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12 NOON-

I finally managed to roll over and go back to sleep and within 5 minutes I was awakened again by a series of disturbing noises, telling me she’s up. And in perfect synchronicity of course, right on fucking time to disturb my questionable bit of rest is the rustle of potato chip bags and its crunch-crunch-rustle-rustle-bang-crash... all this to the background soundtrack of the chattering moron box on which she’s watching Saturday cartoons.
But one thing I’ve noticed over the years with Narcisa, is that all this indignity hardly ever leads to violent confrontation as it once did in the past.
I think we’re both actually smoothing out a bit with all the time and suffering and separations…
Smoothing out like two raw gemstones bashing against each other in a tumbler - because that’s how the jewelers refine rough stones, by putting them in a tumbler and letting them bash up against each other until all their rough edges are smoothed out and they’re ready to be fine cut into precious gems. ( See Alessandra’s Blog, Thoughts on Things)

The trick, though, is to always put like stones together in the polishing process; diamonds with diamonds, ruby with ruby, etc. Cuz if you put a diamond in conflict with an emerald, the softer, weaker stone will be pounded into dust while the other will be left there all alone.
Just like people.
I have honestly come, over the years, to believe that me and Narcisa are surely enough of a like kind to benefit from all this sort of violent contact together.
Two pirate criminals of uncommonly high intellegence and spiritual evolution, albeit both steeped in years of selfishness, nasty habits and covered in all sorts of creepy unconscious emotional trauma scars.
So over the years we’ve pounded and bashed up against each other in a long war of almost unbearable conflict.
So far nobody has killed anybody or died in battle yet.
A real blessing, from where I’m sitting now, counting my blessings.
Meanwhile we seem to be slowly, quietly adapting to each other’s obnoxious solitary ways and nasty habits, much like two wild tigers locked in a cage together coming to some. Sort of an uneasy truce. My big hope is that this could all really evolve into some marvelous symbiotic kinship, after so many blazing, fur-rending, near-death rumbles and bloody skirmishes…
At least that is my thinking for today, and my daily hope…
That over the ragged course of so much time and adventure and violent conflict and dangerous drama and give and take and common experience spent in each other’s company, we might even come someday to live in something like real harmony.
Like two battle-scarred warriors teaming up for the common good or the common bad, a real cataclysmic battle, but this time the two of us fighting side by side, instead of as adversaries.
Who knows? Stranger things have happened in the course of human affairs.
It has been said that, in spiritual terms, when there is an alliance between two former adversaries, it leads to a stronger than average bond. The best analogy I’ve heard is this:

Back in the day, doctors used to worry about the pregnancies of women who had previously undergone c-sections, fearing that the mended flesh, traumatized and weakened by the operation, might bust open from the pressure of the new pregnancy. Then they discovered that the area where there was scar tissue that had mended after an injury of previous trauma was actually much STRONGER than the normal tissue.

It’s an interesting concept.
And love is powerful.
I really have come to believe in miracles, the suspension of belief and disbelief as well, through many real-life demonstrations over the last decade since I’ve been seriously seeking spiritual guidance and healing for the basic conflicts of my heart. Conflicts that almost took me to the cleaners myself with liquor and drugs and all sorts of self destructive living in general, just like my little friend, Narcisa.
Love is powerful
And so is sex.
A powerful hands-on healing magic, even in the greasy blood-stained hands of crippled monkey-brain pirate terrorists like me and Narcisa..
Something is happening with us and, while I don’t know exactly how to define or ‘handle’ it, I am smart and experienced and maybe just intuitive enough not to take anything for granted now.
And I do believe that if we can somehow just manage to survive this rough, violent, terrifying tumbling process, its entirely likely that it might smooth us both out enough to actually become a pair of strong allies. Hard, precious stones being shaped and cut together for some larger purpose..
If we don’t die in the process, of course..
So far I can actually see sometimes how this bizarre, twisted relationship has served us both well in many ways.
It’s certainly given us both plenty of fuel for contemplation - enough for me to even write and publish a whole fucking book on… Maybe more…
Not to mention the other more personal book I wrote for Narcisa, all in one crazy month-long sitting, while she was holed up in that stupid Jesus camp.
That book was 200 pages long and entirely hand written in Portuguese, our common language of choice, even though we both speak English and Spanish pretty well..
I wrote it mostly sitting on the rock at Arpoador beach, in a spiral notebook.
And at the exact moment I finished the last page of dense marginless writing, my cell phone rang and it was her, calling me for the first time in months with her accumulated concentration camp phone privileges to ask me when I was coming to visit.
Then she asked me where I was sitting right then. When I told her “Arpoador,” she told me she already knew it, that she’d actually visualized me sitting at the exact spot where I was sitting at that moment, just as I’d finished the last sentence of her hand-written book.
And I wasn’t surprised, just another typical telepathic paranormal phenomena moment with me and Narcisa, cuz that’s how strong the invisible bond is…
Such extrasensory synchronicity and empathy surely merits more than just one fucking book, no?
So, like it or not, here we go again…
Thanks to my fire-breathing, crack-smoking, shit talking, everloving eternal Muse, Narcisa.

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.

Finally it’s 6 in the morning and the sun is coming up over the bay. As I ride her up the hill to cop, I can see the first pin point of a devil red sun peeking through the steamy tropical cloud cover out over the green hills across the bay.
And we’re riding along and she’s clinging to me on the back of the bike again in the fuzzy warm afterglow of the last hour’s super intense lovemaking… Yeh I will really call it that now.
Because somewhere in the course of our ongoing habitual crack stupor dementia sex party, we’ve somehow stumbled across some invisible line between fucking and lovemaking…
As she clung to me with that drowning rat desperation, I could actually feel that subtle shift again…
It’s as if she’s somehow being infused with the very will to live as I screw again and again her hard into the mattress, into the physical world, back into life itself, injecting her with lust and love and passion and some weird abstract will to just keep living for one more fucking day, filling her being with a variety of living, tactile sensations and earthly energy… And sensations….
Sensations.
It’s kinda funny, but since I’ve been back with her, after our four month seperation, lately now, whenever she gets hungry for snacks, for sustenance between bouts with the crack monster, whenever I ask what she wants to eat she invariably tells me “sensaçãoes”.
Sensations.
The first time she said it, I thought she was just waxing poetic, speaking metaphorically, talking in tounges again….
Whatever.
And maybe she was.
Unconsciously. Speaking in symbols, esoteric poetry rhymes, riddles, speaking the language of the subconscious, talking the tongue of angels… the way it always is with Narcisa.
“Sensaçãoes”
It turned out though to just be the name of some new potato chip brand she’d sudenly become all fanatical about since the old times.
It used to be “Baconzitos,” these fake-food bacon-flavored corn chips that, if you leave them out on a plate for five minutes, they go all soft and stale, and taste like little chunks of bacony cardboard.
But there’s always some strange subtext to these things with Narcisa…
The other day she decided to try something new.
She bought a pack of Cheese flavored Cheetos or whatever… 

dog-shit cheetos, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.


She didn’t really buy ‘em for the taste or even the sensation now anyway.
Now she’s just become totally addicted to the little cards that come in the packages of chips. Some childish “Dungeons and Dragons” type game.
She’s got the whole fucking collection going now, all these little cards with with silly little pictures of weird little creatures with exotic little names like “Pegasus” and “Scarlet Witch” and “Golden Angel” and “White Dragon”.
She says she must have the elusive “Black Dragon” card now to complete her set, so we can play.
Sweet child.
Narcisa likes to play play play, God bless her.
But now she desperately needs the “Black Dragon” card, and she keeps getting me to buy her endless bags of these fucking chips and opening em up and eating whatever’s inside…
Whatever the fuck it tastes like.
Whatever…
We were at the beach the other day, sitting at my little office kiosk at the end of Copacabana, hanging out, watching the waves, both of us stinging with the endless boredom that seems to consume us both during any of her periods of self-enforced abstinence.


She’d just bought this new bag of cheese flavored chips from the kiosk boy.
She opened it up and started munching away.
She even offered me some, probably trying to munch her way faster to the precious card hidden at the bottom of the bag…
I wasn’t hungry though. Especially since having noticed a lingering smell of dog shit in the air.
Fucking people bringing their stupid mutts down to my beach to shit.
Fuck.
Soon enough, Narcisa was bored again, her habitual state whenever suffering from any significant period of prolonged abstinence from the crack.
“Let’s get the fuck out, Cigano. I wanna go. Go go go! Moooove!”
I got on the bike and she got on behind me. I could still smell it as we pulled away, the vague lingering odor of dog shit in my nostrils, so I didn’t mind getting out of there anyway.
We rode off down the beach, Narcisa muching away at her chips behind me, like a contented baby cow.
Half way home! as we pulled up to a stoplight, there it was again.
The irritating smell of dogshit.
I told her and she said I was just imagining it.
Whatever.
One of us had probably stepped in shit. She told me they say it’s good luck and I told her they probably just say that to feel less pissed off for having stepped in a pile of stinky old dog shit, that’s all.
The light turned green and we blasted off down the beach and the smell was gone.
When we pulled the bike up in front of my place a few minutes later, we got off.
And there it was again, that unmistakable dog shit smell.
I told her I could definately smell it, and now she said she smelled it too.
At my insistence, she checked the bottom of her shoes.
No dog shit.
I got off the bike and looked at the bottom of my own boots, first one, then the other.
Clean.
Nothing.
Weird.
We walked up into my building and got into the elevator as Narcisa munched and crunched away, finishing off the chips.
“Black Dragon!” She squealed, jumping up and down. “I got it, Cigano!”
I scrunched up my nose, smelling dog shit again.
What the fuck?
Our feet were clean. Maybe we’d sat in it or something. I turned Narcisa around, checking the seat of her pants.
Clean.
Then she handed me the empty Cheetos bag.
“Maybe you smell inside the bag, Cigano,” she smirked.
I don’t know what I was thinking she was thinking I was thinking.
I put my nose up to the bag and took a wiff.
Dog shit!
“THAT’S where it was coming from!” I howled. “Ya KNEW! You been fucking with me the whole time, ya little witch.”
“Is the new flavor, Cigano,” she cackled madly. “Swiss cheese!”
Swiss cheese.
Dog shit.
Shit.
Pure chemical shit.
But that’s Narcisa, weaned on the worst junk food and junk tv… mixed with advanced esoteric occultism, massive preteen LSD experimentation, Nietzsche and years of adolescent prostitution… just for shits and giggles.
Narcisa.
If I can just survive her long enough to keep fucking her and loving her back to earth and somehow breathe her alive for long enough, she might very well just continue to surprise us all.
The other day while she was flying high on day three of another crack mission, she picked up the new book by David Icke that I’d been reading. She turned to a page and copied a phrase sown on one of the stolen postcards she always carries around to bend and shape into all her weird geometric patterns.JS and David Icke

David Icke, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.


“I don’ need to read any book Cigano.” She declared firmly.
I just looked at her, waiting for further explanation.
“Waste of the time for the Narcisa,” she continued.
I waited. She spoke.
“Only what I need do is open any book on any page an’ right there is the thing I need to see…”
Later on, after she’d flown off into the steamy night like a psychedelic vampire bat, I looked at the postcard lying on my table and saw what she’d scribbled there.
Another clue for me who finds himself compelled, for whatever reasons that even I cannot fully know, to try and decipher her mind and her life… like a underworld miner, digging up whatever hidden message is there for us all.
I looked at the postcard.
I read it again and again.
This is what it said, I swear to fucking god:“It is the same with so many children consuming chemical-infested food and drink who become subject to hyperactivity and other behavior modification.”That’s it.
Now, not to change the subject, but I really do believe that everybody alive should read up on David Icke’s research as quickly as possible. If they all did, I feel it would probably start the ball of truth rolling to heal the whole fucking planet…
Regardless, that one particular phrase, out of everything in the whole 400-plus page book, is exactly what Narcisa spit out of her crooked little paranormal snout, her psychic mental computer that day. Then she left it sitting there scribbled on a postcard on my table for me to contemplate her prophetic existense once again.
And once again, I am reminded not to take anything concerning Narcisa for granted at its face value.
Ever.
Junk food, behavior modification, hyperactivity.
Dog shit-flavored Cheetos.
Hmmmmm… David Icke

david icke, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

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.

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.