Of Daddy Satan and the Baby Jesus of Loyola

The Books of Daddy Satan

“The used book business is not the kind of business where you’re going to get rich,” Daddy Satan said. “People don’t want to really read books anymore: why should they? I mean, give me a break.”

Then he told me: “People come into the store, and, sure, they want books ... but with pictures, with photos.  Or, they want books about television or films.  Not me: I’m a booky, and I’ll always be a booky, in a book world.  When other people would watch television when I was growing up, I would be reading a book.  Reading a book is better than watching a television show.  Movies and television bore me: They’re boring, they bore me.  I just can’t see movies or television, no, I just can’t see them.”

Daddy Satan smacked his lips as if he has just tasted his first cup of coffee of the day.  He patted the book about Women of the Bible that rested on the glass counter that displayed rare books as he attempted to justify his existence working at a minimum-wage, no-benefits salesclerk job during another day of mediocre sales at Printers Devil Bookstore.

His job, in my view, was certainly not in keeping with his recent ordination into the mock cosmology of the Baby Jesus of Loyola. 

“You should work on the Baby Jesus of Loyola to pump up sales, “ I said.  “Maybe he can persuade some of his rich kid acolytes to buy a few books about Liberation Theology, or something.”

Daddy Satan sniffed.  “A new model Jesus,” he said.  “Jesus light.”

“Well, Socialist Jesus is trendy with the kids at Loyola these days, I guess.”

“He’s more like an Easy Chair Socialist.  You can just hear those acolytes of his: sitting around him in coffeeshops, ‘oh, he’s the smartest man I’ve ever met, talking fuzzy Marx to them, after their families shell out the cost of tuition.  Our hero of the revolution.  I mean, give me a break: we’re talking someone who owns nothing but hardback books: none of those working-class paperback editions for him.”

“A hardback fetish,” I said. “That’s a kink I’ve never heard of before.”

“When the Baby Jesus of Loyola sees the collected works of Marx in hardback,” said Daddy Satan, with a snort, “it gets him all hot and bothered.”

Scenes From an Inquisition, Part I

The Great Book of the Court of Inquisition States:  He, Evan Hraesvelg, otherwise known as the Baby Jesus of Loyola, stands under trial for alleged acts of grievous hypocrisy, overt malfeasance, and intellectual browbeating.  Here he waits on this day of reckoning at its final hour, before his judge, the one he once publicly denounced in sour blasphemy as Daddy Satan.

All the weight of historical and religious and moral knowledge Evan Hraesvelg, otherwise known as the Baby Jesus of Loyola, has gained over the days, the months, the years through his studies of radical—though there are those who have deemed it heretical—theology is now placed on the scales of inquisitorial justice.

In the Name of Daddy Satan

Evan Hraesvelg assumed the characteristic position he favored during summer days on the side patio of the Café Noir coffeeshop: that is, stretched out on an outdoor plastic chair, with hairless chest bared to invite to the sun, with khaki shorts barely reaching over his tanned thighs, with his current book on his lap that he read as the mirrored aviator sunglasses that shield his eyes reflected the pages of text.

From time to time, he meticulously removed a burning cigarette from the notch on the black plastic ashtray on the table next to him and took a heavy drag.  Then, he replaced the cigarette exactly into the notch, sipped from his cup of coffee, and turned a page over in his book.

A hardback book.  A Marxist slant on the Spanish Inquisition.

He appeared in total contentment: satisfied in keeping to his casual, sun-blessed ritual: tanning, book, cigarette, coffee, more tanning, book, cigarette, coffee. …

Little did Evan Hraesvelg know, however, that, on this particular very hot and very sweaty Sunday, he was about to enter into the opening act of a divine comedy.

My companion and I approached the table.  He wheeled his beat-up urban street bike over toward it, then parked the bike against a tree ... and proceeded to just stand there, looking Evan Hraesvelg over.  Staring at him hard, a slight sneer creasing the corner of his thick lips.  After a few silent moments holding this pose, he combed a strand of his long hair over his left ear with his fingers, and he shouted out at Evan:

“So, what’s the word, Our Baby Jesus of Loyola?”

And after a markedly dramatic pause, and without so much as one look away from his book, Evan spoke:

“Why, If It Isn’t

Daddy

Satan”

Refreshments for an Inquisition

Daddy Satan takes a stone chalice from off the dais and sips a hot black drink from within it, the steam flowing about the sneer on his face and up into his nostrils as he glowers down at the accused apostate.

Enter Beeratrice

“But I don’t blame her, it isn’t her fault.  It’s been leading up to this for years.  I was always his foil, just his foil.  She’s basically a good kid,” Daddy Satan said.

“I think she has something to do with it, Daddy Satan,” I said. “I mean, she was hanging out with both you guys separately, at the same time, and you know about what happened then.  The Final Conflict over pitchers.”

Daddy Satan laughed. “I still don’t think you can blame her,” he said. “She’s a sweet young kid.  She can still be one of my acolytes.”

“Then, as one of your acolytes, she must assume a name,” I said.  “How about ... I know.  The incident of which we speak took place at The Mirage Bar, am I right?  And she has been known to help empty a pitcher or two of brew, right?  So she should henceforth be deemed ... Beeratrice.”

“Beeratrice?”

“Sure, like that Beatrice, who Dante had the hots for: she who leads those infatuated with her toward heaven ... and later into hell.”

Daddy Satan fell silent.

Expanding on the notion, I continued:  “Except that she’s Beeratrice.  Picture it: She takes you down to hell as your guide, you follow after her, until you come to the very center of hell itself; only there, it isn’t Satan encased in a block of ice, but ... a keg of beer.”

Daddy Satan smiled, and said:  “Beeratrice, huh?  I don’t know.  Maybe.”

Beeratrice and Her Dante

Beeratrice could be found those days sitting at a table in Café Noir, with her Italian-English dictionary and a worn hardback copy of Dante’s epic poem at her elbow, assiduously working on translating it for her class at Loyola University, the Roman Catholic school founded by Jesuits in Rogers Park, Chicago.

At times, she took a break from her books to talk with us.  She charmed us when she talked.  We were enraptured, held immersed in her, watching her look into our eyes as if her words were materializing in a mirror before her.

Here is how Beeratrice talked:  “I don’t think they’re ever going to make a movie or television show about Dante I don’t think they have at least he’s amazing it’s almost like you want to go to hell with him to see all these people who are down there I guess you could say it’s like you want to be down with Dante to see all the people there it’s like one big circus in hell and because you know you won’t be staying you know it’s pretty cool to be down there because you are going to see these evil people living out their evil deeds right in front of your eyes and it’s just even more cool in the original Italian especially at the end when Dante runs into Judas and then finds Satan in a huge block of ice right in the center of hell not the fire you would have thought it’s all so I don’t know Italian and poetic and all like ciao bello Dante Bonjourno Judas Vorrei Una Birra, Satan.”

Beeratrice Charms the Baby Jesus of Loyola

Many lines of conversation at Café Noir often ended up at Evan Hraesvelg’s table.  He was a salon unto himselfan instant symposiast.  A practiced listener and conversationalist, a talent cultivated during those days when he had worked as an academic specialist at Loyola University, he had it all down to a near choreographic art: his nod of the headbrief and smoothly accomplished; his steady eye contact, then, his hard squint as he puffed on his prop, his cigarette.  All as a prompt for someone like Beeratrice to continue her talking, then phrasing his searching questions to her softly, such as:

“And your boyfriend?  Where is he now?”

“Oh he’s staying in Europe see he’s visited there so many times that well before anything becomes serious between us he wants to stay there for awhile and see how it feels like to be in the middle of a different culture without having to leave in three or four days …”

Evan nodded.  He took a drag off his cigarette and, squinting through the smoke, said: “Oh, he is away then.”

The Nativity of the Baby Jesus of Loyola

“And this is my photo album.  I only really show it to my closest friends,” said Evan Hraesvelg.

Beeratrice said, “Oh I see I see oh look at this one here oh look at you here you are such a hippie in this picture …”

“MMM Hmmm”

“… look you’re wearing granny glasses in this picture.”

“That was when I was working for the McCarthy campaign.”

“Oh cool.”

“Waging our struggle against the war.  LBJ, WE AREN’T WAITING.  GET OUT NOW, YOU TEXAN SATAN!”

“Really cool now what’s this who’s this here?”

“Here, move a little closer so I can show you.  This picture was taken back there when I was in seminary school, during our Christmas pageant.”

“Look at you here you look like you are in one of those holy pictures that we used to have to wear around our necks in Catholic School with the curly hair and the little round face you look just like him you are a perfect match you two if I didn’t know any better I would say you were him.”

“Yes, my fellow students said I looked like the Baby Jesus of Prague ... though there were times when I was referred to as Goat Boy.”

Just Call Her Beeratrice of the Mourning

Evan Hraesvelg set aside an hour at Café Noir one afternoon to simply admire a photograph on the tabletop that revealed a side of somber grace to the character of Beeratrice.  He was studying a copy of the photograph she had given him after their long discussions about memorable deaths in their families.

Evan’s uncle had died quickly in suicide; Beeratrice’s father had died slowly from emphysema and then lung cancer.  The photo he studied showed her posing behind the tombstone of her father.  She was dressed in a cloud-white gown that flowed loosely around the fullness in her body.  Her face rested in a grim expression with her eyes cast in a mesmeric, faraway stare.  Evan really liked the way she had set her hands on the tombstone, as if to steady it, to grant peace to the shell of the departed soul beneath that had been shaken so long by a life of gasps.

To Evan, she appeared like the Venus in Bluejeans of Café Noir become the Earth Angel of the Mourning.  

Then he found himself wondering how he would love her.  But he did not so much see her in bed with him, as him on her.  Her body wrapped with sheets in the white of the same gown she was wearing on the tombstone photo.  His head pillowed on the soft of her breasts, he would curl up on top of her and drift off to sleep, as the touch of her breath played on his ear.

Evan Hraesvelg had never before allowed himself to imagine sleeping on Beeratrice, no, Evan had been studious in reminding himself that he must honor her thoughts about her fiancé, far away.  But now, moved once again by this photo, he sighed out a plume of cigarette smoke and admitted the obvious to himself:

Beeratrice Was Smoking

“If your father died as a result of smoking too heavily, why, then, do you still smoke?” Evan said.

Beeratrice stopped blinking her eyes to fix them on him.  “Oh I guess for the same reason you do,” she said.

 

Scenes From the Inquisition, Part II

Poring over the voluminous, hardback tome before him and dipping his quill pen into a bottle of reddish-black ink, the Inquisitor jots down notes into the book and mutters sardonic words to himself in a snarl under his breath before he announces:  “This court is in session to consider the apostasy of, firstly, you daring to call yourself the Baby Jesus of Loyola, and, secondly, you mocking the Inquisition by branding me, in public, as Daddy Satan.  What say you to these grave charges?”

Evan Hraesvelg responds:  “While pondering the metaphysical implications of my studies of the works of arcane philosophers and little-known theologians in varied forms of Latin and Greek and Hebrew, I indeed arrived conclusively at the revelation that I had been called to carry the name of the Baby Jesus of Loyola and was met by hosannas and exultations from my fellow scholars and practitioners in the arts of obscure theological inquiry.

“Though knowing that you and the court would be in opposition, I then followed with what I consider the inevitable inspiration to announce the naming of you.  As a matter of enlightened integrity, I could do nothing else.  Thus, I think of it as the epitomic apex of my cerebral discipline, the very apex of my intellectual accomplishments, to have branded you as Daddy Satan.  It would be an honor to be doomed by this court for my actions, though I be damned through eternity.”

“Damning you eternally is the lesser of the punishments that you face,” Daddy Satan says, and begins to call out the particulars of the offenses with a tick of the pen on the book: “And what other manner of cerebral convulsions are these that you spread like insidious vermin among the scholarly youth? what, that our Lord God imbibed Magic Mushrooms and thus Created Mass Hallucinations of Supposed Miracles? And that the Lord Jesus whom you mock with your false name Committed Acts of a Carnal, Man-Lusting Nature during his holy mission on Earth?  Am I to take seriously what I am reading here? Yet you persist to term such blasphemies as the grand conclusions of your studies?”

“Blasphemies, no.  Truth, I say.”

Violently, Daddy Satan slams shut the tome.  “Do not speak of the truth,” he shouts.  “To the keeper of the books!”

Scenes From the Inquisition, Part III

And, indeed, the walls of the courtroom of this particular Inquisition are lined entirely with books.

All are bound like the book Daddy Satan studies before him, only in different colors.  While Daddy Satan is referring to a pure white book, as white as a spotlight in an interrogation room, in this case before him, the other books on the towering shelvesextending out behind and above Evan Hraesvelg into the infiniteare in red, or black, or yellow, or tan, and many appear to have been heavily used, covered in centuries of dust.

What could these great books contain?  Evan was curious, and felt a sudden boyish urge to grab out a book from its shelf and open it. 

So, when Daddy Satan bent down below the bench to pick up the quill pen that he had dropped in his raging at Evan, then spent several minutes fussing with his cloak beneath the desk, Evan took the chance to sidle over to a nearby shelf and draw out a yellow book.  Cracking it open, he discovered it was filled with the names of persons in minute printname after name in a variety of cryptic languages, column upon column that appeared to cover hundreds of pages.  Scrawled by hand next to each name in the reddish-black ink of Daddy Satan’s quill pen was either a checkmark or an ominous X. 

Before Evan could hope to study the book further, though, Daddy Satan had caught him and was pointing and jabbing the quill pen at him again.  He dropped the book, noticing suddenly that it did not make a sound when it hit the floor.

Daddy Satan spoke: “You read names etched in the plots of blasphemous crime, all hard bound in the dust of this library of guilt.  And your book, you who call yourself the Baby Jesus of Loyola, is long overdue.”

My Revelation to Beeratrice

Eventually, I had to talk with Beeratrice myself.  Not just a few offhanded pleasantries either, but a more involved conversation with historical and poetical and spiritual allusions ... even going beyond her conversations with Daddy Satan and the Baby Jesus of Loyola.  For I believed Beeratrice had not truly understood the creation of a mock cosmology that centered around her very being.

What could I say to her?  A self-defined committed Socialist who had boasted of reading the entire works of Marx and Lenin in chronological order was perilously close to betraying his lifelong tenet of eliminating all forms of competition from the world (like, how many times had Evan chided me for turning to the sports page while I was reading the newspaper at Café Noir? for paying any attention whatsoever to the “funny pages of the infantile adult bourgeois male”) as he faced off against this entity he had branded as Daddy Satan—how was I to explain this all to Beeratrice?

I planned to see her one night at The Mirage Bar: a true Chicago dive located on Sheridan Drive, a couple blocks from Loyola University, that the students and even some faculty had adopted for sessions of drunken slumming.

So, after entering, I bought a two-dollar pitcher of beer at the bar, walked to a table under a framed advertisement for Red Goat Bock Beer with its cartoon of a scarlet billy goat head set on a mirror whose mouth munched on a six pack of empty cans, and put the pitcher down on the table to talk.

Now, I was pretty nervous.  After all, Beeratrice had never revealed herself as thoroughly to me as she had to Daddy Satan and the Baby Jesus of Loyola. Our talks had never ended up as marathon discourses between these living personifications of Hegelian dialectics:  Messrs. Thesis and Antithesis.  I was understandably concerned that she would find my efforts at conversation lacking, after her sessions with these two neighborhood philosophes.

So before we would meet, I had practiced talking to her in front of a mirror in my room.  By rehearsing what I would say first without alcoholic stimulation, I hoped to gather in my mind a technique, a method of approach, a memorized script that would impress Beeratrice with the implications of her actions.  I then repeated the process after drinking down a six pack of Red Goat Bock Beer.

“Once upon a time,” I said to the mirror in my room, “a long time ago, on a dark and stormy night of the soul, there was a writer in search of the perfect story: our friend, now known as Daddy Satan.”  I practiced a nod of the headbrief and smoothly accomplished; steady eye contact, then, a hard squint as if through smoke:

“He had come to believe.” I said to the mirror, “that the only way to become a writer was to have a story, told in a clear, simple prose, with a beginning and a middle and an end.  He would talk in long hurried monologues about the necessity of short, clear sentences and paragraphs in plotted novels.  Punchy prose.  One scene leading logically to another.  Characters, real characters and, always, a theme.  He did not suffer adjectives or ten-dollar words or novels that went—as he phrased it—nowhere slow.  ‘Where’s the story?’ was his question, and his answer was:

You

Have to Have

a

Story

“His search for the perfect story was pure and undeterred,” I saw myself telling Beeratrice.  “And because we both had this interest in writing, I showed him one of my stories.  He studied it quickly and handed it back with his verdict:  ‘Well, the writing is pretty good ... what’s the story?’ ”

Then I would say the answer to her:  “Here’s the story.”

Beeratrice on Television

“Well, thank you, I appreciate the gift, but I don’t watch television,”  Daddy Satan said to her.  “I’m a booky:  I live in a world of books.”

Beeratrice stood behind the used television she was offering to Daddy Satan and laid her hands serenely on it.  She blinked at him.  He smiled and said:

“One time, I saw a sign one of my friends had tacked on to his television—a sign you could actually read, how about that?—that said ‘Death to Your Television.’  That sums up my feelings ... not that I don’t appreciate your gift, I mean, maybe I’ll end up watching something, but not all the time.  Because, I’m a booky.  I mean, take a book that has a story, a real story, and real characters.”  He pointed his finger at her and continued:  “You can lose yourself in a book like that.  You can’t lose yourself the same way in television.”

Beeratrice looked at Daddy Satan and smiled, mildly.  She moved the tips of her curved fingers lightly over the top of the console as if she were a medium channeling a spirit through a crystal portal.

Finally, she said:  “Televisions have stories don’t they of course they do my father would watch them when he was in bed sick and he would say that he couldn’t go a whole day without his story you know soap operas he called them his stories like he was the story only I could never sit through them I never really got the habit it’s like smoking I guess to some people those stories really hook you you can’t quit watching them even though they never end the stories I mean they can go on and on for years and years even.”

His thick-lipped mouth slightly open, Daddy Satan stared at Beeratrice.  Then, he said:  “Man, you’re smoking.”

The Plot Thickens

“Just what was his story?” I said to my mirror.  “He kept telling me that I lacked a story, but, strangely, all the time he continued to proselytize to me about my failings, the less and less I saw of any writing from him.  It was a mystery to me.  And for him.”

For one night we were sitting here, at The Mirage, when he announced after three pitchers of beer that everyone who wants to be a writer should be writing them, I mean, mysteries and crime novels.  None of those profound, academic, weighty tomes for him; no, they could not compare to a good crime story that contains the pulp of true fiction:  the crime, the trial, the sentence, that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.”

The Great Schism

You, Beeratrice, are together at last, at The Mirage Bar, with the One known as the Baby Jesus of Loyola and the other as Daddy Satan of the Future.  You sit at their elbows and muse over your stein of beer, wary of saying anything, waiting for something worse, even a whirl of fists or mugs heaved at walls or slurred obscenitiesall events this bar has seen in its time.

No, you wait for ... not a mere physical battle, no, a Last Conflict of Apocalyptic Wordplay.

Now, you have known this pair as convivial, sometimes entertainingly odd, older acquaintances at Café Noir, but you never understood that, here, together, they would vie for your sole attention as acting agents in a psychic drama, that their apparently lighthearted game of contentious friendshipwith their improvised lines of needling digs and playful, mock insultsmasked the ferment of a bitter, a Final Conflict that will prove decisive for ages to come.

By a round of cyclical and fateful occurrences, the character of the struggle evolved.  A shift in appearances or positions from one inspired a drastic reaction as a counterforce from the other, leading inexorably to this Armageddon of the Brainscape: face-to-face-in-your-face at The Mirage Bar.

You have not so much as come between them, as tipped the balance of the conflict.  See how Daddy Satan invites himself over to your table and makes a point of nudging your shoulder when he sits beside you, while the Baby Jesus of Loyola prepares to tap into the Depths of the Metaphysical for his scourging reply; as he observes Daddy Satan helping himself to a glass of beer from your pitcher without asking permission, his countenance chills with a righteous glare:  a cocked eyebrow, a malicious smile forming on the corner of his lips. 

“Why, look who’s come to bore us with his stories about the Great Crime Novel,” begins the Baby Jesus of Loyola.  “Are you going to pay us now or pay us later for that beer?  Before or after you negotiate your advance?”

“Oh, come on, give me a break, “ says Daddy Satan.  “I thought you socialists were supposed to share with the working class.  I’ll be glad to find you a hardback edition of the Sex Life of Marx for a glass of beer.”

The Baby Jesus of Loyola sighs, and turns to you, taking on that voice of a kindly and worldly confidante he has been using on you since you have known him.  “Our mutual friend believes in drinking beer on the Five-Year Plan,” he says to you.  “In other words, he’ll compensate us around the dawn of the millennium.”

From the appearance of Daddy Satan, you anticipate a reply full of fire and brimstone; watering at the mouth to let loose on the Baby Jesus of Loyola, he smacks his lips until you think you are seeing drops of spittle on the corners.

You now sense a long night ahead of you at The Mirage Bar.

So you reach for the pitcher, but both of your drinking partners extend a right hand toward the vessel to vie for the honor of serving you.

“Oh, excuse me, after you,” says the Baby Jesus of Loyola.  “Of course, you are better at doing this than I am.”

“What do you mean by that, buddy?” says Daddy Satan

“I’m simply acknowledging your years of experience as a waiter, and a damn good one, I’d imagine.  One can’t help but notice the ... elegant way you reach for the pitcher, so quickly and effortlessly, knowing someone else will be paying for it, soon enough.”

Daddy Satan sits back.  “You pour it then,” he says, with a sniff. “Just don’t spill any on your lap.  You never know what you’ll find down there, when you go to wipe it off.”

The Baby Jesus of Loyola suddenly takes on a solemn mien.  He drinks from his stein, and he looks into the mirrored sign for Red Goat Bock Beer framed on the wall behind the table.  “Very good,” he whispers, as if to himself.  “That was well put.”

Daddy Satan now moves in for another hard shot.  “You might not find what you’re looking for, buddy,” he says.

“MMMM Hmmm”

“So don’t wipe too hard.”

“Excellent.  Perhaps you really are a writer, then.”

“And I plan to write your obit.”

How do you react to this, Beeratrice?  Fill in the pause, or fill your empty glass?

The Baby Jesus of Loyola continues to stare at the scarlet goat head in the sign.  Then, Daddy Satan points at him, jabbing his finger forward.  “You’re a loser, my friend,” he says.  “An Easy Chair Socialist with hardback books and soft palmsa loser.  I’ll bet you’ve never read every word of Marx; I’ll bet you wouldn’t recognize Karl if he walked into The Mirage naked wearing a red flag diaper.  I mean ... oh, how can you talk to a person? give me a break, you’re just full of crap, you’re all crapped out, you’re a loser.”

But you had so much to say before, Beeratrice.  Always so eager to talk with us.  Ceaselessly.  Never boring.

“This is language I would expect from someone who reads comic books on a regular basis,” says the Baby Jesus of Loyola.  “Or are these phrases listed in the notecards you bring to Café Noir every day? to show us you really are writing a Great Crime Novel?  Please tell us.  We want to hear about your work, considering that we’ll probably never read any of it.”

“Go to hell, you Baby Jesus of Loyola,”  Daddy Satan fairly spits out.  Then, as if exhausted momentarily by his expectoration, he looks to you and groans.  And, of course, the Baby Jesus of Loyola answers with a look to you of his own.

What do they see in you, Beeratrice?

Our Lady of the Apocalypse?  Helen of Troy as an International Supermodel who inspires Gog and Magog to the war table that will be televised 24/7 on cable news?  Have battalions of the spirit world been mustered on an antediluvian landscape for your approval?  Now, what order of speech have you prepared?  Should you not lift your face to those forces arrayed before you, prepared to violently unite the duality of satanic and godlytoo long locked in inconclusive, epochal stalematein a final struggle?  Should you not give your blessing with an upraised hand gesture as if from some sinister Pope, with words off your lips like a soul kiss from the lips and tongue of a Babylonian priestess?

Instead, you tell them:  “Guys why are you fighting like this let’s be friends let’s drink another pitcher what do you say I’ll buy this time I promise I’ll buy okay okay?”

Scenes from an Inquisition Part IV

The antagonists debate.  The arguments are in tangles of forgotten languages, arcane allusions, labyrinthine pursuits that date back to the first scribbles of sacred and pagan laws, on stone tablets and other hard places.  The visceral excitement of personal belief.  The recalled minutia from obscure scrolls.  Nuance in translation, a twist in dialect, a parameter of interpretation.

Voices rise as high as the tower of books that dominate the courtroom.  Abuse of protocol occurs.  A gavel sounds.  Objections sustained, then overruled.  An oath is broken, and bickering ensues over the difference between the apocryphal and the ordained.

Whole books are spoken in tongues.  Evidence is entered.  A hieroglyphic word undergoes tortuous scrutiny for hours upon hours.  Evidence is withdrawn.  The proceedings degenerate into insults and whining.  Decorum is restored, a ruling goes unanswered.  Point of order, point well taken, point counterpoint, pointed rebuttal, prove the point, what is the point?  Where is the point?

Below where the angels dance.

So, What’s the Story?

Another pitcher, Beeratrice?  For you, never a problem.  I always buy.

Now, where was I?  Ah yes, the story I did not have.  I mulled over his opinion about me not having a story.  Where, indeed, was the story? the characters? the plot? and, most importantly, the theme?  I mean, he seemed so sure of himself, so correct, as only a Daddy Satan can be.

Then, one night, in here, at The Mirage Bar ... an idea for my story came to me.  All the time, it had been staring me in the face, haranguing me, insisting I tell it.  Yes, Daddy Satan demanded a story, all right, and he and the Baby Jesus of Loyola had become, in my mind, some real characters for it.

So, tell me, what do you think of the story so far, Beeratrice? how do you find yourself in it? in this, the story of Daddy Satan and the Baby ...

Scenes From an Inquisition: Pronouncing Sentence

... hiss, did Daddy Satan, through clenched teeth and a raised, foaming upper lip like that off a rabid horse, as the books began to smoke in what he known as the Baby Jesus of Loyola saw as a furious spontaneous combustion.

He cried from the smoke in his eyes with the realization of what his new name would cost him and shouted and raved at The Inquisitor in spasms, as the stench of the books pinched his nostrils with an odor not of paper but flesh and hair on fire in this blast furnace of a room where he would be sealed in his fate, as a plume of oily smoke from sweat and blood and burst blisters of burning flesh drew down his eyelids and blinded him, as flakes and ashes from the books swept over body now curling to the floor of the room like bald tires in a junkyard inferno.

And with that Daddy Satan cited Dante: 

 

THEN THEY RAKED HIM WITH MORE

THAN A HUNDRED BOOKS

BELLOWING: ‘HERE YOU DANCE BELOW THE

COVERS.

GRAFT ALL YOU CAN THERE: NO ONE

CHECKS YOUR BOOKS.

And most finally said: “And now, and only now, can you grovel at my feet, my newly ordained acolyte, because I, Daddy Satan, have finally rebranded you, for all eternity, as the:

BABY JUDAS

OF

PRICK

Unreality Television

Time for your favorite program.  Your story.  The story you follow.  You can’t keep your eyes off the screen.  Black-and-white screen.  Portable television you can take anywhere with you.

Upon this screen, a hand turns the pages of a televisional book.  The hand of Beeratrice.

A real page turner.  More deft even than the hand on the model you remember who revealed letters as words on a legendary game show, her hand turns a page.  And again.  But to a blank page.  So, where’s the story?

Now, her hand turns another page for you.  Your eyes draw closer to the screen.  They draw a blank.  What, did you miss it?  Or is the reception just bad?

But wait, now you see the story.  All the blankness was just a teaser.  So sit back in your easy chair, relax, and enjoy another chapter of the inquisition.

And, We Have a Winner

I suppose you never guessed that I would win you in the end, my dear Beeratrice.  But I am all about competition.  On the spiritual level.

So how did you like my story?  There was no way in hell that I could have ever won you without putting you in it: I mean, we hardly ever spoke to each other at Café Noir or here in The Mirage Bar, did we?  I just sort of, watched you speaking from a distance.

Pickup lines, I don’t do.  Me, I’m only good at picking up ... six packs.

Yes, perhaps I was a little too hard on the principal characters throughout the ... uh, narrative, but, listen, if you are going to play at being a Daddy Satan and the Baby Jesus of ... no, thanks for reminding me, the Baby Judas of Prick ... there has to be a moral to the story.

Let’s see.  How about:  What difference does it make if the glass is half full or half empty, if there’s beer in it?  I said to the scarlet billy goat on the mirror.

THE END