Hell

Johnny John passed the gates of Hell wearing his worn out Levi's and a tired t-shirt showing Meat Loaf on a motorbike saying "Bat Out of Hell " and a big grin on his unshaven face displaying a feeling of home coming rather than the frown of the Eternally Doomed. Satan greeted him with a slap on the back and a smoke saying Welcome Home, that Johnny John instantly put to his mouth. "Hey, do you have a light?" Johnny John asked but at once regretted doing so. He held the sigarette over a burning corpse nearby and soon it was glowing like the ground he was walking on. Satan laughed and passed a wind so foul that made Johnny John's stomach turn like that time he had a spinach and cheese dip with a side order of cheap vodka and a prostitute with chlamydia in Prague, and from this point he began to doubt whether Hell would be the craic he had imagined or not. Johnny John's life was that of a true rebel, or at least so he had told the press; his upbringing and teen spirits had been corrupted by the stench of sewer oosing from the gutter where he was raised and as he famously told the journalist from Rolling Stone (the one he soon was arrested for having put his hand on her rebecca); that if God had created him only to make him suffer like this, then he flipped his finger to the heavens and said fock it, "Grace is not for him." Of course what he didn't tell the journalist was that Grace was the name of the girl he once asked out but she had dumped him for Gavin McAteer - a priest from Waterford, and so making sure he would never touch the subject of hounourable women or eucumenics again.

Satan og Johnny John stood on the brim of a lava river, and Satan asked him why he had spent "his whole life trying so hard, even too hard sometimes to get into Hell", when everybody else was trying to avoid it?

"Well", Johnny John said with a slick smile "it's hard to be a rock'n'roller."

Satan laughed and said even Marylin Manson is going to kick it with St Peter, Paul and Virgin Mary one day, and now that homosexuality was accepted, even Ringo Starr could go through the Pearly Gate.

On the other side of the river bank, there was shack under a neon halo saying The Stale Ale pub, and judging from the dirty windows and number of passed out people lying in front of it, he drew the conclusion it was an Irish pub. Satan showed JJ the way, and as they entered, the porridge like sound from a Fender died out and someone shouted "Bring out the accordion!". Panic struck JJ as the sour and untuned tunes from an old accordion turned into a melody he was almost sure was supposed to be Molly Malone. He once had a Molly in Amsterdam, he thought about her and instinctly put his hand in his pocket to see if his wallet was still there. It wasn't.

JJ walked over to the counter where a little girl with long red hair and an eye missing, was rubbin a dirty handkerchief on a glass and occasionally coughing something green and gooey on it and kept on rubbing it. Her left eye barely noticed him, or so he thought.

"Whaddyous want?" she said, now looking straight past him and he turned around to see on what. Old Elvis was singing a Westlife song together with the untuned accordion, and only now was JJ about to discover what Hell truly was.

"Hey pal, Im lockin' at ye- what the hell do ye want? Im not waiting for evva, ye know". The girl was getting angry now.

"Well, I'll have a pint please...Do yous serve Guinness here?" said JJ and at once the sound and songs in the room stopped as if vacuum had dawned upon them and they were now stuck in the akward silcence between a wife and her man in her underwear. Molly came out from a dark corner and said to him that Arthur McGuinness had been a good Catholic and that the only Guinness he could get around here, was the left overs in the livers of deceased alcoholics and construction workers. They all laughed for about 66 minutes while JJ tried to see what else they served. The little girl said, still cleaning the glass:

" We have a fine brew, a good Norwegian one. Here!" she filled the dirty glass she'd been rubbing for the last decade and filled it with a orange like fluid. He had a sip but gagged. "What in the devil's name is this?"

Satan looked up, he hated being distrubed in his contemplation. "I made a deal with an old man who sold me his soul and an everlasting lease of Ringnes, for a night with Elizabeth Taylor in New York. Too bad for him he wasn't more specific and ended up spending 10 hours in an elevator with her after she lost an Oscar to Audrey Hepburn, and was bitching from one end to the other, and he committed suicide the morning after. Here he is - John, come here!"

The poor man named John came over to their table, and the nuce was still hanging from around his neck and his boney body signalled a long eternity to be spent hearing this story every time a stranger entered this pub.

JJ was sorry. Satan said it's too late now any way, and on hearing this, JJ got up, and ran out through the door and jumped into the lava river. The burning sensation was short yet not particularly painful, and seconds after he felt his body being consumed in melted rock, he fell through something that felt like a wooden floor, and found himself lying in the centre of The Stale Ale, with a hundred or so pair of doomed eyes looking at him.

"Welcome to Hell", said Satan. "And now...karaoke!"