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For the last few weeks Narcisa has been miraculously converting all of her destructive ways into a mind boggling constructive process that seems to grow and flourish with the passage of time.

She’s also begun talking like a child or some sort of primative being, as if shape-shifting into another person in word as well as deed. Shes been simplifying her language to the point where she doesn’t even bother conjugating verbs or personal pronouns anymore, coming up with childlike phrases like “look what make” and “belly button only ashtray now,” “no like eat fat” - which all sound even weirder when spoken in a complex tongue like Portuguese. Especially coming from somebody with an almost supernatural command of the language who said her first words at one and had read the bulk of Nietzche and the secrets of the Rosa Cruz by the age of eleven.

Today I woke op early after a late light brainstorm session with Alessandra who’s visiting from LA. I had extracted a promise from Narcisa not to wake me before sunup. For once she didn’t. Finally I went down to check on her, certain that she must have passed out or maybe died, fearing that was the reason for her silence.
Alessandra was still out cold, so I walked in the little room that’s become Narcisa’s atelier. Her “laboratorio” where she conducts bizarre experiments, using her own body and mind as the supreme guinea pig.
She was wide awake of course, and grinning like a dog with two tails, sitting on the floor, surrounded by her thousands of tiny bits and scraps of plastic, shiny metal, paper… Pieces of tin cans and plastic objects, things she’s been salvaging from trash cans and sidewalks and gutters, methodically snipping into pieces for months, all cut and torn and deconstructed and reconstructed now into all sorts of different sizes and shapes, divided and sorted and catalogued into piles of diverse order, waiting to be recycled and converted into art projects, sculptures, expressions, “multidimensional portals…”
Amazing.
I sat down beside her and watched in awe as she serenely shaped a few scraps of broken plastic parts and pieces of broken junk into a face vaguely resembling some totemic figure from Easter Island, using her fingernails as screwdrivers and her crooked nicotine-patinaed teeth as pliers.
But this was better than the statues on easter island.
More… “moderna.”
“Look these one, Cigano. Have crazy eye that move, an’ the tongue like reptile. Tongue move too. Is very moderno, hein?” she squealed in delight smiling to rival the sunny day blazing outside her long-shuddered window.
And indeed it was a 3-D sculpture with actual moving parts, spinning eyes and flicking tongue. Everything fitted together perfectly without the benifit of any glue or screws or tape. Simply fitted, like perfect parts of some surrealist jigsaw puzzle..
I remember having bought her a hot glue gun. Within days it was dismantled, sitting in her “art supplies” drawer in ten little pieces, destined to be juxtaposed, converted into parts of another inter-dimentional salvage sculpture.

Narcisa absolutely insists on not using any prefabricated devices like glue or tape for her sculptures, preferring that every part, even the tools she uses to make them and the bonding agents that hold them together must be made of the same recycled trash ingredients.
So now she’s taken to saving all the bubble gum she’s chewed to use in place of traditional “prefabricated” glue. And she keeps it all in plastic bags and containers that she finds in the trash, all seperated by color, filed and meticulously color-coded as part of her endless palette of found materials..
I stood in the doorway watching her. Finally I asked her about the objects she was making.
“Playing,” she said. “Never have it the childhood. Now play… These how the poor childrens got for the toy. Make thing… Make anything from the garbage. These the childhood now. Now is only play…”
I have never loved Narcisa so much, nor have I ever felt so grateful for the opportunity to witness someone who spent her entire life being raped, neglected, abused and abandoned being able to simply play in a safe and friendly space.

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.

Of course a couple of hours after disappearing she called me.
I picked up and right away she starts in.
“Why you don’ try to understan’ me, Cigano? I jus’ wan’ it some the company, cuz I tired for to e’smoke all alone. I’m up on Santa Teresa, if you wan’ for come an’ see me…”
Tuesday night. The streets are dead as a graveyard. The good old herd mentality, the sheeple mind. I hate it.
They all go out and clog up the beaches all at once, and they’re all out of their pens, all herded together like chickens. Now they’re all gonna have to go back in their pens all at
once tomorrow… the dreaded work day morning, and they’ll all go and sit in their fucking cars in their fucking traffic jams and honk their fucking horns at each other like bleeting cattle, as they all go to sit in their little boxes of tedium and mediocrity.
But now it’s night, the end of a day of slovenly, mindless activity, and they’re all drunk and slow witted and fat and ugly and corrupt and stupid, taking up space all milling around like cockroaches on a shit heap with their bratty kids and yappy poodles and their bicycles in their leisure clothes and their beer-bloated brains and football fireworks and all their fluffy sound and fury, as
they all work themselves up into a zombie stupor of vile idiocy so they can all go home and plop their fat asses down in front of their televisions and get their brains shit on by the big boys they will never see or even know are there, controling their miserable little sheeple existance from the boardrooms and main offices of the corporate mind-control prison they all live in from cradle to fucking grave. What bullshit.
So I split from the dark crashing night waves and I ride the bike up there to Santa Teresa, and there she is, sitting in a dark, weedy plaza with her dyke, who it turns out isn’t a dyke at all, but
just another young drug addict who’s escaped from the loonie bin and that’s why she’s got that ugly crew cut.
They like to do evil shit like that to rebellious, curious feral young girls in the loonie bin. Kill the soul.
It’s all part of a big, bad Babylon plan to suppress free thinking and rebelion against authority. And it’s especially important for the dark masters to repress all the holy powerful sex drive in woman.
Disable the goddess and stifle the heartbeat of the human spirit. Topple the magnificant monument that all women are born to be, and turn em through the brainwash shame game into an
androgynous race of mediocre, beige, sexually frustrated, tv watching, bible toting, fat-assed manly uglies like Narcisa’s sluggish old mother.
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.

When we got back from the cop spot, I let her in the gates of the big dark empty house.
I got back on the bike and split to go home for a while.
She told me to come back for her in a couple of hours, assuring me that after this next run, she’d come home with me to crash.
I didn’t really believe her, even though she’d already been up for four days now.
But I told her I’d come back in awhile to look in on her. Whatever.
It was 4 in the morning by now, and the streets were quiet as a tomb. It had been another hot, sunny day, and all the sheeple had worn their little sheeple hearts out to exhaustion with the beach and the beer and the barbecues and football and family, and… Now there
wasn’t so much as a stray bum stirring in the shadows as I made my way
home.
There it is again! The good old herd mind.
It was a depressing sight. Another shitty night in Rio. Now it was late. Graveyard late. Cold. Dark. Empty. Dead.
I parked the bike in front of the door of my building. Even the doorman was comatose and took his sweet time to let me in.
What is it with these fucking people? Cloned-out computer programs, just like those suit and tie guys in the Matrix movies!
Shit.
When one sleeps, they all gotta sleep!

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.

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.
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.

Its always funny to see a bold, anti-social, defiant iconaclast like Narcisa acting all sheepish and innocent with that precious shit-eating little girl grin when it comes to sex of all things.
But there it was.

“Stop being in such a hurry, baby. Why don’t you just think about a
nice pretty girl if it excites you so much and
relax?”
“Don, to be ridiculous, Cigano!!” She almost shouted, as if the very
suggestion of such a shameful perversion was a crude affront to her
chaste, virginal sense of propriety. Jesus! When it comes to
self-deception, Narcisa is a practiced, time-tested master.

Anyway, I hurried it up and fucked her as quickly as I could and got it over with.

 Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good…

 Sometimes it’s like a lightning bolt to the soul.

 Sometimes it’s like a defunct geriatric pussy fart.

 With Narcisa you take the good with the bad. Today it was all pretty bad and I didn’t really want to deal anymore.
 Sex with Narcisa is like any kind of business. Even when it sucks, it’s still pretty good… But sometimes, you gotta just cut your losses and bail before it really gets stupid.
 It had already gotten quite stupid.
 So we finished up and she went back out by the pool.
 Then I took her up the hill to cop.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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

We were sitting around the pad in Sao Conrado tonight, looking out over the ocean at a spectacular sunset, enjoying another calm moment in our newfound paradise of domestic bliss.
 She was sitting in one of the big old armchairs, drawing an amazingly complex multidimensional projection for Alessandra’s birthday present, listening to Artie Shaw’s wailing big band clarinet. I was kicking back on the sofa reading a very good book I just stumbled across called 7 tattoos. Very good book! Enthralling writing by some dude I’ve never heard of. Since I picked it up this morning I’ve been unable to put it down, which is pretty rare for me.
 Suddenly she says, “I wrote a book once.”
 What?!
 ”I turned around and faced her.
 ”Fala serio. Are you serious?”
 ”I wrote a book, yes,” she repeated blankly.
 ”Where is it?” I asked.
 ”Thats a good question,” she said.
 ”You don’t know where it is?”
 ”Nope. Don’ to remember… I was sixteen year old,” she added, as if that fact should explain all. Which, knowing a bit about Narcisa’s adolescence, it in fact did.
 ”It was called ‘Incognita’.” She said.
 I was amazed. I am usually amazed by Narcisa. I was amazed again. Anyway.
 ”What did it deal with, this book you wrote, baby?”
 ”Philosophy,” she declared nonchalantly.
 Of course.

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.

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.

“Jonathan Shaw. There are many words different people may use to describe him. What some may see as only a shallow, brash and impetuous incendiary; actually is a true philosophical, transcendent soul. With layers of insight waiting to be peeled away.” - By Lizzy Garcia

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Posted on LACityzine’s blog, and on Johnny-Depp.org, the article’s a pretty extensive and deep interview with JS regarding his tattoo career and his writing career. [click either link to read the article]

Narcisa’s mother, the self-righteous, unrepentant born-again Christian “chocadeira” or “egg layer” as Narcisa has aptly named her, continues to try and harass us, accusing me of being a corrupting influence in  the life of her poor, innocent, well-bred little offspring.

It’s really pathetic how these simple-minded evangelical twits’ warped minds operate. But its predictable, cuz in the absence of the acceptance of a coherent value system to keep the old ego in check and teach one to look inward at the true source of their problems and basic dysfunctions in human society, they’re simply compelled to construct a blame-oriented system of beliefs, always looking outward in search of a convenient scapegoat, an easy villain. The devil.

Now I’ve been given that dubious distinction by this pious old cow. I’m the one who is collaborating and facilitating and enabling Narcisa in her unholy quest for self-destruction. It is one point of view, of course, and quite an easy one to be tricked into, especially in the absence of any notion of personal accountability for karma or consequences in the evangelical doctrine.

Still, I’ve even asked myself many times if there isn’t some truth there, if I’m not indeed feeding her insanity, deluding myself that I’m helping in some way with my love, my belief, my own dubious good example of how an addict can become happy, useful and whole…

These are complicated, agonizing questions that obsess my thinking all day long. And, try as I may to find an answer, the more I live this life with Narcisa, the more I’m convinced there’s no easy answers for us here. So I go with the flow a day at a time, confident of one thing only: that nothing happens by mere happenstance or random accident. No way.

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.

Lately I’ve been letting her hang out in my friend’s big house in Itaipava, spending days up there myself just to keep her company as she runs around in her futile little circles.

Little by little she really is opening up to me and the possibilities of connection with another human being. And I hope I can somehow serve as a bridge to humanity for her…

And sometimes it feels hopeful, gratifying to me. Being the only person who understands her, or really tries to, and wants to help her, while still not pressuring her or trying to impose my own will on her poor traumatized soul that everybody else has always tried to lock up and tie down and restrain and control and dominate.

These are hard lessons for us both to learn, especially living in a flaming raging war of indomitable wills and powerful damaged warped egos and massive trauma-fed dysfunction. But they are lessons that must be learned and lived at all costs, even at the risk of life or death. We are warriors, Narcisa and me, duking it out a day at a time on this bloody battlefield of love’s eternal redemption. And just for today there is hope, always the last little soldier to die. Hope for her and hope for me and hope for us all, somehow, some way, some day…

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.