.
Dawn broke ‘day one’ of 2025 with souls bloodied and broken on Bourbon Street. This was one man’s brain-butchered fealty to the sidewalk death cult known as Isis. Nature turned monstrous, too. Out west, holocausts of hurricane-like Santa Anas, like devouring dragons, crawled out of the Great Basin and the Mojave, blew hot flames and death, burned or soffocated many, turned neighborhoods to ashes, made refugees of rich and poor alike — while cyclones of arctic ice, deep snow and death paralyzed the plains all the way to the Atlantic.
Fire and ice. Happy New Year.
At least I finally made it over to The Last Mile Lounge. I was in search of some”comfort and joy.” God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay –and all that.
I miss Christmas.
Big disappointment. The Last Mile was looking like….well, like the last mile. Just two solitary people there, Deano the bartender and Knox, the artist who lives upstairs.It was the afternoon.
Knox, it turned out, was awaiting me in his solitude — was, as it turned out, about to discharge a mystical orgy of recycled dread; sound the alarm about an imminent earthly reckoning. Soon, for my benefit alone, he would be channeling John the Baptist, administering a post-Christmas dose of a powerful imetic, flushing all the fruit cake out of me.
It was a case of .”Hark! The Herald Angels Are No Longer Singing.
This was a new persona for Knox. It was traumatic just getting near to him. I did, and my reward was a diabolical vision. Really.
He was stationed at a table near the big old juke box, not his usual perch at the end of the bar where he always hangs over a sketch pad, drawing random things. Not on this day (a Thursday afternoon I guess it was, just about a week ago.) His hands were folded on the table; nowhere in sight was his cocktail-of-choice– The Blushing Monk whose ingredients are too numerous to list here. He was instead poised as if in prayer, like some cloistered monk (speaking of monks) over a glass of ice water which he obviously hadn’t touched and in which most the ice had melted.
I felt a rising apprehension just looking at him. Therefore, I took the opportunity to look all around at the happily familiar, cozy setting of the old lounge. I combed its four familiar walls ( where Knox has begun and had yet to finish a mural) and found some peace in Deano’s delightfully kitchy Christmas decorations. They were still out. Lots of tchotchke –as Slavic Jews call such bric-a-brac — scattered happily around before it would all to be put away for the year. Like me, Deano doesn’t like to let go of Christmas.
There was Santa , of course, and Rudolph, the elves…also real evergreen wreaths in the two front windows and on the door; a real tree, a tall one, in the corner. The tree (always a balsam fir) is bought each year by Deano from an outdoor stand in Lynn and smells of the northern forest. And some women who work at Revere Town Hall and the East Boston court house, about five of them — all friends of Joe Barron, the owner — always show up to trim ole Tenenbaum (bless them), along with anybody else who wants to join in.
It’s tradition, as is Deano’s unplugging the juke box during the procedings and playing Christmas carols on a boom box, which fills the room with Bing and Nat King Cole crooning about a White Christmas ( for the millionth time) and summoning All Ye Faithful.. Deano puts out free egg nog, and cidar, spiked and unspiked.
Yes, I miss Christmas! And I missed this year’s tree-trimming. Too bad. But I wasn’t about to miss Knox’s apocalypse.
I briefly went on taking comfort from the fact that the wreaths were still up on the the door and the windows. Deano had, as usual, set up his little creche behind the bar; it was still there. He inherited the set from his Italian grandparents. Mary, Joseph, the baby, the shephards — they were all there. He always waits to put the Magi in on the 6th, feast of the Epiphany when they traditionally finish wandering from a far, guided by that star. (The whole scene will have come and gone by the time you read this.) Deano’s a stickler for that detail –the Magi arriving only when they’re supposed to.
Then the whole thing comes down after a few days. I guess thats when the Holy Family runs off to Egypt ahead of Herod’s murderous soldiers looking to kill the Christ child.
Yes, it all goes away. And has gone away by now. I guess we have to keep it in our minds and hearts as wars rage in our brains and on the ground around us.
Hope. It’s all about hope. . Otherwise, the ball will have dropped. January will have descended like a pall.
The Iceman Cometh. Though, as noted, Knox’s ice had melted. Once again, it was fire – and ice.
And on this aftenoon, there sat Knox, looking icy and unapproachable. I approached — pulled up a chair and, not without trepidation, joined him, deciding to “beard the lion in his den,” as the expression goes. And, speaking of beards, Knox’s needed trimming more than any Christmas tree, giving him the look of a wild desert hermit, or a Santa who’d gone to seed.
He spoke. He fixed me with his gaze.
“My dear friend, Master Wayland,” he said by way of greeting. “I request that you pronounce for my ears that old Yuletide ejaculation” Ho-Ho.”
“Ho-Ho,” I said obediently.
“Can you pronounce Ho-Ho backwards?”
So, here, for an opening salvo, was a inane request. “So you’re a backwards Santa now?” I could see a lump of coal falling into my stocking.
Knox answered for me.
“It’s ‘Oh-Oh,’ my friend. Which, the world over, announces the human encounter with TROUBLE and DISTRESS.”
“I prefer Ho-Ho,” I said.” Or, even better, Ho-Ho-Ho.” But I was thinking, ‘oh-oh’– or, better still, with the right emphasis and intonation, ‘UH-oh.’ And I thought, what’s coming next here?
“I’ve been reading the headlines on my electronic gadgets and in the daily broadsheet,” Knox went on. ” I’ve also been reading a great deal of history while the world was amusing itself by gifting one another with superfluous merchandise and generally suffering the delerium of the diverted and delusional.”
“Didn’t you get any gifts this year, old friend?” I said.”Just a history book?”
“The gift of knowledge,” he said. “The gift of insight. And I’ve discerned that the history of the world is not a dialectical to and fro as that fraudulant Marx would have had us believe. But it does, as Mister Santayana told us, repeat itself.”
“First as tragedy, then as farce?”
He chortled indignantly. Deano was watching all this, amused.
“You are quoting that monster Stalin,” Knox said. “No, first as tragedy, then as DEEPER tragedy. This was most especially true in the Fourteenth Century. That is the century I’ve been studying.”
“That peculiar.,” I said. “Why the Fourteenth? I thought thirteen was your lucky number.”
” I judge that century –the Fourteenth — to be a mirror,” Knox said. “A mirror of our own time.. War, plagues, disaster.”
I recalled that there was a gook by that name — A Distant Mirror. So now I knew what history book Knox had been reading.
“UH-oh.,” I said.
“The Black Death,” he said. “That was the capstone.”
“That was bad,”I said.
“A third of the population living between India and Iceland, dead. It spread from hot to cold. But that, my friend,was just two years in the middle of those calamatous one hundred years. Speaking of which, you had the Hundred Years War overlappiing that century as well. Plague, war and death were black cherries on a poisonous cake.”
And I thought: Knox is verbally drawing the century — draw a big cake with black cherries on it. I notice at this point the dark –I’d even say black — circles under his eyes, suggesting how much time he’d spent with his nose stuck in that book at the branch library, transforming himself into a 21st Century Jeremiah. He’d obviously bought a Bible for himself, too. I never took him to be religious. I thought the worst calamity that had ever befallen him was to be jilted by a Maltese hairdresser who sped off on the back of his romantic rival’s motorcycle.
He was, to my mind, dressed for the part of a modern oracle, though his threads were his usual mufti. He had on this old tweed jacket over a t-shirt. He smelled of tobacco. He sat sideways, cross-legged, old leather Frye boots showing beneath the cuffs of his blue jeans. I imagined his clear water glass suddenly as a round orb — a crystal ball, as it were.
But, in fact, he had left behind the New Age of magic potions and crystal balls and witches, which I knew had once fascinated him. He was now strictly an Old Testament man. That was my evaluation — until he moved on to The New Testament and the Book of Revelation.
“Saint John’s Four Horsemen,” he said in those deep sandpapery tones. “They were on a rampage all those centuries ago. They are coming our way. They are coming our way again. They will be upon us soon.”
He paused here. An artist knows about tone, and he was painting in black and gray verbal tones now- and adding silence, an ominous tone; the tone of death and plague.
” We are all prisoners,” he said “The world is a prison. Plague, war, thieves, fiends everywhere incarcerated with us behind these walls — bad government, rampant peculation in business dealings, unbridled lust, insurrection, schism in the Church….this, my friend, is a violent, tormented, bewildered, disintegrating age. Man left to man — that’s what I call The Wrath of God. Satan triumphant.”
Wow.
He concluded this jeremiad with an arcing flourish of his artist’s arm as if, brush in hand, he was adding to a canvass the Four Horsemen –and old Beelzebub himself astride the globe.
“For each of us there shall be two of Lucifer’s winged accomplices escorting us as prisoner to those black doors at the end of The Last Mile –escorting us to hell!”
At this point, I’d had enough. “Can I buy you a drink, Knox? You got any women I can call to keep you company? How about I set you up with one of your Blushing Monks?”
“The monks shall not be blushing when Armaggedon comes,” boomed the old barroom prophet.
“Pretty soon you’ll be writing on subway walls,” I said.
At last, to my relief, he took a drink of water. But he commenced to stare –more accurately, to glare — at the front door to the street,as if in expecation of seeing The Four Horsemen gallop by, and the Devil astride one of them. It were as if the Evil One himself would come striding through the door presently. Then he slowly turned his gaze upoon me, eyes like lasers drilling a hole in my forehead in order, apparently, to deposit secret knowledge there.
“We know not the time or the hour,” he said.
“The Iceman Cometh,” I mumbled, and offered to put some ice in his water glass. He smiled, forebodingly.
“The Four Horsemen Cometh,”He said. “Death, Famine, War and Conquest.”
“Sounds like an old race form from the Downs,” I said, as if anything could lighten him up.”You got any odds on any of those phillies?”
“The odds are against us, my friend. Take cover. Say your prayers.” He twisted in his seat then, toward the random scumbles of paint and whitewash where he was working on a back wall mural –at owner Joe Barron’s commisioning. The subject: a prisoner in a prison jumpsuit emblazoned with the name BARRON (it was a joke) walking the last mile between two prison guards.
“Old Joe Barron,” Knox boomed, ” will be a stand-in for all humanity. He’ll be escorted to his doom by two acolytes of the Evil One. HIS odds are poor — unless…”
Now, I thought of poor Joe Barron who this year didn’t fly up from his place in Key Biscayne for Christmas, avoiding last year’s unprecedented holiday travel nightmare. I was tempted to call him and warn him that he’d soon be going to hell on the back wall of his own establishment if he didn’t hurry up and request a different mural from Knox — maybe a nice portrait of himself swinging in a hammock under palm trees.
“We can all save ourselves,” Knox rambled on, shedding his first ray of light. ” We need only — repent.”
I figured that was coming. What prophet doesn’t get around to that sooner or later. And I guess we should be glad of that escape hatch.
I sat with old Knox another ten minutes or so, and he never uttered another word. I’m thinking he was silently praying. Knox, praying! That would be new. But his eyes stayed fixed on the big old front door with its hanging wreath. I decided he was waiting for the Devil to appear.
Instinctively I, too, turned and looked at the door and the daylight after so much gloom had been spread about the premises.
And then, it happened.
I saw The Devil amble into sight, pull open half of the double insulated glass door, letting in a chill, then step inside (don’t ask me what he looked like because I don’t want to remember). He took a few step (he must have had legs) in my direction. He was grinning the way a hyena might grin; he stopped abruptly (thankfully) glance menacingly about the empty Lounge as if looking, like a hyena, for rotting quarry to devour, then again at me with the two cat’s eye marbles he had eyes. Then he stood still a moment. (I presume it was a “he,” or was “he” a “she” or should the devil be just an ‘it’?) Then he casually strode over to the bar, plopped down on a stool and, in a voice fierce and unearthly, order a draft from Deano, who regarded him as if he were a regular customer — as if he’d seen him before.
I think I rubbed my eyes at this point, then looked back at Knox who was smiling knowingly, even triumphantly. Was he seeing what I was seeing? But neither of us said a word. I finally rose and went unsteadily to the bar, walking those ten paces almost as if I were drunk — or walking The Last Mile. The Devil had disappeard. But I shook both arms, as if shaking off the grasp of a couple of Mr. Scratch’s invisible legions intent on walking me the last mile. I decided I was suffering from a fevered revery induce by Knox’s wild imprecations. One of Deano’s strong cups of coffee would help.
Deano, who knows I don’t drink, regarded mewith alarm as I approached and plopped down on the stool where the devil had been sitting. He asked, “you alright?”
“Fine,” I said. “Just need a coffee. I’ve been listening to the voice of doom.”
He laughed and went to the coffee urn where he’d percolated himself a cup.
“Seen the devil, eh,” he said, setting down a mug before me.
“Saw him sitting right here,” I said.
He laughed. “Funny I didn’t see him,”he said, and picked up the crossword puzzle he’d been working.”
“Yeah, funny,” I said.
But my seat was warm.
19 Cent Notebook 