“Get a black rooster”, he said. “Keep it 30 days, then after, bring it to me”, he said, his eyes squinted behind thick cigar smoke.

He is big and white with close cropped grey hair that stands on end in a military style crew cut. He has an imposing bearing and a deep voice. His glasses are modern and wire rimmed. His fingers gleam with rings with diamonds and other precious stones and his wrists with bracelets and an expensive watch. Around his neck are strings of beads in black and red and others in pure white. I couldn’t guess his age… maybe 40s or maybe 70s. He exudes a casual sexual energy, a pervading sensuality. He laughs often and with ease, but some how he is serious, serious as a heart attack. When he speaks, you are compelled to listen.

Charles owns Botanica Manuel. In the front window of the storefront, in a seedy part of town, he stocks herbs and incense, oils, statuary of the orishas, and malas of many colors. A life size statue of a black Latino peasant, stands with its feet among paraphernalia. This is Manuel, beside him is a statue of Manuel’s wife. This is Charles’ “dog”, his personal spirit guide, guardian and servant. But in the back, behind a curtain is a different scene, a different world. His shop is small and crowded, though from what I gathered, is not the source of his relative wealth.

Charles is a Santero, a priest in Santeria and a practitioner and priest of Palo. He is not to be messed with. It’s something you just know, you can feel it. There is danger lurking and yet a profound love.

I know as I follow my mentor, Don Cosentino, through a black curtain into a tiny room, that I need to keep my mouth shut. There are chairs in a circle. The space is dark. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust in the darkness. There are others sitting closely together. There’s an air of anticipation.

Today, as I write this post, my memory fails to recall everything in this room. It is cramped with many accoutrement but there is a vision that no amount of time can erase. Next to me appears to be a fire pit. There are railroad spikes, dirt, ashes, bones, a nganga filled with sticks and other things I can’t make out. There’s a chicken’s head that from the bloody neck, appears to have been freshly killed, and a goat’s skull. I see ornately beaded walking sticks and against another wall, drums bedecked with bells and woven shoulder straps.

A nganga is an iron receptacle or a cauldron used for ritual and is used as a source of power. It can contain many things such as sticks, feathers, railroad spikes, graveyard dirt, ashes of humans and animals and animal skulls and they have been known to contain even a more power source, a human skull. It is within this cauldron that the spirit of the dead resides, or as it is known as, the dog. This spirit does the bidding of its owner and assists in divination according to the pact made between them. Manuel is Charles’ “dog” to do his bidding.

About the time it started to feel very close, Charles walks in. He is dressed all in white. He appears to have a crippled foot on which he can barely put any weight. He wears a pained expression. Charles is now inhabited by Manuel, a former slave in his life on earth, who was injured in work and by abuse. He sits and greets us with familiarity and affection but with a certain authority. He is handed a cigar at least 8″ long and 2″ in diameter. An assistant offers a light. He pulls on it until smoke billows into the air, hindering our sight. He appears blind and yet seems to see every detail of each person in the room. We are in the presence of the living dead.

Manuel, once he is settled, begins to call out each person in the room. He tells them about their lives, he chastises them for their faults, he encourages them to do better, at some, he shows disdain and anger. I become worried as he hasn’t called me out yet. He has not made eye contact with me. Perhaps, he has nothing to say to me… but then he turns to me, without any type of expression on his face, and I know he’s looking at me, though his eyes seem blind.

I don’t remember what he said. I didn’t… couldn’t record him. I was paralyzed. I heard the words but couldn’t “hear” them. Even now, when I let myself go, I can remember the gentleness in which my heart was revealed. It was no use to try to obscure secrets buried just under the surface. He called them out… one by one. I remember the rumble, the powerful sounds coming from his throat, his mouth, that caused me to tremble and the tears that came unbidden. Then, his voice became clear like an instructors, “get a black rooster and after 30 days, bring it to me.”

What happened after that, I don’t know, but all I could think was, “where do I get a black rooster”. I knew without a doubt that I was going to do what he asked. I stepped out of the back room behind the curtain, into the sunlit shop. It felt like I had left one world and entered another. I felt slightly disoriented. Charles came behind and others in the shop gathered around him. He was not limping. Amidst the chatter, I made my way to the counter and asked the man standing there where I could find a live black rooster, as if I was asking a clerk at the drug store where to find the dandruff shampoo. Without hesitation, like he got this question all the time, he wrote down an address. I took it.

The bright LA sun was still shining. “I might as well go pick up this chicken while I’m out here”, I thought. Like that wasn’t weird enough, I did it. I found the address in a part of LA I’d never been before. There were blocks of warehouses and delivery trucks. I pulled over in front of a building and parked. Like I knew what I was doing, I entered a large dim and dust filled warehouse. There were cages of poultry of every kind. A man approached me and asked in Spanish, ¿”que quiere”? Luckily, I speak Spanish. Timidly, I asked for a black rooster.

Without hesitation, and within a couple of minutes, the man handed me a cardboard box with a young black rooster in it. I paid a small price and took the box out to my car and set it in my back seat like I did this everyday.

At the time, I was a graduate student at UCLA in the fields of folklore and mythology and my focus was Cuban spirituality. I would be writing about my experiences for my thesis. But this was not my 1st rodeo. I had lived with a Santero. I won’t go into my life with him now since I have written about it in other blog posts but suffice it to say, this was not new to me. Animal sacrifice was a natural part of this religion and I knew what I was in for. I knew the destiny of this black rooster.

I was living in Santa Monica, just blocks from the ocean, in a small garage conversion. I took the box out of my back seat and took it in to my small apartment setting the box down in my kitchen. The rooster was quiet and calm. It didn’t make a sound and it didn’t make a sound for the entire month that it lived in my kitchen. Perhaps, he knew his destiny, as well. Perhaps, he felt honored to be a part of this sacrifice.

Over the next 30 or so days, I fed the rooster and I talked to him and cared for him in every way. I was growing attached and began to feel bad for how his life would end. He would look up at me out of the bottom of the box with one eye and his head cocked as if to say, “don’t worry. I know what’s going on”.

After 30 days, I once again put the box with the black rooster in the back seat of my car and headed for Charlie’s botanica.

I don’t know if Charlie had written down on a calendar or in his ritual book that in 30 days I would be coming back but he didn’t seem at all surprised when I walked in the door. Maybe this was a regular occurrence and he knew exactly what was coming in the door. One of the people behind the counter took my box from me and headed through the curtain to the back room. The rooster remained silent.

Just as before, people had gathered in the botanica and had slowly drifted into the back room to sit in a circle to wait for Charlie to arrive as Manuel. Just as before, Charlie arrived. He addressed each and everyone in the circle, just as before. I grew impatient. I looked around for the box but didn’t see it.

Finally, in what seemed like hours, Manuel departed and Charlie sat there in front of us. Slowly, much slower than what I wanted, everyone moved in to the botanica to chat, perhaps to buy things that Charlie had suggested for ritual. Charlie motioned for me to stay seated and he left to say goodbye to the others.

A short middle aged man came to me and motioned for me to follow him through some curtains into a larger room behind the room where we gathered. I don’t remember a lot about this room except that it was more brightly lit and had the air of a kitchen with a sink with running water and tiled floors and I don’t remember what else because, of course, I was getting nervous. I felt cold. I felt a chill run down my spine as I stood there.Where was my rooster?

Charlie came in but didn’t look at me. He was prepared and he was going to do what he was prepared to do. This is what I remember… that I stripped to my underwear. Charlie approached me holding a large knife and my black rooster by its feet. My rooster didn’t make a peep. It hung there as though dead but its eyes were darting about. I was getting colder and began to shake.

Charlie held the rooster by its feet while he rubbed the live rooster all over my body from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. He was speaking but I didn’t understand what he said. He wasn’t speaking in English nor was he speaking in Spanish. When he was done with me, swiftly, with one slash, Charlie cut off the rooster’s head. The rooster bled into a cauldron where its head had landed, still with no objection.

It was clean and swift. The other man said that I could put my clothes back on and Charlie walked out of the room after he placed the rooster back in my box in a bag. I had previously received instruction that after the ritual I would take the rooster’s body to a graveyard and leave it there. I had looked up the address I was given and was prepared to leave the sacrifice among the dead.

After this, I didn’t see Charlie again until my next visit to the botanica. I had heard from other Santeros that after these kind of rituals there is a kind of exhaustion that takes place and I suppose that Charlie had gone to rest.

I guess there’s a certain kind of familiarity among law enforcement and cemetery personnel, because it was explained to me that finding dead roosters or other kinds of accoutrement in graveyards was not so strangely rare. But I was warned to be discreet. There were certain graveyards that were more tolerant.

I arrived at the graveyard sitting on a hill. It was late afternoon and the sun was bright but low in the sky. I walked among the gravestones and thought about what I had just experienced. I wanted this time to be personal and to be meaningful. As I mentioned before, I had experienced many things living among the Cubans but this was the first time I had been the center of this ritual.

I left the rooster next to a gravestone that was the oldest that I could find. I thanked him for what he had sacrificed for me. I walked slowly back to my car enjoying the sunshine and the heat. My body still felt cold. I drove through LA towards the beach and my home away from home.

Though I remember a great deal about this, still much of it is from my memory. Since I didn’t write down the details after they happened, all I have is my memory.

Though this story may seem strange and gruesome to you, my readers, to me these are, yes strange and extraordinary but they make up the person that I am today and I am grateful for that.

I realize that this story of mine leaves a lot that is not explained, But there’s more writing to be done and there are previous blog posts that go into some detail about living with a Santero and among the many Cubans that I met in the late 1990s.

This post is not intended to be instructional or specifically educational but it is true. Truer than true.