On the parties of the damned

Sometimes, in an effort to remember what the master Jean-Paul Sartre presciently said about Hell (for those who haven't read No Exit simply that "Hell is other people"), I treat myself to an encounter with the damned. I suppose there a couple camps on Hell. There are the Sartreans, who see it as rather existential and undoubtedly personality based. There are the Boscheans, who see it as a garden of the most profound and perverted delights. And, I suppose, the Jews, who doesn't believe in it, even though they are all going there for having killed Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."




(details, Garden of Earthly Delights, H. Bosch, Prado, Madrid)

I've always loved Bosch in a very weird way. His visions of hell were intense, pictorial, and endlessly inventive. Look at the bottom detail: we've got a demon molesting a defenseless girl, two men throwing up, in the middle ground a man with a recorder jammed into his cornhole, all overseen by a bird-headed figure that could pass for Horus in any bad Cairo hookah dive bar. But, even though most of this imagery is pretty fantastic, even frightening, there's the odd humorous moment, like the demon on skates, or water skiis, above Horus' hat.

When I was a kid, reading, for some reason, the profoundly overrated C. S. Lewis' Perelandra series of turgid, allegorical science fiction novels, I always remarked on their trippy, very '70s jacket art.

Yeah. There you go, you've got some white hand, holding an apple, under some stylized awning, and strange celestial bodies in purposeful conjunction. Cover art that is a '70s LSD-ridden take on our dear Bosch. But, I digress.

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I walk into this party in the aptly named Grendel's Den, a basement bar named by some Harvard Square Beowulf fan. Grendel's is a good place, little out of the way, decent drink selection, and apparently it is never visited by its namesake, which is definitely just as well (I hear he's presently employed as a bouncer by the Liquor Store, one of Boston's too many "meta-named" bars.)

The damned have a table, against the wall, with the little placards that Grendel leaves about to designate how large your party must be to play: "5 or more." The table was filled to this level. Out of respect for the dead, I'll not identify the damned. Suffice it to say, there were two ladies, one nursing a tall Paulaner Heffewizen and the other stubbornly attacking a Sammy summer. The ladies occupied the wall seat. They were faced by three gentlemen, one wearing, inexplicably, gym shorts and the others attired more respectably, at least wearing t-shirts and shorts.

It was a sorry scene. My companion, the infamous and occasionally humorous Eric Engler, lept into action, offering to buy a round and even summoning the old waitress, blue-shirt, horn-rims, and white hair to go with her skeptical eyes, to effectuate his claim. The nearest girl, who seemed to be, in some small way, the target of his affections boldly ordered another Sammy summer, and I requested the Paulaner, perhaps out of a desire to feel emasculated by such an imposing glass. Earrings bobbing, she had slim silver shafts that suspended, pendulum-style, a little shiny ball, she engaged the ever-charming Engler in conversation, but soon, Engler's attention was engaged by the man sitting to my left. Because this is not a logic game, I'll explain. Grendel's has a wall-bench, wall-seat, whatever you want to call it along its perimeter. I had taken the first wall seat at the corner of the table, covered with what seemed to be thinly beaten copper but was probably less expensive. Engler was to my right, next to the girls, who were in the wall seat in the alcove proper. To my left were two chairs, filled with the reasonably attired gentlemen, and directly across from me, in a chair, was gym shorts.

Doing my part to facilitate interaction, I started asking what people do. We had a sorry bunch: the man to my left had some sort of non-profit gig and played online poker. The man to his left was unemployed. There was, as seems to be de riguer these days, a disaffected grad student (gym shorts) and the two girls had meaningless volunteer or slightly paid labor positions in the non-profit sector as well. Yet, "poker," the word spoke by the man to my left, was the elixir of the Gods to Engler's fairly avaricious ears. "Poker," he started, and then commenced a verbal torrent that included the key phrases: "world series of poker, made a couple thousand dollars, made a couple thousand dollars in a few hands, Las Vegas, poker tournament, placed 3rd in a field of 470, world series of poker, got kinda nervous but still cleaned up." In short, our dear Engler hasn't changed at all.

While this conversation was furiously being waged in front of me, both men leaning towards eachother with a type of ferocious intensity (the man to my left being surprised that someone of Engler's obvious skill wasn't playing more, Engler explaining he found online poker to be desultory and dull, fit only for beasts) I began to study the other speaker.

He was particularly ill-favoured, so much so that I imagine in less enlightened times than our own he would have been consigned to circus work. His face was dominated by a chef's knife sized nose, thin and sharp and as dominant a rock-face as I've ever seen. His eyes were set below the browline, and his forehead was short and sloped at an acute angle towards a suspiciously flat skull. He was exacerbating his good looks by shaving his head, and the overall effect, with the wide-set, beedy, eyes and the prominently sharp nose and the flat head, was like that of a hammerhead shark. He was extraordinarily ugly, yet almost sympathetic, grinding his teeth a bit as he talked (weak jaw to go along with this) as he was some sort of antediluvian reptile masquerading as man. His companion had a frattish shock of brown hair and didn't seem to do much beyond smile blankly.

I began to realize where I was. I was sitting between Engler, ostentatiously advertising the apparatus of wealth and privilege, and a shark-man, some sad circus freak with flippers, a veritable Oswald Kobblepot for our time. The girls were smiling, talking idly of past hookups--who, exactly, had hooked up with whom while at a certain undergraduate college--oh, how naughty, you're such a skanky ho, oh my no, you, you were a skanky ho in college, titter. I was at a party of the damned, a short look at the most plausible Hell of all: other people.

I began drinking with furious intensity, hoping to escape. I dashed back my beer and , having moved away from Sharkface and Pokerchamp, began talking to Gym Shorts, who seemed marvelously insensible and afflicted with a maudlin concern for nostalgia. Oh my, I realized, time to go.

How dreadful.