Carlos' Cosmic Bummer : Rolling Stone

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During a stay in Maui, Santana was able to find relief not so much from the temporal pain of his marital separation but from something more important: the man who had molested him and the control that man had exerted over his life and all his relationships. "I was carrying what happened to me, and it infected me, and I didn't even know when it's healthy to be horny. I was able to remove the anger by forgiving that man. And ever since I did that, my breath doesn't smell like I need to have a breath mint or something. It changed my molecular structure. Before, you'd brush your teeth but still smell like anger. Forgiveness, man, forgiveness is extremely liberating. And I'm here to tell you, with all my heart and spirit, that it can be done. You can be freed."

He stands and turns to the bay window. "My God is a god of kindness and compassion, but we as people have free will, including the man who molested me," he says. "There's the flesh and there's the spirit. What happened happened to my body, not to me. It wasn't about me. You don't lose your purity and innocence. And that's the thing I want to say. The purity and innocence is intact. So this is what the spirit has offered me, a way out of the mother of insanity, because otherwise I would be foaming at the mouth."

The next night, over dinner at an Italian restaurant not far from his home, Santana talks more about life as a single man. "I have gone on dates, and one thing I have discovered is that I don't need no damn Viagra, that's for damn sure. I'm very, very active.

"But you know what?" he continues. "I've been living like a child in a bubble, trying to appease this other person. I forgot what it was like to be who I was before her. But I'm still hungry for a lot of things. All of us have a child in us that is filled with hunger and curiosity, whether it's about sex or whatever. I don't think God's in another room eating a pizza when Adam and Eve are hanging around with the snake and the apple. Come on, man — God is omnipresent. God's in the vagina, God's in the penis, God's in the snake, God's in the apple. He's everywhere. But I'm not a sick pervert. I'm not a person who would do to someone what someone did to me as a child. No, man. No. And I have learned not to let anyone define me or give me a report card."

It's the end of a 34-year marriage summed up in a tone poem — a great big astonishing human mishmash. And maybe it's best to just leave it at that and not press for more, keep the flesh out of it, concentrate on the spirit — the spirit that has led Santana to be called Cosmic Carlos, that has sustained him even when the music couldn't.

After dinner, driving home in the dark, Santana slows down and points out a park where he used to play the guitar for spare change, before he got famous.

"This is where I got started, man, right in there, with a hat on the ground," he says. "I'm the same guy. I'm still the Mexican dishwasher that started right there. The hat has gotten big, but that's just perception. I'm really not into Santana, I'm not into Carlos. I know what it's like to be playing 'Soul Sacrifice' to 55,000 people and have women bugging out. OK. But right now, I'm still with the dark night of the soul. I'm still with the 40 days and 40 nights. And I don't know how it's going to unfold. There is no clock, no script. What happens happens on God's time. But who am I to myself? That's the question. I am a child of God," he goes on, "and God is not done with me." And after that, it seems like nothing more needs to be said.

[From Issue 1063 — October 16, 2008]

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