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.
