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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.