POWER OBJECT: JACK WATERS

My power object is the Santeria bust our neighbor Maria gave to me and my partner, Peter, in the mid-1980s. She said if we ever decided we didn’t want it to not give or throw it away but to give it back to her. Maria was the neighborhood orisha. She lived on the second floor of our five-story tenement walk-up on the Lower East Side. When people wanted a spell, dream interpretation, or prediction, they’d call from the street up to her window on the second floor. Maria rarely left her apartment except to go to church on Sunday. I guess she had a special orisha name, because there was rarely a day you didn’t hear someone calling “Pooka!” I never asked her about this name; I just assumed it was an orisha name, because anyone who didn’t want her magical services just called her Maria. We never asked but she always said an incantation whenever we had a court date with our evil landlord, Walter. Maria was afraid to cross him legally for fear of eviction and the immigration authorities—he kept her under constant threat. But boy could Maria cast a spell. In thirty years of housing court litigation we never lost a case. Maria passed away some years ago. The bust is still sitting on the sconce in our kitchen.