Damned by Chuck Palahniuk Read Free Book Online Page B

centuries of
world leaders.
    According to the bishop de Spina, a third of Heaven s angels were cast
into Hell, and this divine downsizing, this celestial housecleaning, took nine
full days—two days longer than it took God to create the Earth. In all, a total
of 133,306,668 angels—including much-revered former cherubim, potentates,
seraphim, and dominations—were forcibly relocated, among them Asbeel and Gaap,
Oza and Marut and Urakabarameel.
    Ahead of us, where she walks arm in arm with Patterson, Babette cuts
loose with a peal of laughter, loud and shrill mid as fake as her counterfeit
shoes.
    Archer glares at their backs, the big safety pin bunched in the muscles
of his clenched jaw.
    Leonard name-drops about the different demons whom we might stumble
across: Baal, Beelzebub, Belial, Liberace, Diabolos, Mara, Pazuzu—an Assyrian
with a bat's head and scorpion's tail—Lamashtu—a Sumerian she-devil who suckles
a pig with one breast and a dog with the other— or Namtaru—the Mesopotamian
version of our modern grim reaper. We look for Satan with the same intensity
that my mom and dad looked for God.
    In retrospect my parents were always pushing me to expand my
consciousness by huffing glue or gasoline or chewing peyote buttons. Simply
because they'd done their time, wasted their teen years lolling in the muddy
fields of Vermont and the salt flats of Nevada, naked except for rainbow face
paints and a thick coating of sweaty filth, their heads festooned with fifty
pounds of fetid dreadlocks, teeming with crab lice and pretending to find
enlightenment... that does NOT mean I have to make that same mistake.
    Sorry, Satan, once again I've said the G-word.
    Without breaking stride, Leonard nods and points to indicate the former
deities of now-defunct cultures, now warehoused in the underworld. Among them:
Benoth, a god of the Babylonians; Dagon, an idol of the Philistines; Astarte,
goddess of the Sidonians; Tartak, the god of the Hevites.
    My suspicion is that my parents treasure their sordid recollections of
episodes at Woodstock and Burning Man not because those pastimes led to wisdom,
but because such folly was inseparable from a period of their lives when they
were young and unburdened by obligation; they had free time, muscle tone, and
their futures still looked like a great, grand adventure. Furthermore, both my
mother and father had been free of social status and therefore had nothing to
lose by cavorting nude, their swollen genitals smeared with muck.
    Thus, because they had ingested drugs and flirted with brain damage,
they insisted I should do likewise. I was forever opening my boxed lunch at
school to discover a cheese sandwich, a carton of apple juice, carrot sticks,
and a five-hundred-milligram Percocet. Tucked within my Christmas stocking—not
that we celebrated Christmas— would be three oranges, a sugar mouse, a
harmonica, and quaaludes. In my Easter basket—not that we called the event
Easter—instead of jelly beans, I'd find lumps of hashish. Would that I could
forget the scene at my twelfth birthday party where I flailed at a piñata,
wielding a broomstick in front of my peers and their respective former-hippie,
former-Rasta, former-anarchist throwback parents. The moment the colorful
papier-mâché burst, instead of Tootsie Rolls or Hershey's Kisses, everyone
present was showered with Vicodins, Darvons, Percodans, amyl nitrate ampoules,
LSD stamps, and assorted barbiturates. The now-wealthy, now-middle-aged parents
were ecstatic, while my little friends and I couldn't help but feel a tad bit
cheated.
    That, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand that very few
twelve-year-olds would actually enjoy attending a clothing-optional birthday
party.
    Some of the most gruesome images in Hell seem downright laughable when
compared to seeing an entire generation of adults stripped nude and wrestling
on the floor, grasping and panting in frantic competition for a scattered
handful of codeine