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 smok...
