by Myriam Gurba
A punk dressed and made up to look like Nancy Spungeon sat on a folding chair in the corner. A notebook was spread open across her lap, tic-tac-toe games covering its pages. Filthy nails reached up to scratch her neck.
“Cat’s game…” she said.
What a tweaker.
I looked over my shoulder. Oh, God. From the way Candace was carrying on, you wouldn’t have guessed it was her idea to come here. She was clinging to Sue’s arm like she was a buoy in a typhoon. Sue stood, frozen and wide-eyed, by the didgeridoo-packed sale rack near the exit.
A black cat leapt onto the counter.
Candace shrieked, “Eeeeee!” and Sue screamed “Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Ohmigod!”
I looked at T-Rex apologetically. He shrugged. He was probably used to this sort of thing. Regardless, I felt it necessary to somehow chastise my companions.
“Fucking white girls,” I mouthed to Laura.
“You said it!” she roared.
T-Rex didn’t wig us out, and I knew that most of the melodrama behind me had to do with color: The warlock was one of the few black men in town. T-Rex’s skin tone matched Mom’s mestiza61 shading, cafe con leche, Folgers with a shot of Carnation cream. My friends were caught in a black panic and that T-Rex’s moustache and goatee were groomed identical to Anton La Vey’s didn’t help matters any.
To me, the low tide on T-Rex’s head made him seem less menacing. His hairline receded so that his longish fluff sculpted out into a Bozo the Clown frame. He wore a faded Einstürzende Neubauten t-shirt that fit his pot belly snug, and at his shins, a pair of black leather things that Puss In Boots would’ve had designs on swallowed his jeans.
Slurp. T-Rex sucked salsa and sour cream off his fingers. Silver rings adorned them, each one displaying something a little more sinister than the next. A skull. A tarantula. A pentagram. A Chinese fingernail guard with a long, dangerously sharp tip.
I cleared my throat.
“What can I help you with today?” T-Rex asked.
Laura took his request as a cue to stretch her arms, yawn, and lean both elbows against a glass counter with a big handwritten sign taped to the front that said, “I am not your friend. DO NOT LEAN ON ME.” T-Rex smirked at her.
Laura pressed her face close to the glass and examined the herbs in the case. “Hmm. Eye of newt. I wonder if Neato used any of that shit on you.”
I began blinking nervously and grinding my teeth.
With the tip of his nail guard, T-Rex combed through his little beard.
I placed my envelope on the clean glass before me, swallowed, and said, “I got this weird thing in the mail, yesterday. I think I’ve figured out what it is, but I thought I should come here to get an expert opinion.”
My ego stroking worked. T-Rex straightened up and smiled. He set his burrito down on a paper bag and turned to the tweaker.
“Michelle,” he commanded, “fetch me a Coke. Lots of ice.”
The girl tucked her pen in her notebook, shut it, and slid it under her chair. “Sure, big daddy,” she said and trotted out the door. Small bells chimed.
T-Rex eased himself off the counter. He strode up to the package. “Now what’ve we got here?” He reached his right hand into the envelope and teased out the two papers. He examined them.
We all concentrated, watching him.
“This one,” T-Rex finally declared, pointing at the poem, “is a bunch of horse shit. It’s of no consequence. Don’t worry about it.”
I was relieved.
“But this one,” he knocked the wheel with his knuckle, “this one’s a love spell.”
To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time anyone had ever cast a spell on me. I wasn’t sure how to feel. Scared? Annoyed? In love?
I asked, “How does it work?”
“I’m not certain about all the particulars of this one, but I can tell you a few things about it. First, do you smell that scent?”
I nodded.
“Okay, that’s some sort of rose oil. Once you get it on your fingers, you’re fucked. You carry that scent with you, and it works to constantly remind you of him.” He paused. “Who is he?”
In a small voice, I answered, “My cousin.”
T-Rex raised his bushy eyebrows. His lips turned into a half smile. It gave him a roguish dimple. “Well, your cousin wants total control over your mind, heart, body, and soul.” He pointed to the flaking, ashy edges of the wheel. “See this?”
I nodded.
“This is how the spell is activated, by burning the edges of this wheel once it’s been anointed with oil. This writing that begins on the edges and spirals into the center represents something eternal. A spell that’s supposed to last forever. But I can’t tell you what this says. What is your cousin?”
Blank stare.
“Is he a Wiccan? Is he… What is he?”
“We’re Mexican. He’s from Mexico.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He’s, um, kinda what they call ‘un hippie’ there. His parents are rich. They’re jewelers. He used to work for them, but, he, like, went on some kinda mission down to Oaxaca.”
T-Rex nodded. “Southern Mexico. Yucatan peninsula.”
“Yeah. I think he went into the jungles there to meet the sages. Get loaded and, like, hallucinate and meet God and stuff. He was always talking about doing that.”
T-Rex’s demeanor turned serious. “There are some very powerful shamans down there. Those guys make all this,” he waved his hand, “look like child’s play.”
T-Rex checked me out, eyes sweeping across my frame. I’d dressed extra death bunny since it was the weekend. T-Rex’s eyes sparkled. He liked what he saw.
“Did your cousin– What’s his name?”
“Nito.”
“Did Nito have the opportunity to collect any of your… juices?”
I heard gasps coming from behind me. Laura pretended to be ignoring us. She didn’t even look up from the copy of the Malleus Maleficarum she’d plucked off a rack.
“Just spit,” I answered and felt a panic coming on. What if Nito had HIV and had infected me with saliva that had microscopic blood particles in it? Fuck. When I got home, I was going to have to call the AIDS hotline and hash this out with a volunteer. I’d bawl. I was already having visions of myself in a coffin, Mom wondering what to do with all my things.
T-Rex stared at me while I ruminated. “Well,” he said, “if he did get his hands on any of your secretions, this spell will be very hard to break.”
“All he got was spit,” I whispered.
T-Rex looked at me like he still didn’t believe me.
“One last thing,” he added, “you know that spells have a strong psychological component, right?”
“Kind of.”
“Spells,” T-Rex began, like he was lecturing dummies in Magic 101, “get into your head, like a virus. They infect your thoughts. Especially love spells. The whole point of one, psychologically speaking, is to trick you. You get something like this wheel,” his fingertips tapped it, “and you begin wondering. You get scared. The memory of it stays with you, and the intention is to get you to ask, ‘If I’m thinking so much about this and about so-and-so, am I in love with them?’ It’s a mind fuck. That’s a lot of what magic is. Mental manipulation.”
Laura looked at me over the top her book. She teased, “Desiree’s gonna be a zombie,” in singsong.
T-Rex silenced her with a glare.
“If I were to pay you to undo this thing,” I began, “how much would it cost me?”
“Let’s see.” T-Rex stroked his goatee. “That would entail labor, ingredients, energy. Hmm. Good question. About a hundred dollars.”
I had that much in my piggy bank, but there was no way I was wasting it to break a spell. I’d been saving up for months to buy a pair of white Doc Martin boots I’d asked for but hadn’t gotten from Santa.
“I don’t have that kind money,” I lied, hoping T-Rex wasn’t clairvoyant, too.
“Alright.”
He struck a bargaining pose. “How about seventy-five?”
I shook my head and opened my purse. I dug out all the spare change I could muster, about a dollars worth, and dropped it into a jar marked, “OFFERINGS.”
“Thanks,” I said reluctantly.
“Yup.”
I scooped up my juju, turned, and left.
I tore pictures of Isabella Rossellini, Sophia Loren, and Siouxsie Sioux from magazines and taped them on the wall above my bed. I lusted after each and every one of them and masturbated to them at night.
Thank God, I was still a homosexual. Nito’s spell hadn’t eroded my gayness so my anxiety about the wheel lifted. Anger replaced it. I mean, how offensive to think I’m that easy. Abracadabra, wave a magic wand, slaughter a rooster, and I’m yours?
No effing way.
My self-righteous lesbian indignation, not to mention the fact that I’d saved a hundred bucks, made me smug. I was immune to hexes, but if what T-Rex had explained was true, I was enamored of some pretty sick shit. My mental illness worked exactly how he’d described the mindfuck of a spell: I could be 99.9% certain of something, but if a .01% possibility of it being false existed, that was what hooked me. Doubts haunted most of my waking hours, their shadows trumping all logic, and the sick part of my brain was so excessively rational, so excessively logical, it used the scientific method on minutiae to fuck me six ways to Sunday everyday.
Like walking to my bedroom, I imagined Nito harvesting strawberries in Watsonville or picking peaches in Fresno, maybe mopping floors in San Jose. He’d be wondering, “Is it working? Is it working?”
I laughed but then stopped in my tracks, breaking out into a sweat.
I was pretty sure I’d forgotten to tap the doorframe twice while crossing the threshold.
My favorite crooner, Morrissey, was celibate. And so I became. For him, it was about hiding from his fans that he was a fag. For me, it was about avoiding death and ruin. Babies. I couldn’t shake the thought that I might be pregnant with one.
The idiocy started one afternoon senior year when the end of lunch bell rang. I was under so much pressure filling out college apps and writing bullshit personal essays that I walked around feeling like a balloon sailing towards a needle. St. Mike’s halls were flooded with kids rushing to get their books from their lockers, and amid the scramble to get to fifth period on time, a boy in a letterman jacket and shorts crashed into me.
With unteenlike politesse, he offered, “That was my fault. I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
My face was blue.
I’d eaten three snack bar taquitos for lunch and was struggling to hold in some nasty gas. My colon taunted me but I would not let my sphincter turn spastic. I walked carefully to my locker. As I pulled my Bible out of it, my OCD co-opted my indigestion. It became ammo and I ceased having anything as innocent as mild food poisoning. I’d been knocked up.
In my mind’s eye, I saw how it’d happened. A series of mental pictures, reminiscent of mid-century Sex Ed films, illustrated the miracle of life as it’d unfolded in my womb. One of my eggs had sat placidly by as one of the athlete’s rugged swimmers had fertilized it. Cells had teemed, multiplying, and our fetus swam, now a happy tadpole. My nausea was recast as morning sickness. But wait. It was too early for that. Had other guys bumped into me? Had I been the unwitting participant in a gang rape of sorts?
Yes. Of course. In the school hallways. Any one of the boys sailing down the cement paths might’ve had come on their flies and here they were crashing into girls and rubbing up against them, impregnating them. My baby’s father could’ve been a freshman, a sophomore, a junior, a senior. Who knew when the impregnation had happened, and only a DNA test could tell me for sure who he was. But how to convince the entire male student body to submit to mass swabbing?
Resigned to waiting for my period, I gave myself weekly pregnancy tests. I didn’t trust the little pee sticks very much, so to be on the safe side, I made Candace chauffeur me to Planned Parenthood. A couple of times. Six. We became well-informed about my options–abortion, adoption, or keeping my child–so much so that we could’ve counseled the expectant young mothers packing the waiting room. It was forever full. Santa Bonita High boasted the highest teen pregnancy rate in America.
My AIDS hysteria kept me busy, too. On a warm afternoon, I recklessly guzzled water from a rusty campus drinking fountain. My taste buds detected something tainted and metallic, possibly iron tinged. Wait, blood had iron. The water supply was contaminated with blood! Someone with AIDS and a bloody nose had dripped into it and now I was carrying the human immunodeficiency virus.
While thoughts of my own death usually bombarded me, panic about infecting my family with HIV terrorized me this time around. Anxiety gave me constant diarrhea and I lost ten pounds. Mom couldn’t figure out why I insisted eating off paper plates and using plastic utensils. It was to avoid infecting her and Dad and Libertad and Vincie. I catalogued my symptoms on gum wrappers, napkins, and Post-its, and by the time my college acceptance letters arrived, I’d amassed an entire desk drawer full of scraps with phrases like “purple lesions,” “coated tongue,” and “bloody stool.”
My obsessions collided at the senior lawn, this stupid patch of grass that St. Mike’s soon-to-be alums earned the privilege of sitting on. Husky football players guarded its perimeter like Rottweilers, and after a really bad pep rally, I plopped down with my friends on its northwest corner to eat three of those Soylent Green taquitos I still hadn’t learned to say no to.
Damp grass soaked my skirt. My butt got wet. Pale, I turned to Laura. “Was anyone sitting here before we got here?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“Jesse Lee.”
Jesse Lee, a blonde surfer/stoner who God had created in the image of Jeff Spicoli. I was sure that while sitting in my spot, he had come in his pants. Some of it probably leaked through his crotch and fertilized the lawn. I’d absorbed the leftovers, his semen soaking through my skirt and panties. It was what was making my crotch moist.
And how Jesse loved drugs. He did enough of them to put him in the high-risk category for AIDS. Because of him, I wasn’t just going to have a bastard–I was going to have an AIDS baby! This called for an after-school trip to the county health department.
Candace drove me there, and as a young nurse drew my blood, I told her, “Check me out for everything.” I bit my nails and tapped my heel like jackhammer and twitched my mouth. “Wait!” I screamed. “I didn’t see you uncap that needle!”
With her brow furrowed, the nurse stared at me. “Honey,” she began, “have you been… are you being molested?”
I shook my head.
“Are you sure? You can tell me,” she coaxed.
I shook my head.
She looked at me incredulously. “Well, come back in seven days for your results.” She handed me some paperwork. “Bring this with you.” The nurse looked at me hard, but I made out sympathy in her eyes. “Can I give you a hug?”
I nodded, but grimaced, horrified as she embraced me. I knew where her hands had been.
I, the Night Stalker, Sort of
The Thursday I found out I was HIV-negative, our dishwasher broke. And I graduated.
The dishes piled up for two nights, and me and Mom finally got around to them Saturday. We tried to have fun doing them the old-fashioned way, and I watched Mom’s veiny hands hold a yellow plate as old as me under the faucet, rinsing the suds off. She glanced at me as I dried an orange Tupperware cup with a dishrag. Setting the cup on the cabinet shelf, I turned to reach out to Mom for the plate. A two second image of me pulling down her pants, ramming my fist up her vagina, and snapping her neck raced through my head.
Hold on. Where on God’s green earth had that come from? Was it a flashback from a movie? Maybe a scene from that de Sade book I’d peeked into at the library?
Uh-uh. I couldn’t place this violence. It was mine.
I looked at Mom and tried thinking s
omething nice about her, but it happened again, and the second time, the thoughts were so vivid, it felt like I was doing them just thinking them. My conscience awoke.
“Are you into this?” it asked.
Intent. Intention. Intentionality. Intentar. In Spanish, “to try.”
Our desires can, at times, manifest as thoughts. Did I wanna do these things?
A snippet from catechism: the nuns had taught us you don’t always sin with your hands. Sometimes, a good imagination’s all you need to go to hell. Hell had always been a joke to me. That joke didn’t seem funny anymore.
I dried the last plate Mom handed me and left the kitchen in a hurry; I needed to be around family members I wasn’t mentally sodomizing. In the family room, I saw Libertad and Vincie watching a movie. I ducked in there and joined them.
“What’s on?” I asked.
“The edited-for-TV version of Witness,” answered Libertad.
Vincie looked bored, but Libertad was happy. She’d gone through a brief Amish phase, and during it, she’d gotten bitter that we weren’t German. I remembered she’d quit wearing her normal clothes and had dressed in long Pilgrim skirts and costume bonnets for about a year and a half.
The Amish, now there’s a holy people. Maybe because of my wantonness and wicked, worldly lifestyle, I’d made my brain susceptible to that sicko vision. Maybe I needed clothes without buttons and a wimple to cover my hair in order to set me back on the straight and narrow.
I glanced from the undercover masquerade onscreen–Witness is about a detective posing as a simple farmer–to Libertad, then to Vincie. They were sitting side by side on one of the sectionals. They were getting big. They were going to be starting seventh grade next year. I pictured myself wrapping my fingers around their throats and squeezing the life out of them. “You want to have sex with their dead bodies,” popped into my head.
I could not believe my bad luck. Here were more bad thoughts, and they were spreading to other people, contaminating my reflections. I mentally chanted, “I’m sorry; I love them. I’m sorry; I love them. I’m sorry; I love them.”
