Heaven or Hell (13 page)

I know I reeked of street gunk and alcohol. I just wanted a shot to put me down like the tired old sick dog I was. Youth in Asia (I don’t know how to spell it). Put me out of my misery, please. And although I was talking to the voice, she was gone now, in my darkest hour. And it served me right, because I was gone in her darkest hour. But for some reason, as much as that voice drove me crazy over the years, I was less lonely because of it. Strange as it now sounds, it’s true. Probably at some point I drank to hear the voice instead of get rid of it. What a mess I’d become.

Okay, so I’m doubled over, talking to myself, and stinking up the hospital. I’m ready to die and of all the things that could happen at this moment, a frigging priest somehow approached me, or snuck up on me (and it’s not easy to approach a homeless guy without him noticing unless he’s drunk). I never saw the priest coming at all. I felt a hand on my shoulder and then I see the guy in my face practically. The guy tells me he knows me from some meetings gone by. All I could think was, “frigging priest, get away from me.” And I’ll be damned (probably for sure) if I didn’t say it out loud.

“Joe, it’s me. Father Benjamin,” he says to me. “You know who I am, from the Washington Street meetings.”

I don’t remember what happened in that hospital waiting room after that. I woke up about a month of Sundays later and I was cleaned up in a bed with monitors attached everywhere. My gallbladder was gone and I was sober, really sober.

Father Benjamin told me he raised “Cain” to get me some medical attention. He said I was in the hospital for more than a week before I woke up. I went through withdrawal and I was a real handful for that first week, all in my sleep. I guess I was in like an alcohol- or toxin-induced coma. I don’t know how it works. But I really got cleaned out and that’s when they found the cirrhosis and Hep C. I sure had done a number on this body of mine. And apparently it was touch and go for a while there. They didn’t think I was going to make it.

You ever wonder what happens when somebody is in a coma or hanging on for dear life? I had an experience, I truly did. I don’t think it was a typical experience, but I had one. It wasn’t good, either. No white light, no beautiful music … But then, I guess at that time I wasn’t ready for anything pretty. For several days, I was told, I appeared to be hallucinating and sometimes, in my sleepy state, I would become hysterical. The nurse, Willa, who also became a friend of mine, told me I was covered in perspiration and ranting about things she didn’t understand. She said the devil was purged from my system that week, and that’s why I never wanted to drink again.

“Joe, it was like an exorcism. One that you had all on your own,” Willa said to me a few years later.

At the time, I didn’t talk to her or anyone about what had happened. The experience had been too weird to discuss. I’d heard about people dying and coming back to life, but everything I’d ever heard was positive. The words serene, beautiful, peaceful, and such were always used to describe those experiences—but they wouldn’t be used to talk about what I went through. My experience was dark, dreadful, ugly, reprehensible, and downright terrifying.

I can’t come up with a timeline for what happened to me, but I can give some kind of order for what I underwent. As I sit and think about this now, I believe I created this episode, or my wife did. To be clear, I sometimes waffle on my understanding of the voice and her involvement. This entire process could all be explained away as hallucinations, and occasionally I feel that way, or I want it to be a hallucination. Yet, in all reality, I have to say it’s not just something that my brain made up—this was real, and it’s a bit scary to look that fact in the eye.

Imagine a dream in which you’re falling, and you have no control except for at the very end when you wake up. I began my journey in this falling manner. As I said, the timeline is sketchy, but I know that this happened some point after the waiting room fiasco.

I fall in a fast downward motion where I have no control, and I’m going down, down, down. The falling seems to take forever, but soon I feel as if I’m in a well, or a dark tunnel somewhere. A chill is in the air, not as in cold but as in eerie—in fact, my spine tingles at the thought of this now. I’m still falling downward until the tunnel narrows, and I land hard in some nasty tar-like substance. My senses seem heightened, and this muck smells worse than the gutter, or the street in South Los Angeles.

I stood up and was ankle deep in real crap.

I begin wiping the gunk off of me, a natural reaction, right? A low-level hum filled my ears, and I saw figures rising up through the muck. Arms and bodies, people covered in this putrid mess, reaching up to my legs trying to pull me down to suffer the identical fate. I screamed at them—it was like the Night of the Living Dead, a woman’s shape to my left rising up, and arms, a lot of arms pulling and tugging on me.

I knew then if they pulled me in, I’d drown, and not only be dead forevermore, really dead, but I’d be one of the anonymous dead, suffering in Hell for the life I’d lived, suffering in the sludge, unable to breathe, unable to rise, and with no identity except for my suffering. That would be it, for all eternity, and that’s exactly the definition that I would give today of Hell.

I didn’t know where these people-like things were coming from, as I was on firm ground, ankle deep in the gunk and standing on something. The zombies rose around me as though they were a part of the floor. I thought if I moved I would land in their sinking, stinking world and never return to the “normal” world—that is, the world in which I had my quite abnormal human existence.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t calm. I was scared to death, petrified, frozen in place, about to throw up with the stomach-wrenching fear, and no longer wiping off the muck. My heart raced, and regardless of the chill in the air, I was dripping with sweat. I think I was literally almost scared to death.

“Get back,” I yelled at the freaky things clinging to my legs as I shook them off. “Back away from me or I’ll kill you.” A funny kind of threat to make in Hell.

The episode was disgustingly real, but yet I still hoped I’d wake up and see that this event was only a nightmare. It felt as if hours were going by as I kicked off the hands and stood in the one spot I knew was on solid ground—but for how long would it remain that way? I thrust the bodies back and tapped my bare toe on the ground in front of me. Ugh, I finally realized I was standing in that crap with bare feet. Gross, even for someone like me, who’d woken up in some of the vilest circumstances imaginable—in human excrement and garbage of every possible kind.

I continued to kick and tap my way to the wall, where I had to feel my way around the edges of this circular, clammy, cavelike arrangement. When I looked up in the darkness, I observed the rest of this structure, which appeared to have no ceiling to it—but it did have a smell that’s best described as the bowels of Hell. Maybe that sounds a bit melodramatic, but those words still don’t capture the essence of this odor—and maybe this place really was what the ancients called Hell. Hell, or the pit, was where God threw the rejects, those who refused to turn His way.

I slowly made my way around the outermost perimeter of this place. The wall was smooth and felt like cement, or something equally cold and solid. I leaned my cheek and my body up against it and inched around it by tapping my toe. I wasn’t going to fall into the pit, wherever the pit might be, to join the bodies from the underworld. My mind wasn’t working very well at that time, but I knew if I fell in with the others, I was lost. I would have no chance at all of redemption, and I was scared. Maybe what my elders had said when I was a child was true—maybe the priests actually had it all right. If I didn’t repent, this was where I was bound to wind up.

It could’ve taken only minutes, but hours seemed to pass before my hands finally came upon a hinge to a door. I scooted past the hinge and groped around until I discovered the handle to the exit. I panted hard while sweat dripped off of my brow, and my body shook. The feeling of nausea, too, had never left me.

A low-level hum rang in my ears and the bodies, with extended arms, continued their writhing in the pool of muck. It appeared to be a pool now, with absolutely no floor. Where, then, had I been standing?

The cylinder we were in was dark, but not pitch black, so I could see the zombies freaking as I stood at the door, as if they didn’t want me to open it. The entire pool was full of them now and they were coming closer to me. I wanted to pray, but my mind hadn’t the habit, and I didn’t know how. A man’s hand grabbed my ankle and the outline of his head lifted from the pool. He looked like he was trying to speak, but I knew the words would be inhuman ones. So I put my foot on his head and shoved him back.

“Get off,” I yelled.

This action created a ruckus in the pool of muck, and within seconds I had slimy hands tugging at my bare feet, reaching up my legs, all trying to get a grip but slipping back down. I grabbed the knob on the door, pulled it open, and jumped. No time to check out the other side since the creatures were gaining ground on me and I had to get away. Sure enough, they slipped off and the humming of their cries turned into murmurs. I thought I heard the words “Wait, don’t go …” and “You’ll regret this …” and “You bastard …” as the door shut behind me.

I landed in another dark but silent space. The area was dry, giving off only a slight stale odor. I took a moment to catch my breath and slap my face to wake myself up, still hoping this was a bad trip or something explainable. However, deep down I knew what I was going through was real enough, because it felt realer than this moment in which I sit here writing.

For quite some time I stood, unable to move, in the spot where I’d landed. I wiped my feet on the floor, which had the texture of a gravelly type of cement. After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see I stood in an immense vacant area that appeared to have no walls, but only a ceiling, about nine feet above.

“Hello. Is anybody there?” I whispered. Yep, I was scared. On the other side, I’d been in terror of those hellish brutes; on this side, I was nearly out of my skull with fear that no one and nothing existed in this place.

I tapped my toe forward and discovered I was on solid ground. In my mind I had two choices: I could stand here and look at this circular structure and do nothing, or I could move ahead and try to work my way out of this damnation. I advanced with caution; although I wasn’t sure what direction might actually be onward. I just wanted to get away from that pit.

“Hello.” I spoke a little louder as I moved out of sight of the zombie tank. “Is anyone out there?”

My voice echoed and that was the only noise I heard. Alone, I walked and walked for miles. Miles. I knew they were miles because the soles of my feet, scraping almost noiselessly against the rough floor, became raw. Eventually, I turned around and the circular structure that held the pit was gone. No more pit. I really had to catch my bearings. A guy could get turned around in this vast space without walls and with absolutely nothing to mark the way. I kept going and quit looking every which way for fear of getting mixed up and heading back to the pit.

Alone, alone, I walked on alone. No matter how loud or how long I screamed for attention, no one was in this barren place to hear my pleas. Was this Hell, too? My suffering in my solitary state, with no human connection, was another sort of Hell. I tried to remember my catechism. What, if anything, came next after a descent into Hell?

I must’ve been at it for many hours, feeling helpless and hopeless, and though I can’t remember doing this—I lay down. I must’ve fallen asleep on that scratchy cement floor because I woke up to a beam of light, but I don’t remember lying down and sleeping. Yep, I was on the ground with dried up muck on me and my cheek lay directly on the rough floor, my belly straight down, and my arms splayed over my head. Like I was doing a frog swim! From the distance, this flicker of light had woken me up. It appeared I’d slept through the night and finally daylight had arrived. I stood up and saw the dry muck on my feet and clothes and knew I’d really been through the pit—it wasn’t a bad dream after all. Oh and yes, I smelled to high heaven—or heaven had nothing to do with how I smelled. The place I was in was stale and not like the pit, but I smelled like the pit.

My lungs hurt, my legs hurt, my head hurt—this was no peaceful warm feeling of life beyond life. Getting up wasn’t easy. I moved slowly, with great caution. My knees clicked and my bones rattled as I stood. Top that off with the quiet and complete aloneness. I hadn’t been alone with myself for quite some time, and although I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in that current situation, it seemed like forever. The only noise I heard was coming from me. And even those sounds were minimal at best—my bare feet, bleeding and sore from the long journey, made little noise on this floor. As I tried to move forward on them again, I felt a red hot pain shoot up from my toes to my ankle.

Gradually, I moved toward the beam of light and I was happy to see it become brighter and brighter as I approached. The light stretched across the horizon like a line when the television used to mess up before cable—many years ago.

As I got closer, I thought I was in a parking structure headed to the ledge, and then I actually saw a ledge. Hooray! I planted my butt on the end of that floor and dangled my bare feet over the side. I looked out at the sky, or what I thought was the bright-blue sky with a small speck of a cloud in the distance. Fresh air touched my cheeks and ruffled my hair, and boy that felt good. My mood shifted, the fear subsided, as I sat in silence. I had no idea what to do next with my body hurting and my feet all blistered. I took a moment to rest and gather my thoughts.

I stared out as the cloud floated in my direction, as if I were watching a movie in slow motion. I sat in silence and enjoyed the fresh air, not really thinking about anything. I noticed the cloud growing slightly larger as it drew near me. Slow as slow could be, it floated close, and it grew larger and larger. At some point I realized the cloud was moving toward me, and I felt as though I was a target for that cloud.