’d had to do his organizing when their mighty unions and most if not all of the others had long since been beaten to a pulp by decades of successful union-busting—when the American labor movement as a whole was up to its knees in the tar pits.

  One of the most favored union-busting strategies had always been to replace striking workers with scabs, and when the corporate goons could beat up the union goons it generally worked; when the union goons were tougher or more numerous, it usually didn’t.

  But in the twilight years of the American labor movement—when any government protection, legal or political, had long since faded away, manufacturing jobs were the country’s major export to the Third World, and
massive unemployment made competition for jobs a pathetic zero-sum behavioral sink—even the word “scab” had gone the way of the “N-Word.”

  Scabs were now officially “replacement workers” according to the press and the political life forms. Worse still, the corporate owners no longer bothered to wait for strikes to replace their workers; and worse even than that, they didn’t actually hire these scabrous replacement workers but contracted with so-called temporary employment agencies to supply them—much as plantation owners in the postbellum South had rented chain gangs from the local sheriff—thus avoiding such annoying expenses as the payroll tax, health care benefits, or anything above the legal minimum wage. And the existence of the great desperate army of the unemployed made it as easy and American as apple pie to get away with it.

  But as the saying goes, or anyway Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo’s version, If they throw you lemons, make lemonade; if they throw shit, make a shit pie and throw it back in their faces. Thus his National Union of Temporary Substitutes (NUTS). If the corporate bosses hire armies of scabs and call them “replacement workers” or just “temps”—organize the temps!

  Easier said than done and not a job for squeamish pussies for sure. But then unionizing the bottom rank of the labor pool had always been tough—the bottom rank were always the most desperate and fearful of making waves, which was why they were the bottom rank.

  First you have to work among the unemployed and recruit them as goons by promising them jobs when the battle is won. Then you pick out the weakest sister of the replacement worker suppliers (temp agencies) and announce a strike by NUTS before the union even has any working members, set up picket lines, and get tough with whoever crosses them. Then you negotiate a sweetheart contract with the agency by telling them that their stronger competition will be struck next, thus giving them an opportunity to steal away market share. The next stage goes a little easier because the wage-slaves see that their co-temps at the first target have indeed secured a better deal than they’re getting, thanks to the union.

  True, NUTS was therefore weakening unions by aiding the temp agencies supplying scabs, uh, permanent temporary replacements; but the unions were shrinking toward the vanishing point anyway. The way Jimmy DiAngelo saw it, if the American labor union movement as a whole was going to live long and prosper, or indeed survive at all, NUTS was the vanguard walking point through the corporate jungle. Thus he should have been welcomed in Labor Leader Hell as the honored successor to Hoffa, and Lewis, and Meany, and Bridges, all the way back to Gompers, and Dubinsky, and even fuckin’ Spartacus, for Christ’s sake!

  Unfortunately and unjustly, down here in Hell, as upstairs in the battleground, they just didn’t see Dirty Jimmy that way, and the spastic traffic along the line was enough to make it clear. The word from the bird was that he was a turd.

  The arena floor of what Lucifer thought of as “Dante Stadium” was presently a hip-deep pool of bovine dung, where horse and camel traders, used car salesmen, stockbrokers, pimps, advertising executives, and various other previous purveyors of merely metaphorical bullshit were damned to eternally desperate and futile attempts to peddle spavined nags, gold-painted bricks, counterfeit Confederate money, and their virgin sisters to one another, but unable to spew anything out of their flannel mouths save more of the real thing.

  Lucifer sat in the Emperor’s box disregarding the sorry spectacle as he stared disconsolately at the Big Scoreboard. He was winning the game, or at least under the rules that had been mandated by the Opponent, and he didn’t like it. But then again, he was the Devil, he too was in Hell, and under the rules of engagement, he wasn’t supposed to like anything.

  Lucifer not being steeped in mathematical lore, the Big Board was set up to display the numbers and their trend in visual terms that anyone could understand. It clocked the total number of souls in Heaven or in Hell with a real-time numerical display, plus an animated pie chart showing the changing proportions in demonic red and cloud-speckled sky blue, and added a graphic chart of their rates of increase in curves of the same colors against time and total population axes.

  The number of souls in Heaven and Hell combined was up there in the scores of billions, being the sum total of all the humans who had ever lived and died, and both had been clicking upward with ever-increasing acceleration as the human population exploded. But of late, the soul count for Hell was outpacing the count for Heaven, and at a faster and faster rate. The animated pie chart showed the same thing, the red region squeezing the blue one into a smaller and smaller slice. On the graphic display, the red curve was soaring upwards along the time axis towards the vertical, while the blue was plummeting toward extinction by the end of the next millennium at the latest if the trends continued.

  Lucifer was facing a population explosion while Heaven was attracting fewer and fewer immigrants. This was hardly surprising given the last couple of centuries of human history, with the mass slaughters of the twentieth and the economic disasters and injustices of the twenty-first. Hard and unjust times encouraged a lot more evildoing than high-minded saintly virtue, and the seven-year service contracts, which had once seemed like such a good idea, were outselling promises of postmortem salvation like balloon mortgages at the height of the last real estate bubble or Tulip futures a few centuries back in Holland at the peak of the frenzy.

  Nothing exceeds like excess.

  And while Hell itself, being entirely virtual, was infinitely expandable, the demonic workforce, consisting as it did of transformed fallen angels, was not, and they were all already on duty 24/7. A labor shortage loomed. Lucifer’s relationship with the CEO of Heaven being what it was, he knew he could not get the Great I Am to send more angels down—and even requesting more help would be a species of prayer, and he would be damned if he’d do that, if he wasn’t damned already.

  “—up yours—”

  “—so’s your mother—”

  “—you’re another—”

  Needless to say, Jimmy DiAngelo had never imagined he would be trading insults with Jimmy Hoffa in Hell as their paths crossed while dashing back and forth between the coal pile and their fire-box gates. And even if he had imagined meeting Hoffa in Hell, he would never have thought that Hoffa would despise him and his National Union of Temporary Substitutes.

  Okay, Gompers or Meany maybe, or Walter Reuther, those guys had run unions of unions, and DiAngelo could see how they might see NUTS as “the National Union of Temporary Scabs” violating labor movement solidarity. But the Teamsters? Jimmy Hoffa?

  Where did Hoffa come off looking down his fuckin’ nose at Jimmy DiAngelo? Weren’t they brothers under the skin? Tough guys? Fellow outlaws? Hoffa, who had played hardball with the Mafia, not against them? The Teamsters, who had handed membership pension plan money to Dick Nixon?

  Not that DiAngelo held any of that against him. He had admired Hoffa. Hoffa had been a role model. Hoffa understood that the real job of a union leader was to serve the self-interest of his own membership. Period. By whatever means necessary. By whatever means possible. Whatever the press, and other union leaders, and the politicians including Bobby fuckin’ Kennedy said about Hoffa, his truck drivers loved him. Because he had raised them up. Because they knew he was willing to get his hands dirty fighting for them. Likewise the membership of NUTS and Jimmy DiAngelo.

  Dirty Jimmy Hoffa and Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo.

  “—brothers!—”

  “—union of scabs—”

  “—look who’s talking!—”

  “—whaddya mean, DiAngelo?—”

  “—raided every union you could—”

  It was true. Hoffa’s Teamsters had reached or tried to reach far beyond truck drivers, trying to absorb longshoremen, construction workers, bakers, whatever—

  “—even organized dirty cops, now didn’tya, Hoffa—”

  “—power in membership numbers—”

  “—including prison guards? maybe even while you were inna joint—?”

  That brought Ho
ffa up short in the act of loading a shovelful of coal. “Why not, DiAngelo?” he snarled, just before it got him a jolt from the nearest demon’s pitchfork.

  “—would even organize these bastards too. Whatsa difference, right, Hoffa—?”

  His own words were enough to bring Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo up short and earn him a demonic electronic poke in the ass.

  “Why not, Hoffa?” he grunted as they double timed across the boiler room toward their fire-box gates. Seven foot tall red demons they might be, but jobwise, what were Satan’s goons but cops and prison guards? And near as Jimmy DiAngelo could tell, their working conditions were even worse than those of the lettuce pickers before César Chávez organized them. Seven-day weeks. Twenty-four-hour days. No lunch break. No toilet breaks at all. What was their wage? Were they even paid?

  “Easy pickings, Hoffa,” DiAngelo told him as they fed the furnace together right under the noses of two of the prospective membership. “You ever seen workers laboring under worse conditions than these guys?”

  “You nuts, DiAngelo?”

  “Ex-president thereof,” Dirty Jimmy told him as they dashed back to the coal pile. “NUTS with great big capital letters.”

  “Unionize Hell?”

  “They said you couldn’t organize the temps …”

  “Scabs, DiAngelo!”

  “Whatever you wanna call ’em, I gave ’em a union, didn’t I?” Dirty Jimmy told him as they filled their shovels. “Otherwise would I even be here?”

  “Dunno …”

  “Got anything better t’do down here, Hoffa—?”

  Dante had placed his silly fictional version of the Devil in a lake of ice at the bottom of a Hell that was an immense terraced pit; the real CEO of the real Hell thought that quite ridiculous. But it had given Lucifer the idea for the Control Room. He wasn’t about to plant his ass in a frozen lake, but observing and directing the proceedings from the bottom of a terraced 360-degree surround of monitor-like images of his various virtual tortures, like a television director broadcasting a reality show called Damned in Hell, made convenient sense.