The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

 

the man that you fear
    A MONG ALL THINGS THAT CAN BE CONTEMPLATED UNDER THE CONCAVITY OF THE HEAVENS, NOTHING IS SEEN THAT AROUSES THE HUMAN SPIRIT MORE, THAT RAVISHES THE SENSES MORE, THAT HORRIFIES MORE, THAT PROVOKES MORE TERROR OR ADMIRATION THAN THE MONSTERS, PRODIGIES AND ABOMINATIONS THROUGH WHICH WE SEE THE WORKS OF NATURE INVERTED, MUTILATED AND TRUNCATED.
    â€”Pierre Boaistuau, Histories Prodigieuses, 1561

    H ELL to me was my grandfather’s cellar. It stank like a public toilet, and was just as filthy. The dank concrete floor was littered with empty beer cans and everything was coated with a film of grease that probably hadn’t been wiped since my father was a boy. Accessible only by rickety wooden stairs fixed to a rough stone wall, the cellar was off-limits to everybody except my grandfather. This was his world.
    Dangling unconcealed from the wall was a faded red enema bag, a sign of the misplaced confidence Jack Angus Warner had in the fact that even his grandchildren would not dare to trespass. To its right was a warped white medicine cabinet, inside of which were a dozen old boxes of generic, mail-order condoms on the verge of disintegration; a full, rusted can of feminine-deodorant spray; a handful of the latex finger cots that doctors use for rectal exams; and a Friar Tuck toy that popped a boner when its head was pushed in. Behind the stairs was a shelf with about ten paint cans which, I later discovered, were each filled with twenty 16-millimeter porno films. Crowning it all was a small square window—it looked like stained glass, but it was actually stained with a gray grime—and gazing through it really felt like looking up out of the blackness of hell.
    What intrigued me most in the cellar was the workbench. It was old and crudely made, as if it had been constructed centuries ago. It was covered with dark orange shag carpeting that looked like the hair on a Raggedy Ann doll, except it had been soiled from years of having dirty tools laid on it. A drawer had been awkwardly built into the bench, but it was always locked. On the rafters above was a cheap full-length mirror, the kind with a wooden frame meant to be nailed to the door. But it was nailed to the ceiling for whatever reason—I could only imagine why. This was where my cousin, Chad, and I began our daily and progressively more daring intrusions into my grandfather’s secret life.
    I was a scrawny thirteen year old with freckles and a bowl cut courtesy of my mother’s shears; he was a scrawny twelve year old with freckles and buck teeth. We wanted nothing more than to become detectives, spies or private investigators when we grew up. It was in trying to develop the requisite skills in stealth that we were first exposed to all this iniquity.
    At first, all we wanted to do was sneak downstairs and spy on Grandfather without him knowing. But once we started discovering everything that was hidden there, our motives changed. Our after-school forays into the cellar became half teenage boys wanting to find pornography to jerk off to and half a morbid fascination with our grandfather.
    Nearly every day we made new and grotesque discoveries. I wasn’t very tall, but if I balanced carefully on my grandfather’s wooden chair I could reach into the space between the mirror and the ceiling. There I found a stack of black and white bestiality pictures. They weren’t from magazines: just individually numbered photographs that looked like they had been handpicked from a mail-order catalog. There were early-seventies photos of women straddling giant horse dicks and sucking pigs’ dicks, which looked like soft, fleshy corkscrews. I had seen Playboy and Penthouse before, but these photographs were in another class altogether. It wasn’t just that they were obscene. They were surreal—all the women were beaming real innocent flower-child smiles as they sucked and fucked these animals.
    There were also fetish magazines like Watersports and Black Beauty stashed behind the mirror. Instead of stealing a whole magazine, we would take a razor blade and carefully cut out certain pages. Then we’d fold them into tiny squares and hide them underneath the large white rocks that framed my grandmother’s gravel driveway. Years later, we went back to find them, and they were still there—but frayed, deteriorated and covered with earthworms and slugs.
    One afternoon in the fall as Chad and I sat