Episode One: Hell

So here’s the thing—I’ll try anything once. That is, after all, how I ended up strangling a dachshund with my bare hands when I was fourteen; and that’s why I held my mouth open under the oak tree in my back yard when I was fifteen until a bird pooped in it (which, for the record, took nine hours and twelve minutes); and that’s how I became a heroin addict for three years (or four, or maybe eight, it’s all kind of a blur now); and if I weren’t willing to try new things, then how would I have ever found out that I actually like strangling dachshunds, eating bird poop and shooting up heroin?

As I always say, an addictive personality is a blessing from Jesus.

So anyway, that’s why I went to this bar called the Hellhole over in Boystown the other night. I guess it was an OK kind of place; except it was kind of dark and loud—they were playing Haddaway’s What Is Love loud enough to feel through the soles of my boots—and the ratio of men to women was about 50 to 1, but it was only about 2 AM, so it was still early.

And I didn’t think it was cold enough outside for everyone to be wearing leather pants, and leather vests, and leather jackets, and fingerless leather gloves, and studded leather wristbands and leather belts, and leather chaps and biker boots, and peaked leather military-style hats with patches that said BEAR PATROL, and leather manhood-cupping pouches; so I counted myself fortunate that I’d thrown on my leather trench-coat, since I’m always cold anyway.

I went to talk to the one woman I saw, who was sitting at the bar, which was decorated with hanging chains and manacles. The bartender wore just a couple of leather straps that crisscrossed his chest, meeting at a stainless steel ring between his pecs, along with leather shorts and a full leather hood with open zippers at his mouth and eyes.

“I love Jesus and America too, the greatest nation on God’s green Earth,” I said to the woman as I slid onto the stool next to her. That line never failed to break the ice.

“Say what?” she said. Her Adam’s apple bobbed hypnotically in the bar’s strobe lights.

“Do you love Jesus and America?”

She rolled her eyes—and I swear her eyelashes looked at least two inches long—then picked up her drink and walked away, disappearing through a wide doorway in the back of the bar. The bartender wandered over.

“What’s back there?” I said. I had to shout to make myself heard, my mouth so close to his hood that I smelled leather.

He shrugged. “Hell,” he said.

So I went, because, like I said, I’ll try anything once.

ABANDON ALL HYPE was scrawled above the doorway in glowing green paint. I made a mental note to mention the misspelling to the bartender on my way out.

The entire room—almost as large as the bar out front—squirmed with naked bodies, dozens of men groping one another, standing, lying on the floor, kneeling on all-fours and twisted into positions as pornographic as a Satanic orgy of Sodomites playing pagan Twister, where the only instruction on the spinner said “Go forth and sin!”

The Propellerheads’ Dive! shook all the speakers in the room. Shadows seemed to reach out and touch me as I entered, as if hands grabbed, pinched and stroked my flesh. The air smelled of scented massage oils and sweaty leather and the virile juices of fifty blasphemous men, or perhaps the blasphemous juices of fifty virile men.

I took my clothes off when I realized that the words over the doorway hadn’t been misspelled, but referred instead to the truth of nudity, and the hype of raiment. And also because, as I said, I’ll try anything once.

At the back of the room, in a small alcove hardly bigger than a niche for a statue, I found a man of slim build, but with a nicely cut six-pack and well-muscled limbs, naked, tanned, and his body shaved. His wrists and ankles were strapped to a beautifully varnished blond-oak cross. He had brown hair with just a hint of gray at the temples, an impeccably trimmed beard and a penis that looked every bit as big as Jerry Cooney’s fist.

He saw me staring at him, and he gazed heavenward with his wide, dark, limpid, dilated eyes, apparently in the midst of experiencing blissful visions of the other side. Or buzzed. I often find it difficult to distinguish between the two states.

I looked up as well, and saw a violet wand, along with a large selection of other implements of pagan sexuality, hanging on the wall around his head, like a steel and leather halo.

So I turned on the violet wand and jabbed him in the testicles with a searing jolt of electricity, and he screamed, and I got hard.

And that is exactly why I’m willing to try new things.

“Praise the Lord!” I said, because hard-ons too are a blessing from Jesus.

So I jabbed him again, and he screamed, and I jabbed, and he screamed.

“Thank you, Jesus!” I shouted, and we jabbed and screamed for awhile more, his penis growing hard and glorious; and mine throbbing with revelations as I discovered that zapping him in the armpits produced a delightfully involuntary thrashing throughout his entire body; and then I did a couple of hits of crystal meth, (because chemistry too is a blessing from Jesus), and I pierced him with 14-gauge stirrup nipple rings with spikes, and I twisted a corkscrew into his urethra, and I tied leather thongs like tourniquets around his testicles until they turned a lovely shade of robin’s-egg blue, and I buried the violet wand in his rectum, and I whipped him with a barbed-wire flogger with one hand while simultaneously carving crosses into his flesh with an obsidian knife with the other, and I licked the warm blood from his skin, and I forced him to give a blowjob to a goat someone had brought in, and then I locked him into a steel chastity belt so he couldn’t come without my key, and then I ejaculated in his nose and made him say “Thank You,” because obedience and submission to authority are also blessings from Jesus.

Then I gently unstrapped him from the cross and led him to the back door, where I pushed him naked into the alley so he could be beaten and fucked by anyone who felt like it, because, though I forgave him for corrupting me, doing penance for one’s sins is a blessing from Jesus.

Then I took the cash out of his wallet and left the bar, and I thought to myself that this experience might be difficult to explain back at the Universal Grace Evangelical Church of Jesus Christ, God and the Holy Spirit of John the Baptist Eternal Life and Holy Word Hallelujah Bible Congregation back in Praise the Lord, Colorado.

And so my spirit felt greatly troubled, until I emerged into the sunrise and thought to myself, “Why confuse my flock with details?”

I’ll just tell them that all faggots go to Hell.

Because faith too is a blessing from Jesus.

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Martin Mundt is the author of the Delirium collection The Dark Underbelly of Hymns which will be released in trade paperback in 2007.