I continued to rise. Now it was as though I was swimming through a thick primordial fog. Hell is no place for asthmatics. It was like the smoke machine had malfunctioned at a Def Leppard reunion show. I was confused, for the Hell AccuWeather that morning had called for the usual, sunny with highs in the mid-nine-thousands.
I began to hear muffled noises. Could there be other people adrift in this fog with me? I reached out to them the only way I knew how. “Marco!” I said. “Polo!” a voice yelled. “Marco!” I responded. It went on like this for some time.
Finally we were close enough that I could make out the vague image of a man. “I’m Skip,” I said.
“Herb,” the silhouette replied. “Where are we?”
“I think we’re in some kind of in-between world, some type of suspended animation,” I answered.
“This fog is dense, but I feel like I’m slowly sinking,” he said.
“Sinking? Uh . . . I’m sure you’re . . . fine. Nothing to worry about. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I was on a corporate retreat in Vegas with the partners from my hedge fund. I’d brought along my mistress, posing as my wife. We were at the craps table, betting people’s subprime mortgages and snorting some coke we found on a teen runaway we’d accidentally run over. Last thing I remember, I felt some chest pains and collapsed.”
“Oh . . . well, I’m sure you’re gonna be fine. Nothing to worry about. Hey, where’d you go?”
“Down here. What gives? Is it me or is it getting a little muggy?”
“Feels okay to me. Hey, whatever you do, try not to use the bathroom. Ever.”
“Why? Use the bathroom where? Hey, is that Paris Hilton’s album I hear? I love this song!”
The voice continued to drift downward, as I kept floating up. I was swimming up through the thick atmosphere. There were lights, shadows, and nebulae all around. It was like the time I mistook a tab of LSD for a Listerine breath strip. That was a rough back-to-school night.
The sights and sounds grew more intense. Images from my past flew all around me. I saw my Bubbe dancing the cancan in her prime, while my PopPop peered at her through a hole in the wall. I saw the time my father told Bill Gates he wouldn’t invest in his crazy idea, that the typewriter was here to stay. I saw my wife telling the doctor, “He’s a wuss when it comes to pain—better crank up the anesthesia.”
Suddenly I realized how precious life was and why I needed to get back home. I needed to be there for my kids. Without me they’d go astray. My daughters would inevitably become porn stars. (That always seemed like such a good thing when it was someone else’s daughters.) My boys would grow up to be distant, unable to engage, and emotionally unavailable. So they would be fine.
As the pull of life drew me closer to the surface, I was overcome with emotion. I began to hear my wife’s voice—“Yes! Yes! Yes, that’s it!” I began to head for the voice. I was almost home. Who else but me could teach my kids about life and love? Who else but me could teach my boys to be upstanding young men? Who else but me could really give it to my wife? But hey, who is that giving it to my wife?
It was then that I realized I was back on earth. The good news was that I was still lying right there on the operating table. Unfortunately, my wife was bent over the operating table, and one of the orderlies was right behind her. Turns out that, as usual, I wasn’t the one causing her to scream like a banshee. I was coming back to life. “Hey, what are you doing? Stop that!” I mumbled as best I could. To the living it sounded like “Snnnz rff sht.”
“Hurry, finish before he comes to!” my wife gasped. Funny, I had just traveled through an ocean of foggy soup, surrounded by ghosts, yet she was the one about to get covered in plasma.
Suddenly I felt a surge of energy. “Stop that!” I yelled and sat upright. In a rage I looked at the orderly. My face was as red as his balls were blue. “Get out!” I commanded. He grabbed some medical lubricant and a few hand towels and was out the door.
My wife cried, “Honey, you can understand, can’t you? I thought you were dead. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind that, you trollop, I’m back now. Back to take charge of this family, back to raise our children, back to make us whole again.”
“Oh, honey!” she said, still naked from the waist down and bent over the table like a tramp. “The kids and I could never have made it without you. No matter how many sugar daddies I slept with.”
She was overcome by the moment. “Honey,” she said coyly, gesturing. “Let’s see if that vasectomy took. Why don’t you head on around back there and finish what that orderly started?”
That’s my wife, always full of spunk. Usually someone else’s.
I wanted to celebrate my return from death with sex so I jumped off the table and zeroed in behind her. I tried not to focus on the glowing red handprints the orderly had left on her ass. Or the fact that after his impressive manhood, she could barely feel me. Yet somehow she was excited to have me back. After just three tries, she actually yelled out the right name; it was a new record. Ninety seconds later I was asleep on the operating table again, snoring in my wife’s ear and drooling down her cheek. I was back.
Hell Time
My first night back among the living, it was time for “the talk.” My wife and I were sitting on the front porch after a romantic dinner at Dave & Buster’s. I had won enough tickets at Skee-Ball to get her the sixteen-inch plush SpongeBob. She wanted the Hello Kitty vibrator.
She asked me about hell. I started to tell her about my three days, but she said I was only dead for three minutes. I explained to her that hell time is different. That a minute on earth is a full day in hell. She got excited; she said, “So in hell you could last during sex for two full days?”
That’s when we started to talk about the elephant in the room. And I don’t mean my office assistant Dolores.
She said, “Could you hear anything we were saying up here when you were down there?”
I said that I had heard everything. She did a spit take, as she often did after oral sex. “I heard you talking to the doctors about my condition. I believe your exact words were ‘Do not resuscitate.’”
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” my wife said.
“I know. I also thought it was tacky that you changed your last name and your Facebook status,” I went on. “Before the operation.”
“I have to be honest,” she said. “While you were gone I was with someone else.”
I said, “I know, the orderly. I woke up and there you were.”
She said, “No, before him; he was rebound sex after the breakup.”
“I was only gone three minutes!” I yelled.
“You didn’t expect me to mourn forever, did you? What about my needs?”
The truth is time is different in hell. It slows to a crawl and the more bored you become, the worse it gets. In hell, the shortest baseball game is seventy-two innings. The announcers actually tell you, “It’s the bottom of the century.”
Each commercial break is four hours long, and there’s no DVR. Even the conversation can slow to an unbearable pace. When people talk it sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher but without all the witty repartee.
If one could take away a lesson from this experience it would be this: you know how they tell you to enjoy every moment while you’re on earth? It’s because in hell there’s way too many moments, and none of them are enjoyable.
Eyewitness to Hell
It wasn’t until a few months after my time in hell that I decided to unburden myself and share my story. But with who? With whom? With who? That to me used to be hell—grammar choices; but now I know what real hell is. And it made me want to share my story with the “undead,” as Satan calls them, those on earth who think hell is being a Clippers season ticket holder. I truly believe I was sent back to let people know, real hell is even worse.
But who to share my story with? That’s when the opportunity presented itself. Little Timmy, my four-year-old, ca
me home from Sunday school and asked, “What is hell like?” Turns out the minister had told him if he didn’t keep quiet about what they just did, Timmy would go to hell himself. I, of course, wanted to ask, “Keep quiet about what?—and do you need to show me on the doll where he touched you?” But since his was the question of an innocent, I decided to answer.
As I began to talk, Timmy interrupted. “Dad,” he said, “let me record this on video and also as a backup on my MP3 in case we ever want to sell a book and profit off this. And maybe contact Blue Rider Press and see if we can cut a deal.”
What a precocious and believable four-year-old! So, after he grabbed his complete audio/video setup, I began to tell him about what I saw.
First I told him that when I left my body, I could look up and see him and his mom in the hospital. “Mommy was giving you Vicodin and Robitussin so she could talk to Ernani the orderly,” I said.
Timmy was astounded. He said, “And just as I was falling asleep she told me Ernani might be ‘a possible new daddy!’”
Timmy then asked if I had met Satan and if he had a first name. I explained to him that Satan has many names: Lucifer, Beelzebub, Prince of Darkness, Fallen Angel, Bernie Madoff, Angel of Darkness, Victor Conte, Murray Fishbein, the Serpent, the Dragon, the Leviathan, Levi Johnston, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, and Steve Bartman.
I then told Little Timmy about sitting on Satan’s lap and, based on what I could see, he was clearly not Jewish.... I also related that in heaven Jesus is surrounded by disciples, Moses by other prophets, and Scientologists by famous actors. In hell, Satan’s minions are Hitler, Bin Laden, and Notorious B.I.G. At least I think it was Biggie; it was a large man who spoke only in rhymes that made fun of Tupac.
Then Little Timmy asked, “What is the worst thing about hell?” But I couldn’t bear to tell the young lad what true hell is. In hell, you wake up every night at two a.m., walk into the adjoining room, and always see the same vision: your parents having sex.
Dying and Dying Again
Spring 2011 marked a year since my hospital stay. I was still feeling some side effects. For some reason I couldn’t fill out my March Madness bracket without clutching my balls. My wife found it disgusting. When I told her the other option involved her clutching my balls, she dropped the subject. At that point I was going through what I call “come-and-go damnation.” Sometimes I had horrible flashbacks of my time in that awful inferno. Sometimes I was just depressed because my bracket fell apart in the first round of the tournament. It was like being President Obama, pre–Bin Laden raid.
On this spring morning I had to run some errands. I needed some jock itch cream, something to reduce scar tissue, and enough beer for that day’s basketball games, roughly a pony keg. I loaded up Timmy into my wife’s car. It was immaculate inside. It’s amazing how clean and fresh a car can seem when you’re not constantly eating and farting in it. The one time when I finally bought a brand-new car, I went out and got a fart-scented air freshener just to feel at home. Meanwhile she actually had a real flower, in a little vase of water, inside the drink holder. I chucked the flower, spit my gum in the vase, and it was time to go.
As I started the ignition I was overcome by a terrible sound. My vision went blurry; my skull pounded as though it was fracturing into a million pieces. Was I headed back to hell? Then I realized it was just Barry Manilow in the CD player.
As we drove, I realized that I had a captive audience. Not “put the lotion in the basket” captive, but captive nonetheless. Good Friday wasn’t far off, so I asked little Timmy, “Do you know what Good Friday is?”
“I sure do,” he said, picking his nose gingerly. “That’s the day Jesus died on the cross!”
“And do you know why Jesus died on the cross?”
“I sure do!” he answered in between boogers.
“Really?” I said. “And who told you?”
“I watched Mel Gibson explaining it on TMZ. He said it was because the Jews killed him.”
In my mind’s eye I saw Mel that fateful night, with a bottle of Jose Cuervo on his lap, brushing past all the police checkpoints on the PCH, knocking over road signs, simplifying fancy words like “anti-Semitism” and “hate mongering” to something a child could understand: “Fucking Jews . . . the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
That moment reminded me of the difference between grown-up and childlike faith. Children look to religion as a source of wonder and hope. Grown-ups use it to get out of a Breathalyzer.
Later that month, Timmy threw me for another loop. Actually two loops, if you count the time he asked what my bottle of strawberry-flavored Astroglide was for. This loop involved life or death. My wife and I have a theory: If you walk in on your spouse taking a dump, you won’t be able to have sex with him or her for at least a month. Regardless of whether there’s a bidet. But we also have another theory, one that involves raising kids. From the time a child first walks until about the first grade, one of the main tasks parents have is to keep their children alive. No live ammunition in the house. Don’t approach the ice cream man if his van has no doors, no windows, and a driver with no teeth. Don’t let him go to work as a mule for the Mexican cartel.
Little Timmy was almost ready for kindergarten, and there was still one thing he couldn’t grasp (besides his junk when he was peeing). He couldn’t grasp that when a human body meets a moving car, bad things happen, and any footage of it will end up on those snuff sites based in the Netherlands.
One day Little Timmy and I had stopped at Sweden Crème for a snack. Sweden Crème is the kind of small-town place that sounds like an erotic massage parlor but, sadly, just sells ice cream. Every town has one. McCook has Bone & Jerry’s, Benklemen has 69 Flavors, and in Holyoke, they’ve got Blew Bunny and Good Hummer.
I bought Little Timmy a huge cone, because, as a parent, I just love when my kid is bouncing off the walls till four a.m. on a sugar high. Timmy took the cone and, faster than you can say “childhood diabetes,” he was flying out the door and across the parking lot, headed right for the street.
“Timmy, stop!” I yelled.
He stopped and I jogged to catch up to him. Then I stopped to catch my breath. God, I was out of shape. Gasping for air, I wheezed, “Son, you can’t do that!”
Just then I saw a little pile of fur in the middle of the street. I seized the moment to teach him a lesson. I pointed to it. “See that? That’s a hairpiece from that old guy who was run down last week. He had shrunk so much in his old age that the driver didn’t see him. And he just kept going. The cops still haven’t caught the guy.”
Timmy gazed quizzically at the ratty old hairpiece blowing up and down. “Was it Mel Gibson who was driving, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, son,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Why I Decided to Share This Story: The Coming Events
The real reason I’m back here was not as I had hoped—to spend time with my kids. The real reason I was allowed to return is to carry out Satan’s third task and act as a prophet here on earth. I’m here to share with humanity what I’ve seen and tell them about what the future will bring. I am here to warn the world about the coming events. I am here to scream from the mountaintops like a yodeler being sodomized by a yeti.
In Colton Burpo’s book, he referenced the coming war that will destroy the earth. Jesus and the angels will come and they will fight the legions of Satan in a battle that will end life as we know it. Some interpret this as Armageddon. Others interpret this as the divorce between Arnold and Maria. As someone who’s been to hell, I am privy to a different future for mankind. Much as there are the seven seals that will be broken, there are seven revelations to tell you about. But please, don’t try to make a hero out of me. I don’t have the sophisticated training of Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the earth on May 21, 2011, then postponed it till October 21. I’m merely a messenger, sent to earth because Satan’s AOL was down.
I hate to paint such a bleak picture
but, to be honest, there’s no hope. No amount of praying to whatever god you believe in can save mankind. Sorry to be a downer but the future is more hopeless than Andy Dick’s acting career.
The Revelations
The coming chaos. The beginning of the end will come when Apple goes bankrupt and everyone is forced to go back to their PC. This causes a crisis as the Windows operating system will be too incomprehensible to those addicted to the streamlined technological crack that are our Apple products. Within weeks there will be anarchy in the street, dogs mating with cats. As always in a time of crisis, people will turn to a new leader. John Hodgman.
The coming of the Antichrist. In 2013, in an effort to curry favor with young people, the Senate will lower the voting age to twelve. The effects of this catastrophic decision manifest themselves almost immediately. Narrowly defeated by Obama at the start of his third term, winner of the video game primary Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino becomes a revolutionary youth leader and brings us one step closer to the end. His 501c GTL camps create a small army of youth-interest voters, aged twelve to seventeen, nicknamed the “Leatherbacks” due to their scorched skin from time in the tanning chambers. Fast-forward to the year 2024, when he throws his support behind the rising GOP female star . . . I have two words for you: President Octomom.
The coming bankruptcy. What plunges us into hell isn’t the subprime mortgage crisis, and it isn’t the Chinese. It’s the response of the World Bank to an e-mail from Nigeria. Thinking they’ve found a way to double their limited resources, they reply to a message from a billionaire named Mr. Prince Dakumbo. Within twenty-four hours, no one in the entire world has any money in their accounts except for three guys in a corrugated tin shack in Lagos who promptly spend all the cash on chips, dip, and seven-thousand-dollar racing stripes and shiny spinning rims for their five-hundred-dollar jeep.
Hell Is for Real, Too : A Middle-aged Accountant?s Astounding Story of His Trip to Hell and Back (9781101571026) Page 5