Hell In Two Parts
By Sarah Suzuki and Katie Anania
Photos by Patrick Bresnan <3
I. A Night in Hell
I was a Hell House virgin. Visiting a Hell House was meant to be an ironic gesture, wrought in the campy desires typical of Austinites such as myself. When our 15-person caravan arrived at the Bethel Church in Temple, Texas, the parking lot was already packed with a snaking line of people. Katie dashed to the front of the line. “It’s a two and a half hour wait,” she said when she reported back. “Should we get some Taco Bell? Or maybe some beer?” We considered getting beer, but decided to tough it out and wait in line instead. It was a cool, crisp Friday night on the eve of Halloween. Teenagers were there on dates. The youth group kids giggled and gossiped while they waited, occasionally sneaking cigarettes behind the church vans that had shuttled them to Temple. Parents wrapped protective arms around their children and shot resentful looks our way as the lesbian couples in our group offensively held hands.
By the time we reached the front of the line, we were cold and exhausted. The doorman issued a dire warning: “It’s darkness layered on darkness in there,” he said, raising his eyebrows as he opened the door.
In the first room, a television screen proclaimed that we were not to take flash photography. Patrick took a picture of the screen, using his flash, which grabbed the attention of a rather pudgy looking “Demon.” “No flash photos!” the Demon said. Patrick, unblinking, took a picture of the Demon.

Don't Think of Elephants
The first room was a surgery ward filled with women, all of whom were crying and vomiting blood. Behind a screen, a few doctors were in the middle of botching an abortion. It was exactly what I had expected. “Welcome to Hell!” the pudgy Demon said with a cackle.
In the next room, we were treated to a scene of an abusive husband murdering his three children, his wife, and himself. It was unclear why the murders were happening. Something about him being unemployed. I watched the husband convulse on the ground in mute agony as blood gushed from his mouth. I want an emotional connection, I admitted to myself. But I felt nothing. The mass murder had taken place quickly and without the horror of anticipation, turning a brazen, sinful trespass into flagrant kitsch.
In the next series of rooms, Kelly, a girl whose father “said she would never amount to anything,” pursued an on-line romance with Sergey, a fellow of the same stripe as the Craigslist Killer. We watched Sergey make the moves on Kelly, who rebuffed. The frustrated Sergey decided to rape her. Before he did so, addressed us, unbuckling his belt as he did so: “Kelly is a tease, just like the rest. Now I’ll show her!”
Sergey got what was coming to him, though, because Kelly had a handgun in her purse, which she managed to deftly wield only after her defilement. Sergey died on the ground, vomiting blood.
“But what of Kelly?” another overweight Demon asked the audience. “Follow me, and let’s see what happened to her one and a half months later!”
“What are they feeding these Demons?” McCauley whispered as we filed into the hallway. “Donuts? Hamburgers?”
In the next room, Kelly was curled up in her bed, wracked by sobs. A television screen above her flashed a montage of partial birth abortions spliced with shots of smiling Aryan children. Kelly threw herself on the ground.
“You got yourself knocked up,” a Demon shrieked. “And murdered your baby!”
“I hate myself!” Kelly said as she slit her sinful wrists.
“Kelly had it coming,” the Demon said. “It’s just like her father predicted: She never amounted to anything.”
I was filled with a distinct sense of theater snobbery. Where was the nuance in these stories? The pacing was flat. What narrative thread connected the bloodied rooms of Hell House?
Fortunately, I filled with a yielding sympathy when, in the next room, the audience watched a Wayward Youth “do some freebase” in a pipe that my great-grandfather might have used. The Youth took one hit of a drug that looked like baby powder, then vomited blood. How cute! I thought to myself. The Baptists wanted us to understand the dangers of drugs, but didn’t know what crack cocaine looked like. Our group chuckled merrily and advanced to the next room.After walking through yet another scene involving shrieking gun death victims, we finally arrived in Hell. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Hell looks like Circuit dance club on Ladies Night, where hot chicks in tight clothes writhe in smoky cages. I was vaguely turned on. “Help me!” they shrieked. There were no men in Hell. Satan offered an explanation. “These women gave in to Lust,” he said. “And many are guilty of murdering unborn children!”
McCauley winked at one of the women in the cages, a blond. “I should get this chick’s number,” she said.

Living a Lie
Sadly, Hell was the final room. The troupe of overweight Demons escorted us to a hallway with three video monitors flashing images of The Christ being nailed to a cross. A born-again-Baptist addressed our group in humble earnestness, which we found embarrassing precisely because we were there to satisfy our compulsive need for irony. He urged us to pray with the minister that we may find Jesus. Our group made a fast exit out the side door.
t was late, and we were hungry. Hell had given us an appetite, which we sated at the Austin IHOP. As we ate our Tutti Frutti platters and three-egg omelets, we processed the experience, which was marked by ambivalence.

Deflowered
“I wonder why they said nothing about being gay?” Keith wondered aloud.
They were probably all too scared to even act gay,” Katie said. “The suggestion of gayness might tarnish an unblemished reputation.”
“God would not approve,” Keith said, nodding.”And on that note, I bet that Kelly is the coveted role,” Katie said. “Or being one of the screaming girls in hell.”
“I should have gotten that chick’s number,” McCauley said, shaking her head. “Next time. Next time.”
My Hell House cherry had been popped. Was it worth it? Perhaps. It’s pretty clear that my feminist self is heading directly to Hell. At least I know that Hell is full of hot women.
Sarah Suzuki is social worker in central Texas who practices psychotherapy and works at AIDS Services of Austin. Like you, she is paying off student loans. On Sundays she likes to ride her bicycle and work on her graphic novel.
II. Hell Is For Other People’s Children
Note to readers: I’m probably too genteel to ever behave really badly. We all were. I don’t know what we were expecting, but we weren’t doing anything sinister. The carload of queers that spilled out into the parking lot of Bethel Church on Friday night were all products of middle-class homes, looking at the long line in front of the church, recalling the county fairs of our youth. We’d let our relationships with Jesus lapse, or maybe never blossom to begin with, but that wasn’t going to keep us from waiting our turn in the concession line. We cheerfully zipped up our American Apparel hoodies and ponied up for $2 nachos, $3 “frapps” (coffee drinks of flavored whipped cream—the pronunciation, presumably, a gesture against the French), smoked pot in our cars, and complained about the wait.
The mere existence of a concession line at Hell House, and our reliance upon it during the 2-hour wait to see the attraction, bridged a cultural divide between Us and Them. Regardless of ideological origin, cholesterol-laden snacks will always provide the human touch. In fact, that concession stand line was the most convivial space of the night. Sometimes I wish I’d spent the whole evening there drinking powdered hot chocolate instead of visiting the living hell that awaited me and my queer friends. Yeah, we were in hell, but not the way the Bethel Churchers wanted us to be. It was more of an aesthetic hell.

Dir. Richard Schecner
I get the sense that bad publicity has modified the yearly production of the Hell House scripts. This year, there’s no live abortion or queer punishments. The school shooting scene has been shelved because there haven’t been any lately in real life. Female sexuality, though, is an awesome problem and still going strong, and this year it’s been wedged into a spectacular montage of sexual violence, revenge, and depression.
One of the first scenes of Hell House features a rape and subsequent murder. Kelly is raped, albeit offstage, and then comes back onstage to shoot her attacker, killing him. The “plot” hereafter functions as a great domino-stack of sin, Hell House wants us to think that rape and murder are equally grave acts, and that one has the potential to produce the other. Kelly is raped and shoots her rapist immediately after her assault, but the sequence that we see on stage is strange. Kelly and Serge meet in Serge’s apartment, and then Kelly exits stage right to use the bathroom, and then the assault commences. The audience sees the assault happen by way of a video played onstage. “Demonic” music overlays a short video of Kelly being chased around the bed. How is it considered beyond the pale for two teenage actors to simulate rape in a church setting, and yet we’re allowed to see a badly produced (like, Soul-Asylum-music-video-esque) filmic version of it? And why is it that the most emotionally profound moments in the whole performance are on video anyway? That shit has got to be a commentary on the fact that we all learn our emotions from TV.
And speaking of learning, it’s also important that we take away this next fact: that ladies contain within their own bodies the perfect opportunity for murder in cold blood. They don’t even have to walk out into the street to encounter a potential murder victim. They’ve got one right in their tummies – it’s super immanent, like carrying something around in one’s purse. How lovely and recursive, then, that Kelly had a gun in her purse AND a murder victim in her uterus! Ladies commit murder with guns and with aborto-scalpels, and then later on, with razor blades when we’re wracked with suicidal guilt.

Community Theater
Double Agents—Depression, Fat Demons, and You
So yeah, there were some clarity issues. Sarah has recounted some of them beautifully. The queers in the audience wanted to know who the hell was behind all these rapings and shootings and drunk drivings and so on. Is it the fat demons, or is it the characters being weak and vulnerable to them? We all know that being alone while you’re feeling depressed is totally hellacious, but in Hell House, the depressed are never alone. They have the fat demons with them at all times. The characters don’t appear to be able to see or hear the fat demons, but pretty much all of the characters are dogged subconsciously with insults until they succumb to freebasing, assault, et cetera. It’s a totally miserable—and worse, aesthetically impoverished through bad videos—world.
In the end, Hell House rests on the evangelical Christian message about self-control. Specifically, you don’t have any, and what you do have, you get from Jesus. That’s why evil is never allowed to stand by itself. It’s always enhanced, through props (the gun – lord protect me from twentysomething women with guns in their purses) or media (music videos of rape) or metaphysics (fat demons whispering in characters’ ears) or people like you. In the Christian cosmology, evil comes from Satan, and you’re just the agent of it. You’re a conduit of badness, a vessel for sin. So maybe it makes sense that the Bethel Church used all these props, media, and metaphysics to clarify Satan’s demonic message: it’s because Satan himself often uses all this stuff to get you. Satan, apparently, is a multimedia whore, seething inside all our entertainment.
Hell House, though, also uses music videos as a teaching device—to tell you about Jesus. At the final stretch of the tour, viewers are placed in front of several television screens, again flickering bad videos, but this time of the crucifixion. So the medium of video is a vessel just as a person is. You have to choose: are you going to be the Jesus video or the rape video? Will your circuit party be full of writhing, screaming women in cages or will it be full of Jesus? Well-behaved as I am, readers, I know my answer to that one.
Katie Anania is spending her vacation co-teaching a graduate course called Accidental Pornographies: The Visual Effects of the Women’s Health Movement Since 1970. She is interested in performing any task for which she might be paid in cake.

Please Disperse









I wrote to Swierczynski asking him to elaborate his reasons for the recurrence of underwear in his book. He was initially surprised to realize he did this. I pointed out that it occurs in every novel, and in the most recent book he even includes a few scenes with an infant in a gimp suit. If, as Hannah Arendt posited, every newborn represents the entrance of newness and possibility into the world, then a baby in bondage-wear is the counterpoint that, nuh uh, agency is always constrained and that some people are just born fucked. While there was no great theoretical reason – he admits he finds underwear “funny.” I realized that I have a similar problem to his, which is that I can’t write an academic article without coming off as immature by parodying the form with the interjection of humor. He’s one of the best crime writers I’ve ever encountered even though one of the ‘faults’ with Level 26 is that it never reaches a point where it’s actually scary. Instead, Sqweegel’s obsessive evilness becomes highly entertaining.


