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               Journal entry - 12 June 2005

               Narcisa. She’s a living mass of contradictions.

               The sweetest most open-minded curious savagely authentic courageous generous vibrant and uncompromisingly principled and idealistic girl I’ve ever known. Spontaneous ironic questioning poetic mind. Intelligent confusing brilliant crazed exuberant eccentric beyond measure.

              Damaged beyond repair…

              And with all that, over these last couple of years I’ve known her, especially the last month we’ve been running close again, she’s managed to alternately manifest an equally hateful violent vicious wild animal nature, a perverse mean streak way beyond any reasonable human social constraints. Untamed. Untamable. Selfish, intolerant, hyperactive, impatient, closed-minded and petty as a spoiled autistic brat crossed with an angry, bitter old lady. Spiteful, superstitious, suspicious, destructive. Then suddenly equally charming and charismatic in that indefinable way only children and wild animals can be. And maybe Lucifer.

              Lucifer. He who carries the Light.

              Savage Grace.

              She finally told me what she’d meant that first night we met, when she said, “Do it whatever you wan’ doing to me, Gypsy only don’ to hurt my little brothers, they the innocent one.”

             Turns out later she’d been tripping on Acid and she thought I was the Devil, the Dark Angel she’d long ago made a pact with, finally arrived to take his due.

              Lucifer, that’s me.

             I don’t know if I was insulted or flattered.

               Narcisa.

              Narcisa’s an insane passionate warrior spirit who talks to the Dead, walking her daily tightrope between life and death, enlightenment and madness, pure unconditional love and raving, bone-crushing rage.

              A tightrope artist without a Circus.

              A seeker without a Path…

              Bouncing back and forth between an almost Saintly, martyr-like humility and a dark pathological arrogance and cowardly stupidity that baffles me blind from one moment to the next in a constant dizzy roller coaster ride of emotional freefall and doomsday adrenaline.

             When Narcisa is high on drugs, she’s generally creepy and more or less criminally insane.

             When she isn’t high though, she’s worse.

              Often much worse.

              And she knows it. That’s the real sting. Knowing you’re mad as a hatter and not having the least bit of power to control it.   

              Shit.

              Any prolonged period of abstinence forces her into a terrible state of unrelenting agony where she teeters dangerously between fits of homicidal fury and suicidal depression.

             Or both.

              Shit.

             Arghhh but she’s sealed her fate now, living out her pact with the Dark Forces she’s aligned herself with at last. And she’s gonna have to ride that angry ride till the wheels fall off. Nothing I can do to help her out now. Nothing.

           This is where I get off.

           Tonight she ran off again. With another teenaged floozy, headed for the hills. Abandoned me like a dead man’s sneaker. 

           Again.

           Last straw.

           I had to let her go. Again. At least for now. She’ll be back. But it doesn’t matter, there’s no way we can keep going at this pace anymore anyway. No no no. Too frantic, too violent…

           Hopeless.

           I’m gonna miss her though. My sweet and bitter darling. Maybe someday.

           Maybe.

           What an amazing, terrible creature. Totality of excruciating experience, passion, hunger, lust.

           Savage Grace.

           God protect her.

           God help us all.

           Good Night.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção 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 viva 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.

 We’ve finally made the big time now, me and Narcisa.
 Now we’ve got a stalker.
 What makes such a dark, cowardly, bottom-feeding creature operate?
 How can such a pathetic, vampiric entity exist?
 These are some of the issues and questions I want to contemplate and explore here today.
 The Japanese have an old saying that seems to perfectly reflect the slavish beehive mentality of the reptilian brain, an integral aspect of the human psyche which seems to manifest itself more and more in modern society as the forces of darkness turn up the volume on our species as a whole, in what seems to be a concerted underhanded effort to convert the human race into little more than some new breed of powerless, mind-controlled zombie cattle.
 Here’s what the Jappos say:
 ”Don’t be the nail that stands out, or you will be the first one to get hit.”
 Narcisa and have comitted the crime of standing out.
 Now we are starting to get hit.

A bit of free advice- we have been known to hit back.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção 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 viva 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.

There are times when I just need to get away from all this terrible,
compelling madness for a few hours. Rest my body and my mind.
Sometimes, like today, I can feel her draining my energy, like a
psychic vampire sucking away my lifeblood. And still, with all of
that, I feel guilty for leaving her alone. I guess that’s all part of
the deal. Our common co-dependant sickness. I guess the best I can do
at times is live this and document it a moment at a time, in the hope
of someday being able to make some sense of the many details of this
strange, compelling psychedelic whirlpool I find myself sucked deeper
and deeper into, the amazing kaleidoscopic matrix of Narcisa’s mind.
 And I ask myself at various points and pit stops along this endless
circular journey, why am I here? What is the point, the lesson, the
moral to this immoral story? Like its all a big cosmic joke and I
wanna know who’s the joker.

Earlier tonight she was all lit up like an amusement park, laughing,
joking, telling me all kinds of crazy stories and accounts of hair
raising adventures across the world of her imagination and reality,
memory, hallucinations, visions, torments, trials and hard-learned
lessons. More and more lately, we laugh and talk and really make love,
as opposed to the restless, compulsive fucking for money for drugs
that’s habitually been the standard foundation for our relationship
for so long its hard to even imagine it suddenly being any other way.
But suddenly it is.

Now we find ourselves abruptly redefined as friends, lovers,
confidantes, partners in crime and the odd business of getting to know
each other and ourselves through the context of our crazy interactions
and occult idiosyncrasies.

 Lately she’s been allowed to spend her solitary crack riddled time
more and more at the house I take care of for my Gypsy friend Dolo up
in Sao Conrado.
She’s managed to convince me and I’ve gladly let myself be convinced
that this way at least she can take her drugs in a ’safe’ environment,
away from the noxious infernal influence of the other crackheads and
crazies at the Casa Verde, or up in the favela, surrounded by
gun-toting bandidos and hateful eyes of the everyday citizens of those
crime-ridden slummy communities.

Honestly, I don’t know if any of it’s doing her any good, but I’ve
been trying to at least inspire her to do something productive,
something creative with her time up there toasting her brains out in
her new luxury crack house with the millionaire swimming pool and
panoramic view of the ocean.

 And, sure nuff, she’s been really writing up there and cranking out
reams of brilliant poetry. And it’s got me thinking maybe there’s big
hope for her here if she’s only given a chance and the space and
support to really EXPRESS herself and maybe focus some of her
paranormal vision and genius, that through her own crazy psychic
verbal expression she may yet find a path to salvation by way of this
haphazard encounter with the poetry of her very soul.
 It’s my hope and love and trust that seems to have inspired her to at
least want to try, even if she would still rather die than quit
smoking crack.

 Today she actually told me that nobody had ever treated her with as
much love and respect and trust and belief as I have. She has
convinced me that I am slowly helping her by giving her hope and a
will to live, and I hope and pray it could somehow be true, even as I
still have my own doubts about the inherent wisdom of such a hopeful,
even naïve attitude when it comes to a hope-to-die mentally deranged,
traumatized crackhead.

 But conventional wisdom seems to constantly fall flat on its face
every time I try to apply it to Narcisa. It’s just the nature of her
being as an alien, a cosmic magic mirror of some secret sacred realm
in the deepest hidden chambers of the multidimensional matrix of this
whole wild experience, this dramatic, passionate, confusing meeting of
acid-warped hearts and minds living a common hallucination, bathed
unto drowning in a raging sea of love and terror, just for today.
Shit.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção 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 viva 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.

She’s reading aloud from the dictionary as if she were reciting the most soulful beautiful poetry, with such expressive tone and cadence and fire! For the previous two hours she spoke in so many brilliant discourses that I got absolutely lost. She took a big hit a couple of hours ago, then she lay on the floor on her back and started talking:

“I am only a doll, a toy, a homeless defenseless young girl out in
the world, on the street, the rubber doll to play with. Toy to burn
out and use up, exploit, destroy, throw away. Plastic. Disposable. The
little toy for the men on the streets for play with and throw away. I
am a toy. Disposable. Cheap. Plastic and rubber. To play with and
break and throw it out when is used up and no fun for play with no
more…”

Then she just shifted. She started talking with this happy, playful little girl voice with the sweetest little smile, giggling mischievously, and I knew it was on: spirit possession. There’s this entity that takes over sometimes, a little girl. She likes to sing and play and tell me childish little stories. It’s a benevolent, playful spirit, like a sprite or nymph or something like that. It doesn’t come around too often, usually only when she’s been up for more than a couple of days. But it’s quite charming when it does possess her. And it likes sex, it likes to get fucked, long and hard. And it excites me to no end. I think of it as the ‘Lolita spirit’. More than anything else, that’s part of what always keeps life with Narcisa constantly exciting and compelling. Multiple personalities. She’s many many women and girls with many faces, all wrapped up in one dizzying paranormal totality of experience. People say she’s crazy. And what if she is. I guess that would make me crazy too, since she’s the only girl in the world I feel compelled to want to experience as every
lesson and teaching and challenge for the evolution and edification of my soul, my very life itself.

Hours later, it’s all shifting, changing, morphing, never stable or predictable and now Narcisa is gone, really gone, left her physical and spiritual body open to OTHER beings. I guess this is what it means for a person to be ‘unbalanced’. Completely disconnected from themself.

The drug has taken her over completely now. And the various entities that accompany her are weighing down her entire being. Nothing I can do to pull her off this vicious cycle merry-go-round that is running off its tracks and spinning wildly, digging a hole down down down into the deepest regions of Hell.

What to do? I know she can’t step off this infernal machine. I gotta get off. But how? When? Were trapped together on this dirty little journey.

She’s reading some book she found on the street today, reading it as if it contained the secrets to the universe. Whatever. Insanity. Paranoia. Disease. Dysfunction. Reading out-loud, fast, crazy, driven, spouting out words and theories like a sidewalk preacher babbling bible phrases. Now she’s reduced to this futile cocaine-driven babbling, beating her lips compulsively and furiously like a demented wind up toy, a plastic doll, burning out, running out of energy and soon she’ll need more of the drug cuz she can’t stop and she goes goes goes. Nonsense. Nothing. Breaking through dimensions into another alien reality and this is her way, her only path to enlightenment, and I must respect it beyond all the well-intentioned common wisdom and theoretical knowledge and information available in this current, albeit pathetically limited reality-view. This shit looks to me like pure, indominable psychosis, the hamster wheel, and it goes round and round and round and she can’t get off and I can’t get off and this, my little friends, is Hell.

Just for today. As, momentarily I abandon all hope again and again and again…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção 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 viva 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.

“Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa- Our Lady Of Ashes is the 21st Century’s Romeo and Juliet. If they went trainspotting, and Juliet was Lolita on crack. Read this book!”

- Alex “Orbi” Orbison (Whitestarr, Author of All You Have is Nothing)

NARCISA in the window of St. Mark’s books!

Thanks Wes for sharing the pic.

For those who need a little history lesson:

“Before St. Mark’s underwent its mass “yuppification”, it was
essentially a small, tight-knit, ghetto community where Jonathan’s groundbreaking Fun City Tattoo (NY’s first store-front studio back when tattooing was still illegal) played a
major role. Everyone on the block knew Jonathan well and looked out
for him. He did business with everyone. The cops would drive by as he
stood with his size twelve motorcycle boot on someone’s face and wave
to him without stopping. Everyone was on his side… There was always
a whole vibe over at Fun City, kids outside smoking, laughing,
fighting. Everyone seemed to get along fine though, living
harmoniously in a dysfunctional ecosystem of artists, freaks, losers
and weirdos.”

-From “True Art” by Alessandra DeBenedetti (full article here)

“When the world famous Shaw Fun City studios opened in New York City, this relatively arcane practice was not simply taboo, it was illegal. By citing the mythologies of criminality as relates to Shaw is to understand a very particular creative lineage of social outsiders.”

- From “Illicit Ink” Carlo McCormick of Paper Magazine (full article here)

“On St. Marks Place, a new marriage of caffeine and commerce has popped up with an East Village flavor. “Cappuccino and Tattoos” reads the bright orange awning over No. 94, yoking two businesses: Jonathan Shaw’s 20-year-old World Famous Fun City Tattoos, and the Lynda Diva Go-Cart Cafe, an outdoor coffee stand run by poets that will celebrate its first anniversary this summer.”

-New York Times, 1996 (full article here)

Jonathan Shaw’s bloodthirsty prose pulses through us like an intravenous thrill-ride of the purest dope mixed with gutter water. Narcisa has left a raw indelible tattoo throbbing on the arm of world literature that will take a long time to heal.

-Kenneth Rains Shiffrin (Director of Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow, co-writer of Scardust with Jonathan Shaw and Hubert Selby Jr.)

Visit the film’s Wiki page

Buy Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow on Amazon

….Kerouac is on the verge of a stroke trying to follow the beat, Baudelaire horrified, shaking like a little girl - and Bukowski can’t get enough from the fish-ass taste on his tongue:
Narcisa, Our Lady of Ashes is here and she is yanking them out of their rotten graves to rape them with to most powerful of all drugs: reality.
This is a story of commitment. Commitment to love and the absence of consequences; like every great love should be.
From page one till the end, it is hard to take a breath of air. And forget about pure air by the way. There is not the slightest moment of hesitation by the author to dive head first into the deepest realms of hell, have brunch with Mr. Goat Head in person and let the reader be shat on with pure pain. No compassion whatsoever.
After going through so much immorality on every holy-fucking page of this Goddamn-Bible of Hell, I found and learned one solid moral:
“Love is a piece of maggot-infested, putrid meat that hangs on a hook of an abandoned Butcher’s shop in hell. Only those hungry and brave enough to eat it like a fancy carpaccio will be blessed by the sickness, the wounds that only God himself will heal and transform…”
I got all this and more from this book. Salve Jonathan Shaw,  the most authentic person I know.

- Antonio Luiz “Tonico” Monteiro de Carvalho

“Meu fumodromo narcicista,” she said proudly, displaying her latest creation, a new psychedelic juxtaposition of household objects.

Nothing ever stands still or stable around Narcisa’s world in constant flux and kinetic motion, forever and always rearranging the furniture and every other material object within her alien reach in an endless hyperactive mission to create and recreate from the material world an amazing shape-shifting sculpture of her own bizarre futuristic archeology…

Her “narcissistic smoke-a-drome” is the latest “novidade”. Consisting of an antique mirror with a little marble shelf piled up with three rubber balls, a few little boxes and a butter knife precariously balanced on the top.

“Uma faca desafiada,” she said, her bulging bughouse eyes boring into my limited non-altered perception like alien laser beams. “What on the fuck I am gonna do with a dull knife, uma faca desafiada! Hein?”
“Desafiar a existencia?” I ventured. Challenge existence? A spontaneous play on words almost worthy of Narcisa’s own supersonic alien poetry.

She got it. She gave me a supersonic glance of minute quasi-admiration before turning her attention back into whatever unseen dimension she was traveling back and forth from in her brief visits to the mundane world of matter.

Now she’s tearing through the latest issue of TRIP magazine, ripping out scraps of pages as she reads random phrases, mumbling out load to herself.

“La donna piu bella!” She said in Italian as she examined a picture of a naked girl, then tore it in half.

Now she’s making strange exterrestrial music with the pages, rubbing her fingers up and down, rustling, tearing…
“I wanna KNOW ’bout the texture of things, the speed an’ the quality. Velocity… I can make my own instrumento musical from the recycle things, only paper. But I wanna know how to do it, no the way THEY do it, got it?”

Suddenly she farted.
“Why is always these GASES come out my ass when I e’smoke, hein? … May be is some e’spirit come an’ put his finger in my ass hole when I no looking?”

Then she started singing in an alien language I never heard before, something haunting and oddly familiar, like a cross between moaning and whining like a dog and whinnying like a horse. Amazing.

She hasn’t slept or eaten in two days now. She picked up the package of biscuits I left for her and started scavenging. While she ate, she read the little words on the back of the package out load.
“Lua nova industria e produtos alimenticios, ltda… Ingredientes: farinha de trigo enriquicida com ferro e acido folico, fermentos quimicos bicarbonato de amonio, extrato de malte…. What the fuck I am eating here, man? Drugs?!? Great, Max!! Is pretty good for me!!”

“Ahhh! I am a scientist, an’ my laboratory is these e’stupid body I got here now!”

Just for today I have to agree with her.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção 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 viva 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.

Congratulations Max on selling out your book!

Narcisa is a living legacy jerked out of a diseased typewriter. A broken bottle to your throat, a steel toe to your head, the electric socket you’ve been waiting to stick your dick into. Jonathan Shaw is a dangerous thinker, an indestructible wolf, and a scab vendor unraveled.

-Max G. Morton, Author Indestructible Wolves of The Apocalypse Junkyard (by Heartworm Press)