WHEN I FELT THE SMOKE OF SATAN

I have a guilty pleasure. I like baking hot desert heat, and my feet have polka dots of beech tar that runs like boiling molasses in the sand these days. I'm pretty sure you could bake a sponge cake in this weather.  

I have to remind myself we are approaching winter, and I'm recalling a cool autumn we had several years ago. That slightly chilly but absolutely austral season in Los Angeles meant I wore socks, a jacket and kept the windows closed, which is an important detail in this story.  

Early one evening, I had rewritten to my satisfaction (finally) the opening chapters of Padre Pio and You, and had described Pio's mother as she is; a saint. No sooner had I finished work, when my little place filled with dense cigarette smoke of burning tar and stale ash. Up to this point, after 9 years of coming to Los Angeles for work or to live, I'd never had a cigarette. 

These puffs were not pleasant, but an aggressive fog, most totally unlike the smell of cigar smoke I'd received more than any other mystical scent from Padre Pio that was pungent and delicious, left no nasty odor, and was meant to be a charitable warning to me not to go ahead with something foolish I'd been planning. 

Rather than being a fatherly restraint, this sudden smoke of satan was sabotage and a punishment. It meant I couldn't think of anything else, certainly not a portrait of Pio's father, a saint, too. 

There were two corroborating witnesses. My roommate came in, and said it was like I'd just smoked a two pack. 

Then I came home and found a letter. Neighbors asked me nicely to stop smoking or they'd sue me. I had fight or flight, my head swam with anxiety at the thought of them taking legal action. 

Then as now, I'm not sure arguing satan caused billows of noxious smoke is a good defense. I wondered how they'd smelt the smoke when the windows had been closed. I thought of getting my dentist to write a letter that I'd never smoked. But I could not deny there had been smoke. 

Some have said I've complained too much about "the attack" I came under when I wrote Padre Pio and You. But it was more that my nervous system took a battering. 

I regret the times I went on strike but I had to learn that the devil's threats are made to seem far bigger (and smokier and smellier) than that which the evil one can actually execute. I never had anything like that again. It did make me have a love of Saint Michael - asking his protection calms me when my mind is in a satan-induced storm or as in the case above, a dense miasma.

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The first classic painting, Fallen Angels in Hell was executed by John Martin.