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“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]

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.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE

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, that he wrote with Hubert Selby Jr. and Kenny Schiffrin, 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 Hurricane 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.

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.

 Just for today there is no drama or conflict and everybody’s getting what they need outta this relationship even if it is just sex and money and drugs and love and sympathy and company and humanity, what the fuck else is there really at the end of the day?Shit, everybody’s got relationship problems and there is no happily ever after. That’s a big evil bullshit lie the bastards tried to brainwash us with from little kids with their creeping reptilian brain Disneyland programming.Happy ever after my fucking dick! I much prefer ‘just for today’, or even better, Narcisa’s hyperactive ‘what now?’ works better for us who’ve had all our fairy tale illusions smashed by psychopath parents and psychic rape betrayal and LSD overdrive rude awakenings right from the start. Shit on the American Dream! How’s this for happily ever after?I just got an email from my pal Orbie.Orbie’s Roy Orbison’s kid and a new friend I met while I was up in LA crying my eyes out all day and night for the last four months writing “Our Lady of Ashes” and kicking Narcisa cold turkey while spending fifteen hours a day diving deeply into the inflamed wound of what my friend Lydia Lunch calls “love’s eternal negation”.I was spending a lot of my writing time in the company of Orbie who was then shacked up with my other dear friend Kat Von D- there I go with the names again for all you Hollywood ass-licking sicophants and gossip mongers.Anyway, the fact is that I spent a good amount of my time writing the first draft of my book sitting in Kat’s little tattoo office while she tattooed away into the wee hours every night. During that terrible time, me and Kat and her man at the time, Orbie, were like family, just hanging together for company, and I wound up reading the bulk of the book to them for feedback, just to hear it out loud and know where to tweak it later - whatever, it was all a long crazy painful and cathartic process and I’ll always remember those nights I spent sitting up with Kat and Orbie as my audience and constant companions during a real difficult and painful time for me.And it was almost like I was unconsciously drawn together with those two special people at a time of terrible loneliness and solitary introspection and deep personal mourning for the last dying illusions of happy-ending romantic love. All that time those two were to all outward appearences the “perfect couple” spending all their time together all lovey-dovey and planning their big happily ever after rock-n-roll marriage and future together.

   And it was like a daily rubbing of salt in deep wounds for me on some level as I suffered the forced seperation from my Narcisa while writing it all out all day, everyday as she sat tucked away in that awful Jesus retreat.

I gotta say that it was super painful, almost to the point of masochistic to spend so much time around those two obnoxious lovebirds at just that particular time for me. But they were the friends and family who God or the Devil put in my life to keep each other company on the battlefield of love and sadness and who am I to argue with higher or lower powers at this stage of the game?

But the moral of the story if there is such a thing is this. After all that, here I am back in Rio with Narcisa, the scourge of my existance, my bloody crown of thorns and heavy cross to bear. And somehow we’re living it up, if only just for today. She’s smoking her lungs out and toasting her brains on crack and I’m writing and swimming in the sea and catching waves and riding the night winds with Narcisa. Clinging to me like a hungry little monkey speeding up and down hills through the hungry night and fucking like the damned and eating good food and talking with a few friends from time to time and doing all the things I love to do.Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the land of bullshit happy endings, my dear friends Kat and Orbie, the most perfect little happy couple I ever seen have SPLIT UP after making each other miserable…

And me and Narcisa are living it up for today and what now? And it’s all a big lie!!! So at the end of the day, today’s been a pretty good one and I was sorry to get an email from Orbie who’s as sad and blue as a Roy Orbison song, but that’s how the cookie crumbles I guess and just for today I ain’t complaining and I guess that’s the closest thing to a happy ending I know about and the beat goes on as I sit here by the seaside by my little shack past midnight with a belly full of rice and beans and a dick numb from fucking and salt in my hair from crashing around in the sparkling Brazilian summer waves between fucks all day long and I got no regrets at all and if this is the road to Hell I’m sure as shit taking the scenic route, just for today.

So anyway, it’s Saturday night -  All my friends are out getting hammered in barrooms and parties around town and I’m sitting by the waves just grooving on the cool vibrations of my city by the sea on a long soulful night. Parties and bars I’m not really into, being by nature every bit as antisocial and misanthropic as my dear Narcisa who’s sitting in the dark in an abandoned building across town right now, toasting her brain in a desperate and futile attempt to extinguish her two remaining brain cells who are constantly fueding with each other in her pretty head.Normally it would be my night for a few quick fucks at Vila Mimosa and a stroll by the rock and roll biker bars over there but I’m all fucked out and my money’s almost gone so I’ll just cool it here alone by the flourescent waves till it’s time to go back to Catete and pull Narcisa out of her hole at sunrise for a last desperate shag before I close the coffin on another hot summer Sunday morning with nothing to do but sleep and wait for the roof to collapse.

Sitting alone by the sea basking in the afterglow of what’s been pretty close to a perfect day, I’m thinking how much I really do like hanging out alone and how different that is from the way I used to be when I was younger, Narcisa’s age, always running around like the headless horseman looking for “the action” looking for something or someone to fill some nameless hole in my soul and never ever finding it, at least not for long. Drugs were a good little diversion for my hyperactive, unsatisfied mind for a little while, like 25 fucking years beating my brains out with all kinds of shit on a daily basis till I was finally more dead than alive and still not fucking satisfied. Shit.I can certainly relate to Narcisa’s absolute refusal to do anything about her “problem”, I know from my own experience that all she’s trying to do is survive in a terrible world of ugly memories and traumatic associations not of her making and drugs are the best line of defense. For awhile. My career took me long and far before it took me down and it was a long, long ride. 25 years. Shit.Narcisa ain’t gonna last that long. Not the way she’s going at least. I was a “functional addict” and drugs were my tool for getting around the world and functioning in it and doing what I hadda do to survive the crazy wild violent ride I lived in. But I did get around and I did get some shit done.Narcisa’s just circling the drain at the ripe old age of 21 years old and that makes me sad to see that she’s much worse off than I ever was. Well maybe not really. I mean she’s not jumping out people’s windows with a tv set and sticking needles in her veins like I did for years at her age - at least not yet. So maybe there is still hope for her. I hope so and if I didn’t hold that hope deep in my heart, I probably woulda turned and hightailed it away from her a long time ago…     I just got a call from my new friend, Mayra Dias Gomes, the hip young writer and journalist who’s probably gonna be the one to translate “Our Lady of Ashes” into Portuguese with me. I could probably do it myself, but I like the idea of working with a “legitimate” translator whose actually been to school and knows about grammer and spelling and shit like that, not to mention the fact that she comes from a prestigious Brazilian literary tradition, being the daughter of the venerable Brazilian screen-writer Dias Gomes, and god-daughter of Jorge Amado, one of my own South American literary heros and a sacred cow of world literature by any standards. And she’s a real nice kid and a brilliant writer in her own right.

Anyway she and her boyfriend Alan are on their way over to the “Emporio” bar in Ipenema, and since I’m sitting at the end of Copa less than a 5 minute ride from there I say what the fuck? and I’ll fire up the bike and take a ride over there. I don’t mind that place as much as most places where people gather to drink and talk shit since it has a certain dark druggie rock-n-roll vibe I can sort of hang with and you can hang out on the sidewalk out front and still smell the ocean a block away as opposed to being crammed inside some hot sweaty chatterbox pen surrounded by frenetic drunken sheeple, a real nightmare to my way of thinking.I’ve said it before and ill say it again. I hate drunks! Crackheads are so much more interesting…Well, it’s time to roll, so here I go..

 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.

Welcome to Scabvendor, website and blog of world famous tattooist and author Jonathan Shaw. As Jonathan wraps up his novel NARCISA: OUR LADY OF ASHES, the press is rolling in. Check back for clips from the feature article in the Folha De São Paulo, written by Mayra Dias Gomes, author of Fugalaça. They will be up soon, along with pictures of some of Jonathan’s best tattoos and excerpts from  NARCISA. Jonathan is currently in Rio De Janeiro until the beginning of April when he will return for a small US book tour. Stay tuned for more!

Check out Jonathan Shaw on myspace:  www.myspace.com/jsfuncity