Continued from yesterday (click here to read yesterday’s excerpt)…

     I rolled up onto the next crowded ho-stroll in front of the Holiday Bar. The same sleazy old Copacabana whorehouse where I’d found Narcisa just a few months ago. Now it seemed like another lifetime as I parked the bike and got off, looking around at the familiar surroundings.

     I walked through the crowd, feeling slightly disgusted by the whole scene… The same tired old loveless mating rituals I’d walked through a thousand times before. Whores and gringos. Gringos and whores… The odd lonely Brazilian playboy and a few local businessmen who looked like they’d hopped the conjugal fence for one last boozy Carnaval night out. The girls were all out there milling around in hungry giggling droves. Roving packs of faceless, graceless loud mouthed fast talking razor sharp mulattas and caboclas straight out of the teeming dirt-poor whore-factories, the dusty slums of the Baixada… Predatory Pussy eyeing the nervous little clusters of snappy gringos like so many slobbering jackels watching a henhouse. All the girls wearing the same tasteless frilly short skirts and cheap high-heeled shoes… The same poorly tailored gaudily colored low-cut blouses. The Uniform. They looked like they’d all just popped out of the same cookie-cutter hooker mold. Ruthless ghetto girls out on the prowl for that fabled Magic Gringo Short-Time Carnaval Dollar Dispenser. Or maybe even a whole week shacked up in some fancy Copacabana hotel with trips to the shopping mall and a nice bonus at the end of the programa… If they got lucky.

   Same old Whores. Same old Gringos. Same old hustle. Same old shit... Some things never change.

   Some of the tricks were dressed in suit jackets and other typically inapropriate gringo party wear for their big Copacabana Carnaval Adventure… It was easy to spot the cokeheads. Those guys had kept me in food and clothing and drugs and lodging and whores back in another time, another life. Easy to spot as donkeys at a horse race. I shoulda been a shakedown cop. Just keep your eye on the men’s room, look for the gringo coming out rubbing his nose with that ‘just did a bump’ look on his guilty little pink gringo mug. Easy pickings…

To be continued

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

Here’s an excerpt from the new edit-in-progress of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes–

Carnaval. Fat Tuesday. After Midnight…
Shit. It looks like they opened the gates of Hell down by the Prado Junior…
The Pussy Arcade. Coked up gangs of funny-faced whores standing ready to face the ashy dawn like grim determined warrior ants of the Apocalypse. A hot wind is blowing in over the water from Mother Africa, the full moon lighting up my mind like an old time pinball arcade.
They’re all out tonight, last night of Carnaval. Some standing in pairs or threesomes, others huddled in larger protective gaggles… All talking wild shit, waiting for the next car to roll up, the next exchange of futile ho-stroll banalities, bored and boring creatures of the night, creatures of habit with their easy come and go mentality, so dumbly predictable, the same cheap synthetic gaudy colored outfits, same worn out plastic heels, crappy tattoos and sagging flapjack baby-sucked breasts. I cruise up slowly, taking it all in.
Dejected faces of eternal Disappointment, Mental Slavery. And some odd ghostly glimmer of innocent heroic Optimism…
All eyes alive tonight flashing like searchlights, looking for the big last-minute score, the legendary Hundred Dollar Gringo. But the competition is thick, ten or twenty young girls for every swinging dick out here and more where they come from, packed like showroom dummies into cramped little one-room Copacabana back-street flats that reek of garlic and howling babies, transvestite piss, stale beer, pot smoke, geriatric pussy farts, poverty… Loud music, angry shouts and the occasional gunshot from down the hall…
The lucky ones tonight emerge from the Disco Club hand in hand with muscular, well tanned Italian boys in tight jeans and crisp designer shirts, or balding sloppy sunburned Americanos. They are dutifully bombarded by a small army of beggars, hollow faced flower peddlers, strong arm taxi drivers, killers, hustlers, thugs and glassy-eyed glue-sniffing eight year old wallet snatchers.
I sit curbside on the bike now watching the parade from my invisible perch… An idea pops like a cartoon lightbulb above my head. I fire up the motor and blast off, cruising on down the twinkling yellow Avenida Atlantica.

To be continued…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

1977-

    I long so much for the day… For the freedom so many find in the light of day; but I can’t sleep comfortably at night. 

      I lay awake and shiver in the sticky bird-rising dawn. I would even howl at the moon on appropriate occasions, I suppose… But I fear the neighbors would call the cops.

      Indecision… Too many nights without sleep have made me weak and crazy. I don’t want to sleep alone anymore. Am I justified in writing this? Tell me who justifies things and I will write to them, requesting further information, membership fees, self-returnable envelopes, pillows…

      Why does my head feel like a box of See’s Candies, with the picture of that old lady on the lid? And furthermore, why do I seem to enjoy it? 

      Life in a candy box… There are so many things on the walls of wax paper; pictures, slogans, faces faces faces, haunting me day after day, confronting the walls of oblivion… It’s okay now though, they don’t really shock me anymore. More and more lately I hardly notice them at all… All but one image…

       It’s a picture postcard I picked up in Tijuana, Mexico. The colors are black, white, red, green, yellow and blue; Primary colors, bright and childlike, with the dreamlike pastel patina of age. In spots the colors blend in that unreal way that only happens in old picture postcards and dreams, and maybe death… 

      There is a rolling green hillside dotted with absurd little flowers, above which is an expansive looking sky that seems about to be blotted out by big bulbous yellowish white clouds rising disturbingly on the horizon… Running along the hill are a bunch of soulless looking little Scottie dogs, one right behind the other… They grow larger and larger with a sort of not-quite-right perspective as they run by… The ones in the distance fade into an amorphous looking blot at the left side of the card. What can I say? Above this scene is a slogan in red and black that reads simply: 

       LIFE IS ONE DARN THING AFTER ANOTHER.

       It’s really a bitch! The scariest thing about it is that it’s one of those innocuous looking things that just sort of sneaks up from behind you and turns your brain into soap bubbles.

       I have all kinds of things in here, but somehow this little horror stands out… Sometimes I even think of it as the sole fixture on these walls. And I wonder what it would be like to bow down before that thing on grey mornings when fever hides waiting under the bed…   

       Maybe somewhere in this world there is a sleazy downtown skid row room with spider holes in the floor. The guy who designed that card, an old man now, sits on his tired old gray ass looking at the holes, looking right down into them. I dunno…

       I wish I could just go to sleep and visit the world again tomorrow in the sun.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1977, 2009.

When I was nine or ten years old, I lived among a thinly disguised psychotic little group of alien beings laughably referred to as a family.  This pathetic, dysfunctional neurotic little tribe of psychic pygmies inhabited a big sterile empty house on a heartless tree-lined street in a heartless upper-middle class section of the heartless, sprawling sub-urban wasteland known as Los Angeles.
The wide empty streets of big lonesome desperate lawns – if they could reasonably be called streets – were always very well kept, studiously devoid of any sign of day to day human activity… Life, if it occurred at all, appeared to happen only in secretive dry whimpers behind closed doors.
 The whole desolate hell-scape lay frozen in a dying child’s oversized nightmare of blackness, seclusion and terror. Oh, the hope-bashing, soul-vomiting, mind-shattering screaming brutal emptiness, the bottomless torturous monotony of those big cold white-walled empty looking houses! Such evil fucking insidious monumental insults to human dignity! High walled barriers standing there on that accursed earth’s barren landscape without art or class or character or soul, spartan fortresses of ice whose only real purpose seemed to be to guard againsit the slightest threat of any unwelcome sign of human contact or interaction. No trace of warmth or feeling – ever. Dead fucking reptilian mausoleums of lizard shit.
And there I was, ten years old and as powerless as a fucking goldfish over the screaching mediocracy of that world… Knowing it. Hating it. Wanting to destroy it. Not knowing how…
Even now, almost half a century later, just thinking of that place makes me want to shit on the human race for ever inventing such places to live. Not a good little stroll down memory lane here.
Needless to say, I wasn’t a very well adjusted kid. No no no. Very bad attitude. Right from my very first day at school. I hated everything and everybody and didn’t mind letting them all know it. They obliged me by hating me right back, and so it went.
My favorite word as a child was “cringe”. I even had a comic book character I used to draw called “Captain Cringe.” He had the power to make people cringe and shrivel up and die just by looking at them. Awesome! He was cool and he was powerful. He was a bad motherfucker and he was in control of shit. Always. Captain Cringe knew the score. He was everything I aspired to be in life. Captain Cringe. One bad motherfucker with a bad attitude.
Comics were my big escape and I read, collected, catalogued and hoarded them with a mad compulsive passion. Those crazy little multicolored panels packed with life and adventure lured and held my attention totally and obsessively. Primal and compelling, the pages of the comics drew me in and held me in their spell  like jungle drums. Magic. I was hooked like a dope fiend and I spent the best hours of my nightmarish childhood mercifully lost in that multicolored forest of amazing panels of fantasy.
The comics were my whole life, my only real link to humanity. They exploded off the pages and deep into my thirsty immagination in big forceful lusty iconic images. They allowed me to experience a world I longed to know outside the prison walls of that white vacuous nothingness. And I read them for my very salvation in drooling bug-eyed fascination.
The gorier, sicker ones were my favorites. The more violence, depravity and morbid demented plot twists, the better. Yeah.
My comics were my scared icons and they took me away every day to much better places than the shitty white-walled lunatic hell I came from. Sacred motherfuckin multicolored icons, living treasures of art and passion and life in a dead, dry, ugly void.
 Living in that hollow white marble tomb of a neighborhood, I would catch fleeting glimpses of various neighbors from time to time, usually from afar, across an ocean of manicured lawn or an endless driveway, as if seeing some alien life form from behind glass in a laboratory or something. Never more than a
faint smile or a weak furtive nod to indicate that these fuzzy shadows of people were any more human and alive than the brilliantly vital animated super characters who shouted out from the pages of my beloved comics. Yeh, I loved my comics.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Rio De Janeiro, 2009

crisis time 6 am
deconstruction project of weird science
coming up
over this
empire of ashes and ruin
and rust
this physical body getting heavier,
denser, slower,
dying.

i crawl out of dreamspace to watch the sunrise
coming up
over abundent fields of
churning waste and obsolete matter.
light another cigarette.
the whole world is
sleeping with the fishes
now.
shit.

But the spaceship awaits, holy mother…
mother ship, rocket ship, holy god penis torpedo to the stars, baby,
ready
to take us on home
Alpha Centauri distant star home
waiting waiting forever
and a day, just like today…
Home
where these gross and corrupt torn salvation army space suit
bodies
serve no more in the dense vibrations of this
prison planet this
laughing barrel of drunken monkeys
that was never any home
to me and you
but a crazy old baffling way station movie reel
comedy stew of
tragic and comical
illusions and
bedtime stories for bad boys and girls
a guillitine trap for the most gullible fish of us…
where even the saints and gurus and
truth tellers here are
con men and liars and pimps…
but good ones
innocent and true
like you and me…
hungry for bacon and eggs
in the bleeding morning
of flying creatures
like you
and me…

what now? he sez
as it all falls apart in rotting stewing ruins of oblivian
or awakening…
whatever…
and now these earthly terror places
of unwelcome discovery
where even dreams are obsolete
are fading out of vision again
and only serve to awaken
painful holy garbage can lids trembling in winds of
atomic secrets and other revelations
tearing me loose from this obscene ‘me’
again forever…

even now, still lost in nights of solitude and fear and visions of
what comes next
in this unholy memory bank this
heavy burden of earthly space places where the
things that I used to do
lord, i just cant do ‘em here no more.

Did this screaming Dakini come really come here
sword in hand, flaming rod of truth burning
like holy death ray
to simply show me the way home
?

it’s a painful road, letting go
aint it baby
?
and why cant we figure it out the crucial formula and
element to
make our great escape
together
now
?
or can we
?
how did we end up lost again
and on different sides of
this crummy fence of waste matter
again
as baseball games rage and
i rub the beautiful earthly skin of others
but
only in dreams now as this reality decays
before my tired eyes
into raging nightmare ruins
beyond all
horrors previously concieved
by this faulty mind that
burdens me down here too
slowing me down
slowing me
down…

looking for art and perfection in the garbage
cuz i don’t know where else to look
and finding once again
this gross grinning death head comedy tragedy freak masks
of abandoned children with
rats in their ghetto mouths like cats.
of course
but…
where is the love that will bring us all home
?
where?
and why am i here again alone
and abandoned again and again and again
?
why this swirling Persian rug pattern of
nightmare vision that I can’t escape
with this rotting body
even after all these
years of running?

i call out to you in bleeding lung lunatic night
and i know it you are out
there somewhere
everywhere
within and without
a henchman of the truth that’s been
calling out to reach me here and
carry me home – such a long
and demanding journey…

i am lost and i am ashamed
down here on earth
and feeling so very dumb and
dense and stupid and
sentimental and maudlin
and self indulgent and
human
once again.
i am sorry my god my love where are you
now
?

i want the plane of bliss, baby
and i sure as fuck cant find it down here
where those rats crawl in gutters
like babies crying for their mothers too,
crying “too late, too late”
…it used to be “meow”…
or ”happy birthday”
or something
like that
didn’t it
?
before this awakening that feels like a burning
cross I been strapped to
for blast off..
countdown 10, 9, 8, 7,
6 am
alone here in the universe I can’t sleep
and can’t seem to budge
with this crazy avelanche of
death and illusion raining down
on the sleepy head
again with a thousand questons like
where did the mayans go?
and
can i go there too
?
or am i still gonna stay around down here
as a reporter,
a war correspondent to cover this
final beautiful battle
where all our blood runs
into the streets of another
abandoned planet war again
another
dead end boobie trap again
to show ‘em all
the lighter touch of the road home…
?

Cuz after all were all just junkies here
in this expanding pool of tears…

so cry me a river and take us on home
baby
far from here
where the buffalos
roam
so cold
and
ridiculous
today…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

Read Part II 

       When Ted woke up he was all alone. Unless you could call the presence of his parent’s dead bodies company. Ted couldn’t…    

       His thoughts seemed distant, rattled and confused but still quite numb by the time he came to find himself dragging his parent’s bodies down the hall into the big open closet there. 

      He felt like another person as he dumped buckets of soapy hot water onto the blood and scrubbed and mopped the foamy pink muck around and around and around… He did a pretty good job of cleaning up his room he thought abstractly… Not perfect. But fair, all things considered.

       He was already putting the cleaning things away when he heard car doors slam out front. The haze thinned a little more as he dropped the garbage bags full of broken glass and plastic… A surge of panic. He ran over to the front window. He crouched down and peeked out behind the curtains. Sure enough. The cops… Two cars parked in the front of the drive, motors running, red lights scanning the darkened bushes in the yard, shimmering wierdly off the snow. He saw a third car pulling up to a stop in front of the crowded driveway. Two cops came out of the new car and exchanged words with two others who were standing beside their cars. The first car was empty. One cop pointed toward the left side of the house as another ran back to the car and came out with two rifles, shotguns.

       Desperate thoughts, confusion… It seemed as though no time had passed between his murder of the TV and his parents and this moment he was in here now crouching beside the window, bruised, bloody and sweating profusely.    

       And suddenly Ted was swearing under his breath, cursing life and death, afraid to move, afraid not to… He crouched down there leaning on his gun like a cane and he shivered, crying tears of hate and frustration as shaky fingers groped in his bulging bullet heavy jacket pockets.

       He loaded the gun and looked out again. More cops. This time they spotted him there in the window. A bright light hit his eyes. He fell back behind the ledge.

       ”I’m no killer,” he pleaded silently to nobody. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. They made me like this… They’re the fucking killers!!”

       Sobs.

       Sirens approached in the distance. Ted could hear them, but he didn’t hear them. He was somebody else now, watching a movie… Tires screeched, voices spoke, yelling and then he heard a frightening metallic voice calling from out there, something about how if somebody didn’t lay their gun down and come out slowly now, it would be their last chance… That voice was formidable, threatening; its uncompromising tone, its hollow lifeless quality, its finality all made him feel scared and alone, like a frightened abandoned little boy. 

      Ted thought of the Creature From Planet X. How that picture had  frightened him when he was just a little boy. How he should be watching it again right now, sitting in front of his tv drinking his last beer, holding his big gun for protection.    

       The Creature From Planet X… That’s exactly what the loud metalic voice reminded him of: something alien and unforgiving and final and unbelievably cruel. He hated it…

       And suddenly everything was going all red and dizzy again. Ted was screaming, foaming at the mouth, snot running all down his face now. And then he was standing up by the window, shooting wildly all over the place BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! not aiming anymore, just firing, squeezing the trigger, mouthing the word ‘kill’ over and over. ‘kill’ ‘kill’ ‘kill’  as he squeezed the trigger again and again and again and kept squeezing compulsively even after there were no more bullets left in the gun.

       More shots sounded from outside the window now, shattering a bit of glass here and there. But he didn’t hear them anymore… All he felt was that bloodrush of images, faces, nightmares that didn’t stop…

      And like some horrible prayer, his lips still moved with the words kill kill kill, though it no longer meant anything. Nothing at all… 

      Ted didn’t even look up when the front door came crashing in Kill kill kill and a hail of bullets tore into his body, stopping the fiendish mantra moving his lips once and for all, nailing him good, pumping him full of lead.

(copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009)