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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.

The Crack Monster is a totally filthy, destructive creature, nothing like the prissy little perfectionist old bitch Narcisa becomes whenever she’s away from the drug for awhile.

Tonight she actually blew her fucking nose right in front of me into the hundred dollar blouse she’d begged me for the last time she swore off crack for a few hair-raising, white knuckle, teeth-clenching restless, irritable days, consumed in a swirling consumer cloud of continual endless Want, gravely exaserbated without any crack to stifle or anestetize her bottomless need for impossible material satisfactions, distractions, adventure and unattainable “fun.”Later tonight, when she’d got herself well buzzed with a good head full of crack smoke, she just began tearing the fancy little mother of pearl buttons off the snot encrusted shirt, one by one, before slowly, methodically shreading off strips of fabric with her yellow teeth, until her beautiful, expensive designer-label shopping-mall trophy was finally reduced to a tattered remnant of it’s former glory, about the size of a ragged little dishrag bra….I think she trashed the shirt because she was pissed of at it for not being able to fill up the gaping hole in her soul.But the crack monster wasn’t satisfied, even with the shirt’s demiseBroken mirrors, mangled silverware, shattered cups and glasses. Torched, melted sticks of lipstick, tampons (*see below). Disabled radios, telephones, binoculars, sunglasses, pens, pencils, scissors, eyeliner, furniture, whatever…

fire, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

Whatever gets in the crack monster’s path, it immediately and efficiently destroys.Cigarette lighters seem to be a specialty…The other day, she put her little “Cricket” disposable lighter down on the table by my bed and walked away talking to herself, the way she does when she’s flying smoke rings around Alpha Centauri. Suddenly it just exploded like a flaming grenade, singing my head, reducing my beard and eyebrows to ashes.Scaring the shit out of us both.I walked around for days looking like that fucking dog in The Little Rascals. How?The Crack Monster has a special touch…Fuck. Does this kind of shit happen to “normal” people? I sure hope not, for their sake.

“Oops” is Narcisa’s favorite word, poor thing.The other day my friend who knows all about these weird plagues from the spirit world told me she carried an “encosto”, some troublesome, pissed off crustacean attachment that fucks people up really bad, makes them break everything they touch before it finally just all turns to shit.That sounded pretty familiar.Quite plausible too, especially in Narcisa’s case.I asked my friend how she could get rid of it.”She has to want to,” he told me.Great.He also said it would help a lot if she gave the crack pipe a little rest for awhile.Duh!Shit. That’s not gonna happen. No time soon, anyway.I don’t think Narcisa wants to get rid of the Crack Monster. She thinks it is her best friend.Narcisa says she really likes things the way they are.Oh well.She just came out onto the balcony where I’m sitting and looking out over the bay, writing about her. She sat on my lap for awhile, singing some crazy old song in her heartbreaking and raw, savage growl. After awhile she got bored, as usual. Then she stood up and walked away.As soon as she was gone, the biggest, ugliest, nastiest, most persistent insect I have ever seen in my entire life swooped in on me, circling my head like a miniature helicopter from Hell, going round and round and round, until I was so dizzy and pissed off I thought I would puke.Beelzebub…The Lord Of The Flies.Shit.I’m really starting to wonder about this 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.

Shit, it’s almost time to go back and get her now… but I’m really too tired to keep going. Fuck! She should be all beat to Hell by now too, after four days without food or water or sleep.But she won’t stop, can’t stop…Narcisa has completely lost all control now…When I went to pick her up earlier this afternoon after her 2nd or 3rd trip to the crack spot today, she told me that even one of the local bandidos who run the drugs up there had told her she was looking like shit.Hello.

Santa, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

“So you’re really hooked on it bad now, huh?” He said as he took her money and handed her a little bag of the deadly rock.She nodded.”I see you up here every few hours, girl,” he said.. “What’s up? You can’t stop?”She’d just shook her head shyly in defeat.The bandido just laughed.”Of course you can stop,” he said. “I used to be all hooked on this shit too, and I quit.. Now I’ve got this little job selling it and I’m making money, doing pretty good now. You just need to go out to run on the beach first thing in the morning, like I did. And then, if you ask God to help you quit, you can put the shit down…. If I could do it, you can too.”She’d actually seemed pretty impressed with that.Sure.Here’s a little dead-end thug, selling crack up in the favela, armed with a machine gun and home-made hand grenades, just another nameless teenage soldier in the vast underworld drug army… and even HE’S telling her she should quit now….Not only that, but now she’s telling it all to me too, the very trick who’s stood right by her through it all! Right up to the point where I went from being her friend to being her full-time trick, to being a real friend to a friend in need.Then I went from being her friend to being her lover to her full time sugar-daddy boyfriend now.Even I, her closest accomplice many years clean off of drugs, am always trying to encourage her to quit…Suddenly she’s just found herself surrounded by all these irritating little reminders that its finally time to do something about her problem…Even some of her old crack buddies, denizens of the notorious Casa Verde, have finally thrown in the towel and gone crawling off to the Narcotics Anonymous meetings and quit…And still Narcisa just keeps muddling along.Sometimes I think she’d really rather die than have to give up any of her poisonous old ways and ideas.When she told me what the bandido had said, I just looked at her sadly.”God has been talking to you about this shit for a long long time now, baby,” I said. “And God will use anybody to get a message to you - even the ones who pay for it now, even the ones who fucking SELL it to you. Don’t ya see? That’s God trying to get through to you… but you just don’t wanna listen…  I just hope you’ll wanna get out of this mess someday. I don’t know how and I don’t know when… and I know I can’t even tell ya the way out, cuz it wouldn’t mean shit… But I never give up hope for you… That you can make it. Shit. If I could, you can too. And that bandido just told ya the same fucking thing…”

She didn’t say anything but I could tell she was listening to me, and she even gave me an appreciative little squeeze there on the back of the bike that just made me want to cry.But I’ve already cried so so many tears for Narcisa over the years that now I hardly even cry at all anymore lately.I cried for so long and so hard for her, all while I was writing the book about her, the whole time she was tucked away in that ridiculous evangelical rehab.Finally, I guess I just ran dry. And now I got no more tears to cry anymore.Not for Narcisa. Not for anybody.Not today.At this point, I just pray for the little victories.Now I just pray to be able to get some sleep tonight.Sleep… So I can make it through yet another long, agonizing fucking day with 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.

Narcisa is the only person I’ve ever known who smokes crack-cocaine as a totally psychedelic- or “mind expanding”- drug experience.

For her, of course, tea and cookies at Grandma’s house would be a psychedelic freakout carnival ride to Alpha Centauri.

So why should her unique and fiercely authentic approach to crack addiction surprise me?

Or anything else about my Narcisa?

It’s all a big crazy cosmic three ring circus, with elephants and acrobats and flaming human cannonball clowns!

The monkeys are really loose tonight!

She just took another big hit of crack… and boom!

Suddenly it’s like there’s a pounding roomfull of hyperactive, acid-tripping electrical monkeys running amok all around me now…

She scampers up the wooden support pole, disappearing like a greased weasel into the loft, deftly avoiding the more traditional ladder approach usually preferred by slow-witted, clumsy human beings…

And now she’s up there, tumbling around, crazy, frenetic, jerky, bouncing movements I can hear, but, still wrapped up in my writing, I don’t bother to look up and see…

RUSTLE RUSTLE… CRASH! BUMP BUMP!BANG!!!

What the fuck?!?

Then - BOOM!!!

Here she comes, Jesus H. Fucking Christ!

Narcisa, flying down like Haley’s fucking Comet over my head in a perfect red-assed baboon somersault, landing right on her perfect white adolescent ass on the sofa with a goofy look of surprise on her face as astonished as my own…

Okay…Whatever.

So I just take note of the event and go right back to my writing as though nothing unusual had happened, with only a quick, offhand comment to Narcisa.. “The monkeys are loose again, huh, baby?”

I’m used to it by now…

But just when I think I’ve seen it all…

As if by way of an answer, she suddenly plops herself right down on my lap, like 90 pounds of shivering cataclysmic chaos with her colored pencils and a sheet of paper.

Okay… She swiftly sketches out some alien geometric form resembling an unbelievely complex crop circle…

“That’s beautiful,” is all I have time to say before she’s up on her feet again, creeping across the room like a shellshocked Alaska King Crab.

I watch in utter baffled fascination, knowing anything can happen next.

And it does.

Suddenly she’s wrapped her wirey, naked frame up into a powder blue sheet like a Hindu sari and she’s methodically tearing a powder blue plastic garbage bag into another smaller sheet and wrapping her long brown hair up in it like an alien Maharaji’s royal turban.

She sits down again there beside me, looking like some weird outer space Mata Hari acid vision…and as I stare at her in total amazement, suddenly she cocks her head back like a hungry coyote and howls like a cat in heat.

“MEE-OOOW!!”

I laugh and laugh and laugh!

The monkeys are loose tonight

How I love my beautiful, terrible, inimitable dakini, Narcisa!!

How I love 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.

Things are getting better around here.Even as so many weird, seemingly malevolant “outside forces” appear to be gathering around us in the form of insane, abusive religious fanatic relatives and phsycotic, bottom-feeding parasitic stalkers, bubbling right up from the stinking depths of Hell itself to harass and persecute and crucify us daily for our art, our love, our chosen lifestyle, for all our “godless, evil, immoral ways”…Even with all that depressing ugly, soul-stifling evil shit going on lately, on some other deeper level, personally, as this unlikely couple, we’ve oddly been getting better somehow, Narcisa and I…Growing closer and closer every day.I don’t know just how that happened. And I don’t know if it’s a blessing, or a curse really…But we’ve paid our admission and we’re on the big fucking ride now, once and for all…

And all along this hair-raising, teeth-rattling, unpredictable spookhouse roller coaster ride, things are rattling and clattering, moving and grooving and changing… morphing and shape-shifting all around us now.As usual…Violent, turbulant winds of change… as if to somehow perfectly reflect the ever-changing, totality of the surreal landscape of our very existance itself…It’s hard to even believe it, but it’s been well over a week now since we’ve even fought or tried to completely destroy each other…Thats huge! Memorable! A cause for celebration and joyful rejoicing!Even our traditional Sunday night knock-down-drag-out was somehow quietly averted this week, simply passed over and forgotten like some unimportant missed date…And suddenly, shit, it’s Tuesday afternoon again already, after a long lights-out crash day… and now we’re waking up, almost like a normal little couple, to coffee and crackers and cigarettes…Waking right back up to our nasty old cosmic whorehouse tricks.Fuck fuck fuck, smoke smoke smoke, go go go…No fights. No discussions. No crazed screeching, nose bleeding death threats or arguements or rabid vendettas or violent rebuttals…Not a fucking peep…That’s historic in itself.Damned if things aren’t getting better between me and Narcisa.And that’s a start.I find myself hoping once again. A start. Hope. A prelude to Narcisa getting better at last, to her wanting to get better, finally wanting to live again…Why not? After all, Narcisa and I are nothing more, in esoteric terms, than two sides of the same fucking coin… A unit. A team. An agreement…I asked her this morning if she wasn’t a little worried that our little habitual rituals and routines were starting to become a bit… How did I put it? Predictable…Predictable?She just looked at me.”You know, baby,” I said sheepishly. “Fuck fuck fuck, smoke smoke smoke… Sleep sleep sleep, eat eat eat… Defecate… How about us turning the page, before some ignorant, ranting moralistic morons with their fucking bibles and guns come along and turn it for us?”"No, Cigano! We DO turn the page!” She said with such a firm conviction, I just sat there quietly and nodded her on.”No only fuck fuck fuck, smoke smoke smoke now… Also think think think,” she said, “talk talk talk, write write write, art art art… Creatividade, Cigano, what you say ’bout that, Hein?”Holy shit. She’s right! We’ve been doing all that and more together lately, in our own dysfunctional little way….And she’s been cranking out the poetry like a fucking maniac, too. Good poetry. Solid poetry. Some of the best, most honest, soulful poetry I’ve ever seen. Heard. Lived…Things are really getting better…Better.Amazing.It would appear that those dark-minded, stinking evangelical assholes and dickless do-gooders and shit-gobbling, low-rent stalkers who’d like to drive us apart out of envy and sour grapes for our perceived offenses and transgressions of their bullshit hypocritical self-imposed morality codes are really only serving to strengthen and unite us more and more, super-charging our crazed and obsessivly passionate kinship with a new and powerful spirit of allience and an iron-clad solidarity.Ha ha ha!Today she awoke from her latest peaceful 24-hour crash, getting her troubled little head ready for the latest mission to start again.She sat there on the sofa, happily watching tv while I picked away at my Blackberry, furiously composing the latest blog entries.She squealed in delight like a happy child watching the latest adventures of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.Totally surreal.”Cigano! Put it on our blog page that Narcisa’s favorite TV personalities are Paris Hilton and Nicole… Do you know them, Cigano? Put it in the blog, an’ say that Narcisa love them an’ she wanna meet them…”I told her I didn’t know them, but that my main girl in Hollywood, Alessandra probably did. Alessandra knows EVERYBODY!Narcisa’s eyes lit up at the news as, dutifully, like some kind of sleepy whorehouse Santa Claus taking an order, I wrote it all down.”Narcisa’s favorite TV stars are…”Then I stopped and asked her for some more names.She just gave me a blank look and went back to watching the Paris and Nicole show.No more?”That’s it, Cigano. Only these ones…”"That’s not a very long list for a questionaire, baby,” I said.Questionaire?She glanced at me blankly again, before turning her full attention back to the blaring nonsense chatter of the TV box.I guess its a step up from staring at herself bug-eyed in the mirror for hours and hours….I asked her why she liked those bimbos so much, hoping to maybe fill out the list a bit, make it more interesting, whatever…”You can put it that Narcisa like them because they are very slutty… they are tall an’ skinny… an’… extravagante! Very extravagante an’ controversial an’ FREE… An’ I am… How do you say? I am in LOVE with them too because they are completely retard!”I started to write it all down. Suddenly she grabbed my arm, as if I might be about to unpin a grenade or something.”No, Cigano! Is better you don’ to put it that I say they retard, because maybe then they no gonna LIKE Narcisa an’ they never gonna call…”I told her it was alright to say they we’re retarded, because they are.I explained that for people like that, “retarded” was probably like a term of endearment or something.She made a thoughtful face and was silent for a moment as her bright, bottomless hazel eyes scanned the TV screen greedily.Then she looked back at me and said, “I like them the most because they REALLY retard… like you can fuck them in the ass an’ then they just gonna look on you like… ‘Wha’ the fuck just happen, man?’ You know?”What the fuck just happened, indeed.Yeh, baby, things are getting better.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.

I been thinking of mold today, as the unique smell of it clings to my senses like a vague past life recollection.Living here in the tropics, things tend to go moldy pretty fast. Mold and mildew just accumulate when things aren’t aired out regularly.Narcisa’s clothes usually sit in a damp pile in a corner on the floor, going moldy.Narcisa digs through the pile and puts on some clothes and walks around all day smelling of mold and ashes and crack-tainted sweat and sex and life and death and dirt and blood and lust and endless, unsatisfied want, fear, anger, passion, adrenaline and…Something Else there are no words I know that can quite describe.Maybe something like a spiritual mold…

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.

I fell asleep cold and damp and uncomfortable on the bare, sheetless loft bed in the big abandoned house on the hill. Narcisa sat on the cold floor below, using the only blanket as a pillow for her lazy self-centered ass while she smoked crack and admired herself shamelessly for hours in the mirror, flirting with herself, checking out her tits, her south-bound sagging ass, seducing herself, making love to whatever’s left of herself with her eyes, her whole being. A disgusting, depressing self-centered display of undisguised narcissism.I couldn’t get near the bitch of a creature that posessed her now more and more with every hit she took, she just pushed me aside and continued her dark, heartless psychopathic journey into the hellish realms of self-obsession in that accursed mirror.I was getting tired of waiting for the next fuck, great as the last one had been. And I knew it wasn’t gonna happen. Till her crack supply ran dry. Like a hungry buzzard, I hovered and waited..Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore. I crawled up into the loft bed and put in the earplugs and fell right asleep..Half an hour later I awoke to a sharp tap on my shoulder. I jumped up with a start, thinking it was Narcisa, finally bored with her own ash grey raccoon-faced image in the mirror, waking me up for a fuck, a touch of human companionship, warmth, company, money, cigarettes, something, anything to lift her up out of whatever dark pit she’d gotten herself lost in, sucking on that little funnel to hell, staring into the deep pools of insanity of her own crack-addled eyes.I looked around in the dark. It wasn’t Narcisa in the bed with me.It was something, but it wasn’t her.I looked down and there she was, still sitting there transfixed before the mirror, staring at herself. Obsessed. Lost. Gone.
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Then I felt it again. Some ghostly hand touching me.This time I was wide awake. I screamed out loud.I could feel goosebumps covering my body as I scrambled down the ladder. She barely glanced in my direction as I threw on my clothes and stumbled toward the door.Just as I was about to close the door behind me, I glanced over at her and I saw it.Saw it in her face. The same something that had awakened me with a scream and a chill from a sound sleep.She had finally managed to open some terrible portal, casting an ugly spell of self-obsession on herself and somehow unleashed an entity… a heartless, inhuman, hateful lower spirit being into herself, into the room, into the world.Great.She continued staring at herself in the mirror. I picked up my case of heebie-jeebies and got the fuck out of there in a hurry.Two minutes later I was sitting at the lively, brightly lit paderia Santo Amaro, surrounded by busy little people having their morning coffee, on their way to work. Old Roberto Carlos music was playing on the radio. Busses and taxis were rumbling down the street. The sun was emerging in the 6 am sky.I drank my coffee and tried to muster up the courage to go back up there and try one more time to rescue Narcisa from the deadly malevolant curse of herselfFinally after 2 cups of coffee and a half a dozen cigarettes, I got on the bike and rode back up to the house on the hill. The House On The Hill. It sounds like some old horror movie, doesn’t it?It was….As I climbed the creaking old wooden stairs to the room where she sat, I could swear I saw something indistinct darting in the shadowy hall.I opened the door and there she was, still sitting where I’d left her half an hour before. Sitting in front of the mirror, fucking around with her god damned crack pipe, opening the gates to some occult hell I’d rather not know about, but for as long as I’m under her spell, there’s no real escape from.I stood in the middle of the room and looked at her. She looked up. Somehow she looked more human in the soft emerging light of day now.”What’s up?” I said curtly.”My last hit,” she mumbled.Great. The beginning of a new mission. Or sleep…Whatever.
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viewfromahill, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

I walked out onto the balcony and sat down looking out over the bay, watching the bright red sun of morning emerge, listening to the squawking bird sounds and the distant rumble of the awakening frantic machine of the city as Narcisa sat in her ash strewn corner with her last hit, awakening God knows what from the invisable Underworld closing in all around us now…..

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.

A few days ago there was another big shooting war up in the crowded complex of favelas where Narcisa buys her crack and, more and more often lately, smokes it.
I was sitting out on the balcony of the house on the hill, watching the sky when I heard it all jumping off just across the way.
It was a stormy afternoon, just before dark. Distant lightning flashes covered the cloudy skies, as thunder aproached dramatically from all around.
Suddenly the stacatto pop of machine gun bursts, then a booming rally of exploding grenades filled my ears, coming from over the hill. I could see the muzzle flash of automatic weapons firing wildly in the dark maze of ghettos just across from where I stood watching.

the Favela from my house

It was on.
I crouched down behind the little balcony wall, taking cover to avoid catching a stray one. That happens to a lot of people around here. That would suck.
So I huddled down, got my back to the wall and listened as all holy fucking hell broke loose over there…
I knew Narcisa had gone up a few hours ago to cop, and I hoped she hadn’t stuck around there to smoke it.
I felt kinda bad, guilty for not just letting her hole up here and do her thing where at least she’d be safer from immediate annihilation.
But I just don’t like to let her smoke it around me anymore, don’t like watching her change from Jekyll to Hyde, don’t like the little heaps of ashes that pile up all around her and become her whole fucking world when she’s smoking that shit.
I don’t like the smell of it, and I especially dislike all those creepy bottom-feeding supernatural entities who posess her after she flicks her Bic and opens the roaring gates of Hell right before my eyes..
Sometimes she smokes it in a little crack shack right there in the “boca”, the drug spot up in the favela - usually when she wants to avoid the shuffling zombie hordes of the Casa Verde, which by now has become a full-time crack-house, with all the attending horror-show cast of psychotic characters and their spooky, low minded paranoid antics.
Other times though, she just buys her stuff up there on the morro, then splits to go off and smoke it in the bushes somewhere else, up in the hills around Santa Teresa, or whatever… Cowering in the shadows, talking to spiders and ants and monkeys and bats and darting shadows and whatever the fuck else she winds up with up there in the trees and jungle.
The other day she told me she’d been invited by one of the armed teenaged thugs who run the spot into a dark room in a run down shack at the back of a narrow alley to smoke in there.
But when she took her first hit, which is usually the worst and most paranoia provoking, she saw in the glow of her cheap plastic lighter that the walls of that little room were all covered in streaks of dried blood and riddled with bullet holes.
She was smoking crack in a fucking makeshift execution chamber.
And soon enough, in her hyper-aware state of raw fear and supernatural sensitivity, the anguished ghosts of murdered rats and deadbeats and informers and crackheads and undercover cops were all clamoring so loudly in her ears that she had to beat it right the fuck out of there.
After that she didn’t go back there to smoke again for awhile.

Just as well, I thought now, as I listened to the raging gunfire. I really hoped her boycott of the volatile deadly favela was still in effect today.
But with Narcisa you never know.
After half an hour, the machine gun bursts became more sporadic… then finally it quieted down over there and I stood up and looked at the sky.
The lightning was getting closer, giant mile-long white rays of fierce raw electricity crackling down over the city and all around as far as I could see, the heavens rumbling as if to answer the puny gun shots below with a raging spirit war overhead.
Just as I felt the first big raindrops falling from the sky, Narcisa appeared out of the dark house behind me, looking like a pale hollow-eyed zombie ghost.
“Tudo bem, Cigano?” She croaked.
“Baby! Come give me a hug! I was worried about you,” I said as she melted like a flaming rubber doll into my arms.
“Worry? For me? Por que, Cigano? Que foi?”
I told her about the big shootout I’d just witnessed. Told her it sounded like a serious one.
“Shit! I just miss it again.”
“You sound disapointed, baby. You should be glad you weren’t up there. I’m sure there’s quite a few bodies laying around your favorite spot right now…”
“Is incredible, man! So much as I wan’ get a bullet in my head an’ get the fuck out from these shit world, it can never happen! I only just was in there, only two hour before. I start to e’smoke in there, an’ everything was cool. Then something just say to me get the fuck out right now from these place, so I go! These all ways happen with me. What the fuck, man? The death she always keep missing me. Every time! Why, Cigano?”
“Maybe God just don’t want you to die right now, baby. Who the fuck knows about such things?”
“Fucking God!” She spat.
I just shook my head.
Fucking God.
Narcisa.

War Zone

The next day she went back up there to the favela. Looking for drugs. There’s hundreds of other favelas all over town where she could go. But she had to go right back to that one.
When she got up there, the whole place was like a ghost town, all commerce closed, not a soul in sight.
War zone.
That didn’t stop Narcisa from walking boldly right down the empty alley to the spot.
Right into the heart of a raging guerrilla war where even the local bandidos, armed to the teeth, didn’t tread that day.
Narcisa didn’t care. She wanted to cop. Or die trying.
She stumbled along the labyrinthine bullet-scarred alleys of the deserted, post-shootout favela, raving, yelling, “Show your face! Shoot me, kill me! Where are you, cowards!”
“Where the fuck is everybody?” She cried out desperately, an abandoned child running around like a frantic white rat in a maze.
The only answer was her own echo in the eerily still kill-zone.
“Show you face, you shits!” She shouted again and again to the invisible Drug War snipers hidden in the shadows, holding her long white arms out like Christ the Redeemer.
“I wan’ some crack, porra! Show you fucking faggot faces or just go an’ shoot me… I wan’ it the DRUGS, man, got it?”
Nobody showed their face. Nobody shot her. Nobody sold her any drugs.
Finally she got bored hearing her own lonely voice echo there in those lifeless empty alleys of the dead.
Then she finally gave up and went away to look for drugs or death or whatever she could find somewhere else.
The end.

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.

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.

The Ego is made up of the persisting elements, in the adult psyche, of the original nature of the child. Certain aspects of the infant’s psyche may be usefully examined. There are three factors which should receive attention. The first is, as Freud observed in his priceless phrase “his Majesty the Baby,” that the infant is born ruler of all he sees and surveys. He comes from the Nirvana of the womb, where he is usually the sole occupant, and he clings to that omnipotrnce with an innocence, yet determination, which baffles parent after parent. The second, stemming directly from the monarch within, is that the infant tolerates frustration poorly and let’s the world know it readily. The third signifigant aspect of the child’s original psyche is its tendency to do everything in a hurry…”- Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, M.D.I picked Narcisa up in front of the Casa Verde just after she’d presumably smoked the last of her crack. Her eyes were bugging out of her head like she’d seen a ghost or a batallian of ghosts and she most likely really had, that’s what days of sleep deprivation and self-induced crack psychosis will do to her or anybody else. She really looked bad. Worse than a few hours earlier, and she didn’t look too good then. Shit.We got up in my apartment and she was still tweeking hard, looking around like a scared animal, waiting for all sorts of demons to come scrambling out of the woodwork and eat her alive or whatever. Jesus. She’s up, then sits down then jumps up like she sat on a nail. Then she runs over and turns out the lights and I say no no no no no, I don’t want to sit in the dark so she puts the light back on and slithers over and cowers in the corner like a sick old dog.  And still with all her spun out fearful terror show of horrors and frights and spooky self-inflicted misery, still she has the arrogance to complain about the music on the jazz radio, saying it’s too slow and depressing, it’s for old retarded people and the light is too bright, and then she’s just ranting and complaining in general, complaining to complain, making these little tsk tsk noises at everything in sight, not to mention things that are mostly invisible to me. The good news? All this is a sure indication, I’m thinking, that she’s coming in for a crash landing, that no matter how much she smokes at this point, the shit just isn’t working for her anymore and she’s endlessly vexed because of that very fact.  Anyway, I go over to where she’s sitting on the floor and I try to sit beside her and she shrinks away from me like I was Turd Man or something so I just get up and go over and sit on the sofa and pick up my little notebook and start writing. Then she looks at me with the most paranoid suspicious look of utter contempt and asks me why I’m always writing in that book, as if I was writing out her ego death or something which, in a way, I am.I’m definitely exposing her diseased insanity for her to take a good look at. That’s for sure. But that’s the problem. She will not look, just absolutely refuses to read the book I just wrote about her…

She knows I’m still writing about her and she doesn’t like it one bit. I just stopped and looked over at her pissed off frustrated indignant face and that was it. I had to restrain myself from blasting her in the mouth with a knuckle sandwich. There’s only so much senseless insanity and abuse a man can take- though there are those who would say my capacity for shit-eating is boundless when it comes to Narcisa.  Finally I just looked at her and said, “Ya wanna know why I’m always writing in these little books? Ill tell you why. I do it so I don’t have to end up like you, ya miserable cunt… Bored, restless, irritable, discontent, critical, paranoid and pissed off at everybody and everything all the time, living in a constant state of mute, indignant, powerless terror and hate and self-pity. That’s why I’m always writing in this little book. So as not to have to sit festering like you in the shitty sewer of a frustrated, undisciplined mind, so I don’t have to be constantly seeking some unattainable chemical or emotional relief from the prision of all these trauma-based emotions and a constant state of boredom that would have me sucking on a crack pipe just like you if I didn’t do something creative with the terrible thoughts and visions that plague this untended shithole mind of endless trauma memory you call your ‘self’! Thank God I have a little book to write in and channel my thoughts and fears and nightmares into some form of creative expression, some semblence of sanity for somebody who’s every bit as capable of murder and suicide as you are. An undicsiplined, unoccupied mind is the most dangerous instrument of destruction in the world and I got a bad brain too, just like yours, filled with memories of harms and fucking hurts and spiders and rats and bats and things that crawl in the shadows - but I DO something with it so it doesn’t run my life into the gutter like yours does to you. You just go on in the living hell of a stifled frustrated poet. You’d really be better off dead.”"Fuck you, Cigano! Bla bla bla, that’s all you know for do is talk you e’stupid words that mean nothing. I got nothing to lose an’ I wan’ nothing, so what I gotta do anything for? I just wan’ for die and go ‘way from these shit world an’ all you shit peoples!”  ”That’s cool baby,” I said, almost driving her to a violent reaction, but not quite. “Anyway it could be worse, Narcisa… It could be me. So have a nice death, baby. And may it come soon. I’ll be swimming in the ocean and riding on my motorcycle and eating delicious meals and fucking lots of pretty girls, traveling around the world signing books I wrote about people like you and their bad brain and having a pretty good time, thinking boy it’s too bad Narcisa can’t be here to enjoy all this but she had to go and kill herself and she didn’t even know she just killed the wrong person, stupid cunt!” Sure enough she fell asleep while I was still talking and I waited till she was really out good before I put a blanket over her and thanked God for having let me survive nicely another one of her shitty little pity-parties. Then I rolled over and slept the sleep of the righteous once again. Ah!

And now she simply is destroyed and getting worse by the minute and I just want to cry cause I remember how, before I came down to Rio, we talked for hours on the phone like excited kids and made all these big plans to go traveling and go to the beach and all these fun things and I told her I’d written a book and she said she wanted to write too and where is it all now? Ashes ashes ashes and she is dying and I am mourning and I wish wish wish it could all be different like in her once sweet innocent fairy tale mind and I curse this disease that destroys lives and dreams and hope and love and turns it all to ashes.

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.