My First Christmas in Hell

I guess I wasn't too surprised when the ambulance I was being carried in swerved precariously to the left, off the interchange. It then made that memorable sharp descent, ferrying me down a cold tunnel below the city. I always knew this place was down here. Somewhere. I actually learned about it way back in Sunday School. Just never realized it was always literally there, just below my feet and yours. I guess we all suspected it was pretty close, but were never really ready to be irreversibly delivered there—as I was, that fateful December.

Like any young child described either as "demonic" or "angelic," I was clueless in my youth that I'd someday be in line to pay this place a visit. And a permanent one, as I was to learn once inside the foul-smelling premises. OK. I guess I should have figured out where I had been dropped-off by the tacky gilded letters over the gate: Abandon all hope those who enter here,  it read. Right. Good one, Dante. Such a big teaser. Trying to put into his anal-retentive cosmology some fourteenth-century obsession with hierarchies for our own spiritual edification.

And I guess he did, actually, creating two worlds which were to encapsulate the ultimate polarity at the terminus of things. Light and dark, good and evil, happy and sad, benevolent and nefarious—literally shit from Shinola. And unlike his beloved Virgil's sweet, obedient Beatrice, hovering above the angels in a perfumed sky, Hell, as it turned out, was to be the lower end of this cosmic enchilada which I would end up in.

But why,  I frantically wondered? Why was Hell ever made or even conceived?  I even asked this upon entering through its somber portals, that cold December night. I asked it politely of the robed attendant, standing below the sign. The officious one with the black clipboard. And not surprisingly, after vetting my name as, in fact listed, even he  wasn't really sure himself of the place's raison de etre!

Throughout my dismal wanderings inside of Hell over these years, I have kept wondering, was the existence of this place simply designed to frighten everyone up there on the streets into some better degree of civility? To get them to more accurately pay their taxes? Become truly monogamous? Be more faithful to their mates? Was it really crafted to give children choices, with the threat of "bad ones" linked to outcomes more virtually real than any slasher video game?

The whole notion of a fetid underworld—a place where "evil" was sent to be punished, just seemed so damned arbitrary to me. Such a pointless attempt to try to eclipse our baser instincts. A nary world to replace them with half-baked dogmas which adherents would only hypocritically cling to for their image sake. The whole notion of where I had been sent just didn't seem to take into account that we all  are such beautifully imperfect creatures, indelibly imbued with a rather faulty genome to begin with. Each of us being irreversibly programmed by many millennia for mere survival.

So there I was, that first of my many Christmases, in the underworld.

I had only recently been inexplicably delivered to the system's ugly nadir—Hell  to all you religious sorts who know of it by that name. I honestly can't say I didn't half-expect it was coming, though. I realize now I was at times no angel in my life. But what can you say about Mr. A. Dante's view of this place—after all, he being an egocentric male poet, describing the face of God floating in the ultra-stratosphere as . . . a red rose? Come on, pal. That's it? And . . . Him? Why not Her?

Looking back from Hell now, there was a time on Earth when I did enjoy reading of Alighieri Dante's descending rooms of Inferno. How he wrongly envisioned the essence of this place—seeing it as an inverted pyramid of descending rooms, delineating sinners in a downward order, the lowest point being a chamber filled by those of the worst order. In Dante's mind, and possibly his own times, that lowest room was inhabited by . . . "priests who lie." What?  So, what about all the mother-rapist and father-stabbers of today, the pedophiles who go un-caught or punished—still alive and well, up there where you all dwell? Those fellow creatures of ours who, spreading their poison, infect not just a moment  in a young life, but a lifetime.  In my hellacious travels, I have just not seen enough of those sorts down here as neighbors. So I say to you—so much for any real justice in this skewed cosmological system. A world I had found myself in, as that first Christmas Day approached.

It was a surprisingly warm evening down here in Hell when that initial Christmas Eve came round for me. It found us all huddling together, and looking up—not at a scintillating sky full of stars, but a ceiling of dark earth. Yet, there was this odd comfort, surprisingly acknowledged in us all which permeated through the dark chasms that night and into the next day. Perhaps it grew out of nothing more than our lasting recollections of what we once shared with those we once loved. And no doubt the eternal memories of those who truly loved us.

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