How I Bought My Ticket to Hell

I have a few theories about exactly when and where I actually bought my ticket to Hell. Any reasonable and sound person who believes in the supernatural could point to a wide array of things I’ve done in my life to explain my eventual, assured, eternal damnation.

I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.

It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?

The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.

As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.

Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?

More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.

For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.

But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….

One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.

At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.

But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.

So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.

The Bible Belt Loops North

I've officially been a Bible Belt resident for approximately two months. As long as I don't mind driving for 40 days and 40 nights to find a synagogue (and I don't), it's fine. What I left behind in New York was the melting pot of religion, culture, dining, acceptance, stress, costly parking, foul-smelling public transportation and skyscrapers that throw bricks off their faces at pedestrians like kids throw water balloons out a second-story window in the 'burbs. Boy do I miss it.

Anyway, last week confirmed my belief that it was a good idea that we moved when we did. While we (the new Southern 'we') have ownership of the Bible-thumping loonies, in a place where everyone and his brother is an ordained minister of some sort, New York is somehow paying the price for being so open.

Being really far from Kansas, Long Island isn't exactly the first place you think of when you hear the word tornado. However, this past week, Dorothy and the gang decided to pay Islip Terrace a visit. Truthfully, if Long Island did have a flat, plainsy, Kansas-like area, Islip Terrace is it. Islip Terrace – and the entire South Shore of Long Island, for that matter – is a barren wasteland of flatness, strip malls and slightly-too-expensive housing. We North Shore types only do two things on the South Shore: 1) go to concerts at Jones Beach, and 2) use it as a cut-through to get to the Belt Parkway.

Back to the point: Islip Terrace apparently did something to piss off Mother Nature. As the region experienced the most violent rainstorm of the past century, a handful of Islip Terrace residents got the rare opportunity to see Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt speed past to try to get their crystals into the vortex of the tornado that opened a hefty can of whoop-ass on the town. Trees three feet wide snapped as easily as Daniel-son's leg in the final scene of The Karate Kid; a shed became dislodged from its foundation and wound up fully in a neighbor's yard (imagine the scene: "See, Mike? I told you I'd get my sawzall back from you one way or another."); and cars experienced damage that I'm sure will be a bitch to explain to the insurance company ("Well, Mr. Adjustor… I can't REALLY explain why the interior of the Taurus is sprouting saplings.)

At least nobody was hurt, and more importantly, Mrs. Cheever's beloved, hand-made wooden tulips escaped unscathed, even as they sat in the window box outside her living room, next to the mammoth tree that took out the power lines that once delivered electricity to the entire town of Islip.

And then there was the rain. THE RAIN! Seeing the pictures of the flooding reminded me of the time I spent in China. China, it should be noted, is a third-world country. They have virtually no infrastructure, including proper drainage, to deal with many of the daily problems they are faced with. When it rained there, everything flooded big-time, and bicycle-ridden men were hard up to deliver food orders to the local Jewish population. (Cultural note: Chinese food in China isn't the same as in the U.S. They use normal containers – not those ridiculous square boxes with the rickety wire handles.) Ironically, after looking at the Long Island pictures, I found myself hungry about an hour later.

What's not so surprising about Long Islanders is that, as evidenced by the photos, they don't seem to care that other cars are literally floating away in several feet of water. There's always some jackass in a four-wheel-drive (usually some wussy-type truck like a Honda CR-V) who just knows his vehicle was made for this exact situation and guns it into the temporary river delta - only to be the next putz calling for help from his brother-in-law that lives nearby and has a boat. These are the same people who fail to realize that it doesn't matter how many wheels you have driving when you're on ice.

As I understand it, the Island has dried out somewhat, and everything is back to normal. Everything, that is, except the sandbox in the Lembeck's backyard, which is now full of wet sand because SOMEONE forgot to put the lid on it before it rained.

To add insult to injury, New York City decided that same day that it needed some attention and immediately exploded. Well, it exploded in midtown. Apparently, people walking through Manhattan aren't jittery enough about potential terrorism. No, the street decided to add to their daily anxiety by spontaneously exploding in the heart of rush hour. A non-terrorist explosion, it caused a powerful steam geyser to spray up into the air. Keep in mind, steam flows freely in the underbelly of the City. The Indians obviously never realized the potential in steam and decided to sell the entire island, Empire State Building and all, to the white man for a West Virginia state quarter, a few nylon fibers and a George Forman Grill.

As New York heals, many devout locals there are seeking help from the Bible to make sense of it all. If they are able to find peace and understanding through it all, more power to them. In the meantime, I have to go warm up my car. Rosh Hashana is coming in a short 52 days and I can't be late for services.

Give Me Independence or Give Me Death

We only had two near-death experiences at our house this past July 4. Both involved children, but only one was prompted by an adult. Thankfully everyone survived. Everyone, that is, but the frog that was found belly up in the pool skimmer.

Since we just moved into this house toward the end of June, Independence Day gave us the perfect excuse to host our first party. First off, this house was seemingly built for parties. The layout is such that Caligula (12 AD – 41 AD) himself used it as the inspiration for his Roman Bath. For those of you who don't know the story of Caligula, it involves a psychotic Roman ruler who was known for his extreme extravagance, eccentricity, depravity and cruelty. He is widely recognized for having been the very first person to utter the words "You're Fired" on national network TV. But I digress...

The party started without a hitch. Drinks flowed freely, kids and the aforementioned former amphibians floated in the pool, lawn darts streamed through the air – aaaaaahh, summertime in the South.

Now, I confess, I'm well-known for being the uncle that flips kids off their rafts in the pool, bumps them in when they're standing on the edge – that sort of thing. In other words, it never really comes as a surprise if some random kid winds up unexpectedly underwater when good 'ole Uncle Scott is around.

So picture the scene: a ten-year-old kid, let's call him "Humberto" for confidentiality's sake, is floating on a tube in the pool, and has been pretty much all day long. Humberto keeps passing comments all day about how small the pool is, how shallow it is, how nobody could drown in it, etc., etc., etc. Essentially, Humberto is at once enjoying the soothing effects of floating in the pool AND mocking the pool for its size, shape, depth, color – even its purported inability to drown people. This, my friends, is what we "writers" call "foreshadowing," or, a process by which part of the story's anatomy is purposefully cut away by an overpaid rabbi from Westchester.

Having had just about enough of this kid's anti-aquatic taunts, I waited until just the right moment to plan my counter-attack. As he floated by me while sitting on top of a tube, he floated by throwing out another pool-related taunt. Just as he passed, I dove under, came up in front of him and flipped him backwards into the water that "couldn't drown anyone." His terrified screams of "NO! NO! NO!" were met by deaf ears as I had finally scored a point back on behalf of my beloved backyard summertime haven.

Figuring I had taught him a lesson, I found myself laughing inside. Until three nanoseconds later, I hear my sister screaming from the pool's edge, "HE CAN'T SWIM! HE CAN'T SWIM!" It took me about a half a second to be under the water, grab him and pull him to safety as he latched onto my body as tightly as an angry boa constrictor might. The terrified look on Humberto's face and the claw marks on my back were testament to the fact that my sister was indeed telling the truth.

My first thought was, "Holy shit, I almost drowned a kid at my very first pool party." My second thought was, "Why didn't anyone tell me that this TEN YEAR OLD KID who has been in the pool all day doesn't know how to swim?"

As soon as Humberto hit the patio, his bathing suit came off with all the swiftness of a Let's Make a Deal contestant trying to win $50 from Monty Hall. Humberto was fine by the end of the day – just a little shaken up. As a last note, I should point out that approximately two hours later, Humberto came back outside and admitted that while his life flashed before his eyes, it was actually "fun." Why I oughta….!

Which brings me to the next exciting adventure of our death-defying party. Just after dinner, the barbecue was simmering down from its red-hot red-meat-scorching glory and the adults were all unbuttoning their top buttons. Which reminds me, if anyone's considering a move to the Bible Belt, good pizza and Chinese take-out aren't the only things you can't find in the south. Again I digress....

The Popsicles were handed out as each kid fought over who would get the last red one in the box. (Note: it's always helpful to have an adult who's willing to take the fall on that one and eat the last red one themselves.) As the children all ran around, Popsicles sticking out of their mouths and scissors in hands, "Barney" decided to approach me as I sat at the post-dinner poker table. Folding a pair of nines to what I was sure was a made two-pair (I was correct, incidentally), Barney asked what I was doing. "Losing!," I snapped, scaring the tip off the Popsicle into his inhaling mouth.

The initial shock was just that: Barney, looking at me wide-eyed for about two seconds before he began turning blue, made a mad dash for the house. I immediately ran after him, yelling his name and hoping to God that the Heimlich Maneuver wasn't just something I had heard about on last season's 'Dancing With The Stars.' Right on my heels was Humberto's dad Louie. I grabbed Barney and flipped him around. Just as I was about to administer the very maneuver whose posters I always laugh at in restaurants, Barney began crying. Once I heard that cry, I knew that he would be fine – and I realized I had left my poker chips unattended. I had no idea what was happening. But I needed to get this resolved as quickly as possible to get back to my stack.

If I didn't know any better, I would have gotten all 'My Name Is Earl' on everyone's ass and gone the karma route. I mean, I try to kill someone's kid in my pool – and almost immediately thereafter, my own kid tries to off himself with a purple superhero Popsicle. Aaaaahh, the joys of summertime fun. I just chalked it up to coincidence and a healthy lack of parenting on my part.

After everyone escaped death without incident, we all retired to the front yard to see the pyrotechnic craptacular that twenty bucks buys you at a supermarket. After all, it was Independence Day. What's July 4th without some rinky-dink little fireworks show that is almost as impressive as a lit cigar, only they smell worse? What do you expect from the local supermarket? I can only suggest that a single Macy's firework shell has more firepower in it than the entire display of "fireworks" they sell at Publix. But how can I complain? I didn't even purchase any fireworks this year. At least a friend brought some.

Our first party at the new house sure was fun. In between trying to make sure that everyone stayed alive, we did manage to drink, eat and have a pretty good time. The seafood cheese dip was outstanding, the homemade salsa someone brought was terrific and my sister is no longer welcome at my parties if she is going to bring ice pops. If anyone is free, I think we're going to be having a Labor Day party, too. Just don't forget the life preserver.