“Jonathan Shaw has made it through the eye of the needle into our lives. This kind of rite of passage gives his perspective a sense of the physical wold which he creates for us. To immerse ourselves in this bare-bones attitude is what a novel is supposed to do for a reader. Lucky us.” Thank you Debbie Harry for the kind words!
So anyway. Now that I got her back after our brief misunderstanding about the hospital and all that, I got it and once again accepted that for Narcisa there’s gonna be no easy way out of this, and I am definately not gonna be her knight in shiny armor or the caretaker of her life’s path or soul’s progress, only a big lover and friend and well wishing admirer and that’s that.Can I live with that and the fact that she may just have to die on my watch? I guess I have no choice but to live with it, since the only alternative is to bail out and just for today I’m not prepared to. All the other times I got a break from Narcisa- and there have been several breakups of varying lengths of duration- it always happened spontaneously and organically. And when the time comes again I’ll know it, just like for now it’s the time to stay with her. I also know that like everything else, this too shall pass.I know that my friend Lydia Lunch and other dear friends like her mean well and want to see me happy and fulfilled and living a kick ass life- but what they may not fully get is that this is my kick ass life, just for today this is the chapter I’m living a totality of experience through and who’s to say what’s sick and ‘dysfunctional’ anyway in a world that’s proved itself again and again to be totally dysfunctional from the very start of monkey-brain human affairs on this creeping snot ball of reality-reality!Reality, at best, is highly subjective and if you had been subjected to any of the psychedelic surreal extremes of subjective reality I’ve been living in since I was old enough to know I was alive, whatever that meant, then you too would probably put great value in this and every experience that came your way, good, bad and ugly!I remember when I went back to Narcisa after the first month-long breakup, the time she got her head bashed in by bandidos she’d mouthed off to in Copacabana, and the one person who I listen to, my friend Jaycee, told me to just go with the experience and not judge it or try and define it by ‘normal’ standards of sanity or whatever and that was the wisest, most liberal advice I’ve ever gotten about a challenging dilemma, and that’s from a guy I really respect for his hard-earned wisdom, especially cause he’s a guy just like me with a very similar background and insanely abused as a kid, a homeless orphan street running juvenile delinquent just like me and Narcisa, and that’s the only kind of people guys like us listen to anyway, cause we’re really just listening to ourselves, a mirror image of our own souls and that’s the closest thing to the voice of God or whatever a little street snipe like me will get…But I remember that what impressed me the most about what Jaycee said, wasn’t so much what he said, even though that was good, but what I saw him doing and it was this:Now you gotta know that here’s this guy I really look up to as almost like a teacher, a guy I been listening to most attentively right from the beginning of the time I got sober many years ago and a guy I really respect and look up to for all his knowledge…As we’re talking, his girlfriend walks up- this is in Copacabana, right before I loaded up my bike to go down to Penedo and rescue Narcisa from whatever hole she’d dug herself into that time after I’d left for a month. So me and this guy Jaycee are talking and here comes his girlfriend … And she’s a fucking monster!!! Old, ugly, fat, fake tits, bad attitude, looks something like King Kong and more of a fucking man than both of us put together… and rude and stupid. Jaycee tells me she’s filthy rich, whatever, but the point is, here’s this guy who’s really the shit who I really look up to and he’s saddled up with this old dragon I wouldn’t stick my dick into on a million dollar bet and suddenly it just hit me, how could I look down my nose at Narcisa?!?Young, vibrant, beautiful, sexy, paranormal intelligence, cosmic retribution and totality of hungry passionate experience- and an eternal muse to boot! A cathartic relationship that has most likely come into my life experience as a boot in my psychic ass to teach me to transcend the bad information and faulty programming that I learned growing up in a raging war battlefield of violence and abuse and insane betrayal with an alcoholic mother and her husband with the dick of a housefly.So I’m learning not to complain or look a gift horse in the mouth or up the ass. And me and Narcisa have a paranormal screaming make-up fuck and start the whole cycle all over again. What IS it with her that no matter how stupid and abusive and dangerous it gets, the sex is always so hypnotically compelling that as soon as I get back in that insane saddle after even a couple of hours away, I’m in for another wild ride right back to Looney Land without a care or the slightest reference to the past or future?
So we started in and by now it was clear that the worst of her run was over, no need for the hospital or any other kind of intervention, divine or otherwise and if anybody’s gonna end up in hospital at the end of all this it may just as we’ll be me. So off we go galloping, full speed ahead down the road to Hell again and now she’s crossed the point of no return and she’s feeling bold and strong and beautiful again, so now she’s gonna dance, and now that she’s lost 15 lbs in that many days it’s good to watch her dance again and she is shaking it in pure kinetic poetry of motion and it is pure apocalypse ballet.I can’t take my eyes off her twirling whirling hypnotist’s ass and I’m up on my feet drooling and grabbing that ass and my dick is hard and we’re dancing like puppets on the devil’s string and around we go dancing, fucking up down all around knocking shit off the shelves and it’s raining evil spirits of debauchery and carnal mayhem again and I don’t care don’t care. Away we go, just like that last time before we split up in the book.But this is a new book, a new life, a new moment, a new day and it’s just for today, right now Cigano go go and she’s a go-go girl conjured up from the depths of a 1960’s acid trip that never ends.Just for today I am lucky.I am blessed, holy, bathing in this eternal river of motion and sex and sound energy frequency, crazy life blood radio waves and spirit-dancing, way past dawn… and of course after another cataclysmic fuck she needs more crack to fuel the fire in her soul, who cares about sleep anymore and by now its 8 o’clock in the morning and everybody’s going off to work in the robot slave factory, not like in the favela where there’s no nine to five, business is conducted at all hours of day and night under the sanctified gaze of teenage boys holding ak-47s and ar-15 assault rifles and grenades and its business as usual for Narcisa, drug business, whore business, monkey business the way she likes it.Just for today- until our fucking souls rot and why not? Everybody else’s are rotting too down there in the teeming beeping pushing shoving rat race rush hour traffic and that’s the problem with the rat race that even if you win, yer still a fucking RAT and what fucking good is that?So the party goes and goes and finally when I need to crash she goes off and I close the coffin for awhile and just for today all is peaceful and good. I enjoy my nap and soon she’s back and its more more more Cigano go go go and just for today I don’t fucking mind a bit. 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.
The waves are suddenly high tonight, rolling in at my feet by my little shack by the fisherman’s colony at the far end of Copacabana. There’s no moon now at midnight and it’s like I blinked and missed this month’s moon over the last couple of weeks- I can hardly believe it’s already two weeks gone by now since I finished writing Narcisa, after months holed up in a cold Hollywood Babylon winter bubble of isolation and reptilian solitude before coming back home to Brazil.
Two weeks already gone by in a surreal blur of fevered fucking and fighting, two weeks since getting off a red eye flight from Panama City to find Narcisa holed up in some dump in São Paulo waiting like a freeze frame movie monster in suspended animation, waiting like a sea monkey for me to come and pour water on her and bring her back to life.She didn’t die or last long as a born-again Christian either, thank God.She simply went into freeze-dried hibernation for a few weeks since squeezing out a bathroom window in the middle of the night before trudging for miles through the jungle to the highway, hitchiking south to São Paulo in her great escape from the bizarre sinister Jesus camp where she’d spent months giving the crack monster a well-needed rest before getting ready to unleash unholy retribution on the world again.I dutifully got off the plane in São Paulo to bail her out of her plight and the first thing she wanted was to jump right back into our old pathological sicko routine, as if six months seperation and the Jesus camp holy rolling bible banging had never taken place, as if I hadn’t just written her life story, exposing our common insanity for the whole fucking world to see…Fuck me!I tried to show her the “instant underground classic” I’d just written about her and her eyes just fell right on a page where it said, “sex and drugs - smoke smoke smoke fuck fuck fuck” and she said that’s exactly what she wanted to do and nothing else “right now, Cigano, go go go!”And so, after months of stifling abstinence for each of us from our drug of choice or lack of power to choose otherwise, we jumped right in and did exactly that. After a few rounds, and being jet-lagged and bordering on total mental collapse and exhaustion after a marathon four month, fifteen hour a day writing lockdown, I quickly fell into a comatose stupor and when I awoke the next day, the little hotel room had been converted into an ashtray, just like old times- unbelievable! And she was huddled in a corner with a case of paranoid jitters, swearing she never wanted to smoke crack again - I think she really meant it too at the time….So we went straight back to Rio, where by the time I settled back into my little apartment in Catete near downtown, I was stricken with a dangerously high fever….After a few days spent shivering in bed while she sat glued to the chattering television, eating chocolate and cold pizza, I wasn’t getting better, having to get up from my foggy stupor to fuck her every few hours. I finally crawled to the hospital, more dead than alive, where the doctor told me I had a severe case of bronchitis that through total exhaustion had developed into pneumonia and that I was going down down down if I didn’t find a way to get some rest soon.
Of course I tried to make Narcisa understand and of course she wanted no part of letting me get any rest… It all came to a head when I got back from the hospital soaked to the bone from a tropical downpour and hallucinating at the end of a dizzy motorcycle ride where I’d barely made it home alive and I told her she needed to leave me alone for a couple of days.And, like a vampire seeing her energy source dry up, she went instant psychobabble on me and cold cocked me with a coke bottle, sending me right back to the hospital for 5 stitches above my left eyebrow. The doctor who’d just told me to get some rest just shook his head. I guess he’d seen it all before!Narcisa, true to form, didn’t neglect to call my cell phone collect while I was getting my face stitched up to explain to me how it had all been my fault. After thanking her for that crucial bit of information, I told her it might be a good idea if she stayed away from me for awhile.God forgive me, I lied to her and told her the cops were looking for her for her savage assault on my face.Thank God she fell for the ruse, actually laying low for a few days, only calling me collect from time to time to complain that it wasn’t fair. When I could finally get a word in, I told her she should thank her lucky stars that it wasn’t fair, because if life was ‘fair’, she’d most likely be eyeball-deep in her own shit and ugly karma for her countless heinous misdeeds and crimes against humanity over the years.I don’t think she quite got that, and I seriously doubt she ever will. That’s Narcisa, God love her…A friend of mine who happens to be a witch doctor came to visit from Buenos Aires during the time I was holed up recovering and informed me that Narcisa is an energenitic parasite, a vampire who lives and thrives off my life force, and that she was slowly sucking me dry of my vital energy. He didn’t have much trouble convincing me of it since I still had a terribly high fever and could hardly walk across my little apartment to go to the bathroom and had lost ten pounds in as many days. So I managed to dodge her for a few more days, holing up at my rich friend Tonico’s mansion in the hills, during which time Narcisa turned a few tricks and made due without me, biding her time and waiting for me to recover enough for her to get her fangs back in my jugular.Meanwhile I’m getting emails from friends and ex-girlfriends and ex-wives and lovers all over the world telling me I’m the worlds biggest chump and asshole for putting myself in this shitty sewer of moral degradation. Maybe I am. But I just don’t seem to be able to shake her loose for more than a few days. I guess this is what you call an “unhealthy relationship” and now I’m back in it up to the top of my dick-shaft.Today, after two days absence, she showed up filthy, sleepless, grey, demented and dissheveled, begging me to let her in to take a shower and change clothes. What a sight- I had no choice but to let her in. Afterwards she passed out naked on my sofa.After really trying to ignore her for half an hour, finally my dick pointed me right down the road to Hell again and I had my way with her sleeping carcass three times while she snored as peacefully as a sedated maniac. Then I too passed out beside her, napping away the sunny afternoon.When she finally woke beside me at sundown, like Nosferatu crawling out of a coffin, she expertly calculated and extorted exactly the market rate price of three fucks from me!How did she know? She’d been sleeping soundly the whole time! It’s like her pussy has a built in calculator now, or a fuckometer or something! I gladly payed up in a mix of confused admiration and relief to be rid of her again for a few more hours, but I know shell be back soon enough!I just went out and got some dinner and it was good, beans and rice and spicy meat, just what the doctor ordered. Now I’m sitting by the crashing waves here in my little open-air office at the far end of Copacabana waiting for the phone to ring again and I look up and just as I notice it’s after midnight, I see the waning moon peeping over the horizon across the bay over Niteroi.Somehow it’s comforting to know I didn’t miss it completely this month, and I vaguely wonder how I’m gonna explain all this to Lydia Lunch. Shit…Xx JS 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.
Welcome to Scabvendor, website and blog of world famous tattooist and author Jonathan Shaw. As Jonathan wraps up his novel NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES, the press is rolling in. Check back for clips from the feature article in the Folha De São Paulo, written by Mayra Dias Gomes, author of Fugalaça. They will be up soon, along with pictures of some of Jonathan’s best tattoos and excerpts from NARCISA. Jonathan is currently in Rio De Janeiro until the beginning of April when he will return for a small US book tour. Stay tuned for more!
Check out Jonathan Shaw on myspace: www.myspace.com/jsfuncity
