The other night, as is my wont on most nights, I couldn't fall sleep right away. I tried saying the Rosary, as that usually puts me under, but it didn't do the trick. So I waited patiently for Miss Mabel's breathing to become heavy and regular, signaling her spiral into the arms of Morpheus.

"No ma'am," she said as soon as the first bedspring creaked when I started to throw my legs over the edge of the mattress. "No ma'am!"

"But I can't sleep," I whined, pulling my legs back onto the bed and staring into the darkness.

"Oh, now that's shocking! Why don't you go drink yourself another few cups of tea?" she asked sarcastically.

Though I had a full bottle of cough medicine with codeine in it, plus a bottle of Benedryl and a whole drawer full of Zyrtec samples from the doctor, I didn't want to artificially induce a sleeping state.

I lay in the dark sighing, tossing and turning until Miss Mable finally snapped, "Go on and get up so I can go back to sleep!"

Whenever she says that, I get giddy as a schoolgirl! Boy, I just HATE going to bed!

As soon as my foot crossed the threshhold into my office, Miss Mabel called out, "And no typing! Tap tap tap click click click tap tap click click. I can't sleep with that racket going on!"

My head fell and I shuffled into my office. While I sat and stared at the wallpaper on my computer monitor, the phone rang. After I pressed the talk-button, I didn't even say hello. There was silence for a few seconds.

"All right, the line's clear," said Citizen Jim. "It's a nice change to call you and know the phone isn't tapped. I told you if you stopped writing that column for the newspaper, the FBI would get off your ass."

"Hi," I whispered, not wanting to wake up Miss Mabel.

"Why are you WHISPERING?!" Citizen Jim yelled.

"What was that?" Miss Mabel called from the bedroom."You better not be on the phone with that pet psychic again."

"You're gonna get me in trouble!" I said into the phone, still trying to keep my voice low enough to escape detection.

"Well, Missy, I guess you haven't been reading the news or watching 'The Daily Show' or you'd know you're already in trouble," Jim said.

"Can this not wait until tomorrow at a decent hour?" I asked.

"Listen to you talking about a decent hour! You used to call me after a McDonald's run for breakfast burritos and tell me you hadn't even been to bed yet," he said.

"My life is different, now," I told him. "I have some structure these days."

"From what I hear about that pope you Catholics just elected, you're about to get more structure than you want," he said.

"I'm serious," I insisted, then I lied: "I'm even thinking of taking up some yoga."

"I am NOT joking around. That old scary-looking Bavarian who's about to start running your church, he's not gonna put up with all that tomfoolery like John Paul II. No siree—not from Dan Liebke†, and not from you! This new guy says he HATES yoga. If he hates yoga, you can just imagine how he feels about homosexuality. And it looks like that ain't all you Mother Mary-freaks have to worry about, now."

"What do you mean," I asked, fearing our Church leader was going to do away with Vatican II and make us go back to saying the Mass in Latin.

Honestly, though, I could live without saying the Mass in English if the new pope would excommunicate the idiot who conceived the "guitar Mass," designed to "bring young people back" to church. Call me old-fashioned, but there's a special place in Hell for anybody who thinks adding reverb and a drum solo to the singing of the Lord's Prayer is a good idea.

"For one thing, when this new guy was a just a lowly Cardinal, he sent the letter out to all those Catholic bishops in the U.S. right before the election. He told them they needed to let the Catholics know that voting for John Kerry would nix their right to take communion and hand them a one-way ticket to Hell—next thing you know, Bush's Catholic supporters increase by six percent," Jim said. "And for another thing, the first miracle he performed as Pope? He knocked Harry Potter off the German bestseller charts. I mean, talk about God on Earth!"

Jim then went on to tell me about the papal prophecies that some old drunk Irish priest named Malachy made during the 12th century. In all, St. Malachy made 112 predictions about future popes, some of them eerily correct. One such was his prediction that the 260th Bishop of Rome would rule while watching religion laid waste—and damned if Benedict XV didn't oversee the church while the Bolshiveks were killing the czar and setting up Communism over in Russia!

"And this new pope? Old St. Malachy said all long he was going to be elected from the Benedictine order," Jim said. "Spooky, eh?"

"But this new pope isn't from the Benedictine Order," I said.

"What's the new pope's name, Sherlock Jones?"

I sighed. "Benedict XVI," I said. "But—"

"But what, jackass? Don't make me blow my referee whistle in your fucking ear," Jim said. "The last time I did that, it woke up my my neighbors and they set fire to a paperbag full of dog feces and threw it inside my Jeep just as I was on my way to work."

"I was only pointing out—"

Jim growled into the phone, my signal to shut up. "Listen, Stimpy, this pope's 76 years old, but you better hope he lives to be 150," Jim said. "Cuz the next pope? The one after this one? HE'LL BE THE LAST POPE!"

"I suppose this is another one of St. Malachy's predictions?" I whispered.

"Damn straight. Not only will the next pope be the LAST pope, but he's gonna be a JEW," Jim said. "And you know what means."

"I don't know—maybe that Madonna's gonna remake that song 'Papa Don't Preach' with a video where she's studying the Kabbalah with Demi Moore instead of prancing around in a black teddy and pedal pushers?" I asked.

"Oh, sure, you make your jokes and laugh it up now, but you sure won't be thumbing your nose at all this when the anti-Christ puts on that funny hat and brings Armageddon down on our heads," Jim said. "It's hard to tell what kind of doomsday those Cardinals are cooking up for us right as we speak."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, for God's—"

I heard Miss Mabel shifting in the bed right before she yelled, "Get off that phone and get in here! Normal people are asleep this time of night."

"Please, Jim, I gotta go," I begged. "We'll talk about this later."

Murder in the Vatican Lucian Gregoire

"Maybe we will, maybe we won't," Jim said. "That depends whether those cuthroats in Rome are gonna assasinate Benedict XVI like they did the poor old fella who was Pope right before that Pollack took over. If you don't believe me on that one, all you have to do is read Murder in the Vatican by Lucian Gregoire, and then you—"

The line went dead, which was apropos, as Miss Mabel had appeared in a puff of smoke right beside my desk and was about to kill me.

—————

†: "Can I be the 6314th person to say that I'm so glad that the Catholic Church has elected somebody named 'RapSinger' as Pope. Way to get the kids back in, guys. Phat."

—from Liebke's web site, Astonishing Tales

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