Now the time has come for the famous and tediously predictable ‘geographic cure’, a perverse phenomenon so familiar to those of us who have ever lived in the twisted world of an addict.
After a grueling week-long marathon of high-tension, dramatic death-defying wreckage and mind-warping acts of destruction, during which she nearly lost her life again and again, she finally awakened like the Loch Ness monster this morning, dredged up from a 2 day coma, blasting me right out of a sound sleep at 6am with her blaring fog horn voice, bellowing like a dying buffalo for food and attention and God knows what else.
Narcisa was awake.
Awake again to the multiple injuries, contusions and lacerations and hurts she’d mindlessly incurred from a series of falls and accidents and street fights and scuffles and skirmishes with other random lowlifes and complete strangers only too happy to help her end her miserable existence.
I once read somewhere that an angry person is ten times more likely to be randomly attacked by other angry people who are unconsciously attracted to their vibrational field of anger or suppresed rage than an average person or someone who has consciously faced and dealt with their issues.
Narcisa is living, walking proof of the validity of such statistics.
Before she finally kissed the pillow, she’d started a big fight with me on the last night of her run that had quickly degenerated into a full-scale street brawl involving the cops and everything but a complete bloodbath.
After the police finally sent her on her merry way, she’d gone on to get her ass kicked again and again as she weaved a trail of mayhem and destruction across the four corners of Rio de Janeiro, before finally showing up at my place after dawn, limping, beat down and still raving in self-pity and vowing violent retribution against humanity at large for all the slings and arrows she’d suffered, real and imagined.
After I slipped a micky in her Coca Cola, her rants soon turned to snores and it was lights out for Narcisa for the next 48 hours.
Now she was awake again. Moaning, groaning, complaining. Demanding.
I soon wanted to kill her myself..
I stumbled around for half an hour in a somnambulant stupor as the idiot chatter of TV cartoons melted my weary eardrums, trying to keep up with her incessant barrage of whining infantile whims and demands.
As she finished tearing through her breakfast – more of the food ending up on the floor or the sofa than in her bleating blowhole as I struggled desperately to keep clear of the furious flying shrapnel of her now-dwindling feeding frenzy – finally it came.

THE BOTECO WHERE I BUY FOOD TO FILL BABY’S TROUGH

boteco, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

“Everything on my body is hurting. Pain pain pain! I can’ to take it no more, Cigano! I can’ to go on living these shit life these way…”
I could hardly believe what my exhausted ears were hearing.
Was she finally done?
I stopped what I was doing and stared at her two blackened eyes and split lip like a gawking rube at a carnival, waiting for her to conclude her thought.
Could this be it? Was she finally throwing in the bloody towel? Had some miraculous angel of mercy come to her in her sleep and convinced her of the error of her shitty ways, showed her the futility of persuing her addiction to its inevitable tragic conclusion?
Had she finally decided to abort her one way journey along the road to insanity and a premature death?
Was she really about to ask for help?
I stood watching, waiting for her to say more, knowing full well it wouldn’t be worth a shit coming from me. The desire to change has to come from within.
Then she spoke.
“We need to travel, Cigano!!” She said decisively. “I gotta get away from these e’stiupid city an’ all the shit peoples. Gotta go far far ‘way from here an’ take the trip in the country. These place making me crazy!”
Ah. The good old ‘trip to the country’ trick…
Oh yeh. Right.
Of course. It was the PLACE that had been making her crazy now! Silly me! And all this time I had stupidly thought her problem had something to do with mental illness, unresolved traumas and dark emotional complexes, drug addiction…
How stupid of me, how shortsighted I’ve been not to have seen what was right in front of me all this time. It wasn’t any of that stuff that was the problem.
Now it was just the fucking PLACE that’s been making her crazy all along.
Of course!
I vaguely remembered a popular movie, some stupid Yankee comedy with a catchy title. “Blame it on Rio”. Something like that.
Must be a common theme…
Shit!

Why is it that addicts and alcoholics so often end up stumbling around the planet like wandering lost souls in search of some ever-illusive perfect fairy tale place or situation where all their problems will suddenly, miraculously disappear into thin air?
Poof! All better now.
Not!
It’s probably because the human mind is simply wired in its most primitive form to always look away from itself as the very source of and solution to all our human difficulties.
What a deadly trap that little default thought mode is for a long-suffering drug addict!
The dear old iron-clad, bullet-proof protective wall of the human ego, wildly inflamed by years of drug abuse and all the attendant delusional, warped rationale and knee-jerk self-justification that goes with it… Making it nearly impossible for an addict to ever make the dreaded admission of complete defeat and personal powerless by the unaided will that is so crucial and necessary to any real chance of recovery from that hopeless condition of mind and body.
Shit.
Poor Narcisa.

EVEN THE MONKEY’S BEATING IT THE FUCK OUT…

monkey, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

“I know a place in the mountains, Cigano, where everything it is perfect. Waterfalls… Clear water an’ clean air. All the natural food an’ the nature, away from all these pollution an’ all the bad influence an’ corruption!”
Wow. Paradise. Fucking Shangrila! Where do I sign?
Only one problem.
Narcisa.
I tried explaining to her the concept that, wherever you go, there you are… tried sharing with her the benefit of my own decades of hard-lived experience as a world-traveling fuck-up, scrambling around the planet in a desperate and futile three-ring circus of jumbled people, places, faces and events. Wreckage, failure, disappointment, frustration. Self delusion… Until I’d finally come in for a crash-and-burn landing that stopped me dead in my desperate little tracks.
It was no use, of course.
Narcisa had made up her mind.
“That’s YOU story, Cigano. You experience. I’m different…”
Of course you are, baby. Just like everybody else. Vive la difference!
Narcisa decided it was time to take her ratty, warped little mind-powered disease on a fucking road trip.
Fun fun fun!
Well, I didn’t say no.
I figure as long as you’re going to Hell, ya may as well shake hands with the Devil.
So I started packing my bags.
They say that more will be revealed.
I’m always down for whatever. No matter what you do, you’ll be sorry anyway…
Another adventure with Narcisa. What the fuck…

BYE BYE RIO

Rio from Balcony, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

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.

So today I was sitting at Solar De Cahuenga on the corner of Cahuenga and Franklin, which is my usual haunt if anyone I owe money to ever wants to come find me, and after a particularly draining and bizarro phone call which I shouldn’t have answered but did anyway, the guy siting next to me made a comment about something I’d said on the phone- something about my hair. I looked at him for a second and then cracked a smile. We started talking about writing, books, I told him about Narcisa and all my other projects and he told me he runs a magazine. I said which one and he said “have you heard of FOUND?” to which I replied “umm yes, I am obsessed.”

FOUND is a compilation of love letters, grocery lists, photographs and other things that people find on the street. Send all your found shit to them and they will publish it.

some letters people found on FOUND

Now I’ve spent hours and hours of my lowly existence sitting on Howie Pyro’s couch laughing at this magazine and the sheer brilliance of the effect that looking into other people’s lives, even for just a glimpse, has on the human psyche. I don’t know if it’s therapeutic or just entertaining to live vicariously through other people for moments in time.

That is why I enjoy Jonathan’s work so much. I think I get off on it, being there but not being there. It’s like something I experienced last time I was in Brazil, riding through the favelas on the back of the motorcycle. At first I was scared shitless and did not want to go in to Rocinha, did not understand the De Facto government of the Drug Lords and why I had to take my helmet off when we passed the police barricade or why I had to show my face at all times and take off my glasses too. It was so foreign and I didn’t want to be there. So we left.

But as soon as we left, I wanted to go back in. I was curious, I wanted a taste. I wanted to live it, just a little. And then get out on command.

That is what FOUND magazine allows the reader to do.
That is what NARCISA allows the reader to do.

Fucking brilliant. Now I’m here, reading the issue of FOUND that Davy gave me before I left the coffee shop, between bouts of editing Narcisa and watching Forensic Files and smoking cigarette butts.

The whole conversation was inspiring though. It really put some fire under my ass to get this new project going with Jonathan, a book that will feature scanned journal entries that we’ve each saved over the years. It’s eerie how some of them mirror each other exactly. I am still kind of freaked out at how much our minds have melded.

I gotta go.

A

Another excerpt from Jonathan Shaw’s upcoming novel Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes

NARCISA LIKED: Bad Brazilian TV, Soap Operas and asinine American sitcoms dubbed in Portuguese. She also liked children’s shows, cartoons, pizza, chocolate, Coca Cola with lots of ice cubes. She liked to chew up ice cubes. They say it’s a sign of sexual frustration for a woman to chew up ice cubes. That would’ve made sense, given her surreal background of abuse and trauma. She also liked eating messy snacks in bed or on the toilet, in the shower too. She liked to eat and chew on ice cubes while I fucked her. Go figure. Sometimes she liked to sing during sex, mostly when she was good and high.
Narcisa liked attention. Lots of attention, especially the negative kind, and she talked real loud and cursed a lot, especially in public. She dressed eccentrically and sometimes liked to wear her bra and panties outside her clothes, then hurl evil venomous curses and insults at people on the streets of Rio de Janeiro when they stared and gawked.
She liked the mountains, but didn’t like the solitude. She liked rain, didn’t even mind getting soaked to the bone, caught in an apocalyptic tropical downpour. Probably because it gave her something good to complain about. Narcisa liked to complain a lot. When not complaining, she liked Classical music, old Brazilian rock and roll, bubble baths, bubble gum, and anything to do with smoke and fire.

She smoked cigarettes, copious quantities of weed, Crack, tobacco pipes, and even cigars. She said she’d smoke anything and insisted on being cremated, not buried under any circumstances, when she died, which she hoped would be very soon… Often, she’d leave several cigarettes burning on the furniture in random places around my apartment, maybe in hopes of fulfilling her death wish and smoking herself as a final act.
Narcisa.
Our Lady of the Ashes.
One time as she dropped her cigarette ashes on the freshly swept floor of my apartment, I handed her an ashtray. She looked at me with utter disgust for a beat before speaking. Spitting on the floor for emphasis.
“The world is my ashtray, Cigano!”
She liked to argue with anybody about anything and dreamed of becoming a lawyer someday. She would criticize everything she saw, machine-gunning an endless barrage of terrible hurtful insults at everybody who was ever close to her. By the time I found her there weren’t any more people close to her, so it pretty much was all for me. Somehow I didn’t mind.
Narcisa loved the color Purple. The color of Redemption and rebirth, oddly enough. Everything she owned and wore had to be purple. Sometimes she couldn’t find stuff in purple, so she would settle for pink. Even her food had to be purple or pink, and she ate heaps of beets, big plates of beet salad at the Kilograma restaurant downtown we ate at sometimes. Maybe in hopes of shitting purple. Just for good measure.
She also chewed great quantities of pink bubble gum and stuck it to the walls and furniture all over my place like a dog pissing to mark its Territory. One time she bitched me out on a busy downtown street for ten minutes straight because I bought her blue bubble gum.
“This shit is blue, Cigano, blue!” She yelled, throwing a wadded up ball of gum at me, bouncing it off my head as passersby stopped and stared on the crowded sidewalk.
“Blue is for the boys, Cigano, don’ you know?” She ranted on. “Could it be you didn’t noticed I am the girl and my color is the pink?”
I stood there watching, horrified as she suddenly pulled her pants down right there on the street, flashing her bald, shaved pussy at me accusingly, like an undernourished pet I’d forgotten to feed. A crowd gathered and stood watching, gawking.
“You know what this is, Cigano? This shit is a poo’sy! The very nice one too, don’ you think so, peoples?”
She stood there defiantly flashing the shocked crowd gathering. Some of the men leered, agreeing vociferously, as I cringed in shame and embarrassment.
“You like it, this Poo’sy, Cigano? This is what the girl got, Cigano. The Girl, No the boy, got it? The color for the girl is pink, Cigano, no the blue, no the black, no the yellow, no to any other color, got it? The Purple she ok, very good for Narcisa, Cigano. And after the purple, only the pink, got it? No the any other color. Now you got it!”
I got it.

….

NARCISA HATED: Waiters, uniforms, Police, fat people, Argentines, country music, newspapers, newscasts, poor people, rich people, soccer, bad taste, the beach, airplanes, old people, especially her family, or so she said.
She hated her body, and punished it every chance she got, often provoking street fights with random strangers, getting them to do it for her. Battle scars and stitches and bruises and contusions everywhere. She hated her bodily functions as an extension of the body- she hated, hated going to the bathroom, shitting… defecating, she called it, not liking even saying the word shit… She hated her period, her pussy, her tits especially, and she talked about having them cut off, tiny as they were, if she ever got enough money from peddling her odious snatch to afford plastic surgery… she hated the fact that she was a female, and didn’t like women, but was tolerant of teenagers and young girls, probably because she wanted something from them – usually sex. Narcisa also hated men. Or that’s what she said sometimes.
Being- despite her eccentric and abrasive ways- quite charismatic and charming in a most surreal manner, Narcisa usually got what she wanted. She professed to be something of an expert at mind control techniques she’d picked up reading books on Satanism and black magic. She also claimed to have participated, from an early age, in more sinister, ritualistic pacts with The Devil…
She especially hated any words printed on clothing, particularly clothing labels, and she would cut all the labels off her clothes, even the expensive designer stuff she latched onto. One time I gave her a tee shirt, and the first thing she did was take scissors and cut out the words on the front, leaving her hated breasts exposed, rather than be a walking advertisement for parasites she didn’t derive any benefit from.
She also hated machines, and was fond of breaking radios, telephones, blenders, and televisions. She hated the sunshine. Narcisa despised food. Eating was an unpleasant necessity. She said she wished she could just dehydrate her food and smoke it up in a pipe for the unpleasant but admittedly necessary chore of nourishment, that someday she would invent a way to do just that and get rich selling it to other people like herself. Problem was that there wasn’t anybody else like her. One day she realized this, and as the terrible reality of it sunk in, she sulked and pouted for days on end. A very dark time for her…
“Everything’s going to be alright, Narcisa,” I said, trying to soothe her.
“Is never gonna be alright!” She screamed hysterically.
And for just that moment, I almost believed her.

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.