THE TATTOO MAGAZINE PRICK HAS POSTED A FEATURE ON JS. HERE’S A LITTLE OF WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY:
“Enter “Narsica: Our Lady of Ashes,” the tale of a man’s love and hate for a teenaged prostitute and drug addict who blows into his world like an unexpected ocean storm on an otherwise calm day of sailing. With his lust for the open road, robust adventures, and thrill for the untamed life, Shaw is the closest thing we have to Kerouac in this modern day and age.”
So it’s been brought to my attention, for the umpteenth time, that I am a horrific editor. If Helen Keller were asked to edit Mirriam Webster’s… it would look something like the job I do on a daily basis. But that is not the point.
Here’s a little story, to keep you busy while I figure out my point.
Back when I was a skinny little junkie of eighteen, I found myself in Hollywood, California, puking up blood in a gutter on the corner of Sunset and Vermont.
Suddenly I was startled by the engine of a motorcycle. I lifted my head and wiped my mouth only to see the enigmatic and intimidating Jonathan Shaw, looking down at me with hearts in his eyes from a smoking two wheeled gypsy perch.
“Hey little girl, wanna go for a ride?” He asked me. (I’m pretty sure those were the exact words…) Then he handed me a tiny battered “bitch” helmet.
“Sure” I burped.
He took me to a little barbecue joint on Cahuenga Blvd where we sat for about two hours and he asked me what I was doing with my life.
“I’m an editor” I told him with stars in my dope-pinned eyes.
It was not a lie, it was just the only answer I could come up with in my brain which had at that point been poisoned and roasted and toasted and burned out several times over. Plus, I’d like to think the question was a completely unnecessary means of creating “friendly conversation”, due to the fact that I was clearly insane, I weighed about 35 pounds soaking wet, had jaundice, staph infections, crack sores and reeked of detoxification.
I was not doing anything with my life, besides destroying what was left of it.
“Well, good,” he said.
Then he handed me 300 dollars and a little manuscript called Scardust, which you will all be very familiar with in the not too far off future, if the world continues to exist for another few years, which it might not at this rate because I crashed my car. What time is it.
Anyway, he asked me to look this manuscript over for him and I said yes and then he asked me to move in with him in his lonely Hollywood penthouse to which I also said yes, since my boyfriend had locked me out of our apartment.
This 6 month period was split between Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, and New York City, trembling under Jonathan’s greasy black wing, during which time I flirted with the following possible career opportunities (in no particular order):
Painter, Tattoo Artist, Prostitute, Jet Setter, Egg Donor, Drug Counselor, Drug, Dealer, Drug Addict, DJ, Fashion Designer, Indentured Servant, Waitress, Phone Answerer, Suicide Girl, Chef, Insomniac, Mental Patient, Serial Killer, Serial Domestic Abuser, Poet, Psychologist, Philosopher…
Until one day… Finally… After much adue… Jonathan Shaw grew tired of my squirrelly behavior, put a notebook, a pen and a coconut in my hand, and left me sitting on a beach in Rio de Janeiro for ten hours.
The rest is history.
Here is the abridged version…
While Jonathan began his ongoing battle with a disease I like to call Narcisa, I returned to Los Angeles to “brainstorm” on the “future” of Jonathan’s massive memoir project, Scabvendor: - Confessions of a Tattoo Artist.
Soon enough, that veered off into Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes which Jonathan played around with for three months until Heartworm Press having heard of it through some putrid underground grapevine, came along, unsolicited, and took it off his bleeding hands…
I then started a website called Scabvendor.com, a place for Jonathan and I to share Narcisa and the rest of his wacked-out life and times with other sick fucks like you, a safe haven for us to ruminate on all the cunts that torment our charmed existence and so, so much more.
The unabridged version will be available on my Wikipedia, someday…
The point is… I’m not an editor.
Right now I am a sleepy blogger. Tomorrow… I’m not sure. It will probably involve fixing some more typos.
So it goes.
I decided to post this week’s weekly blurb with a little bit of history. Underneath the blurb you will see an excerpt from Jonathan’s other memoir Scabvendor, which might give a little insight on their relationship…
“Jonathan Shaw is a fucked-off hunk of shit. A fish asshole cunt-sucker!”
- Charles Bukowski (1978)
A NIGHT WITH BUKOWSKI
The root problems of the writer are personality problems.- John Gardner
Stubby fingers pounding away at an old Royal typewriter. Classical music playing from a radio on a kitchen counter next to an empty whiskey bottle… Bukowski is sitting at a cramped breakfast nook by a window in his kitchen, wearing a wife-beater and boxer shorts, writing. He moves his head in a strange rhythm to the music, like a prizefighter, bobbing and weaving in a motion so subtle, only the benevolent spirits of his poetry respond…
He stops typing just long enough to fish a half-smoked cigar out of an overflowing ashtray, surrounded by a dozen empty Miller beer bottles. He shoves the cigar stub into his battered, junkyard face, lights it, and resumes his work. He hears a timid knock on the living room door…
“Go’waaay!”, he shouts automatically, as he types on.
Several short raps on the window beside him get his attention.
“Who arrre yaaaa, whaddya waaant?” he growls.
“Hey, I’m sorry to bother ya”, I say. “I write for the Free Press…”
Bukowski mumbles distractedly.
Standing on the dirty concrete porch, I talk to the window, playing my last card, “… I got some beer…”
Bukowski starts to say something, then stops, editing himself. He surveys the empty beer bottles standing like little ghosts around his typewriter. Finally he speaks, in a weary, W.C. Fields-like drawl. “Yeahh, alriiight… just hold onnnaa minnit.” He pounds out a last line and stops. He grabs a dirty kitchen towel off the counter, throws it over his work, and gets up. The big man steps into a pair of ratty slippers and walks, slouching, across the little living room to the door.
I’m standing on the porch, looking down at the cement… hallowed ground. No welcome mat. Shivering nervously shifting my weight from foot to foot, holding the heavy case of beer. It feels cold in my hands in the summer air that smells of cat piss and night-blooming jasmine. I hear classical music playing behind Bukowski’s window. A baby cries and a television blares from apartments across the courtyard. A gunshot pops off in the distance… Awkward as a schoolboy on a blind date, I stand by the dirty screen door and wait…
Suddenly, the door opens and Bukowski’s big, battered face is there before me. I’m standing in the presence of Genius… and it looks like it’s about to knock me flat on my ass.
Without ceremony, Bukowski reaches into the cardboard box I’m holding like a temple offering. He casually extracts a can of beer and cracks it open. Without giving me another look, he turns and disappears into the little bungalow. My eyes scan the cement porch, my brown leather boots, the cuffs of my dirty jeans…
“Jeee-sus, kid, ya just gonna staaaand out there? Bring it in-siiiide,” he drawls from the darkened room. I step over the threshold.
Later, I’m sitting around a cheap coffee table covered with empty cans. An empty pint bottle of whiskey sits on Bukowski’s end like a captured Queen in a chess match. A pile of my poetry sits out on the table between us. I reach into the empty cardboard box and crack open the last can of beer.
“Heeey, giii-me thaat”, Bukowski protests. I ignore him, drinking the beer.
“Soooo, yer a wriiiiiter, haaah?” he says finally.
I pass the half-finished can over. Bukowski takes it and guzzles it down. He burps.
“Weeeelll”, he says, looking drunk and rather nasty now. “If yer a wriiiter, what ya do is ya wriiiite, get it? What ya don’t do is sit aroooouund taaalking abooouuut wriiiting with other guys who wriiiite. You wriiiite. And then, ya wriiiite some moooore. That’s it, baby. But… if ya got nothing to saaaaay, then youre just another bum with a ten dollar typer, with alotta taaaalk, and shit for braaiiins… And, to be brutally honest, Jono, yoooou impress me as a self-conscious punk who needs to do some liiiiiving…”
“Who you callin’ a punk? Ya old fart…” I hear myself say, instantly regretting it. Too late…
“YOU! YA LITTLE CUNT LICKIN, FISH LIPPED MOMMA’S BOY. PUNK. PUNK. PUUUUUNNNNK!!!”
“Motherfucker”, I yell, rising to my feet, fast, knocking beer cans off the table.
“Yeeeaahhh, I fucked your mother. And I’ll fuck you too, fish fucker,” Bukowski taunts, coming at me like a train.
Drunk and crazed, I take a swing at him and feel my fist connect with the rough, bearded skin of his face. Not phased, Bukowski clobbers me in the ear. I see stars. Now it’s two of us, drunken poets, trading drunken blows, I taste blood in my mouth and keep hitting him. But Bukowski is getting the best of me, pounding away with those big, red, ugly mitts.
I crouch low, defending my face, and try to head butt him in the gut, but he grabs me like a bear, and we both wrestle to the floor, toppling over the coffee table which cracks and splinters. I’m rolling round on the dirty wall-to-wall carpet in a spinning chaos of beer cans, pages of poetry flying, pissed and gasping like some savage, lumbering beast of old, an ugly, deformed, drunken puppet, breaking everything in it’s terrible path…
Finally, breathing hard, bloody and sweating we both stop, laughing hysterically…
“Geeeeez, kid”, he says finally, “ya fiiiight just liiike a giiiirl I useta fuck in a toiiii-let…”
“Was that before, or after she shit in yer mouth?” I snap back.
“Shit, I shiiiit bigger than you… Look at my beautiful cofffeeeee taaa-ble. You oooowe me for that, ya little shit…”
We end the night sitting on the floor, drinking, trading insults, reading poetry, and toasting to each other’s speedy demise as the sun rises, emerging like a punch-drunk sea monster over the smoggy purgatory of Bukowski’s doomed Los Angeles…
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
I thought this might interest some people. While digging through boxes and boxes of papers at the office, I came a cross a little comic strip that Jonathan did in 1966, entitled “The Menace of Captain Cringe”. I remember reading about this specific comic in Jonathan’s other book “Scabvendor” (which is still in the works)- so I’ve paired them up accordingly.
Here is a segment from Jonathan’s life memoirs, Scabvendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist.
The comic you will find below it.
I remember sitting in my room, livid with frustration, anger. The Eucalyptus tree outside my window strangely still in the windless night. I was trapped in there, sensing the Jabberwock silently wiffling through the stillness. An indistinct stench of burning rubber in my nose, a smell of futility and death. My skin burned red with a desperate longing to escape and never come back. I looked around the room, the dark blue walls I’d painted, recalling my grandma’s voice. ‘Why ah ya paintin’ it such a dahk culla? Ya’ll go blind in heah, tryin’ ta see anything.” And thinking cuz the rest of this shitty place is white - stark, absent, sterile. Fuck that. Blue is the color - dark, shiny blue, the color of deep ocean dreams and fantasy and the sky at dusk, stretching far away from this place of stark terror and white empty void the color of washcloths stuffed down a child’s pink throat. Nah, blue was it, alive and shiny like a hard protecting armor. And I went to that dark blue place, where I was safe and inviolated, where they couldn’t reach in with their jabbering squaresville static…
I could hear voices downstairs, Doris raging, muffled shouts and conversation, the evil rise and fall of her voice, punctuated by the low steady serious hum of Len’s pathetic, ineffectual ‘reasoning’ tone, a steady cadence, like some foul, unwelcome tide. I switched on the little stereo, the one I’d smuggled upstairs when she replaced it with a newer, louder one for her drunken classical music sessions in the dreaded den… Was I turning into her, locked alone in a dark little room with solitary music? Fuck. If they would only just shut the fuck up… I pulled out a record by a band called The Rolling Stones, put it on the turntable, lowered the little metal arm onto the spinning disk. The speaker by my bed crackled and the music began to play. I can’t get no… Satisfaction. That was better. I liked the Rolling Stones, liked the way they looked, standing there on the album cover, tall and dark and tough looking, like a gang. Their hair was long and covered their foreheads and eyes, and just seemed to say FUCK YOU to all the Doris’s and Len’s and stark white walls and neighbors and police stations and schools and all the shit I hated. I rolled a joint and smoked. Better now, I got out my papers and colored pencils and started working on my comic book…
Here is a comic strip from then 13-year-old Jonathan. Just as a side note, I find it funny how a young boy could create such the perfect archetype of a classic raging alcoholic he himself would soon become…
And another little clip from “Scabvendor”…
Strong, pungent marijuana smoke fills your senses, the room… The narrating voice booms on as you find yourself drifting into the next panel. “And suddenly,” the voice says, “a chemical change occurs in Wilfred Wormus. His filthy, unwashed clothes and sweat mix with the stale beer, resulting in a strange and powerful supernatural reaction…”
You can feel your scrawny, undernourished body grow suddenly in size and mass, ripping through your clothes like the Incredible Hulk. Your bare torso is covered with exotic, abstract primal designs, tattooed all over. Similar to the style of the dark black, bladelike, spindly, clawlike tendrils that made up the word BEWARE a long time ago…
You hold up your huge, muscular, tattooed arms and hear your own voice roar triumphantly, “I have become MASSIVE!!”
You are now the great and powerful Captain Cringe. You tower menacingly over the cringing bullies, who cower in a corner, under your imposing shadow…
“Yes…” the radio announcer’s voice booms in your head. “Something in the booze CHANGED Wilfred. It made him POWERFUL. And something else, something more… They all CRINGED when they saw him. Besides his rippling muscles and hairy legs, what made them CRINGE before him? Could it be the strange markings that covered his body???”
You are the terrible, invincible Captain Cringe… running amok, tearing up the barroom. Destroying everything in your path. Slaughtering your foes, in a bloody, homicidal rampage. Then suddenly, the gory, heart-pounding action sequence FREEZES…
Gigantic long red fingernails come into vision, tearing the frozen animated panel in half. RRRIIPPPPPPPPP…. exposing a grim, unwelcome world…
Doris, in a rage, is tearing up Jonathan’s drawings and comic books. Len stands ineffectually in the doorway of Jonathan’s bedroom, holding the bag of weed between his fingers like a dead rat, a dower grey look on his face…
“I’VE HAD IT WITH YOU AND YOUR CRAP, BOY”, Doris screams, violently ripping another stack of comic books to shreds.
You stand helplessly, cursing her silently under your breath. “Fuckin’ bitch!”
“THESE DAMNED COMIC BOOKS ARE THE REASON YOU SIT IN HERE BROODING ALL DAY,” Doris raves on, “FILLING YOUR HEAD WITH THIS TRASH… AND NOW YOU’VE BECOME A THIEF, A DELINQUENT… AND A DRUG ADDICT…” she sobs with he trademark melodramatic stage tears. Phony bitch, who’s she think she’s fooling?
Jonathan looks at Len pleadingly. Make her stop, man. Len gives you his best “fatherly” look.
“Why were you shoplifting, when you have everything you need, Jono?”, he sputters, crinkling up his forehead. “Was it to pay for these drugs?”
Jonathan gives him a look of disgust. Clueless, pussy-whipped bastard. Dickless loser… You get up and bolt out the door, brushing past him, screaming ’til your voice box hurts, “I HATE YOU FUCKIN’ PEOPLE…”
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
