Letters from Hamish

Hellfire on the square

(From the letters of novelist and historian Hamish Hepburn, discovered after his death by asphyxiation in the year 2026.)

July 24, 2008

Dear Hortense,

As our mother has no doubt informed you, I have moved quasi-permanently to the city of Knoxville, Tenn. I enclose a copy of my Mother’s Day greeting to our Dear Sweet, who, to date, has not responded. (Will you please confirm she’s still alive? Perhaps she found my letter shocking; she can be so disapproving. But I maintain Knoxville’s Mother’s Day Abortion Parade was but one sampling of this city’s charms, and I mean to examine them all.)

I am living downtown, in a rundown waterfront enclave called Maplehurst. I have made a few friends among the seedy writers who populate the university department that now employs me, but crave the camaraderie of a real native. So last week I set about finding one, and Lo and Behold, I found it! In the form of a screaming, doomsday, hellfire preacher. You don’t even have to join a church around here to find one; they walk around and shriek at passersby in the open air of downtown any time they want to.

The preacher I’ve befriended is Duane. His pulpit is a raised area on the north end of Market Square, where I walk my new mutt Squiggy and browse shop windows. The raised area often serves as a stage for over-amplified musical events and dreadfully under-amplified theatricals. (For some reason the city natives believe music should be incomprehensibly loud, to the point that it threatens pacemakers; while theater should be virtually mimed, with shrill yet vague projections of Shakespeare that make Squiggy woof.)

Duane is an artist without patronage. His medium is religious invective, and his audience is made up of all the captives who are trying to live, work or enjoy the subtle grace of Market Square. Of course none of them appreciates the genius of Duane the Screaming Preacher, and I have no shortage of contempt for the buskers with their cellos, saxophones, etc. Poor Duane doesn’t demean the people with plaintive efforts at entertainment. He merely wants to damn them all, as loudly and inarticulately as possible, while they try to eat, converse or quietly go about their business. And they don’t like him one bit.

In fact, Duane told me they have tried to have him ousted from the Square. This was after he told me that I was damned for honestly answering his question about being saved. I don’t think I am saved; I don’t even know what it means despite Duane’s subsequent spitting rant on the issue. He went on and on, describing how my unbelief has consigned me to an eternal afterlife of impalement — through my rump, mind you — on a spit over fire fueled by the magma of Satan, of being roasted and turned like a “red pig” with a “thorny apple for a ball gag” and my hands and feet tied together “hoggy-style.”

Duane became even more enraged when I interrupted his fantasy with a simple question about how I could be hog-tied and fully impaled at the same time; it seemed to me, rather, that the spit would need a complex concave shape that would be difficult to execute forcefully. Well, you would think I was back in Father Finnegan’s catechism, questioning the infallibility of the Pope. Duane became utterly unwound, explaining that the Babylonians of science have no power in hell, and he led me to believe Newton himself is now free-floating in an infernal poison gas chamber, choked by the thorny ball gag of the apple he dropped to establish the law of gravity.

But don’t get him started on the city snobs who want to have him silenced! They reason that his angry oratory — consisting mainly of scathing diatribes against homosexuals and the people who defend them — upsets the palate and keeps them awake. True enough, Duane rambles on for hours, sometimes past midnight. And there are residents on Market Square. But thankfully, Duane has friends in city government and the police department who understand the citizen’s right to make loud, obnoxious noise, hate speech and threats in a public space for as long as he wants. There are no controls on that sort of thing and anybody can do it, anywhere, any time. There is no such thing, it appears, as disorderly conduct in Knoxville, Tenn., as long as you say you are doing God’s work.

Of course, you know me better than to think I care about his divine mission. What fascinates me about Duane is his subject matter: the tortures of hell, and the means by which one gets to hell. All of it has to do with sexuality and reproduction. If you fornicate, commit adultery, engage in homosexual acts, have an abortion or think about and discuss these issues in what he calls a “liberal” fashion, you will roll out of your death bed into the forked tongues of a host of demons who will spirit you on a flume of fire to the roiling lake of sulfur, full of the legions of likeminded deviates.

In short, I have never found a more delightful companion for discussions on sadism, masochism, and other perversions. Yesterday, I sat with Squiggy in a café just off to the side of Duane’s late-night sermon and sipped some grotesque imitation of cognac served by an annoying waiter who kept apologizing for Duane’s incessant rants about my status as a first-class passenger on the railroad to Gehenna. If that meddlesome waiter had only left me the hell alone, Duane might have opened up and really let go with more lurid descriptions of the horrors that await.

In fact I’ll close now before I forget to write my note of complaint to the restaurant management. Say hello to Mother for me, and let her know I’ve found someone else to pray for me. Ta.

Hamish