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Narcisa called me a few hours ago while I was sitting at the far end of Copacabana, watching the waves roll in at high tide. I checked my watch and it was midnight. She wasn’t looking too good when I dropped her off at nine o’clock and now she calls and she sounds terrible. On the verge of a mental/physical collapse.It’s been coming up fast over the last couple of weeks but now she calls and says “Cigano, help, I’m sick. I am dying, come and get me go go…”And I ask her where she is and she says she’s at the main intersection up in Santa Teresa, not her usual haunt and I tell her “Don’t move, I’ll be there in ten minutes” and off I go flying through the night on the motorcycle and I fly off the green green highway from the beach, tearing through the narrow cobblestone streets of old Catete, my neighborhood, Narcisa’s home and the scene of many of our crimes, up up up the winding road into the hills of Santa Teresa.</p>I found her standing at the trolley stop at the Largo Dos Guimaraes, looking grey and diminished as an old ghost but still with that haunting tragic ethereal beauty that at this point only I can see. She climbed quickly onto the back of the bike and we rode down the hill. She was shaking and coughing to the point that she started wretching so violently that I had to pull over for her to sit in the gutter and wrack her bones with dry heaves till we could move on.

I told her “That’s it, you’re not smoking any more today!” (as if I could ever keep her from going out and doing whatever). And she said that was fine, she was done and didn’t want any more, that she just wanted to sit and drink a soda and catch her breath, so I stopped in front of the old Cafe Lamas and went up to the counter and got her a passion fruit drink.Her face was the color of the sidewalk and her skin as clammy as an old used rubber with a cold sweat. I couldn’t take it any more and I said “I think we should take you to the hospital before you croak”. She shook her head violently like one of those bouncy plastic doggie animals on a drunken cabbie’s dashboard no no no no no hospital Cigano no no no!

 And I said “Jesus, baby, you need to see a doctor. You can hardly talk, you’re all fucked up here…” and she just stood there shaking her head like a stubborn old bitch and said she just wanted to get off the street and go home to my place and smoke a joint she had, take a valium and rest up…At that point I’d pretty much had it and I told her I wanted to get her some help, that I didn’t know what to do anymore and she said just take me home. I had visions of her going nuts again and going all crazy on me so I said no. I wanted her to see a doctor. Then she panicked, thought I was gonna take her to the nut house, her all-time worst fear, of being caged, restrained, sedated, and having just escaped from the horrors of four months of Jesus farm she was still full of trauma of that so she just walked away and left me standing there. Walked off down the dark street, around the corner in her little waif get-up, skinny legs and mini skirt, looking like a twelve-year-old Lolita’s ghost and then she was gone.I instantly regretted my decision and I knew this was her way of telling me if I didn’t just take her home and give her shelter, then somebody else would and it wouldn’t take her long to get picked up looking like that, wandering the pre-dawn streets of any neighborhood.She’d been depending on the protection of strangers, older men and gringos since she’d hit the streets at twelve and she knew the game, knew what sort of sob stories those men liked to hear, how she was just a lost confused little schoolgirl who’d run away from home and just needed a place to stay and some care and feeding and would gratefully return the kindness with her virginal innocence. Wasn’t that the sweet little routine she had going when I’d first met her years ago when she really was a homeless teenager out for whatever? Now she was way over twenty-one and therefore something of a fraud, but by the looks of her a convincing one and in the dark late Sunday night shadows only I knew the truth and I didn’t much care, I just wanted to find her before anybody else did and tell her I was sorry and I’d play it by her rules, that I got it and it was cool.Well, I got on the bike and rode all around those dark streets teeming with homeless shadows and prowling cars and stray cats looking for her but I already knew I’d blown it and she was gone, far far away, she could be anywhere, and then all the scenarios started filling my mind, as the seeds that had been planted long before started to sprout their seven hundred heads of insecurity and menace and loss. Shit. She was gone. Gone.Hopped in a passing car with somebody, anybody, off to the next sordid adventure, the next quick trick, hitched a ride in a cab for a quick blow job to Copacabana and the next gringo, the next dissapearing act to nowhere, to everywhere, to outer space, back to Alpha Centauri without so much as a kiss goodbye. Shit.What had I done? I rode around and around until I knew for sure she’d flown the coop and I rode all the way to Copacabana and as I rode down the long ho stroll we both knew so well the visions and ghosts danced behind my eyes and I stopped the bike in front of “Help”, the big gringo whorehouse where I knew she’d worked her magic on so many men over the years. I stood there watching the familiar depressing proceedings, the same old tired faces and sad phoney mercinary heartless mating rituals, torturing myself, driving myself nuts until I couldn’t take any more and I got back on the bike and headed back to the neighborhood.

THE CASA VERDE:

Casa Verde, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

I rolled up to the Casa Verde for the third time in the last desperate hour and this time I saw her friend Pluto, Narcisa’s twin beggar spirit, a sort of male version of her, sitting out front in the middle of a pile of garbage, staring into space in the dark. I stopped the bike and asked if he’d seen Narcisa. He just pointed down the street and said, “Here she comes…”I looked down the street and sure enough there she was walking toward the Casa Verde. I rolled the bike down the hill and stopped beside her.”Baby. Why’d you run off? I was worried about you…”"You the one what leave me all ‘lone, Cigano.”I could see there was no use arguing, even though it seems that’s what we do most, besides fucking… Self-justification is her shield and her buckler on the battlefield of human relations and I just let it go at that. “Sorry” was all I said and I meant it.I’d learned my lesson again and who was I to try and make her see her errors? Its not my job. I was just happy to have found her and have her back, her skinny waif arms and legs wrapped around me from behind as we made our way back down the street towards my place again. When we got home she stripped off her skimpy garb and gave me a memorable fuck and as soon as I got up in her I knew again instantly why I put up with all her shit. Every fucking time… All of it.She’s the one and for now at least that was that for us both. I think that Narcisa, like me, knows good and well that none of this will last, nothing is permanent.Maybe that’s why she insists on everything all at once right now go go, because like she’s said before “I’m twenty-one years old Cigano and soon I’ll be old and fat and done and just let me live it the life how I wanna live now.That’s Narcisa. No past, no future, live live live as intensely as possible, a totality of experience, love and hate and joy and terror and sensations, just for today.That’s what her tattoo says, “so por hoje”, the tattoo I did on her shoulder that time she tried to get clean and go to the NA meeting in Ipanema every night till one day she just kicked me to the curb hard and ran off with that nasty wino lesbian poet. Just for today. I’d taken her to my friend Beto Sata’s studio in Copacabana and tattooed it on her shoulder right below the black ball where I’d covered up the satanic pentagram she’d tattooed on herself when she was 14 years old, in a dubious effort to close the gates to hell she’d opened up from that tender age, before I’d first met her. Just for today. After she relapsed (first on weed and wine with that cursed lesbo, then soon right back to smoking crack, the express lane to hell) she would look at that tattoo and joke that just for today she was gonna smoke crack. Just for today.But even that wasn’t enough for Narcisa, more more more, and she wanted me to do another tattoo on her, the words “e agora?” (what now?) going all the way down her forearm. That was better, she said, than “just for today”, more immediate, more… now. What now? Right now, Cigano, go go go… Narcisa. But we never got around to doing that tattoo cause she could never sit still or focus for long enough to go with me and do it.”Just for today” was just a fluke, or maybe cause when we did it, just for that day she really had been making an effort to slow down and stay calm and find some focus, some discipline and put her life in some kind of order. It didn’t last very long, but whatever, the tattoo will be there to haunt her for as long as she lives, which may not be much longer if she doesn’t wake the fuck up soon. Narcisa really is living just for today and, one way or another I gotta hand it to her, she does it with great class and distinction.In fact, I’ve never seen such poetry and style in the act of self-destruction - and I’ve seen a lot of that, believe me. 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.