The Dark Side Calling

For my brothers and me, Halloween kicked off the annual holiday season. We loved the masquerade nature of it, getting to be a superhero, cowboy, Count Dracula, werewolf, or ghost for a night. It was fun going from house to house to collect bags of candy apples and fruit, chocolate bars, and candy corn. Some years all four of us were decked out in our Halloween glory, and other years only two of us got real costumes due to the slim household budget. For the two of us left out, my mom compensated by painting our faces, transforming us into ghouls and devils from the neck up.

“George, Julio, Eustaquio . . . come on!” I yelled impatiently from the front door of our apartment, my face painted red like the devil, makeshift horns on my head. I had just looked in the bathroom mirror one last time and grinned at my reflection—my eyes, painted black as coal, even freaked me out a little.

Mamí came down the hall pulling Eustaquio by the hand. He kept tripping on his long black vampire costume and sounded muffled through the plastic mask that covered his face. “You keep an eye on your little brothers, you hear?” she said, pinning me with the look. “I want you boys back by 8:30 at the latest.”

I promised her we would and off we went, taking the stairs two at a time to get outside as fast as possible. The streets of the Bronx came alive on this night, with costumed kids darting this way and that across the noisy streets. Even the hookers that worked the street corners traded their usual miniskirts and fishnet stockings for provocative Halloween costumes like cats and Playboy bunnies. We met up with some of our friends and headed for an apartment building rumored to have the best candy in the neighborhood.

“Oh, man, you gotta check out this one house!” my friend David said, his voice breathless from running in his Batman costume. “The lady who lives there made it into a haunted house with—”

“Don’t spoil it!” I shot back. “Let me see for myself.”

As we climbed the stairwell inside the building, I heard scary music playing and deep throaty voices chanting from the third floor. My heart beat faster, and when we hit the third-floor landing I saw that whoever lived there had transformed the entire area around her door into a witch’s lair with cobwebs, black lights, dangling skeletons, and black cat figurines. The door to the apartment was open, and white smoke poured from the dark room beyond. Our creaking footsteps on the landing signaled whoever lived there, and she flew out at us dressed like a witch, screaming and cackling into the hallway. We shrieked and laughed, enjoying the good Halloween scare, then held our bags out for the candy she offered. I went back to her door four times that night.

My fascination with the dark, mysterious nature of the underworld gained a foothold that year, and the supernatural seemed to step out to meet me. I started seeing things that shouldn’t have been there—or rather I saw things that weren’t there . . . in the physical realm. Years later, as a warlock and high priest of Santeria, I would look back on this time of adolescence and realize my spiritual eyes were being unlocked for the very first time.

One night, after playing down the street with my friends, I came into our building and headed for the stairwell. Our apartment was located on the third floor, and as I rounded the corner at the first landing, a strange, dwarfish woman with a distorted cartoon-like head popped out from behind the second-story stairwell. She looked human, but her head was impossibly large—all I saw was this freakish head popping out, a clown smile on her face. My heart froze in my chest and I lunged back to the first floor. After waiting ten minutes, I tried again . . . and again . . . but every time I advanced up the stairs, she popped out, blocking my passage.

The woman looked very young, with long black hair and pale white skin. I had never seen

anyone like her in our building before, and a sick feeling in my gut told me something was not right. She was not right. Desperate to get home, I ran back to the main lobby to see if anyone was going upstairs so I could walk up with them and make it past the dreaded second-story stairwell.

“Hey, can you help me, sir?” I called out when a man finally entered the lobby. He stopped and listened as I described my predicament—and the strange dwarf lady on the second floor—but when he went to check things out, he called back down to me, “There’s nothing here, kid! You’re seeing things!” and made his own way up the flights of stairs.

It took me an hour to finally make it home; in the end I walked upstairs with another resident of the building, and of course the dwarf lady never showed up.

Another night, at my grandmother’s house, I looked out the back window and saw a tall woman in a red dress running from one side of the alley to the other—except she didn’t run, she floated. Back and forth she went, in quick succession, and as she glided by she would turn her head and smile as if taunting me. Terrified, I ran into the kitchen.

“Abuela, come quick! There’s a lady outside,” I said, tugging on my grandmother’s arm.

She turned from the stove and looked at me. “What do you mean, Johnny? There are lots of ladies in this neighborhood.” But something in my eyes spoke to her, and an instant later she followed me back to the living room.

“Shhh. We have to surprise her,” I said as I hid behind the curtains and gestured for my grandmother to do the same. A worried look framed her face, and I knew she realized that whatever I had seen impacted me greatly.

I peeked around the edge of the curtain. “There!” I said in a loud whisper, but my grandmother was too late. By the time she glanced out, the gliding lady had floated out of sight, leaving only a flash of red behind. Once again, the apparition seemed intended for my eyes only, no one else’s.

One day weeks later I ran outside to meet a friend in the vacant lot beside our apartment building, and we fell into a rock-throwing competition, seeing who could score the most hits at a window on the sixth-story building across the street. Tommy and I stood a good distance apart, taunting each other—“I got a better aim,” “No, I do.” Our verbal jabs volleyed back and forth, and suddenly something dropped from the sky and landed at my feet. I bent down to see what it was and saw a beaded Indian necklace with bright colors lying on the ground. I stuffed it in my pocket before Tommy could see because I knew he would try to take the necklace from me.

In that same instant I heard someone call my name, and it sounded like my mother. “My mom’s calling me!” I yelled to Tommy as I ran toward home. But my mother never called me. Years later I realized what I heard was a familiar spirit—a principality that roamed the air. When I went into our building, I kissed the necklace and put it around my neck. This is going to protect you was the immediate thought that came to my mind. A few years later, when I took my first steps into witchcraft, my main spirit protector was an Indian chief that called itself Tawata. It was this spirit that threw the necklace out of the sky, I realized—initiating me to the dark side before I ever even heard the word Santeria.

Unbeknownst to me, the strange portal into the supernatural was opening wider, and in my youthful innocence and hunger for a father figure I walked right into it—without realizing the price I would pay.

A few months later I stayed over at my Aunt Lydia’s house one night, and as the clock inched toward eleven she asked me to run to the store to get a gallon of milk for the morning. I put on my sneakers, stuffed the money deep in my pocket, and ran down the stairs to the street below. In the

street, I started fast-walking across the avenue toward the convenience store five blocks away, ignoring the cluster of Reapers gathered here and there on the street corners.

After picking up the milk, I started back toward my aunt’s apartment down the dark streets of the Bronx. Without warning I felt something creepy following me, and I cast backward glances over my shoulder. Looking up the street, from a distance I saw a blue Chevy parked under a streetlight. That looks like my dad’s car , I thought to myself. The closer I got the more familiar the car looked. “That is Papí’s car,” I said out loud. As I approached the car I saw a man slumped over the steering wheel and knew it was him. Excited but nervous, I went up to the window and tapped.

“Papí, Papí, are you okay? Do you need my help?” I could tell he was very intoxicated, so much so that he couldn’t drive and probably didn’t even know where he was parked. He rolled down the window. For a fraction of a second my heart lifted and filled with compassion for him. Maybe this would be a father/son bonding moment—my chance to be a hero and rescue my dad for the night.

His voice came out in a pathetic slur, but I understood every word. “What are you doing, stupid. Leave me alone! Go home!” As I walked away I felt my heart shatter, and I knew that this person I called Papí was never my dad. I buried him that night in my thoughts, in my heart, in my life because he demolished me to the point where I wished he was dead. I came home a different boy that night. As far as I was concerned, I was open for a new love in my life, a fatherly love to a son. Where would I find it?

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1016