Entertainer's Ward

In Hell’s ward for artists Andy Warhol sits on his bunk bed thinking about James Brolin in Hotel and the Village People. “Even if there were a TV, even some wallpaper would be nice, “ Andy Warhol said. “I’m lonely here” he said aloud. “I don’t have anything to do.” An obese Oscar Wilde lying in the bunk across, his face ravaged by his syphilis, stares at flies on the wall. “I never really did decorate” Andy continues. “How about a bowl of carnations, a lace doily on a nightstand? Doesn’t anyone have any parties? Why is everyone so glum? Ever spent a night at the Chelsea? I had friends there. Some of them died in the rooms.” Candy Darling never talks to him.

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In the ward for entertainers, Rip Taylor and Avery Schreiber do not get along, having spent their last days above earth in nursing homes penniless. Rip however was more the raconteur, metamorphosing handkerchiefs into pigeons, tossing confetti made from shredded memoranda among the senior citizens in the lounge while tooting a plastic trumpet. On the operating table, he pulls out swatches of handkerchiefs from his tunic, producing from his armpits tiny incendiary devices that bring the Swat teams. When this lord of misrule is lowered into middle earth, the funeral attendees half-expect him to pop the coffin lid and throw firecrackers at the pastor as he reads the last rites. But Avery Schreiber
reacts as if he’d had his heart torn out! Because he was the silent one in the act. Who then would have guessed that he had talent? Physical comedy of the Chaplin-Keaton mode was not the order of the day. All the children remember of him on earth is munching Doritos in commercials. And so his art was lost along with that of Wheeler and Wolsey and Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle. He looks among the inmates for commiseration. Jim Jones and Koresh wish they had Rip Taylor on their team.

Rip has the bad taste to set a smoke bomb off among the high command of hell. Some of the Rat Pack out the window pick weeds to distill into a crude fermented beverage or to roll into a kind of cigarette that emits a stench so pungent and evil-smelling that a sulfurous whiff of it occasionally wafting above to earth will asphysixiate livestock. As the inmates defecate, their waste bubbles up into tar pits. Their gas paralyzes rats and deposits itself among tyrannosaurus rex or flying reptiles, their bony wings, more webbed than feathery, unrecognizably contorted by mother earth’s thousand-kilo-fold pressure, which is
the lid on hell.