My First Voodoo Curse is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, January 15, 2004. It is part of Memories.
It wasn’t really voodoo, it was Santeria.
It happened when I was eleven years old, at a time during which my mother was involved in various unsavory revenue-generating activities. She would, having no other recourse, often take me along to her appointments. In this case, the plan was to test the purity of, and remove the impurities — the “cut” – from, a half pound of meth-amphetamine.
She was working with a paramour of hers called Rick, a small time low-life to whom she had been introduced by some mutual acquaintances who had assured her that her participation as chemist would net her some cash and high-quality speed with very little grief. The romance that developed between them was a side bonus.
The day before we were to make the big swap, cleansed drugs for cash, Rick took us to a park where we happened upon a ritually slaughtered chicken at the base of a tree. There were diagrams drawn around it in blood and there were pennies and uncooked corn kernels sprinkled about in what looked like a careful, intentional pattern. When my mother tried to inspect the bird, Rick grew flustered and we left the park.
It was an ill omen, but we didn’t really understand how ill. On the day of the event things went very poorly. We ended up in a high speed chase through the streets of Philadelphia, Rick at the wheel, my mum in the passenger seat and myself in the back of that big black Lincoln.
The chase car was a nimble little mid-seventies Firebird with four thugs in it. I collected beer bottles and assorted junk from the floor of the car and jettisoned them out the window in an effort to break the windscreen of the Firebird, but I had no luck. When they pulled up alongside our car my mother reached over and jerked the wheel to the side, slamming us into them in the manner of bumper cars. Metal crunched and screamed, and the right rear tire popped when the fender was bent inward by one of these collisions. We were now racing over the bridge into Jersey on a naked rim, smoke billowing into the air.
The car finally gave up on us in a suburban neighborhood just a little over the Jersey line. The Firebird pulled up behind us and the goons got out and surrounded our car, pounding and telling, after which they scavenged the sidewalk and nearby yards for improvised car-openers. When one of them slammed a tire iron against the safety glass by my head, breaking it into a spider web of cracks, my mother tried to jump out of the car and kill him with her hands, her feet, her teeth — such is the blind rage of a protective mother. She was, fortunately, restrained by Rick.
As I sat there, thinking that things were only likely to get worse, I remembered that I had, in my little red backpack, a decommissioned Second World War hand grenade — the kind that looks like a big metal pineapple. I had purchased it from the surplus bins at Edmund Scientific a few days before. What else could I do? I opened the door, stepped out and pulled the pin from the grenade.
The men, at first coming towards me to seize me and barter me for the contents of the car, lept back at the sight of the hand grenade. If they had been smarter they would have known that the US military had given up that model around the time of the Korean War, but they weren’t; instead they saw the hand grenade they had known forever, the one they had seen in cartoons when they were small, the Platonic grenade. They saw it in the hands of an evil child who wasn’t smiling.
“The kid’s got a grenade!” There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world with which to punctuate this cry.
I tossed it to the nearest man in an underhanded lob, as one might toss a softball. He didn’t catch it. I ran for the nearest house to borrow the telephone, call for help. No one would let me in. I repeated this process at two more houses, but everyone turned me away, looking at me, wide-eyed, through the windows of their safe and secure suburban homes.
When I looked back at the road I saw that the police had arrived in force. They let the men in the chase car go free, arrested my mother and Rick, and put me in an interrogation room at the local station, where I waited for a few hours until my father’s mother arrived from Philadelphia to fetch me.
Rick was released immediately. My mother was not. Rick worked for the police, as did the men in the chase car. They weren’t on the force, but rather criminals who traded immunity from prosecution for their services, which, in this case, included the entrapment of my mother.
Rick, neé Enrique, was a Cuban whose mother was a practitioner of Santeria. She had instructed him in the ritual slaughter of the chicken. He had cursed us to assure his success. My mother figured this out while waiting to stand trial. She read several books on voodoo and brought with her to the trial the trappings with which to reverse the curse, driving Rick from the courtroom on one occasion with the totemic power of a dried chicken foot. Sadly, it was not sufficient to derail the prosecution, especially after the judge banned poultry parts from the courtroom.
I stayed with my grandmother for awhile after these events. My father was already in jail on unrelated charges and I didn’t have anywhere else to go.