“And of course, one of your finest moments, in the summer of 2003,” Lucifer cackled.
As payback for dumping their leaves into my yard, I had frozen my urine into homemade Popsicles and served it to the neighbors at our annual barbecue. “That’s not that bad,” I pleaded.
“Shmuley,” he said, “you’re not being honest with me. Did you forget that I see all and know all? Those weren’t normal hamburger patties you served them, either. That was truly disgusting.” I had been caught! How could even Satan have known about my hideous deed? What gave me away? “Most people missed it,” he said smugly, “but if you looked closely and paid attention, you’d see that backyard barbecue had just a little bit extra corn.”
Reflecting back on my life, I was certainly no angel. Self-copulating while driving, sentencing an innocent man to death, serving up the neighbors a poo-poo platter, these were not things to be proud of. But deep down I knew I was capable of redemption. If Casey Anthony could get acquitted, I, too, deserved a second chance. Heck, if Michael Vick could make a comeback, so could I. Besides, all I ever did was arrange one little fight between my kid’s guinea pig and the hamster.
I knew somehow, someway, I could find a way out of hell and go back to earth.
Satan’s Rebuttal
From the desk of Arnold Mishkin, Esq.
Dear Mr. Shmuley:
Under the New York Court of Appeals ruling in Satan v. Plume, Blue Rider Press, Shmuley, et al., you are required, where appropriate, to give my client, Satan, a chance to rebut or clarify any misleading and/or erroneous statements in your book so as to avoid the possibility of a libel. Forthwith, please insert this memo from my client, unedited.
Sincerely,
Arnold Mishkin
Attorney at Law
ABA-Certified Specialist
in Wills, Trusts, Divorces,
DUI, and Prenups
First of all let me say I don’t remember meeting anyone named Skip. At least not anyone over ten years old. I have no recollection of any conversation with him nor do I admit he was ever in hell or that somehow he managed to escape. More important, in no event do we ever let anyone look at their file folders.
Having said that, let me take this chance to give his readers a more balanced picture of myself.
Shmuley may call it hell but to me it is another four-letter “h” word—home. Sure, it is filled with some of the most despicable people in history, but here is my point: I didn’t make them. They are in God’s image, not mine. So if John Wayne Gacy is in God’s image, who’s the bad guy? Me or the serial-killing clown in You Know Who’s image?
Think of hell as a place where people come to when the Almighty Supreme Being who actually runs a very restricted country club decides they can’t get into heaven. He only allows in the chosen few; me, come one, come all, come in your pants for all I care. Basically what I am saying is that God is an elitist. I am a populist.
We have no limits on who gets to stay in hell; nor do we make things difficult for our “guests.” And look at our advantages: no cold winters; early dinners; no harp music. Hell is like Florida with fewer dead people.
Now let’s get to me. There are so many inaccuracies I can only address the most egregious. Yeah, look it up, Shmuley, I went to Harvard, not Cornell like you, so fuck you for that snide little comment that I’m illiterate. And by the way, you spelled it wrong on page 37.
Also if I’m the sick one, how come you know what a “bleached starfish” is and I had to look it up? I don’t care what porn stars say, there is no camera shot from that angle that is ever going to be attractive.
And finally . . . at least for now, you are dead wrong, I am happily married. Here is her picture:
The Tour: It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
I must have said those words “find a way out of hell” out loud. Because in a second, Satan said, “What kind of host am I? Let me show you the rest of this place.”
I figured, what the hell.
Satan’s door slammed behind me and I was on my own. Satan had obviously tired of my company so I figured, why not go for a walk and see what I could see.
A few hundred yards away from Satan’s Palace, I could swear I was back in Los Angeles . . . the first five shopping centers were nothing but walk-in plastic surgery clinics, medical marijuana dispensaries, and TCBY shops. Maybe this place wasn’t so bad. There were some self-centered jezebels to look at, some herb to take my mind off all the rest of it, and yogurt to help the buzz. Naturally they were sold out of weed and yogurt. And the lines were thirty million deep at the plastic surgery centers. It really is L.A. except no one tries to sneak across hell’s border.
Once past the shopping centers I was hobbled by a pothole in the road. A large, moving pothole with a bear trap in it. As I lay on the ground and looked up around me, it was like a scene from the Wikipedia page about Charles Dickens. There were belching smokestacks from the factories (unlike the rest of America, hell still has a solid manufacturing base). Diet soda, Crocs, enema bags, and Lunchables are all produced down there. The rough-and-tumble factory workers were just getting off their shift, and they glared as they passed me. Maybe they were annoyed by the fact that the only manual labor my hands had ever seen was compulsive masturbation, but the glares became more menacing.
Not wanting to push my luck, I ducked into an alley. A group of young toughs was huddled around a burning trash can. “We’re in the middle of hell, what do you need a fire for?” I asked. As their brass knuckles speed-bagged my uvula, I began to regret our social interaction. I quickly departed the alley, removing several switchblades that had been lodged in my skull and butt cheek.
The urban decay in hell is horrible. None of the neighborhoods have been gentrified by trust fund hipsters. Which would have made hell even more of a hell. In fact, I was roaming in one of the only seedy neighborhoods left without an artisan gelato shop. The food is awful. The one McDonald’s in hell serves nothing but old McDLTs from the 1980s. Walking a little further down restaurant row, I came across a Soup Plantation. Upon entering I was horrified to discover it was an actual plantation, and I was immediately put to work harvesting soup. If you’ve ever tried to fill a bushel basket with cream of broccoli, you know how difficult it can be. I made a break for it when the foreman went to go check on the mulligatawny section.
It was now almost five p.m. on my first day of being dead. Dusk was starting to settle and the creatures of the night were beginning to stir. Not content to write on walls, graffiti artists had taken to vandalizing passersby. It was a half hour before I realized someone had spray-painted a “Kick me” sign on my back. Although I was relieved to find people had been kicking me more out of obligation than disgust.
Suddenly a seedy guy in a leather jacket approached and tried to sell me drugs. He carried only the hardest, deadliest stuff around. Vioxx, Celebrex, Chantix, it was all there. I declined it all. “You’re not a narc, are you?” he demanded. “Not me,” I responded. “The only time I ever squealed was when I got a Barbie doll for my seventh birthday. She had such pretty hair.” The dealer moved on in search of someone with more comprehensive health coverage.
Not wanting to be caught on the streets after dark, I checked into a nearby youth hostel. There was a group of European tourists who weren’t actually condemned to hell, they were just visiting it on holiday. They could have saved airfare and just gone to Bulgaria.
When dawn broke I made a beeline back toward Satan’s Palace. These streets were too rough and I wanted to be back in the relative safety of familiar ground. Even in hell, you don’t want to get mixed up with the wrong people.
Everyone Is Old in Hell
As I sat down on a park bench outside Satan’s Palace I started to think about my family. Where were they? They all deserved to be in hell. Especially my grandfather.
When my PopPop died, I inherited an old desk from him. Why an unemployed guy who spent WWII huffing paint in a toolshed in Omaha needed a d
esk is beyond me but there it was. And in the drawer of that desk was a giant stack of nude pictures of old flappers. How I loved those photos! They simultaneously got me through and brought about the end of each of my marriages. The pictures were stunning. I never knew that Fanny Brice was in that good shape. If only Streisand had looked that good naked, but only Elliot Gould, James Brolin, and every guy in New York in the ’70s knows for sure.
At first I wondered why PopPop kept those around until I realized, this was how he met my grandma. Yes, there among all the other old nudes was my grandma in the flesh. She definitely looked a lot better than that one time I walked in on her in the bathroom, filing her bunions.
Was this another reason I’m in hell, the fact I rubbed one out while looking at a picture of my Bubbe?
PopPop also left behind a penknife, a collection of original Hardy Boys novels, and a membership card to something called NAMBLA. It must stand for Nice, Amicable Men Believing in Life Affirmation. (I suggest you all look it up. On your office computer. Trust me it’s safe.)
All of a sudden the connection became clear. Bubbe’s best friend Sylvia. Sylvia! She was the receptionist I had seen the day before. Then it dawned on me. In hell, I was meeting face-to-face with some of the dames in those photos who’d occupied so many of my waking hours on earth.
How could I have forgotten her? She was like Mary Pickford and Clara Bow rolled into one. But she hadn’t looked the same. Even though she died at age twenty-seven from a gin rickey overdose, in hell she looked like Methuselah. In fact, the only thing sexually attractive about her was she had no teeth.
It was then I realized—everyone grows old in hell. Even if you died young, soon your body turns into a tired, weather-beaten old husk. Even worse, because of the temperature, every woman has that dried-out wrinkled skin between her breasts like a fifty-two-year-old keno dealer. All that moisturizing was for naught.
When I think back to meeting those old flappers, I realize the only thing flapping was their gums and their breasts. These women had died young and left behind a beautiful corpse, enjoyed one final time by the coroner or mortician’s assistant, but then the passage into hell and time there had aged them. Everyone asks me now what my vision of hell is and I say simply this: it’s a ninety-five-year-old woman dancing the Charleston in the nude, with her nipples on her knees instead of her hands.
My Return to Earth
I must have dozed off on the park bench as I was thinking about all I had seen. In my dream I heard a voice yelling for help. The screaming got louder and louder until I was startled awake. The yelling was coming from Satan’s Palace. Even though I was in hell I wanted to help. I opened the door to the palace and ran toward the sound. It was coming from the inside of Satan’s Throne Room.
As I walked in I could see Larry the attendant anally impaled on his mop handle as if a rogue NYPD cop had roughed him up. He was near death, again. And coming from stall numero uno I heard the cursing.
It was Satan. “Can someone get me some goddamn toilet paper? I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes and I can’t go there with a bumper crop of dingleberries.”
Here was my chance.
I said, “Satan, what’s it worth to you?”
He said, “Shmuley? You’re back?”
I said, “That’s right I’m back. Didn’t really think this one through, did you? God is all knowing, but you’re just a Harvard know-it-all without a roll of Charmin.”
He said, “For my sake, get me a roll of toilet paper, six hundred ply. It’s in the cabinet.”
Six hundred ply! That still has wood chips in it. Again I asked, “And in return?”
He said, “Okay, tomorrow come to my office at seven a.m. sharp and we’ll talk about you returning home.”
If only I had taken that Chester Karrass course advertised in every airline magazine in the world I would have been able to negotiate a better deal. But since I hadn’t, I handed him the toilet paper and agreed to the morning meeting.
I walked back to my room at the motel. When I got there, the key didn’t work. I went to the front desk, where the clerk explained to me that they had to release my room because they’d had a VIP check in.
I asked who.
“Ted Williams’s head,” he said.
Is the joke on those cryogenics people or what? They spend years setting up elaborate trusts to pay for themselves to be frozen for eternity only to find out that all this does is ensure they go straight to the one place where even a minus-453 liquid nitrogen–filled head will eventually melt.
The clerk was kind enough to give me a key so I could retrieve the belongings I had left in the room. When I entered, there was Ted’s dead head.
The head said, “Hey, kid, I’m the greatest fucking hitter who ever lived.”
I said, “I know.”
He said, “Do you want an autograph?”
I immediately started to calculate how much this would be worth if I ever managed to talk Satan into letting me return to earth.
I said, “Would I ever!”
Teddy Ballgame then looked at me and said, “Then find my fucking arms.”
What a total asshole. I gathered my belongings as he continued to scream at me and I left. Since there were no empty rooms at the motel I curled up next to the motel ice maker, although at these temperatures, it was more of a puddle machine.
The next morning I was at Satan’s office bright and early. After an awkward moment with Sylvia the receptionist (somehow she knew what I did to her picture up on earth), I was ushered into the Big Guy’s office.
Satan said, “Sit down. I appreciate what you did for me and I owe you one. What can I do for you?”
I said, “Satan, can you send me back to earth? I have so much to live for. I want to have a catch with Little Timmy and tell him he has a better arm than Ted Williams. I want to go out with the other accountants at my office and reminisce about the time we miscounted the votes so that Gwyneth Paltrow won the Oscar. I want to watch my wife grow old. Just for spite.”
Satan smiled. “It’s already taken care of. It’s been a done deal ever since you stumped me with that question a few days ago, the one where you asked if you flunk the test in hell, do you go to hell? I had never prepared for that and now I have an answer for the next person who flunks the orientation test.”
I said, “And your answer?”
Satan said, “Flunk the test and here is what happens. You take it again. That’s it. Like a driver in L.A., doesn’t matter how many times you crash, eventually you get your license. But Shmuley, since you made me stop and think, you go back to earth. You will be the first and only person to have come to hell and been allowed back.”
I said, “What’s the catch?”
Satan said, “None . . . except you need to carry out three tasks for me back on earth. If you agree, you will go back to your old life.”
I said, “Name them and it’s done.”
He said, “First, I need you to file an extension on my taxes—I’m still looking for receipts. Second, I want you to fill in for me at a seminar scheduled for Pepperdine University in June 2011 where theologians are arguing whether there is hell. I’m scheduled to give the rebuttal to those who say there is no hell and I don’t feel like showing up. Just go and tell people that there is a hell. It will be good publicity for your book.”
I said, “How did you know I planned to write a book?”
Satan said, “Because I am all knowing . . . plus, you’ve been talking in your sleep.”
I was about to ask how he knew I had been talking in my sleep, but the answer was too grotesque to imagine.
Satan then filled me in on the third task: to reveal to humanity the coming apocalypse.
Satan said, “It’s part of the deal, one last chance to avoid Armageddon, yada yada yada.”
I stifled my desire to tell the devil what a dick he is for saying “yada yada yada.” Instead, I agreed and he handed me a piece of paper with his revelations and a warning not to op
en them until I was back on earth. We shook hands and then I blurted out, “How do I get back?”
Satan said, “Put on these ruby red slippers, click your heels three times, and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’”
This was it. A pair of ruby red slippers appeared by my feet. I easily slipped them on as they were my size and this wasn’t the first time I had cross-dressed. I closed my eyes and clicked my heels three times and said, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
When I opened my eyes a second later I was surrounded by Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Buddha, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Zeus, the Great Pumpkin, that Wiccan priestess who works at the Starbucks near my house, and Satan. They were doubled over with laughter.
Satan said to Jesus, “Hey, J man, get this video on YouTube. I bet we get more hits on this than when we tricked Rebecca Black into singing ‘Friday.’ Now get him out of here.”
Jesus approached me, laughing. He put his hand on my shoulder and, in a flash, hell melted away. I was on my way home.
The Journey Home
Ascending back to the living world wasn’t as simple as I thought. It’s very delicate. You can’t go too fast or you get the bends. And you can’t go too slow or you get the runs.
I felt myself getting lighter and lighter on my feet, until I began to float upward. I looked down and saw a sea of condemned souls staring at me with anger and envy. They gossiped among themselves, “Looks like somebody’s sleeping with the boss.”
I could tell by the way Satan watched me that he’d always remember me as the one that got away. Like that special girl in high school who pepper-sprayed you before you could even get to first base.
Hell Is for Real, Too : A Middle-aged Accountant?s Astounding Story of His Trip to Hell and Back (9781101571026) Page 4