I Wanted Like Anything to be a Witch

Not realizing I had the powers all along

Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash

The year was 1979. I was fifteen years old and “My Sharona” was the Number One song on the Billboard Top 100. It was the summer of the Iranian Revolution and because of that there was an energy crisis with long lines for gas. Voter confidence in the Carter administration was at an all-time low.

My neighborhood friends and I were petty crooks, stoners, drunks, truants, and vagabonds who had a passing reference to what was going on in the world from the blaring TV sets we passed on our way out of the house.

In general, though, we could not have cared less. We just wanted to know where the next party was.

Each of us came from varying degrees of dysfunction in our families and were largely estranged from them. We did what we wanted. Our parents, for the most part, looked the other way, involved as they were within their own lost dreams, ensuing alcoholism, relationship, and job drama.

We lived for the next high and loved things witchy and dark. Mind you, this was seventeen years before movies like The Craft had girls trading in their horse love books for classics like Sybil Leek’s Diary of a Witch and The Complete Art of Witchcraft.

The idea of magic, creating magic with enchanted items and smoky spells seemed like a way to control our noxious home environments over which we effectively had none.

While my friends may have taken the whole witch and occult thing tongue in cheek, loving the aesthetic of it more than a verified belief system, I liked to think of myself as being one step deeper, philosophically at least. (Nevermind that I worshipped Stevie Nicks for her own witchy vibes and cut my hair like hers which, I realize in retrospect, was neither “deep” nor philosophical.)

I had developed an interest in the occult due largely to my deceased mother who had told stories of the supernatural at the kitchen table and a brother and brother-in-law who took secret “witch art” classes downtown at a place called Sanctum Regnum.

They never spoke much about those classes. What was left unsaid became part of the mystique. So did my brother’s books by Aleistair Crowley and The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulson.

Consider that we were raised Roman Catholic, which is full of stories of mystical visions and embued with rituals borrowed — dare I say, stolen — from Pagans.

So there is a connection there that cannot be denied.

The occult shop was called Archangel and my friend Sandy’s sister, Aurora worked there. I was convinced she was a witch, and Sandy never did say otherwise. She loved that it might be a possibility, or at least a suspicion.

Aurora reminded me of Joni Mitchell. Blonde, nearly white hair, pale face and translucent eyes, no makeup, high cheekbones and thick eyebrows, a look of inner wisdom and calm. A natural, bewitching kind of beauty.

Those eyes and her witchy clothes, dark flowy blouses and wide legged jeans frayed at the hem or what we called then, “gypsy” skirts, convinced me she was not of this world.

She wasn’t nice and she never smiled. She took the air of not owing anything to anyone. She knew things, deep and sinister, and we had to respect that.

We took the bus from our Southside working class neighborhood to Brady Street on the Eastside. Brady Street was actually a few long blocks of small head shops, cafes, a used book store, a resale shop filled with trinkets and trash, a dirty laundromat where men who had no home went to get warm, a tiny overpriced grocery store, a few musty taverns and Archangel.

Brady Street was then home to hippies, starving artists, poets and “freaks” like us. We were park rats and pot heads who called ourselves freaks with some sense of pride.

When we opened the door to Archangel, tiny Tibetan bells that were attached with red cord to the inner door knob jangled.

Immediately we were swallowed up in earthy witchy smells: sandalwood, patchouli, frankincense, cedarwood. An oil mixture called Thieves.

Aurora had told us that gravediggers used to douse themselves in the Thieves oil to stave off any illness or bad energy lingering on the dead bodies they stole jewels from. It was great, she said, for immunity and repelling evil spirits.

If the store was empty, Aurora would emerge from the Indian patterned curtain door to the back storage room, her long hair pulled back into a braid and a floral scarf headband atop her head.

We would wander around the creaking wooden floor to the tables and shelves, smelling all the oil samples, putting drops on our wrists and necks. I wanted to bathe in it.

There was always a stick of Nag Champa incense burning and some witchy instrumental record playing behind the counter.

If it wasn't busy, Aurora would take us behind the curtain and light up a flower top to smoke with us. She sold weed from behind the counter to trusted customers. A little side gig, she said, that she needed to survive in this hellhole of a world.

Aurora would tell us what phase the moon was in and how the planets were aligning. She would warn us of potential mood swings or peaceful states of mind we might experience because of it.

She always stared into me like she could see my soul. It made me uncomfortable so I would look away.

I didn’t want anyone seeing that deep into me. She would see my murky, aching, profound loss I kept there and the unfathomable pain I carried with me.

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The glass shelves of the shop were filled with crystal wands and stones that Aurora said gave off powerful energy. There was one for courage. One for vivid dreams. Another for enlightenment.

There were little kits in mesh bags tied with ribbon. These kits were filled with tiny various colored candles, sections of hemp rope or cloth, oils and herbs for performing specific spells: one for attracting love, one for seeing your destiny, one for enacting revenge, illness or death to an enemy.

I wanted that one for my father’s live-in girlfriend. I needed to put a spell on her so she would die.

One time, as if she could read my mind, Aurora came up beside me and said that was black magic and you had to be careful because it could easily bounce back on the initiator of the spell.

I had no money so I could never get the spell kit anyway. But one day, I vowed I would.

There was a rack with pentagram chains next to incense holders and boxes of Gonesh cone incense and glass jars filled with varying scents of cheap stick incense: 10 for a dollar.

There were boxes of Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot decks, and Celtic knot earrings made from a local craftswoman spread out across a red cloth in the middle of the shop.

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There were shelves of smoking paraphernalia locked inside the glass case that was the check-out counter, fancy glass pipes, Zig-Zag rolling papers, lighters with marijuana leaf decals on them, packets of screens, the current issue of “High Times” magazine.

On the shelf behind the cash register were rows of bongs made of fancy shapes and colored glass.

One particular Saturday, Sandy was proud to purchase one of the bongs she had been saving up for and as she was checking out and talking with Aurora’s boyfriend, Finn, who also worked there, I went over by the hex curse kit to try to see if I could make my own somehow and curse the woman who was making my life miserable.

Suddenly Aurora was there behind me and she all but whispered, “Take a black candle, write her name on it along with a piece of her hair or clothing that you tie around the candle. Light it and let it burn as you say: ‘By this knot I bind your tongue and hands. No more harm to me by my command.’”

The spell did not say: Choke and die. Or: fall down the stairs when you are drunk and break your neck.

But it sounded witchy enough and would have to do.

I looked up at her and marveled at her reading my mind again. I managed to croak out, “I don’t have a black candle.”

She said nothing but whisked away, her red billowy skirt fluttering behind her.

Before we left, she placed a small paper bag in my hand. It contained a tapered black candle about the length and width of my index finger.

When I opened my mouth to say thanks, she put up her own finger to her lips to say: ssshhhh.

Why the secret? I wondered. But I dared not ask.

So I held the candle in the bag up my coat sleeve and never showed the others.

When we got back to Sandy’s house, her mom was home sitting at the kitchen table listening to Big Band oldies on the radio, smoking a cigarette and drinking brandy, neat.

She crinkled her nose up and said, “You all smell like French whores.”

We laughed and grabbed chips and bread and pickles from the fridge and went back up to Sandy’s attic bedroom.

I sat staring at Sandy’s poster print of “The Scream” that she stole from the school art room wondering how her mom knew what French whores smelled like.

Then I asked Sandy, “Do you think Aurora’s a witch?”

She stared at me for way too long, the way she did when she was stoned. Then she smiled with her perfect white teeth lit up and made even whiter by the fluorescent black light that stood in the corner of her room and said, “I don’t know, but I sure the fuck hope so.”

Touching my hand to my face that felt like it was melting off, I heard myself ask: “Why?”

She stared again and then started to laugh hysterically. Just as fast she turned serious as stone and said: “Because we need some fucking magic in our lives, don’t we? I can’t live if it’s just this shit.” She waved her hand around her room.

It was the wisest thing Sandy had ever said.

I thought of it at home later as I listened to that old drunk hag yelling in the other room at my father that it was going to be either me or her, and how he had to choose, as I carved her name, tied the hair I had taken from her brush around the candle and lighted the wick.

I needed this spell to work, because ‘I couldn’t live if it was just this shit.’

I said the chant while I stared at the candle and watched it burn to extinguishment. I then waited patiently for days and weeks and months for the wicked witch that lived in my house to fall mute, or get her hands broken in a machine at the factory where she worked, or for her to fall into the street into oncoming traffic as she stumbled out of the tavern.

She never did though. Ironically, she lived into her eighties while good people who were kind and led meaningful lives died all around me.

The candle, the spell, the desperate prayers when nothing else worked, did not achieve the result I desired and needed then: for her to be gone.

The magic didn’t work.

I decided that maybe Aurora had not been a witch after all, or maybe my spell was not strong enough or maybe the evil witch who thought she could take my mother’s place, maybe her powers were more powerful than anything.

A few months after I made the spell, Aurora would blame me for stealing some Mexican gold coins from her bedroom, which I certainly had not.

I was high and drunk at a party when she said that. I swore at her and told her she was not a witch but the rhyming “b” word, which I did a lot while I was drunk and high. I became some sort of possessed devil cussing at everyone and daring them to hit me.

She punched me in the face, shook me, and shoved me into a doorknob and I almost lost my eye.

Maybe the black magic had circled back to me like she’d warned me it might. It then followed me for years afterward as I struggled to get through most days and nights walking a straight line and without tears.

Aurora later found out that her other sister, Patty, had in fact, stole those gold coins from her, and at one of Sandy’s house parties she cornered me and said, “Hey, sorry. I thought it was you.”

I said, “Okay,” just like that, even though I could have lost my eye.

I had learned to say “okay,” “no problem,” “I don’t mind,” a lot and for years of my life, even when it did, in fact, really matter. A lot.

But I wasn’t a witch and I didn’t have powers to change anyone, not even myself. Not yet, anyway.

Not until one day and many days after that when I clicked my heels and realized I’d really had that power all along. I had the power to change my destiny and to eventually say: Hey, that hurt. Stop hurting me.

Or: No, I do not accept your apology.

And: You are toxic to me and I will no longer put myself in your presence.

Yet, part of me has always remained witchy inclined.

I still love the oils and the Tarot and the incense and the crystals and the candles lit in memory of someone.

I am, for all intents and purposes, an agnostic, open to all the possibilities of this crazy life.

But: I love to believe that there may be witches among us and that I just may be one of them.

I worship nature, talk to trees, understand the language of animals and a black cat is my familiar.

I absolutely find magic in the everyday of my existence, amazed that I have made it this far.

I am a survivor and I have made it to the other side. I kept striving. Even though one dark night I almost gave in, I was revived and kept going.

Therein lies my strength. Therein lies my power. Therein lies my magic.

Blessed be.

Photo by Miriam Espacio on Unsplash