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 Just for today there is no drama or conflict and everybody’s getting what they need outta this relationship even if it is just sex and money and drugs and love and sympathy and company and humanity, what the fuck else is there really at the end of the day?Shit, everybody’s got relationship problems and there is no happily ever after. That’s a big evil bullshit lie the bastards tried to brainwash us with from little kids with their creeping reptilian brain Disneyland programming.Happy ever after my fucking dick! I much prefer ‘just for today’, or even better, Narcisa’s hyperactive ‘what now?’ works better for us who’ve had all our fairy tale illusions smashed by psychopath parents and psychic rape betrayal and LSD overdrive rude awakenings right from the start. Shit on the American Dream! How’s this for happily ever after?I just got an email from my pal Orbie.Orbie’s Roy Orbison’s kid and a new friend I met while I was up in LA crying my eyes out all day and night for the last four months writing “Our Lady of Ashes” and kicking Narcisa cold turkey while spending fifteen hours a day diving deeply into the inflamed wound of what my friend Lydia Lunch calls “love’s eternal negation”.I was spending a lot of my writing time in the company of Orbie who was then shacked up with my other dear friend Kat Von D- there I go with the names again for all you Hollywood ass-licking sicophants and gossip mongers.Anyway, the fact is that I spent a good amount of my time writing the first draft of my book sitting in Kat’s little tattoo office while she tattooed away into the wee hours every night. During that terrible time, me and Kat and her man at the time, Orbie, were like family, just hanging together for company, and I wound up reading the bulk of the book to them for feedback, just to hear it out loud and know where to tweak it later - whatever, it was all a long crazy painful and cathartic process and I’ll always remember those nights I spent sitting up with Kat and Orbie as my audience and constant companions during a real difficult and painful time for me.And it was almost like I was unconsciously drawn together with those two special people at a time of terrible loneliness and solitary introspection and deep personal mourning for the last dying illusions of happy-ending romantic love. All that time those two were to all outward appearences the “perfect couple” spending all their time together all lovey-dovey and planning their big happily ever after rock-n-roll marriage and future together.

   And it was like a daily rubbing of salt in deep wounds for me on some level as I suffered the forced seperation from my Narcisa while writing it all out all day, everyday as she sat tucked away in that awful Jesus retreat.

I gotta say that it was super painful, almost to the point of masochistic to spend so much time around those two obnoxious lovebirds at just that particular time for me. But they were the friends and family who God or the Devil put in my life to keep each other company on the battlefield of love and sadness and who am I to argue with higher or lower powers at this stage of the game?

But the moral of the story if there is such a thing is this. After all that, here I am back in Rio with Narcisa, the scourge of my existance, my bloody crown of thorns and heavy cross to bear. And somehow we’re living it up, if only just for today. She’s smoking her lungs out and toasting her brains on crack and I’m writing and swimming in the sea and catching waves and riding the night winds with Narcisa. Clinging to me like a hungry little monkey speeding up and down hills through the hungry night and fucking like the damned and eating good food and talking with a few friends from time to time and doing all the things I love to do.Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the land of bullshit happy endings, my dear friends Kat and Orbie, the most perfect little happy couple I ever seen have SPLIT UP after making each other miserable…

And me and Narcisa are living it up for today and what now? And it’s all a big lie!!! So at the end of the day, today’s been a pretty good one and I was sorry to get an email from Orbie who’s as sad and blue as a Roy Orbison song, but that’s how the cookie crumbles I guess and just for today I ain’t complaining and I guess that’s the closest thing to a happy ending I know about and the beat goes on as I sit here by the seaside by my little shack past midnight with a belly full of rice and beans and a dick numb from fucking and salt in my hair from crashing around in the sparkling Brazilian summer waves between fucks all day long and I got no regrets at all and if this is the road to Hell I’m sure as shit taking the scenic route, just for today.

So anyway, it’s Saturday night -  All my friends are out getting hammered in barrooms and parties around town and I’m sitting by the waves just grooving on the cool vibrations of my city by the sea on a long soulful night. Parties and bars I’m not really into, being by nature every bit as antisocial and misanthropic as my dear Narcisa who’s sitting in the dark in an abandoned building across town right now, toasting her brain in a desperate and futile attempt to extinguish her two remaining brain cells who are constantly fueding with each other in her pretty head.Normally it would be my night for a few quick fucks at Vila Mimosa and a stroll by the rock and roll biker bars over there but I’m all fucked out and my money’s almost gone so I’ll just cool it here alone by the flourescent waves till it’s time to go back to Catete and pull Narcisa out of her hole at sunrise for a last desperate shag before I close the coffin on another hot summer Sunday morning with nothing to do but sleep and wait for the roof to collapse.

Sitting alone by the sea basking in the afterglow of what’s been pretty close to a perfect day, I’m thinking how much I really do like hanging out alone and how different that is from the way I used to be when I was younger, Narcisa’s age, always running around like the headless horseman looking for “the action” looking for something or someone to fill some nameless hole in my soul and never ever finding it, at least not for long. Drugs were a good little diversion for my hyperactive, unsatisfied mind for a little while, like 25 fucking years beating my brains out with all kinds of shit on a daily basis till I was finally more dead than alive and still not fucking satisfied. Shit.I can certainly relate to Narcisa’s absolute refusal to do anything about her “problem”, I know from my own experience that all she’s trying to do is survive in a terrible world of ugly memories and traumatic associations not of her making and drugs are the best line of defense. For awhile. My career took me long and far before it took me down and it was a long, long ride. 25 years. Shit.Narcisa ain’t gonna last that long. Not the way she’s going at least. I was a “functional addict” and drugs were my tool for getting around the world and functioning in it and doing what I hadda do to survive the crazy wild violent ride I lived in. But I did get around and I did get some shit done.Narcisa’s just circling the drain at the ripe old age of 21 years old and that makes me sad to see that she’s much worse off than I ever was. Well maybe not really. I mean she’s not jumping out people’s windows with a tv set and sticking needles in her veins like I did for years at her age - at least not yet. So maybe there is still hope for her. I hope so and if I didn’t hold that hope deep in my heart, I probably woulda turned and hightailed it away from her a long time ago…     I just got a call from my new friend, Mayra Dias Gomes, the hip young writer and journalist who’s probably gonna be the one to translate “Our Lady of Ashes” into Portuguese with me. I could probably do it myself, but I like the idea of working with a “legitimate” translator whose actually been to school and knows about grammer and spelling and shit like that, not to mention the fact that she comes from a prestigious Brazilian literary tradition, being the daughter of the venerable Brazilian screen-writer Dias Gomes, and god-daughter of Jorge Amado, one of my own South American literary heros and a sacred cow of world literature by any standards. And she’s a real nice kid and a brilliant writer in her own right.

Anyway she and her boyfriend Alan are on their way over to the “Emporio” bar in Ipenema, and since I’m sitting at the end of Copa less than a 5 minute ride from there I say what the fuck? and I’ll fire up the bike and take a ride over there. I don’t mind that place as much as most places where people gather to drink and talk shit since it has a certain dark druggie rock-n-roll vibe I can sort of hang with and you can hang out on the sidewalk out front and still smell the ocean a block away as opposed to being crammed inside some hot sweaty chatterbox pen surrounded by frenetic drunken sheeple, a real nightmare to my way of thinking.I’ve said it before and ill say it again. I hate drunks! Crackheads are so much more interesting…Well, it’s time to roll, so here I go..

 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.