Seven Steps to Hell

*Another deleted chapter from Wild West Village, in which a spiritual journey takes a Dante-esque turn*

Aged 18, in Joshua Tree and in possession of infinite knowledge (obviously)

My mother disliked most of my friends, and while I do believe it is wrong for an adult to cast judgment upon children, I have to admit: most of the time she had a point. Carter was no exception. I met her the summer we were going into 7th grade, at a sleepaway camp where she managed to turn two girls gay and another two blonde. She was a magnet in cat eye liner—always laughing, crying, or singing. You never knew what you were gonna get, a disposition I found at once stressful, familiar and exciting. 

Years later, when I was 18 and she was 19 I went to visit Carter in Los Angeles, where she was living. When she finally arrived to pick me up from the airport, I was pleased to find her singing. It was sort of like the scene at the end of Pretty Woman, when Richard Gere enacts Julia Roberts’ childhood fantasy by waving roses through the sunroof of his limousine. Except in this case, the limousine was a minivan and the sunroof was a door that opened too quickly, flinging Carter to the ground of the passenger pickup area. I was thrilled, even if I had been waiting over an hour. After all, I had on a great outfit and a pair of noise canceling headphones. When you’re 18, you can survive for months on those provisions alone. Besides, it was my first trip without my parents, and I had used money I had made playing in a JC Penney commercial to take it. In the ad, I run around chasing other girls and talking too loudly at them. You can’t hear any of my lines because there’s silly music over my dialogue and I’m definitely supposed to be representative of the larger sizes the brand offered, which I didn’t quite get at the time of filming. Still, the commercial aired during the Oscars, which in my mind meant I had  basically won an Oscar. I was very proud. 

Carter’s cousin Maxanne was driving. I had heard about Maxanne a lot because Carter hated Maxanne but also loved her to death. Maxanne was a ballerina from Altadena with long straight black hair and perfect skin. 

As soon as I got in the car, it was clear they were in the midst of a fight because every time Carter smiled, Maxanne frowned. 

“That was all my babysitting money, Carter.” Maxanne fumed. She was so beautiful when she was angry. But Carter just kept singing. She sang all the way to the Mexican place we went for lunch, where she continued to sing with the house Mariachi band. I loved her singing. Which was a good thing because she kept singing all the way to her apartment, where she was finally stopped by a neighbor who started screaming at her from his window. 

“Whore!” he yelled across Hollywood Boulevard. Though backlit, I could just make out the silhouette of a large, old queen. 

“Fag!” Carter yelled back. Now this was living!

Once inside Carter’s studio, Maxanne burst.

“Where am I supposed to sleep if she’s sleeping in your bed?”

“On the sectional!” Carter gestured towards an oversized black leather sofa, though she didn’t really need to because it took up two thirds of the apartment. 

“That’s a nice sectional,” I encouraged.

“Thank you. It was a gift. From Gary.”

Gary was the host of a popular talent show on TV. Carter had come to Los Angeles to work with him in some sort of pre-fab girl group. 

“Wow!” I replied, star struck by association.

After that Maxanne got very quiet, staring into the distance while Carter told me about Gary. I loved hearing about it. She was so grown up, living by herself in an apartment in Los Angeles with a sectional. I tried to ignore Maxanne who had started rocking back and forth in anger. Having grown up depending on the calm of hysterical women, I sought to soothe her by patting her head, which she did not like. 

“THIS ISN’T FAIR!” Maxanne screamed. 

Carter switched gears. Very serious now:

“Then get the fuck out.” 

Maxanne packed up her stuff and left in a huff.

“She’ll be back.” Carter reassured me, though I wasn’t sure which prospect was scarier.

“She literally can’t go home.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Her parents kicked her out. They hate me.” 

“Aren’t you related to them?”

“Yeah, but,” Carter rolled her eyes as if to say “you know.” I did. 

“Is she taking the car?”

While seeing Carter was always a joy, the real reason for my trip west was to visit the hotel room where a rockstar I liked had died decades earlier. It was two hours south of LA, in Joshua Tree, but this was before I knew that going to Joshua Tree with a spiritual purpose made you a dick. Being from New York, I couldn’t drive. Or rather, I could but I was just too afraid to drive long distances because a psychic had told my mom I’d die in a car accident. In any case, Maxanne’s minivan was crucial. Carter had assured me it wouldn’t be a problem. She blew sideways out her mouth which was a weird, cool tick she had. “We’ll find another one.”

An hour later, a young male actor was driving us around the East Side. He was generically handsome in a sideways baseball hat and maybe gay or maybe in love with Carter. I listened to them talk as I smoked cigarettes out the backseat window. We went to karaoke. Carter sang again. It was fantastic. She had the best voice. Even my mom had begun to like Carter after she’d heard her sing. When we got home that night the old queen was at the window again. 

“Slut!” he yelled.

“Blow me!” Carter shrugged. 

When we got into bed, I began to doze off from all the fun and the time difference. But Carter stayed wide awake. 

“Would you mind if… if I did a bump?” 

“Oh!” I replied surprised, but trying to sound otherwise. This wasn’t my first rodeo: a year earlier, my sister had almost died from a overdose, but she was safe now and living in a sober community in south Florida. “Isn’t that gonna just keep you awake?” I tried to reason.

“It actually really helps me sleep.” 

“Ok. Ya.”

I watched her take out a little pink baggie and break it all up and make it into a line. I wondered where people even got stuff like that. She was so grown up.

The next morning, I was determined to get Carter clean, at least for long enough that we could still make it to the hotel room I’d booked in Joshua Tree. After all, I didn’t want to go alone and Carter had assured me a car. I had two days to accomplish this mission. But without Maxanne’s babysitting money we were somewhat low on funds. Keeping Carter entertained for so long would be a challenge. So I proposed a hike to the top of a popular mountain and a free yoga class we just giggled through the whole time. At sunset, she played me a song on a banjo by her kitchen window. I took a photo because I wanted to remember it forever. When the sun went down, she was allowed to do coke again per our agreement. She did. We went out again. Another friend drove us around. The neighbor yelled as we came home. I went to sleep. 

In the morning I woke up early to pack my stuff for Joshua Tree. 

“Lo,” Carter mumbled from the bed.

“Ya?” I feared the worst. 

“I can’t come.” The worst had come true. But I liked Carter too much to get mad at her. On a certain level, I already knew. People like Carter don’t make plans. Or rather they do, they just don’t tell other people about them. 

“That’s ok.” 

I called Jennifer. 

I had met Jennifer when I was 16 and disliked her immediately. My mother agreed. Two years later, we were best friends. She talked in Richard Brautigan poems and dressed like the women on the covers of his books. 

“I have a very important hotel room in Joshua Tree. Do you wanna go?” Though I didn’t really need to ask. People like that always wanted to go to Joshua Tree. 

“Ya!” she said, as if waking up from the world’s grooviest dream. “Do you have wheels?” Wheels meant “car” in Jennifer.

“Well, no.”

“Ok, that’s a bit of problem.” 

“Don’t you have a car?”

She said yes but then went into so much detail about something to do with the transmission I stopped paying attention. 

“I’ll find one,” she said finally, then hung up.

We met on the corner of Fairfax and I have no idea I just wanna leave. Her eyes followed my approach through the rearview mirror of a borrowed Diesel Mercedes, where she was sitting next to a tired looking redheaded man. 

“Hiiiii,” she announced huskily as I slid in the backseat. Her head whipped around and she kissed me on the mouth as was her greeting. “This is Sam Spiddle,” she said, gesturing to the ginger. 

“Hi,” he mumbled, before crumbling his Army jacket into a pillow and taking a nap. 

A few miles later, I noticed a foul odor. The landscape had begun to change from suburb to desert. Vultures sailed over the windshield. Death, it seemed, was everywhere. Jennifer threw on a mix CD that took me back to the simpler times I had never experienced. I smoked pot and watched the sky turn pink over rocks in all formations. 

Wearing my mother’s old jean jacket, I combed the aisles of a gas station near the hotel. I wondered what my mother would think of me hanging out with strangers and borrowing cars. Would she punish me? Or had she been this way too? It was hard to picture her being young and free. To me she was all little girl and bitter adulthood. Nothing in between. I pondered this as I opened a pack of Lunchable’s. What freedom, I thought. I was never allowed these when I was a kid. A leathery looking man poked me in the shoulder.

“Them’s the seven steps to Hell.”

“Exsqueeze me?” I begged, my mouth full. 

“On your jacket. The seven steps to Hell.” He poked the pyramid looking patch on my arm again.

“Oh, this is just my mom’s jacket. It’s from the 70s.” I had no idea when it was from really, but liked the way a mom’s jacket from the 70s sounded, like something Jennifer might say.

“Does she know about hell?” 

“Maybe?” I quickly paid and scurried back into the car. 

When we got to the hotel, the man at the front desk informed me that due to a booking error  the dead rockstar’s room had been given away, but there was another one right next door and the cleaner’s could let us in for a photo in the morning.

The promised photo, by Matt Sukkar

I tried to act like I wasn’t crestfallen but he saw through it, offering some of his “world famous Chai,” (his words, not mine), as compensation. In the hotel room, we drank bourbon and played cards. But every hand I drew was sixes. Six. Six. Six. The seven steps to hell. Jennifer dealt, an opaque look in her eye. Sam kept stealing my weed even though I was right there. I excused myself to the bathroom. 

There were paper doilies and little wrapped soaps and plastic cups inside more plastic and stains everywhere. Tip envelopes for the housekeeper, her name (Griselda) penciled next to an ornate looking Hibiscus. I wondered if Griselda knew how to draw anything else, or if like me, she was a one trick pony. If I worked here, I thought, my envelope would have a dog next to my name, because that’s the only thing I knew how to draw. A boy with no arms in a cave with rocks falling and two doors that lead to a room with bacon. Draw that and you have a dog. 

While charming, the hotel certainly did look like a place people go to die. It certainly smelled like it. The scent from the car was even stronger now. For a moment, I wondered if this meant I was close to the ghost I had come to visit. But in reality, I knew: he’d been gone so long that what I was really experiencing were just the ghosts of others like me. Aimless pilgrims who had also come in search of something they’d never find. Sighing, I went to dry my hands on a towel folded like a sad swan, when the sight of two strange artifacts on the shelf caught my attention. Weird hippie desert art, I thought. They looked like hearts. Not the love kind, but the ones that beat inside your body. Candles maybe. I poked one. It jiggled. I screamed.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Jennifer stated calmly as I returned from the bathroom.

“There’s hearts in the bathroom,” I replied. “They look human.” My spiritual journey had turned into a trip to Hell.

“What?” Sam piped up from my weed.

“Hearts?” Jennifer bolted intrepid in their direction. Nick and I followed meekly behind. 

“See?!” I pointed to the bleeding guts on the shelf. Jennifer picked one up with her bare hands.

“Don’t!” I screamed.

“What are we gonna do? We can’t call the police. You have too much weed.”

“Well she doesn’t have that much,” Sam interrupted. I shot him a dirty look.

We deliberated a while. It was too late to call my mother and she’d just get mad anyway. Mad that I was high. Mad that I was with Jennifer, in the desert. But even more mad that I’d gotten bound up in some sort of diabolical crime scene. 

“There’s only one thing we can do,” Jennifer offered. “We have to call your psychic.”

I had told Jennifer about the psychic, the one who had said I’d die in a car accident, because she had also told me Jennifer had killed me in a past life. I was Jesse James. She was Robert Ford. Calling the psychic made sense.

“Okay.” I picked up my phone and dialed the psychic’s number. It went to voicemail. 

“Should I leave one?” I whispered, helpless.

“Let me.” Jennifer grabbed the phone. 

“Hello. This is Lola’s friend Jennifer. Lola is very scared because I bought two sheep’s hearts today at the market and placed them in the bathroom so she would be–”

I grabbed my phone and hung up. Then I grabbed a sheep heart and threw it at her. Or maybe I just wish I had. I’ve never been good at revenge.

The next day in the park it rained and we kept losing Sam because he kept getting caught up in the beauty of this or that. Jennifer and I took an arty picture under a special rock. It was the same one where the rockstar’s friends tried and failed to cremate him so he wouldn’t have to go home and be buried with his family. I wondered what his mother must have thought about that. I already knew what my mother thought about Jennifer. And in that moment, flashing my tits for a picture Jennifer was taking with an antique camera, I missed my mother more than anything. 

Thank you for making it to the end! I am so grateful for you taking the time to read my work.

Love,

Lola