Damned (3 page)

What's worse is how my mom even said all her Gaia Earth Mother baloney
in
Vanity Fair
magazine when she was promoting her last movie release.
The magazine took her picture arriving at the Oscars red carpet with my dad
driving them both in a dinky electric car, but really, when nobody's looking
they go everywhere in a leased Gulfstream jet, even if it's just to pick up
their dry cleaning, which they send to have cleaned in France. That one film,
she got nominated for playing a nun who gets bored and unfulfilled, so she
ditches her vows to do prostitution and heroin and have some abortions before
she gets her own top-rated daytime talk show and marries Richard Gere. A total
of nobody went to the film in theatrical release, but the critics creamed all
over it. Critics and movie reviewers really,
really
count on there being
no actual Hell.

My guess is I feel about
The Breakfast Club
the same way my mom
feels about Virginia Woolf. I mean, she had to take Xanax just to read
The
Hours
and still cried for almost a year.

In
Vanity Fair
my mom said the only true evil was how big oil
companies were using global warming to push innocent baby polar bears closer to
extinction. Even worse was she said, "My daughter, Madison, and I have
struggled for years over her tragic childhood obesity." So, yes, I
comprehend the term
passive-aggressive.

Other kids went to Sunday school. I went to Ecology Camp. In Fiji.
Other girls learned to recite the Ten Commandments. I learned to reduce my
carbon footprint. In our Aboriginal Skills workshop,
in Fiji,
we used
certified organically grown, sustainably harvested fair-trade palm fronds to
weave these crappy wallets that everybody threw away. Ecology Camp cost about a
million dollars, but we still all had to share the same filthy bamboo toilet
stick to wipe our butts. Instead of Christmas, we had Earth Day. If there was a
Hell, my mom said you'd go there for wearing fur coats or buying a cream rinse
tested on baby rabbits by escaped Nazi scientists in France. My dad said that
if there was a devil it was Ann Coulter. If there's a mortal sin, my mom says
it's Styrofoam. Most times they'd spout this environmental dogma while walking
around naked with the curtains open so that I wouldn't grow up to become a
little Miss Whorey Vanderwhore.

Sometimes the devil was Big Tobacco. Sometimes, Japanese drift nets.

Even worse, it's not as if we traveled to Ecology Camp aboard sampans,
gently pushed along by the Pacific currents. No, every single kid got there on
a separate private jet, burning through about a gazillion fossil-fuel gallons
of dinosaur juice the likes of which this planet will never see again. Each
child was borne aloft; provisioned with his or her body weight in organic fig
bars and free-trade yogurt snacks sealed within single-use Mylar packaging
designed not to biodegrade before the future date of NEVER, all of this burden
of homesick children and between-meal calories and video gaming systems would
rocket toward Fiji at faster than the speed of SOUND.

What a fat load of good that did... now look at me: dead from a
marijuana overdose and damned to Hell, scratching my cheeks raw in an attempt
to convince my next-door-cell neighbor I suffer from communicable psoriasis.
Surrounded by a million-million stale popcorn balls. On the plus side, in Hell
you're no longer slave to a corporeal self, and this can be a blessing to the
truly fastidious. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you've no more of the
tedious, endless stoking and scrubbing and evacuation of the various holes
required to keep a physical body functional. Should you find yourself in Hell
your cell will feature no toilet nor water nor bed, nor will you miss them. No
one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during
yet another punitive presentation of
The English Patient.

No doubt my mom and dad meant well, but it's really hard to argue with
the fact that I'm trapped within a corroded iron cage boasting a scenic view of
a raging excrement waterfall—actual poop, I mean, not just
The English
Patient
—NOT that I'm complaining. Trust me, the last thing Hell seems to
need, in a coals-to-Newcastle way, is one more complainer.

Yes, I know the word
excrement.
I'm trapped and bored, not brain
damaged.

And it was my parents who told me to act out, a little, and experiment
with recreational drugs.

No, it's not fair, but I guess the worst thing they taught me was to
hope. If you just planted trees and collected litter, they said, then life
would turn out okay. All you had to do was compost your wet garbage and cover
your house roof with solar cells and you'd have nothing to worry about.
Renewable wind energy. Biodiesel. Whales. That's what my parents considered our
spiritual salvation. We'd see approximately a quatrillion Catholics throwing
incense at some plaster statue, or a billion-zillion Muslims all lined up on
their knees and facing New York City, and my dad would say, "Those poor
ignorant bastards..."

It's one thing for my parents to behave all secular humanist and gamble
with their own eternal souls; however, it's altogether
not
all right
that they also gambled with mine: They placed their bets with such
self-righteous bravado, but I'm the one who lost.

We'd see Baptist people on television waving baby dolls impaled on
wooden sticks and dripping with fake ketchup blood in front of some doctor's
clinic, and I really could believe that all religions were way-bat-shit loony.
In contrast, my dad always preached that if I ate enough dietary fiber and
recycled any plastic bottles that had a neck, I'd be fine. If I asked about
Heaven or Hell, my mom gave me a Xanax.

Now—go figure—I'm waiting to get my tongue yanked out and fried in bacon
grease and garlic. Probably demons plan to stub out their cigars in my armpits.

Don't get me wrong. Hell isn't so dreadful, not compared to Ecology
Camp, and especially not compared to junior high school. Call me jaded, but not
much compares to having your legs waxed or getting your navel piercing done at
a mall kiosk. Or bulimia. Not that I'm a totally eating-disordered Miss Slutty
von Slutski.

My biggest gripe is still hope. In hell, hope is a really, really bad
habit, like smoking cigarettes or fingernail biting.

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It's
an addiction to break.

Yes, I know the word
tenacious.
I'm thirteen and disillusioned
and a little lonely, but I'm not simpleminded.

No matter how hard I try to resist the impulse, I keep hoping I'll
still have my first menstruation. I keep hoping I'll grow really big boobs,
like Babette in the adjacent cell. Or reach a hand into my skort pocket and
find a Xanax. I cross my fingers that if a demon dunks me in a vat of boiling
lava I'll get thrown together naked with River Phoenix, and that he'll say I'm
cute and try to kiss me.

The problem is, in Hell there is no hope.

Who Do I Think I Am? In a thousand words... I don't have a clue, but
I'll start by abandoning hope. Please help me, Satan. That would make me so
happy. Help me give up my addiction to hope. Thank you.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I thought I saw you, today, and
waved madly like some fevered groupie to get your attention. Hell continues to
unfold as an interesting, exciting place, and I've begun to learn some
rudimentary demonology so I won't feel like an idiot forever. Really, there's
almost no time to feel homesick.

Today I even made friends with a boy who has dreamy brown eyes.

To
be completely
technical about the matter, time in Hell doesn't consist of days and nights,
only a constant low-light condition accented by the flickering orange glow of
flames, billowing white clouds of steam, and black clouds of smoke. These
elements combine to create a perpetual rustic après-ski atmosphere.

Recognizing that, thank God I wore a self-winding calendar wristwatch.
Sorry, Satan, my mistake, I said the G-word.

To all of you alive people walking around, taking your multivitamins and
busy being Lutheran or getting colonoscopies, you need to invest in a
good-quality, long-lasting wristwatch with day and date functions. Don't count
on getting any cell phone reception in Hell, and don't think for a second
you'll have the forethought to die with your charger cord in hand or even find
yourself locked inside a rusted jail cell with a compatible electrical outlet.
That doesn't mean go buy a Swatch. Swatches equal plastic, and plastic melts in
Hell. Do yourself a big favor and invest in a high-quality leather wristband or
the springy expandable metal kind.

In the event you neglect to equip yourself with an adequate wristwatch,
do NOT scope out some bright, proactive thirteen-year-old chubby girl wearing
low-heeled Bass Weejuns and horn-rimmed eyeglasses and then keep asking her,
"What day is it?" and "What time is it?" The aforementioned
intelligent-albeit-beefy girl will simply feign looking at her watch, then tell
you, "It's five thousand years since the LAST time you asked me
that...."

Yes, I know the word
feign.
I may be a tad annoyed and
defensive, but—no matter how nicely you ask with that wheedling tone in your
voice—I am NOT your little timekeeping servant bitch slave.

And before you make the effort to give up smoking, take note that smoking
cigarettes and cigars is excellent practice for being in Hell.

AND before you make some snide remark, based on my general temperament,
that I must be "riding the cotton pony" or suffering from a
"red-letter day," need I remind you that I am dead, deceased, and
rendered eternally pre-pubescent and therefore immune to the mindless
reproductive biological imperatives that, no doubt, shape every living,
breathing moment of your crummy living, breathing life.

Even now I can hear my mom saying, "Madison, you're dead, so just
calm down."

Increasingly, I'm not sure to which I was more addicted: hope or Xanax.

In the cell next to mine, Babette exhausts her time by examining her
cuticles and buffing her fingernails against the strap of her white shoulder
bag. Anytime she glances in my direction, I make a big show of scratching my
neck and around my eyes. It never seems to occur to Babette that we're dead, so
conditions like psoriasis would be fairly unlikely to continue into the
afterlife; however, when you consider her choice of frosted-white nail varnish,
it's clear that Babette is no one's idea of a scholarship girl. A Cover Girl,
maybe.

Catching my eye, Babette calls over, "What day is this?"

Scratching myself, I callback, "Thursday." Actually, I don't
allow my fingernails to make contact with my skin; what I execute is an
air-guitar equivalent of scratching; otherwise, my face would be raw as
hamburger. The last problem I need is an infection in such dirty, filthy
surroundings.

Squinting her eyes, peering at her fingernail beds, Babette says,
"I love Thursdays...." She fishes a bottle of white nail varnish out
of her fake Coach bag and says, "Thursday feels like Friday, but without
the pressure to get out and have fun. It's like Christmas Eve Eve, you know, December
twenty-third...." Shaking the little bottle of nail varnish, Babette says,
"Thursday is like a really, really good second date, when you still think
that the sex might be okay...."

From another cell, fairly close by, someone begins to scream. Alone in
their cells, other people slump in the classic postures of catatonic stupor,
wearing the soiled costumes of Venetian doges, Napoleonic vivandiers, Maori
headhunters. They've clearly been able to abandon all hope and clutch their
filthy cage bars. They've flailed and thrashed in complete resignation, and now
lie stained, staring, and motionless. The lucky bastards.

Painting her fingernails, Babette asks, "Now... what day is
it?"

My wristwatch says Thursday. "It's Friday," I lie.

"Your skin looks better today," Babette lies in return.

I counterlie, "Your perfume smells so good."

Babette parries my counterlie with, "I think your breasts grew a
little."

That's when I think I see you, Satan. A towering figure steps out of
the darkness, striding down alongside a distant row of cages. At least three
times as tall as any human being cowering within the bars, the figure drags a
forked tail which grows from the base of his spine. His skin sparkles with fish
scales. Great black-leather wings sprout from between his shoulder blades—real
leather, not like Babette's shabby, fake Manolo Blahniks—and thick horns of
bone burst through the scaly surface of his bald pate.