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               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.

Another excerpt from my upcoming novel Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes to be released by Heartworm Press this summer.

Journal entry — Love House Hotel. 2:00 am 19 February - Carnival Monday

CARNIVAL - The streets were littered with odd clusters of somnambulant jaywalkers tonight. Fucking Zombies. I dunno if they were all drunk or just so tired, drained of all will to live that they began wandering carelessly like stray chickens right out into the road. Their overall demeanor and body language seems to say Just kill me, I don’t care anymore. I just want to lay down somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere. Even the morgue…
Strange thing this fucking Carnival, I’m thinking, maybe people just aren’t made to have a whole week of license like this with nothing to do but fuck off and drink and raise Hell.
People seem to need to be caged up in factories and offices, put through their paces like lab rats, worked half to death in order to just fucking function in some civilized fashion.
Take that away for five whole days, and they seem to quickly degenerate into savage, unruly, destructive creatures, diving right into the gutter like depraved, masturbating monkeys to wallow in their lowest common shit like lazy, unprincipled savages.
Just look at Narcisa. Her whole life is like some Dark Carnival.
Shit.
No wonder she’s so hot to fuck off back to Alpha Centauri. The fucking Human Race sure ain’t all that.
I’m looking at people scrambling around drunk, incoherent, stupid.
And suddenly they just look to me like rats milling around a big fucking garbage can.
Then it occurs to me. That’s an insult to Rats.
I’m thinking about Narcisa now and I’m picking up on her rage, her hate, her revolt as if it was my own.
And it is my own. It is me.
Like some dark electric current flowing between us.
Because it is us. Twin Flames.
Rats. Shit.
Rats are better than people.
Rats don’t neglect and abandon their young. They may eat them sometimes…
So do people, I’m thinking.
Like Narcisa’s people.
Shit.
Rats don’t smoke Crack.
Rats don’t have to sell their pussies.
Rats don’t get abortions.
Rats don’t have to build jails to incarcerate other rats.
They just eat their young and be done with it when they can’t take care of them.
Not people. People eat their young for fun.
People just keep cranking them out, making babies, throwing them away.
Cranking them out. Throwing them away.
The streets are teeming with them tonight.
So are the whorehouses. The Crack spots.
The prisons.
Hospitals. Morgues.
The nuthouse.
Shit.
Rats just eat them.
Not people.
People just keep cranking out the Meat.
The streets are swarming with the Meat tonight.
And now they are bored to stupidity.
Bored. Idle Hands.
If Idle Hands are the Devil’s playground, then this fucking Carnival is His amusement park Coney Island Magic Mountain Disneyland Knott’s Berry Farm and Sea World all rolled into one…

Copyright 2008 Jonathan Shaw. 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.

HERE IS THE FIRST INSTALLMENT IN OUR NEW WEEKLY SERIES OF EXCERPTS FROM JONATHAN SHAW’S UPCOMING NOVEL “Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes”–

That fateful night I found her after her long disappearance, standing in the rain outside that low-end whorehouse at the rat’s asshole end of Copacabana. At first I thought it odd to even see her there.
Where was the old prideful Narcisa, the one who was always too good for the life of a low class street hooker?
How the Mighty I Am had fallen from the exclusive top-shelf call-girl joints down the beach to this.
Only seeing was believing that shit.
Narcisa?
There she was alright, filthy, homeless, in burnt tatters.
But still carrying an equally filthy, tattered Louis Vuitton bag that looked like it had been excavated from King Tut’s fucking tomb, along with its owner.
Where was Louis Vuitton now?
Ashes.
Ashes.
Ashes.
Narcisa.
Narcisa.
Narcisa.
And may Jesus help me, when I was broke, unable to buy her all the clothes and shoes and fucking spangles and baubles and gimcracks and whim whams she wanted, she’d just light into me with all the haughty indignation of some pampered, overfed Ipanema matron.
Narcisa.
One day we were walking down the street in this fancy neighborhood, don’t ask why…
Suddenly she froze up like a dummy, right in front of this showy pretentious gingerbread designer boutique.
I looked at her and her eyes were glazed over like she’d just taken a big hit of Crack, staring like one of those crazy drooling bird dogs at the shop display.
I looked where she was looking. A simple purple dress. Nothing special.
What’s up?
I think she mostly liked it because the window mannequin was tall and skinny like her and looked about twelve years old.
Narcisa.
“Buy me that!”
What?
“The mannequin?” I joked.
“The dress, Cigano.”
I thought she was kidding.
For a second.
Then I remembered.
Narcisa didn’t kid.
I started to patiently explain that I’d spent all my money on her last devastating run .
I was so broke now I could barely pay attention.
She left me standing alone talking as she tore off into the store.
While she tried on stuff inside, I wandered off down the street.
No choice.
That dress cost more than a year’s wages for the average Brazilian.
I barely had enough money in my pocket to buy a pair of dead man’s shoes from the garbage-picker sidewalk vendors of Catete.
I kept walking.
When she caught up with me I got to hear all about it.
“You the so big the Jew, Cigano! I say you I wan’ it the dress an’ you gone ‘way. Jew! Jew! Jewish!! You more worst than even real Jew. Is true, man! I know! When I e’stay the New York together my husban’, he never refuse for buy it to me any little thing I wan’. Never! In the New York City, I use-ed have it the whooole closet only for the Narcisa, all ’spensive dress and thing and sooo many the e’shoe! More than e’fifty differen’ the kind the e’shoe. Now you so complain same like big fucking Jew because I wan’ only you buy it to me these cheap Made in Brazil shit. Jew!”
Blaa Blaaa Blaaaa. And where was all that great fucking treasure now?
Ashes.
Blaa Blaaa Blaaaa.
What part of broke doesn’t she understand?
Blaaaaaaa…
I tuned out the noise and kept walking.
Sometimes that’s all you can do.
It would be pointless to remind her that every present I’d ever given her hadn’t lasted a week with her special Midas touch.
Everything Narcisa ever touched was quickly and efficiently converted to ashes.
Everything.
Her infallible affinity for the destruction of material things.
A perverse need to create conditions of total blight around herself.
And then complain.
Narcisa was so attached to her stupid little self-imposed Born to Lose identity, whenever she got anything nice, it suddenly became like this big threat to her whole self image, her very existence. So she just had to destroy it.
Immediately.
If for no other reason than a pretext to keep her endless fucking Pity Party going.
She loved to talk the talk of wise philosophers and poets, forever citing Nietzsche or Sartre or Bob Marley to back up a useless argument, win some inane petty dispute.
Narsica could talk all the talk. When it came to walking the walk, though, she usually fell flat on her face…

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.