I learned about hell as a
kid. It was a word that parents used when they spilled a drink; it was a
modifier they slipped into conversation. It was a benign word that didn’t hold
a lot of menace.
“He had one Hell of a
hangover.”
“I’m going to give him Hell when he gets home.”
“Hell’s bells, Joe, what
the Hell is wrong with you?”
No threat.
Then I met the nuns. The
Sisters. Handmaidens of Our Lord.
And, man, did they
understand Hell. Plus, they practiced all day; suffering, celibate, lonely,
angry, no skin products, wearing uncomfortable clothing, waiting until some
dopey little kid spoke out of turn, laughed out of turn, thought, moved, picked
his nose out of turn. Then they would wail on him and rehearse for their next
life. They communicated the agony of the underworld to us. Some of those women
were clever, too; they had creative minds bubbling under the wimple.
I couldn’t get my head
around the idea of God, the Trinity, The Holy Spirit, which was either a ghost
or a conscious light or something else that was impossible to understand. If we
didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the concept of The Holy Spirit, we
were condemned to Hell. Automatic. It
was in the Bible.
I was seven for Christ’s
sake. Biblical and Christian and religious scholars have been struggling to
figure out this crap for ages, and I was expected to get it all, without
question, by the time I was seven.
The punishment for not
getting it? Hell.
Deep, dark and hot. Not
just hot. Hot was sunburn and the nuns tried convince me that neverending
sunburn times 1,000 was considered a treat, a pleasure, in hell. How about
skinning me alive, over and over for, oh fuck, Eternity? How would you like
that? And remember having a splinter? Well, lost boy, can you conceive of
splinters the size of a pencil wedged under every square inch of your skin,
infected, pus-filled, tormenting and they will be there forever? Eternity.
Barbecued alive. Snakes.
Maniac demons.
Bad smells. They kept
talking about bad smells. I didn’t know sulphur or chemical waste but I knew
the bathroom, the toilet. I think that convinced me, the fear of everlasting
stink. I’d better do what I could to avoid perdition because entering the boys
bathroom during a stomach flu epidemic, that smell, magnified by a million,
tangible and surrounding me, everywhere, for ever, was really something that I
could sense, literally. I imagined the horror of thick, cloying bathroom smells
and gagged. For Eternity.
Which, like the Holy Spirit, was pretty goddamned hard to grasp. I
could barely tell time. I had to look at my feet to figure left from right. So
I had to have an absolute grasp of Eternity, Infinity, and advanced Physics in
order to avoid everlasting, unending bad assed torment.
Most of what frightens
people is bullshit. What makes them anxious, disturbs their peace, is generally
something they’ve learned to be afraid of. None, or little, of it is real. I
learned to be afraid of the same stuff that frightened my family. When I was a
kid I worried about foul balls at baseball games, rattlesnakes, getting locked
in a refrigerator and suffocating, swallowing glass or nails, being torn apart
by animals, other people, burning up, losing a body part, being dragged behind
a bus. Looking back over my life I’ve only been hit by one foul ball; I have
not experienced the rest of the stuff on the list. Most of what I learned in
school and at home was not true. I get that now. It was made up in order to
keep me in line, make me obey, or to scare me into submission. They were
stories and examples and tortures that were the result of generations of
unexamined fear.
I had a hard time
believing. I think everyone did, but we were taught Faith. That is, I was
encouraged to believe things I knew weren’t true. The scary tales of hell,
rattlesnakes and foul balls were made up by frightened people and repeated to
convince kids to stay out of the way, obey, and do what we were told and not to
ask questions.
I don’t know where all the
legends and anecdotes and warnings originated, but the combined fertile
imaginations of the nuns and the dire warnings from parents kept me on edge.
Until I was around eleven.
I’d spent four or five
years looking over my shoulder, watching my language around adults, trying not
to steal, hardly every touching myself in the bathtub and then one day it all
became clear.
When I was eleven years
old I was in the sixth grade at St. Anselm’s school. I sat in the back of the
class at the end of the row, and, for a few weeks, my desk was turned around so
that the rest of the student’s couldn’t see me. I suppose I was being punished,
again, for not maintaining the code of fear and silence.
The nun, Sister Mary
Timothy, a tall woman with a well-trimmed mustache, was blathering on about
God, The Trinity, or some other concept that was losing its grip.
I heard a car
accelerating, fast, loud, and I looked out the window. Some guy with greasy
hair was skidding in a beat up car with a broken windshield around the corner
just outside of the school playground. He bumped up on the curb and a hubcap
bounced off of the tire, rolled along the sidewalk, wobbled into the schoolyard
and came to rest. As the driver was speeding away, another car, a cop car,
black and white with lights flashing, slid around the corner and followed at
increasing speed.
Sister Timothy continued
her lecture, a few of the kids glanced up, momentarily distracted from her
tales of horror and misery.
But I was changed forever.
I’d just had a clear demonstration of the difference between fantasy and
reality.
Sister Tim, Hell,
someone’s concept of obedience and fear, were all fantasy. All bullshit.
But a guy in a car,
probably stolen, trying to out run a cop through a residential neighborhood,
losing a hubcap and disappearing up the road and into my imagination.
Absolutely true. Observable and measurable.
At recess I got out of
class before anyone else, ran through the schoolyard and picked up the hubcap.
It was about eight inches across, dented, and the chrome was scratched. I put
it in my book bag and took it home. Later, when I started smoking, I used is as
an ashtray. It’s gone now, but it sat in the middle of my coffee table for
years, full of cigarette butts, matches and the unsmoked ends of joints.
It was a small monument to
truth.
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