Let Me Know the Way Before There's Hell to Pay

On average, 99 young people between the ages of 10 and 25 die every day in the United States.

Death has never been so real.

Prepare yourself for the most daunting experience of your life: my snarky blog on what was supposed to be the most daunting and life-changing experience of my life: The 99. What is The 99, you ask? Courtesy of whatisthe99.com, the 99 is a walk through theater that graphically reenacts the five leading causes of death in teenagers and young adults. Many of these deaths are influenced by drugs or alcohol and a vast majority of them can be avoided. Or, a state-of-the-art production designed to portray the very real consequences of poor decisions that claim almost 37,000 young lives every year. The production is not based on fear or scare tactics, but rather is based solely on reality with each room designed from real life situations.

Ahem.

It begins harmlessly enough as you stroll through the tent over to the nice ladies with hauntingly white smiles. Write your name, address, e-mail and phone number on this paper, they say. Your information remains private. Hell with that, you think. But if you're thinking you'll just write a fake name (Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves) and the number 123-4567, you're forgetting one important thing--gender. Does it matter? you ask snarkily. Well, sometimes you can't tell from the name. Icyglare. Somehow, they know you're doing this for kicks--but that's okay, the power of scary-ass Jesus will set you straight and you will be SAVED bold italics capslock.

Things get trickier as you pass through the gendered wandings--yes, gendered wandings--and enter the pre-exhibit, which I like to think of as pre-Jesus'd purgatory. You got your motor vehicle accidents, pictures of before and after meth addicts and sweet little political prop children taking your dollar entrance fee. Suddenly, your line moves into the official entrance--halleluiah!--only to realize that you're being instructed to not touch the actors, even if they touch you. Bitch please.

The first legit Jesus haunted house room you enter looks suspiciously similar to a strip club--that is, in the sense that you're standing in a circle around what can only be described as a stripper cage with a single beam of red light. Then it goes dark, ack! Garbled demon voice from speaker then tells you that you're beginning a decent into your worst nightmare--you're decending into Hell! (I didn't have time to tell our demon guide about my horrific dream about the Keanu Reeves spider...Hell pales in comparison.) Stop 666, here we come.

The next room features a clusterfucked car wreck. And by clusterfucked, I mean two junk yard cars collided on account of a young female driver who was intoxicated and used excessive amounts of blood packets to convey DEATH, DUN DUN DUH. The non-toxicated car featured a man driving, his wife being passively passengeristic and an overturned car seat. While well enough to take out his cell phone to dial 911, the man was unable to speak--I found I was not surprised at this, as I'm sure speaking would be difficult for anyone with seven packets of fake blood in their mouth. Stream of white blood flowing down white car door: dramatic effect win.

I was horrified at the next room--not because of the excessive amount of in-your-muthafuckenface-screaming, but because of the extreme racial stereotyping. After five black girls scream incoherently at each other while our demon tour guide garbles incoherently over poorly-placed speakers, they run and place a bag over a mixed-race girl and beat the shit out of her. Bag o'Half-and-Half.

At the risk of boring anyone or being repetitive, I'm going to sum up the subsequent rooms in a nutshell:
(1) Crazy-haired, child whipping, fetus aborting (at least I think so?), toilet-hugging, George Forman grill-having drug addicts,
(2) Shakey pretend crack addicts that I probably pissed off by taking the lord's name in vain,
(3) Long black haired, black eyelinered suicide girl who broke more than one statistical probability rule by shooting herself in the chest,
(4) Also, suicide girl had a Twilight poster on her wall--comes as no surpise that she had no self-respect,
(5) Some graveyard or something with a video of how young, sweet children binge drank themselves to death--they had pretty projected stars there,
(6) Some elevator with a stereotyped hip muthafucken black man where we were instructed to juuuuuuuuust dance--I may or may not have pulled out some ADPi Ice Ice Baby moves, just saying...

And FINALLY,
(7) S&M HELL. Complete with whips, chains, poles and stripper cages. Oh, and did I mention we met the devil there? I had my shoulder grazed by a demon, whom I promptly to the lord's name in vain to.

Whilst in S&M Hell, I subtly pulled off some Gaga moves and disrespected the lord by complaining about being forced to go into the light...yes, forced. While I wanted to stay and party it up in S&M Gagaland, the security guards forced us (much like cattle...metaphor?!) to walk towards the blinding white light. Where we were exposed to none other than THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. Did they even have the rights to show the movie? Probably not. Then the movie disappeared and Real Jesus came out behind the curtain and we were instructed to follow him and the roman guards to the next room... [insert suspense]

JUMPING GYRATING JESUS H. CHRIST ON A CROSS! That Jesus had more ooph than Christina Aguilera and more fibulaic honesty than Shakira. And I mean that in the most awkwardly respectable way possible. Directly after gyrating Jesus, they plop you down for a movie, which strangely relates God and Jesus to Ralph Fiennes and token small child. Token small child gets smooshed by train (indirectly) by his father so that heroine addicts, self-involved women who wear makeup and loney people with large glasses could be Saved. And doesn't Ralph Fiennes see heroine addict a few years spinning happily around with a young son in the MIDDLE OF A HEAVILY TRAFFICKED SIDEWALK with no regard for the several people she almost carelessly runs into.

Then they pray for you, blah blah blah only people who don't believe in Jesus drink, commit suicide and get in car accidents, etc. and ask you to take a survey at the end. Survey, as I previously understood it, meant filling out a sheet of paper gauging my interests or reactions to certain topics on a numeric scale. Not so in Haunted Jesusland.

For a half hour, I was badgered into Christianity by a Jesus Guru who insisted that while she did not approve of scare tactics, this was perfectly acceptable and did I know God doesn't like religion? Hmm. While I genuinely enjoyed engaging in a dialogue with a person I normally would avoid like fanatic Twilight fans, she was very manipulative in the way that she would dodge my direct questions (how do you feel about people who use Christianity for political means? How can you argue that abortion doesn't cause infertility or breast cancer when it's a proven fact?) and go all anecdotal and sob-story on me. I refused to give her any personal information, which irritated her, and when I explained that I had been at rock bottom, she dismissed it on the grounds that no one gets out of rock bottom without Jesus. I told her that although we were at ideological stand stills, I appreciated her time and enjoyed talking to her. At that, I stood and shook her hand, which I'm pretty sure stymied her and walked away.


Then I went back the next day ready for round two with Nikki.