I Saw a Demon
by William J. Jackson
Last year a Baptist group harangued people going into a Catholic carnival in Chicago —both churches are situated near Midway Airport. The Baptists yelled that the fund-raising carnival was “Satanic fraud!” perpetrated by a condemned, bankrupt church. The most abusive protestors were arrested and put in a cell.
One of the policemen who jailed the protestors had been reading The DaVinci Code, and he couldn’t resist saying to the arrested Baptists, “You know, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, right?” They called him a Satanic fool, and began chanting that in the cell.
When the case went to court, the protestors, in their defense, cited the policeman’s words as evidence of bias and infringement of First Amendment rights.
That reminds me of the activities of the evangelical group from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, which I saw on display at Barack Obama’s inauguration. At first I wondered if they were related to the protests at the carnival. The Westboro Baptists are the ones who show up at soldiers’ funerals with signs like “God hates fags” and argue that American soldiers die, and all American misfortunes—hurricanes, floods and all—occur because of the betrayal of biblical righteousness in heinous acts of homosexuality. The Westboro church vehemently fights demons.
That church reminds me of something I saw when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, back in the ‘80s. During the annual Regatta on the Charles River, gracefully curving tree-lined Riverside Drive is closed on the last weekend of October so people can walk with ease there and watch the rowing races in a pleasant holiday atmosphere. The boats are thin like knife blades and slip along the river with great speed. People watch, sometimes with a picnic or drinks and snacks, enjoying a little vacation.
As I walked along I noticed that at the sidestreets approaching the Drive there was a van that kept returning, driving as close as possible to the people walking. In the white van it sounded like there was a maniac with a microphone shouting, and a loudspeaker on the vans roof amplifying his words.
“Hey! You demons! Demons of Babylon! Devils! You are going to hell! Demons of the Whore of Babylon! Devils! You will soon burn in hell! Demons! Do you like fire?”
Most of the people walking along by the river pretended not to hear this ranting. Some moved in another direction. But I got curious, and left Riverside Drive to walk closer, to see exactly who was yelling so gleefully to these big crowds of bright young people enjoying the race and the mild autumn weather. I found the van, its motor still running, and went up to it.
The van’s grill was near a row of sawhorses blocking vehicles from entering Riverside Drive. It was hard to see inside the van, because the windows were rolled up and seemed tinted. But getting closer, from one angle I could dimly see a face in the van gleefully yelling into the microphone. “You demons will fall like idiots, head first from the tower of Babel, dash your heads against boulders, burn in eternal torment!” It made him so happy to say this. I could see it in his homely clownish face. He looked like a tall rube pretending to be a cosmic savior. At first glimpse, his face looked demonic, insane, like a lost soul burning in hell. I put my face right up to the passenger’s side window to eliminate glare coming from the bright orange autumn leaves in a nearby tree. That way I could see the driver’s face a little better.
For a second I saw a wicked gleam in those beady eyes, a maniacal comic face above a white shirt and tie. I saw how his head was wrinkled, so old it was like he might have already been aged when he as born, and got worse from then onward. But the sheer hilarity inside the van was stunning. It was like he was at the center of a huge joke. The glee on the man’s mouth and eyes was not child glee but strange, like a crazed ghost’s glee. His lips were curled like in a mask of cruelty making a face that craved ugliness and enjoyed yelling about it, pointing to it and rubbing it in. I saw a shrunken head on the dashboard. Then I realized it was a stern old Puritan bobble head, nightmare grim and wrinkled, with a weird, possessed grin.
Then everything inside the van turned shadowy and obscure again, opaque. I jumped out of the way as the jittery driver put on a black hat and began backing up fast, turning around to find another approach to get nearer to the festive crowds and couples walking hand in hand along the glimmering river. “Hellions! You threw a party to find hell, and forgot about the prophet of God! I’ll block the exits and throw fire bombs!”
I guess we all know what a demon looks like, from pictures of them in the world outside us and from faces inside too. But I hadn’t realized how gleeful they can be, and how self-righteously demonic.
That encounter with the old ugly one in his white van on that sunny day felt something like what I feel when people are brutal toward animals because they think animals have no souls. “Look who’s talking!” I want to say. Drivel from the bug-eyed and batty, inspired by a heartless shrunken head, can raise dust and a stink, and stimulate disgust, true; people look to see who’s yelling. But when someone crazy as a bedbug makes that noise, trying to raise a ruckus, we have to take it in our stride.
The little coxswain shouts to the rowers, steering with the rudder and encouraging the crew with his voice. The big loudmouth possessed by vitriol focuses on celebrating what he imagines his God hates, gleefully serving as a mouthpiece for the demonic.
William J. Jackson has lived in Illinois, New York, Vermont, and India, and currently lives in Indiana. His novel, Diving for Carlos, is about growing up Midwest, and is available as a paperback and kindle book on amazon.com. His haikus can be found on Twitter, under the pen name Tsalabagundi. Contact William.
