“Morrie, do you think it’s possible to find true love in hell?” I asked him.
“No way,” he replied. “Everyone’s got an ulterior motive in this rotten place. I met a woman here once that I really fell for. She had a body that just wouldn’t quit—except for that time she dropped dead from an aneurism. I thought we had a real connection. Turns out she just thought of me as a piece of meat.”
“Morrie,” I said, “you have the body of a seventy-seven-year-old man who’s been decaying in hell for almost a century.”
“I know, she was sent down here for cannibalism. She wasn’t dating me, she was dry-aging me.”
One day I decided to join Morrie on one of his trips to go mall walking. I met him early in the morning at the Gates of Fire Galleria. He tightened up the Velcro on his Rockports and we were off. Morrie said he originally tried listening to music during his mall walks, but in hell all they give you is a Zune that holds four songs.
“Morrie,” I said as we walked quickly past a Hellshire Farms kiosk, “I feel like we’ve really become good friends. Do you think we’ll stay in touch if one of us ever gets out of this place?”
“Of course not, you idiot. I’ve already filled out my paperwork. If I ever get out of here, I’m getting reincarnated as a toilet seat in a ladies’ room.”
“Wait, you mean people can sometimes be reincarnated?” I asked.
“Yeah, but the waiting list is backed up for a couple millennia. You can speed things up, though, if you’re willing to sleep with the right people.”
“Really? Have you tried it?”
“What do you think this demon on top of me is doing?”
Eventually my dear friend Morrie was granted his voyeuristic reincarnation fantasy. He came back to earth as a toilet seat, where day after day unsuspecting women would plop their bare behinds down upon him in a never-ending procession. Unfortunately it was in the ladies’ room at Club Bounce, the nightclub for BBWs and the men who love them.
Before he went back, Morrie taught me a few other life lessons.
• Your family is always your family. Even down in hell they’ll still be with you. Close to you. Which isn’t as great as it sounds. Most of the family members who get sent down here are those overly touchy uncles.
• Mall walking is useless if you stop at the food court on every lap.
• The Zune really is a piece of shit.
• Respect your elders; listen and learn from them. No one else is going to. Most of the ones down here died of neglect.
• Old men’s ears and noses continue to grow, even in the afterlife.
• Life is not a sprint; it’s more like a marathon. You start out confident and strong. By the very end you’re wheezing, gasping for air, and crapping yourself.
Most Interesting People You’ll Meet in Hell
Morrie wasn’t the only famous person I met in hell. Over the course of my three days, I not only ran into a lot of historical figures and fascinating faces, but there was also a “reservations” section, similar to ones they use at Hertz rent-a-car, with a list of celebrities who were yet to arrive. I don’t mean to frighten anyone, but I took a cell phone picture of the board and, with a few questions to the clerk (Oscar again), found out why they were going to hell.
Mitch Albom. The good news, he gets to spend a whole lot more time with Morrie.
LeBron James. Won’t LeBron be surprised when he finds out God is from Cleveland?
Jon Gosselin. Although in hell they’ll try their best to evict him once they realize he’s worthless, contributes nothing to their society, and refuses to get a job.
Everyone who ever worked on Wall Street. Except, oddly, Bernie Madoff. If televangelists can con their way into heaven, why can’t he?
Senator Lindsey Graham. You know why. Your staff knows why. Even your mom knows why. It’s okay, we don’t care. But Satan and God are both pro gay rights and hate hypocrites.
The Kardashian sisters. Well, just the ugly ones.
Lady Gaga. She was actually destined to get into heaven. But she showed up to the pearly gates in her own modern interpretive angel costume that she said “reinvented the whole afterlife thing.” Jesus finally got to use that new trapdoor he’d installed.
George Hamilton. It’s his chance to get a really great tan.
Tom Brady. You just can’t have three Super Bowl rings, knock up a supermodel, leave her for another supermodel, and still have everyone love and adore you as an American hero. You just can’t. It’s too much. It’s not right.
Kanye West. Got really, really close to heaven but the vanity thing got him. Also, he kept interrupting Saint Peter.
Any Winehouse’s hairdresser. Not Amy, just the person who talked her into that beehive. No wonder she overdosed.
Rick Santorum. It turns out God created man-on-dog sex. And is really mad you are against it.
Antonio, the Saturday morning waiter at Morels in the Palazzo in Vegas. He is so slow, if he’d run Schindler’s list, we’d all be dead. He was last seen telling Lucifer, “I’ll show you what an eternity is.”
Pau Gasol. For committing the sin of sloth (did you watch that series against the Mavs?) and for not even bothering to add the fourth letter to his first name.
Tim Tebow. God will tell him, “You know what? Go try your Little Mr. Perfect act somewhere else.” On the plus side, in hell at least he’ll get some playing time.
David Schwimmer. But good news, Schwimmer, they have dinner theater in hell.
Anyone who’s ever played Angry Birds.
Burt Reynolds’s toupee. Burt gets heaven. But God will say, “I made everything in the universe except that. It looks like a squirrel mated with a Brillo pad.”
Nicolas Cage. He had been guaranteed entrance to heaven after Raising Arizona. By the time he did The Weather Man there was to be at least a little purgatory. But Drive Angry sealed his fate. Sadly, down in hell, even Medusa asks him, “What’s the deal with your hair?”
Satan’s Favorite Jokes
Think of the worst comedy club you’ve ever been to. Now think of the worst comic there. That’s Satan, who appears every night at the Chuckle House in the Hell Airport Marriott. And here are his favorite jokes:A Scotsman, an Englishman, and an Irishman are sitting in a bar in hell, reminiscing about home. “Back in me pub in Glasgow,” brags the Scotsman, “fer every four pints of stout I order, they give me one fer free!” “In me pub in London,” says the Englishman, “I pay fer two pints o’ Guinness and they give me a third one free!”
“That’s nuthin’,” says the Irishman. “In my pub back in Dublin, you walk up to the bar, they give the first pint fer free, the second pint fer free, the third pint fer free—and then they take you upstairs and you have sex for free!” “Is that true?” asks the Scotsman. “Has that really happened to you?” “Well, no,” says the Irishman, “but it happens to me sister all the time!”
A guy is stuck down in hell, talking to Satan. He starts rambling on about how lousy a wife he had back on earth, until Satan finally says, “You know, I don’t understand what you’re complaining about. All the other guys in here only have compliments about your wife.”
An E-flat gets sent down to hell. Satan says, “Sorry, we don’t take minors.”
A woman walks into hell with a duck under her arm. Satan asks, “Where’d you get the pig?”
She says, “That’s not a pig, it’s a duck.”
Satan says, “I was talking to the duck.”
Did you know that heaven and hell are actually right next to each other? They are separated by a big chain-link fence. Well, one day hell was having a big party and it got a little out of hand. God heard the ruckus and arrived to find his fence completely smashed by the wild partyers. He called the devil over and said, “Look, Satan, you have to rebuild this fence.”
Satan agreed. The next day God noticed that the devil had completely rebuilt the fence . . . but it was two feet farther into heaven than before.
“Satan!” Go
d beckoned. “You have to take that fence down and put it back where it belongs!”
“Yeah? What if I don’t?” replied the devil.
“I’ll sue you if I have to,” answered God.
“Sure,” laughed Satan. “Where are you going to find a lawyer?”
A guy is sent down to hell and Satan asks him, “Why is the front of your pants all bloody?”
The guy answers miserably, “My wife caught me with another woman and cut off my penis.”
“Oh, come on,” replies Satan.
The guy says, “If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you.” He proceeds to rifle through his suitcase and pulls out this long thin thing and hands it to Satan.
Satan bends down and looks closely and says, “Why, this is just a cigar.”
The guy looks puzzled and says, “I have it here somewhere,” and proceeds to fumble through his pockets and comes up with another long thin thing, hands it over, and says, “See that?”
Satan inspects it closely and says, “You asshole, that’s just another cigar.”
Now the guy staggers backward and steadies himself, leaning on the wall, and says, “Son of a bitch, I must have smoked it!”
A guy went to use the bathroom in hell. He was in there for a while, yelling, so one of Satan’s minions went to check on him.
“What are you screaming about?” the minion demanded.
“Every time I try to flush the toilet something keeps biting my balls!”
“Well, for starters, try getting off the mop bucket.”
Bill Clinton is in hell. When he gets there the devil greets him and offers him three ways to spend eternity. They go to the first door and the devil shows him Rick Perry hanging from the ceiling with fire under him. Bill says, “Oh, no! That’s not how I want to spend all eternity!” They go to the second door. The devil shows him Rush Limbaugh chained to the wall, being tortured. Bill says, “Oh, no! Not for me!” They go to the third door. Behind it is Ken Starr, chained to the wall, with Monica Lewinsky on her knees giving him a blow job. Bill thinks and decides, “Hmm, looks okay to me. I’ll take it.” The devil then says, “Good. Hey, Monica, you’ve been replaced.”
Ways to Ensure You’re Going to Hell
Turns out there are only three things that get you automatic passage to hell. Everything else is subjective and Satan makes case-by-case decisions, but if you have done any of these three, it’s straight down.
1. Botoxing your eight-year-old.
2. Being a member of the Westboro Baptist Church.
3. Pretending your nine-year-old went to heaven and profiting off his fake story. (Oh—and one other thing—if you are Jennifer Pet-kov and you taunted a terminally ill seven-year-old girl on Facebook, Satan can’t wait.)
Things Worse than Hell
It’s important for everyone here on earth to note that although hell is bad, there are things on earth worse than hell: Internet cat videos. How many times can I watch a kitten crash headlong into a sliding glass door?
Yelp and Citysearch. Everyone’s a critic. Someone sinks their life savings into their lifelong dream of opening a restaurant, only to get crucified online by a college kid who accidentally got cilantro on his chicken curry.
Running out of hot water in the shower before you’re done masturbating.
Having to attend your kid’s elementary school graduation . . . or even worse, your nephew’s.
Square dancing.
Sex with Hugh Hefner.
Nonprofit work.
Epilogue
Hell really changed my life.
Like opera, German cooking, and prison sex, it’s not for everyone. But for one Skip Shmuley, I am not now who I was.
For one thing, while writing this book, I lost my job with the accounting firm. They said I was taking too much time trying to warn the world of the coming apocalypse and not spending enough time on my bean counting. That, plus the missing petty cash. Plus what HR affectionately called the “Christmas party zipper incident.”
But it didn’t matter because I had already decided to quit and devote myself to my new interests....
Like tinkering with my inventions. In fact, I came up with a great one that everyone should have in case they ever end up in Satan’s Throne Room. I call it 20,000,000 Flushes. And trust me, you’ll need more than one.
Like lobbying Congress to outlaw vasectomies. Who cares about the growing anticircumcision movement? Why are men allowing themselves to be routinely browbeaten into undergoing a dangerous, painful, and in my case temporarily fatal operation just so their wives or girlfriends can go off the pill? My friend, when she suggests the vasectomy, remind her why God gave her a mouth to open and a nose simultaneously to breathe with.
And finally, I’ve devoted myself to kids. Not my own, of course, but other people’s kids, foster kids, dozens of them. Do you realize what you can make off these future little criminals?
There is a fortune in government money to be made if you don’t give in to their incessant whining and waste it on food, clothing, and shelter.
So that’s my story. It’s as real and true as the Burpo family story or the other true, factual, not-made-up stories of everyone who has ever gone to heaven and come back.
Because make no mistake—there is a heaven and there is a hell. I’ve been to one and hope to go to the other. And if there is one thing I am sure of in this life, it’s that where you end up does not depend on whether you believe in Jesus, Allah, or the Book of Moses . . . it is solely, one hundred percent dependent on whether you fart in an elevator.
A Final Word from Satan
To: Mankind
From: Me
Re: This dopey book
First of all an apology for letting this schmuck return to earth. It would have been so much easier just to send you all a tweet with my warnings of what lies in store for the wicked. Truthfully I could have summed it up in less than 140 characters.
Here’s the tweet. “Most of you are screwed.”
But call me compassionate; I thought hearing from Skip would have made my warnings seem more real so at least you could prepare. That’s the last time I send a putz to do the work of a tweet . . . as opposed to tweeting my putz.
Anyway, the main point of me having the final word, besides the fact that I get ninety-five percent of Shmuley’s royalties under our deal if I write something, is that I wanted to let you know that I hate anyone who spends half their day worried about “going green.”
Is there anything stupider than that? There’s a great idea, Al Gore. Go fight pollution by flying a private jet around the globe burning up a thousand years’ worth of oxygen, to give a speech telling people to recycle a plastic bottle that gets picked up in a non-smog-checked truck, driven three hundred miles to a coal-powered recycling plant, then cleaned and shipped back so the process can start again. Idiots. It’s why there’s hell. It’s for people who recycle and are smug about it. And it’s also for people who fart like Shmuley. So we’re talking ninety-five percent of New York City.
Bottom line: Shmuley is only half right. True, I hate people with digestive problems. But I really hate people who have holier-than-thou smug attitudes about recycling. And if you are in an elevator bragging about your Prius and the great sustainable organic shrimp you ate last night and you rip a bad one, you might as well just get ready to burn forever.
But for all my complaints about Shmuley, and despite him painting a pretty inaccurate picture of me personally, his depiction of death and what happens postmortem and what you see in hell is one hundred percent on the money. For thousands of years man has speculated on what happens after death. Some say you go to a core place where you see Barry (that’s what I call God; his actual name is Barry Fishbein); others say that since time doesn’t truly exist, death is just a reboot for all probabilities; still others say your brain and body simply cease functioning and there is just eternal nothingness.
Nope. Shmuley gets it. A few of you go to heaven, and the other seven billi
on are going to be spending a lot of time with me. And arriving here soon. Just not in a handbasket. Whatever that is. And whatever a handbasket actually is, I hope it causes global warming.
So I look forward to our meeting. After all, I’ll be seeing most of you soon enough. As for Skip, I have a message for him in the form of an old Irish blessing:
May the road rise up to meet you, especially if you get run over like that old guy who only left a ratty old hairpiece behind.
May the wind always break in some other guy’s elevator.
Hell Is for Real, Too : A Middle-aged Accountant?s Astounding Story of His Trip to Hell and Back (9781101571026) Page 7
