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Self pity. Self justification. Self obsession. Self destruction. Poor Narcisa.
I think about the crimes and punishments of my parents; My stepfather’s pathetic laments, even as my mother lay dying on a shit-stained matress in the next room from the ravages of a life of
madness and untreated alcoholism. How he stood there and cried like a baby, saying, “I never thought this was how we would spend our lives in the end. All our plans and dreams…”
So much for the fucking American Dream. Death on the installment plan. Shit.
Denial. The belief that the satisfaction of their primary instincts for wealth and power and prestige and material comfort, sex and luxury will somehow open the gates to an artificial garden of eternal
happiness, the childish belief in a man made plastic paradise… The road to insanity and death. Self delusional, egocentric Ignorance of life’s true purpose and value. And intellectual pride. Oh yeh. Pride and fear. That unholy pair has killed more addicts and alcoholics over history than all the liquor and drugs and wars and scourges and plagues and diseases of mankind combined. Shit, I saw it kill my whole family off before I was old enough to know myself, or start my own dark descent into its ugly world of trouble and doom, seeking that same artificial paradise. Shit.
I just remember looking at my stepfather that day with a mixture of
pity and utter contempt.
And now here we are, me and Narcisa, reliving the whole nasty
scenario all over again like a recurring nightmare merry-go-round of
horror you can’t ever get off. Shit.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
NOTIFICAÇÃO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são inteiramente fictícios. 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 várias fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

It’s happened again. Stalemate. She’s gone. Disappeared. Running amok again tonight, God knows where.
It’s been truly horrible the last few days. Horrible in direct proportion to how great it’s gotten finally, how close we’ve really become…
And now it’s as if the demon curse is seeing her really letting somebody in, another human being getting closer and closer to her soul. It feels that threat to its malevolent soul-cancer that only wants to isolate her from all love and human contact, to better just kill her off. And seeing that threat, it’s suddenly struck her hard again with a new round of lightning bolts right to the brain, unleashing all of Hell’s fury. And she’s insane again, beyond insane.
South of insane. Digging her own hole to Hell again.
Violent, irrational, unreasonable… and out for blood.
My blood now.
After busting up my place, knocking over lamps and furniture, throwing all my books in the bathtub and turning on the water… Bitch… threatening me with death and worse, I finally managed to get her out
onto the street without too much violence. Her little bag was already packed and ready for a one way trip to Hell after her day-long tantrum, another attempt at emotional blackmail, her favorite trick and last resort, since I’d done everything in my power to just ignore her and all the insane outbursts and threats…
So I had no problem luring her out into the street on the pretext of giving her money, my other smart chess move which left her even more pissed and vengeful once I had her out..
Of course. Cause once maneuvered into that more vulnerable position, standing out in the street again like a vampire cat in the middle of a vast open desert, she still pitched another fit, right out in the open
for all gawking pedestrians to watch, threatening me with further vengence and dire retribution if I didn’t give her the “fuck off” money she wanted for more crack.
Scandalous tricks from her worn out whore Gucci bag.
Extortion.
“You got it two choice now, Cigano. You gonna help me to die… Or I gonna kill YOU, got it now?”
I believed her. You would too, believe me. I gave her a quick 20, happy to just be rid of her, and she was gone with the ill wind that brought her, off into the night like the wicked witch of Hell.
An hour later, she was on the phone.
“Wanna see me?” Of course.
I left my post by the waves at the end of Copacabana, flying down the fluorescent beach on the bike. On my unholy mission for Narcisa.
Again.
Ten minutes later I rolled up to the usual corner. There she was, sitting in the shadows, the eternal, dirty-faced homeless waif, sitting there with the little bag of clothes she’d taken with her to let me know she “never wanted to see me again” for the thousandth time. Sitting on her lap was the whole pile of the notebooks I’d given her to inspire her to write, filled now with her illegible scrawled crackhouse
epiphanies, genius transcendent poetry and rants.
She was sitting in an empty doorway of one of those crumbling old colonial buildings at the corner of Rua Santa Cristina in the shade of a big Mangueira, writing in one of her poetry
journals. She might have even been mistaken by some poor unsuspecting fool for an innocent little schoolgirl waiting for her daddy.
More like Lolita on crack waiting for Charlie Manson .
She was visibly shaken up after only an hour back on the streets that
used to be her home sweet home before I took her in off the dirty old ho-stroll and got her as strung out on me as she was on the crack.
As strung out as I am on her.
Sex, money, drugs, love, sex, money drugs, love. Drama. Passion.
Adventure. Danger. The endless roller coaster cycle of mutual addiction and Need…

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 a timeless portrait of the damnation of the human soul, seen through a shattered magnifying glass. Its unrelenting detail is like pieces of food you find in your vomit as it drips drips drips off your chin.

-Mayra Dias Gomes (author of Fugalaça)

Eugene from Gogol Bordello, JS and Mayra Dias Gomes

Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes has been reviewed by the fine people of Playboy.

For the full review, Click here. 

               Journal entry - 12 June 2005

               Narcisa. She’s a living mass of contradictions.

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

              Damaged beyond repair…

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

              Lucifer. He who carries the Light.

              Savage Grace.

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

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

              Lucifer, that’s me.

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

               Narcisa.

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

              A tightrope artist without a Circus.

              A seeker without a Path…

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

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

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

              Often much worse.

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

              Shit.

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

             Or both.

              Shit.

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

           This is where I get off.

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

           Again.

           Last straw.

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

           Hopeless.

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

           Maybe.

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

           Savage Grace.

           God protect her.

           God help us all.

           Good Night.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

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

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

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

Thanks Wes for sharing the pic.

For those who need a little history lesson:

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

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

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

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

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

-New York Times, 1996 (full article here)

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

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

Visit the film’s Wiki page

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

Congratulations Max on selling out your book!

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

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