“Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes is one hell of a wild ride through the bizarre netherworld of his own damaged consciousness. His experiences are real and his language and insights kinetic and brutal. This is what the French would call “littérature maudit”, and Shaw’s writing certifies him as a subversive and criminal inhabitant of the world of human expression.”
- Jim Jarmusch

So it’s 3:30 in the morning but I’m still up wondering why I can never sleep like a normal functioning human being in this city where everyone has 8 am wake up calls including myself. Why I feel lonely and isolated today, the way Narcisa must feel sometimes when she’s all alone up there in the favela. I worked all day at the coffee shop on Cahuenga and Franklin writing and emailing and sitting with Amy, Jonathan’s ex who is adorably pregnant and married to Noah Levine. Then I sent some more emails trying to set up a meeting in Berlin for a European book tour, went to see a guy about a thing, ate a hamburger really quickly and ran off into the night to seek some validation. Went to 86, the best decorated new bar in Hollywood, then stood outside of Vine Bar for a minute and felt empty so I wound up (as usual) with Nicky at the Cafe 101 and drank some tea. When I got home I emailed Jonathan and told him to call me, but he didn’t.

I’m assuming right now he has a pillow over his face and is sleeping away under Brazilian summer sun. I missed him tonight. Tonight was painstakingly lonely. And then I realized, we’re all battling the same loneliness. It’s not about validation from other people. It’s about validation from yourself. Someone asked me what I wanted today and my answer was “oblivion”. And as true as it rang in that particular moment standing in front of the bar, it’s not true. Feelings are important. They are the only real thing in life. Everything else is an illusion- matter, time, space… it all comes from a feeling. Why would I not want that? I wish someone would explain that to Narcisa.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção – registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.
As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

It’s eight in the morning and I got nothing to do with my life and that’s the truth, and Narcisa’s been up driving nails into my head for days now and it’s raining and I give up and give up and give up again.

I’ve told her everything I know or tried to anyway, I’ve pointed out all the exit routes I know in answer to her little song “can you show me the exit to this shit world?”Yeh, I’ve given her all the information I got, delivered the goods, all the lectures, read her all the books, taken her to all the meetings and the clinics and doctors, cried all the tears, prayed all the prayers – and still she won’t give up, she cannot admit defeat and she’s living in a swirling hell of memory and torment and her goddamned ego will not cannot fucking let go and this is Hell.I am there and she is there and we are there again and again and again forever. Shit shit shit.

Today she came and woke me up again from a sound sleep at seven in the morning again, of course, and I’m thinking is this really what it takes to live as an artist? Is this really what old Bukowski meant when he told me some 35 years ago to fuck off and get a life? Is this a fucking life I’ve got here or just some nightmare replication of Past life karmic retribution?

So here I am again again again standing in the doorway in my underwear as she creeps in trembling and crying toxic crack tears saying some other crackhead aquaintence from the Casa Verde, or from hell (same thing) followed her in the street all the way to the favela and tried to steal her drugs and she punched him in the face and he tried to kill her and I just shake my head thinking what a life, is this what Bukowski was talking about? Shit… It’s the second time already this week she’s come slithering in like this, the other night it was the same thing, she’s getting worse fast I’m thinking… Just a couple of nights ago I remember she’d been wandering around the dark metro station in the middle of the night- God knows why. With Narcisa there is no why, no why not, it just is. So some guy followed her and grabbed her and tried to drag her into the bushes. She managed to escape and call me and I got on my motorcycle and went to get her and when I said let’s ride around and find the bastard and see how he likes getting his head hammered in, I already knew it was useless, that it really wasn’t any person or human power that was stalking her now through the dark streets of Catete now, but incarnate spirits of the damned that her very soul sickness was attracting to her as the inevitable consequence of her own steadfast refusal to give up and throw in the towel and just accept all the help that’s been trying to ger through to her for years as she stumbles and struggles down the crooked path to hell that’s been laid out for her. Like it was laid out for me, for all of us who, like Narcisa were simply born into this world of torture and betrayal with the Devil’s dick up our asses..

I told her again and again that she was no different than so many others, than me and if I’d found a way out then she could too but she’s just never wanted to hear it so that’s that and she’s sealed her fate again another day, another night of pounding fear and torment. She just stood there in the middle of my room and put her arms out like Jesus on the cross above her old drooling sedated mother’s bed of nails and broken dreams and said

“This is me, Cigano. This is my life.. I am born to this, born to be a whore, a begger, a bum, a loser. I got nothing. I don’t WANT nothing! Only thing I want is for feel pleasure! I only wan’ it the Sensation and the feeling, Cigano, got it? Feeling. Sensation. I don’ wanna think or talk or listen to anybody opinion or stupid e’story ’bout nothing! I only wan’ it the feeling, Cigano, the most extreme feeling and sensation, got it? That’s it, nothing more! I am the whore, an’ I only want to give it the pleasure to the man and I only wan’ you give me the money so I can take the drugs and enjoy it the life, that is the plesure for the Narcisa and that’s all I wan’ from the life, got it? That’s it!” 

I just looked at her with sadness and pity, the way you look at some terrible tragic disaster and shook my head and said nothing as she took off her shorts again and laid back on my sofa and spread her legs for me, for my pleasure and for hers. Shit..

A half hour later she left, saying, “I no going back to the Casa Verde no more. Now if you wan’ for look me, I gonna be up on the favela for e’smoke in there.” I knew how dangerous it is up there and I knew she didn’t care and I just shook my head again as I watched her leave and I wondered again if today would finally be her last day in this shit world she hates among the living she hates but sometimes longs to be one of because of the ’sensations’ she’s so hungry for.

A few hours later I woke up bleary-eyed and stumbled down to my motorcycle and rode across town for my noon apointment with Dona Marta, the elderly gypsy spirit medium who’s been advising me from the very start of this madness. After waiting awhile in her living room and smoking two cigarettes to wake up, a young gypsy girl came in from the back and told me Dona Marta would see me now. I walked into her little ‘consultorio’ and she stood and greeted me warmly with a kiss on both cheeks, then we sat down. She looked into a clear crystal glass of water sitting on the table between us and watched the movie, telling me about my life. The first thing she said was:

“You’re very worried about the girl. You should be. She’s had many crises, and drug relapses, and now she is going down very fast.”

She was quiet for a moment, looking deep into the water in the glass. Finally she shook her head and spoke.

“The outcome is not good, my son. She is not long for this world, poor thing.”

I just sat there as I had done many times before and I cried. As she spoke on. “You have loved her and been a true friend to her soul. And she has really tried to love you too and let herself be loved. But it is just too much for her. It is too late for her now. She has given up on this world and now she only wants it to end. She really does want to die. It is what she really wants – and she will have what she wants.”

I sat there crying softly as she spoke, cried and cried because I knew it was true. I could see it in Narcisa’s eyes, her body language, her whole demeanor, I could smell it in her hair – she is giving up the fight. And not in any way she could come back from to find recovery like I had done. She had simply layed down her sword and her shield on the battlefield of her life and lay down and spread her legs in defeat for the enemy, for the Grim Reaper’s final cold embrace to come and lift her spirit out of this body, this life, to show her where’s the exit to this shit world at last.

Poor Narcisa. She really never had a chance here.

THE BEACH 

Now as I sit here on the beach with my friend Tonico at day’s end, I think of how I would like to take Narcisa’s unrepentant, self-righteous asshole Born-Again Christian mother out into the woods and tie her to a tree and pour sugar water over her and watch the big red ants and other jungle insects slowly eat her alive while yelling in her fat, stupid face,”Where’s your fucking Jesus now you stupid cunt. Now you think about what you did to your children you crooked old cow! Now you think of Narcisa, the sweet innocent child you destroyed, you heartless old cunt! This is for Narcisa!” I am yelling as I watch the big jungle ants crawling all over her stupid face, biting eating devouring her corrupt flesh as she screms and cries. And then I spit right in her eye and walk away…

Narcisa’s almost dead at the end of the last four day run and still she wants to keep going – she asked for food though which was a sign she was about to crash and I put some downs in her soup and watched her go out. Not before she almost tore her skin off scratching at her detoxing poisoned hide, complaining and bitching and lamenting her bitter existence. She wakes up thirty hours later – incredibly I too manage to sleep a full twenty-five hours too, and I haven’t been up for days smoking crack – maybe its all the sex and close proximity with her insane tweeked out energy – whatever- but the sleep is always welcome.

Of course she wakes up bitching and insulting me but I’ve gotten wise to her tricks and I know she’s just trying to get me to pay her to leave. Of course I always offer her an alternative, but she wants no part of it. She’s got the TV on, watching some stupid yankee sitcom and she says “Take me with you when you go to the states next time, Cigano” then I just can’t take it anymore and I tell her,

“That’s up to you. If you want to go anywhere with me besides bed, you would have to quit what your doing and get recovery – like this I ain’t taking you anywhere and you know it. Its all up to you.”

Then the shit starts… “When it’s time for me to dance for you and be the wild crazy sex maniac whore, then you like it, but now you complain and you want me to stop…”

“No, I didn’t say I want you to stop baby – I just said you’d have to stop if you wanna do anything more with me than this – of course I like a wild crazy whore, whaddya think. I’m a man. What man doesn’t like that shit? But that doesn’t Make me an idiot whose gonna marry one and carry some sick monkey around the world to fuck up my life too.. My name ain’t John Gold baby” I laughed, rubbing salt in for her. “You wanna run with a big dog, you’re gonna have to get down off the porch, baby… That’s up to you”.

 After that she just told me to shut it and take her to the spot and I did.

When I gave her a mercy 20, which I thought was pretty generous being that I hadn’t had a fuck in days and had been feeding and taking care of her like a crippled mutt, she groaned and complained a bit and I just laughed and she shut up pretty fast. She knew. That must be the worst part for her.

I went for a ride down by the beach and looked at all the other stupid slaves like me and her milling around on their Sunday leisure too stupid and stunned by beer and sunshine and football to even think of their plight and I wondered who’s worse off them or Narcisa? And for a moment I even felt pretty fortunate…

An hour later she called all shook up and crazed and begged me to go get her out of there and I told her to walk down to the Paderia Santo Amaro – ten minutes later I picked her up and she said she wanted to go back to my place and “take a pill and smoke a joint and ‘relax‘” and I saw she was bad off, all jittery and pallid in a cold sweat so I gave it my best shot and tried talking to her for awhile while I rode her around. She had no choice but to listen to another of my lectures. I just said I was constantly trying to show her a way out but I couldn’t do anything to help if she didn’t want it.

“If you like this arrangement baby, you the fucked up crack whore and me the sicko sober john, its ok for me- I’m not the one whose throwing his life away at the end of this little drama. The fact I’m even wasting my breath trying to show you a way out is a simple act of love… That’s God, baby, not me. Don’t you think its a real coincidence that God would put somebody like me right in front of you who’s living proof that an addict can recover? I don’t have to try and help you, ya know. If I just wanted a good time girl to fuck around with, I could sure do better than you, don’t you think? There’s a gang of fucked up whores on every street corner for a guy like me to have his fun with – but friendship, love and respect, that’s a lot harder to come across. If you don’t think so, just keep going. You’re gonna have to learn the value of things the hard way I guess. Too bad, but its on you, so don’t blame me. You’re making your bed and you can sleep in it.”

She finally got me to take her home and then of course she only wanted to take off her clothes and get fucked and leave. Its a funny thing, cuz I could feel that by fucking her, I was giving her something more, I was giving her my life force, my energy, my love and something more – something vital, something human. She clung to me like a drowning man holding a life preserver as I fucked her and she moaned and ghasped like I’d hardly ever noticed and her pussy was sopping wet and I could just tell there’s something powerful going on when I fuck her, beyond the power of thousands of words and stories and opinions and theories I could offer her…

I still don’t know what the fuck is going on, maybe she’s digging the hole to the bottom with me, cuz after opening herself up to somebody the way she has to me, there’s no way its not gonna hurt when I step off again – and I will have to and she knows it and I know it and maybe that’s just the road to recovery or death, whichever comes first. I should know better than anyone just how dark it has to get before the dawn’s light can shine into the heart of a junkie- I’ve been there. Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção – registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Scanned from one of JS’s little notebooks.. (as mentioned by Mayra Gomes in an earlier blog)

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Just got off the phone for a long time with Jonathan. Finally he’s had a moment to call me (the original cosmic waif who got lost in the greasy São Paulo summertime) in between bouts of toxic dance-offs with Narcisa, The Dakini who wears the skulls of her victims so proudly around her throat, God love her. We love her. I’m here in the office as usual. My ass hurts and so does my brain from being thrown up against a wall a few too many times for my own good.

But, alas, I found these pictures. I’d like to call this series “things that go on in Jonathan’s backyard”  

 Iggy Pop, looking good…

 and then there’s Narcisa, about to be devoured by buzzards.

    I’m missing Rio alot today.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção – registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Jonathan Shaw is a shameless evildoer and a decorated veteran of the drug war whose deviance is only exceeded by his clever ability to weave his sickness into a true classic piece of American literature.He is Oscar Wilde and Charles Manson tattooing his own ‘Portrait of Dorian Gray’ on the white underbelly of a society desperately in need of this type of fearless storytelling.

-Marilyn Manson

So the day went in a blurry surreal series of impressions and events till I look at my watch and suddenly its two in the afternoon and Narcisa’s saying we should go to the beach. It’s a beautiful, hot, hazy day- perfect for a ride to the beach- but first of all she needs to get some crack and I try to explain that its not exactly the right drug for the beach, but of course her mind’s already made up. She tells me to have an open mind and try something new cause she knows that’s gonna shut me up… and it does.

So she runs off without a backwards glance while I just get on the bike and go down the road and find a little boteco and sit down and get a plate of food, but before I can even finish she’s calling me on the phone asking me where I am.”Where are you Cigano???”… Turns out she finished smoking and went back to where I guess I was supposed to be waiting for her to finish- fuck my lunch- and when I wasn’t there she flew into a mad panic and started running around the very dangerous favela like a headless horseman of the apocolypse till she found a phone and I told her I was just eating and I’d be right back to get her, but as soon as I got back in five minutes she was so stressed out she said fuck the beach “right now Cigano go go go” and that was it.Then I took off in disappointment to the beach all alone, as usual, as she went to smoke her crack and ruin her life some more.Just as I pulled the motorcycle up beside the waves my cell phone rings and it’s her calling collect but by now I’m so pissed off and disappointed and sick of her crackhead bullshit I don’t even answer and that’s that until I get home after nightfall and she calls and I pick up and she says don’t be mad at me and I say I’m not and I go and pick her up at some friend’s house where she’s holed up.She always has all these angels of mercy to look after her all the time, all over the place, cause that’s Narcisa (God love her) and so many people love her too in spite of herself. So I get her and bring her home and she’s so calm and civilized I’m curious now about this friend of hers cause I notice that every time she spends time at this guy’s house she always comes back calm and nice, and I know it’s a real friend, a platonic pal and not some trick.She’s been telling each of us about the other for days now…So after a crazy Dakini dance-fuck she’s looking so sexy and beautiful I don’t even want to risk her walking the streets and picking up another trick like the night before, so I drop her at her friend’s house myself. He’s an alkie and drinks himself into a stupor and doesn’t mind her creeping around in her paranoid hell so it works out. I split saying I’ll be back in a couple of hours and I’m thinking I’ll go up to the Vila and have a go at the little angel from last night but sleep deprivation kicks in and I wind up passing out for an hour at home.When I wake up it’s time to go look for Narcisa so I go back up there and suddenly she appears in a window of a house across from the Casa Verde, the squat she holes up in sometimes, and she wants me to come up and meet her friend Marcos, the one she’s always so nice and calm after hanging out with. So I go up there and he wakes up out of an alkie nap on the veranda just as she brings me in and we shake hands and start talking and after five minutes it turns out we are kindred spirits and know all the same people from 30 years ago and we have so much in common its spooky and it’s this big Bohemian meeting of the minds and we end up talking there on the veranda for hours while she’s off smoking her crack but it’s all a good vibe and she’s so calm and there’s jazz playing on the stereo and a light rain begins to fall and she finishes smoking and comes over and sits on my lap and it’s still a good vibe.I keep talking with Marcos about art and literature and he’s very curious about the book I’ve written about Narcisa, all her cronies over at the Casa Verde are buzzed out about it too and, while this Marcos keeps that bunch at arm’s length, he’s a neighbor and diplomatic about it being on friendly terms with some of the less heinous denizens over there.So they’re all talking about it, thank God none of them have read it- but it’s a good night and finally it’s time to go for cigarettes and he wants a beer and she wants more crack she goes back to the spot to go smoke while Me and Marcos go down to the old Paderia Santo Amaro, the late night bohemian gathering spot. It’s uncanny how many of the same people we’ve known in common over the years and we hang out and talk into the rainy saturday dawn until she shows up all frazzled and shot and it’s time to go home and she’s the homeless waif with cosmic fishbowl eyes and it’s time to crash and she keeps going and she’s driving me crazy.It’s 8 in the morning and I want I just want to fuck her so bad and all she wants to do is keep smoking…. and she never finishes ever ever and I am so tired so tired so fucking tired and I know its all part of her plot and now I remember what her friend Marcos said earlier, a million years ago, when I told him I’d never suffered so much for any woman in my life…He just looked at me and shook his head and said you ain’t seen nothing yet my friend…

Shit.

 Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção – registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.