“Jonathan Shaw’s passionate descriptions of the surreal, paranoid jungle he inhabits capture the haunting poetry of his soul…Scabvendor is an original and compelling work…” -Hubert Selby Jr. 2003, Author of Reqiuem For a Dream and Last Exit To Brooklyn
Her divorce papers were finally served today. She had just woken me up again at ten in the morning and, after I’d gotten over the urge to just fucking slaughter her as she stood in my doorway with that shit-eating beggar’s grin on her sweet little face, I let her in.
Now we we were laying up in my loft bed getting ready to do the evil deed that gives her the money to smoke the crack that supposedly helps her to forget the guilty conscience that plagues her for needing the money and having to do all the terrible things in the first place that she must do to get the money to keep smoking the crack that rules her life now, and makes her do anything to get it - including having sex all day long with a man, the one fucking thing she always dreaded most of all, due to all the rape and abuse and prostitution trauma that plagues her mind’s troubled memory banks.
A confirmed lesbian who has spent so much time in the last year with my dick tucked up deep inside her, she’s now become as addicted to the dick and the man attached to it as she is to the crack-cocaine habit it supports.
The other day she sheepishly confessed she was in love with me, whatever the fuck that means.
She said something about being a happy whore with one steady client. I am pretty happy with the arrangement too.
Shit.
What a strange, perversely poetic, twisted karma to endure again and again and again…
Narcisa.
She was in a pretty good mood though at ten in the morning of her third day up tweaking her brains out, and I was gonna make the most of it now, playing with her perfect ass, that wonderful, magical ass I’ve loved and lusted after for years, but could never lay claim to… until the crack monster got her a year and change ago and dropped her right into my hungry clutches like a cat laying a crippled bird at its masters feet..
What a strange and twisted karma for us both.
So there we were, laying up in my loft bed, fooling around, having a pretty good time for two evildoing, karmatically-enslaved, hopelessly addicted lost souls…
Suddenly, there’s a loud knock at the door.
Who the fuck is that, I’m thinking, wondering if it’s her evil, Bible-thumping fat old mother, finally making good on her threats to come over with a mob of fanatacal Jesus Freaks to kidnap Narcisa away from me again and throw her back into that hated Born-Again Christian brainwash camp she just spent four months at, giving the crack monster a well needed rest… before she managed to escape from there and bring it all back to me.
All of it…
Well fuck it, I think, I’ll just deal with it, God’s will, whatever… and if it’s time to pistol whip and choke that old bitch and drag her inside here and slice and dice her and flush her nasty old carcass down the fucking toilet with Narcisa, so be it then.
Another evil little adventure for us…
The Christians say we are two evil, anti-social people… So why not do some evil, anti-social shit this morning?
What a strange and twisted karma to endure.
I tucked the hard dick down into my pants as it slunk south like a whipped old dog. Then I climbed down the ladder.
I grabbed the battered old .38 Special off the dresser and yanked the door open, ready to kill or be killed by that evil Christian lynch mob.
I looked out and it’s not her mother standing there at all. It’s only the dimminuitive “oficial da justicia” again, back to re-serve the subpoena he’d been unable to deliver a fortnight ago when she was still locked up in the nuthouse at Pinel.
Now the time had come.
Too relieved to be annoyed, I quickly tucked the pistol in my back pocket and smiled. No need to shoot or even pistol whip this one. I just told him to come on in, and he did.
She stayed there in the bed, silent as a corpse, hiding under the covers up in the loft, where the little man would never see her.
Narcisa is good at hiding, a trick she learned by cowering in closets and under beds as a little girl while her insane whore mother heated up coat hangers on the stove to beat her older siblings with, leaving her sister with a permanant disfiguring dueling scar across her face and still deeper scars that can’t be seen on the outside.
Narcisa’s soul is covered in such invisible battle wounds.
So is mine. Birds of a feather.
What a strange and twisted karma.
Like me, she learned early on in life the importance of knowing how to hide. And how to run too.
And over the years of her adolescence, she’d run far and wide, scrambling around trying to dodge her own terrible memories, running all across the length and breadth of Brazil by hook and by crook and by thumb by the time she was fourteen. Eventually running all the way to Israel and New York City in a ridiculous, impossible marrage that had blown up in both of their clueless little faces.
Just another futile attempt to run away from herself, her past, her strange and twisted karma.
Now there was nowhere else to run, and the little man stood there with the divorce papers in his hand.
“Is she out of the mental hospital yet?” He asked me with a strange look of uncomfortable concern on his face. I felt bad for him. I vaguely hoped he hadn’t seen me pocketing the gun.
My first instinct was to just lie like she’d told me to and say I didn’t know where she was.
But when I opened my mouth to tell the little man she was gone, I heard myself saying something else.
“Just sign the fucking papers and get it over with, baby,” I yelled up to her in her hiding place, feeling a bit like a rat.
The little man looked startled when her heard her crazy rasping growl from the loft bed above our heads.
“Fuck!” She said.
the loft
Then her long, elegant, crack-stained hand appeared, gesturing for him to hand her the paperwork.
He passed the papers up, and the phantom hand disappeared with them, like one of those crazy hand-in-the-little-black-box toys.
The little man and I stood there in silence, waiting.
I heard her laugh. Then she started to have one of her terrible, gut wrenching coughing fits.
Finally she stopped hacking and choking like an old hag and spoke again.
“E’stupid bastard!” She grumbled.
I gestured for the little man to wait as I climbed up the ladder and sat down on the bed beside her where she was looking over the paperwork, shaking her head as if, once again, she was the innocent Little victim of yet another great injustice.
“Look what these e’stupid guy saying bout me here…”
I looked at the papers…
“The defendant abandoned the conjuntal home over a year ago and has since been involved with hard drug use, and keeping terrible company with criminals, engaging in drug traffic, prostitution and other activities unbefitting a married woman… Bla bla bla…”
“Just sign the fucking thing and get it over with, baby,” I said. “Its over now. Let it go.”
After waxing indignant for a couple more minutes, finally she caved in. “Gimme a pen,”
I climbed back down the ladder. The little man was only too eager to hand me his pen to put into the pale, ghostly gesturing hand that appeared again from the shadows above.
He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, obviously dying to get the fuck out of there.
I can’t say I blamed him.
But I couldn’t get the fuck out. I was trapped by my strange and twisted karma.
I almost envied him for a moment. He could leave. He was just doing his job, delivering papers…
What a way to make a living, poor bastard, I thought.
Then I didn’t want to leave anymore. He still hadn’t seen her beautiful face… and I’m certain he was plenty content not to.
Finally the signed papers came floating down from the loft bed like a flock of dying albino bats fluttering from the sky, struck down by an angry deity displeased with his own flawed creations.
The little man and I scrambled to capture the casualties and put them back together. It was a half dozen pages long altogether, a sordid pile of incomprehensibly dry legal words and clauses and language and formulas, all adding up to a sad litany of curt, irrefutable accusations of disappointment, betrayal, wreckage, crippled hopes and failed dreams.
Shadows. Ghosts.
Her husband just hadn’t been ready for the insane, brutal, heartless crack monster she quickly became there in the Big Apple while he was off at work, struggling to build the American Dream for the unlikely newlyweds.
Poor bastard.
Now she’d lost her American Dream and he’d lost her to the crack monster.
He lost her and I found her. And she found me.
Lost and found.
Finders keepers.
What a strange and twisted karma…
I remember her once telling me that her favorite movie back when she was living in New York with the well-heeled Jewish Gringo she’d snatched up off the ho-strool in Copacabana and conned into marrying her and taking her away to Gringolandia where she would live happily ever after, was none other then that all-time feel-bad classic, “Requiem For A Dream.”
How fitting.
She said she’d liked the movie so much, she’d gone out and bought the DVD on her husband’s platinum credit card, and then watched it a dozen times.
It must have really inspired her…
She went out to live it.
She’s still living it today.
What a strange and twisted karma indeed…
Stranger still, when I consider that the terrifying story itself was written by none other than my old friend and one-time screenwriting collaborator, Hubert Selby Jr.
Small fucking world, aint it?
The little man checked his little pile of papers. Satisfied with the signature he’d come for, he nodded and smiled weakly. His job was done.
“From today,” he whispered, “she has fifteen days to contact a lawyer and respond to the legal action of the plaintiff, her… estranged husband. In the absence of a legal response on her part, the judgement on his demand for divorce will be decreed in his favor by a court.”
I nodded, knowing full well that she would never bother to speak to a lawyer or ask for anything she hadn’t already taken him for.
She’d long sucked that poor john dry and moved on to the next poor bastard - me.
Why waste time dwelling on an old dried up sting when you’ve got yourself a new one who knows the score and doesn’t even mind?
Turn the page and move on. That’s the pirate way.
Like me, Narcisa’s a pirate. That’s why we don’t mind playing together. It’s all just a big, fascinating game of chess for us.
Game over? Next game? Your move baby… That’s how we roll, me and Narcisa.
Now that she was gonna be divorced, we could finally get married, just like we’d been talking about for so long.
Lucky us.
What a strange and twisted karma.
I let the little man out. He looked relieved. I was happy for him.
Then I heard Narcisa moving around up there on the bed, and I felt the call of the wild on my dick again.
I dropped my pants, gun and all, onto the floor and climbed back up there. Time to get busy with Narcisa.
She had that mischiveous, precious shit-eating grin on her crooked pirate’s mug again.
As I lay down beside her, fondling that cherished flawless white ass, she showed me what she was grinning about.
“Look what I got, Cigano!”
She’d kept the sad little man’s pen.
I looked at it. A pretty nice pen, for a lowly, underpaid Brazilian process server. Stainless steel ball point.
Poor bastard.
He’d been in such a rush to get the fuck out of here, he’d forgotten all about his nice stainless steel pen.
He wouldn’t be back.
Now it was Narcisa’s pen. And she was grinning proudly.
My crooked-toothed little baby pirate princess….
Finders keepers.
“This pen she gonna make into a good new crack pipe for me,” she growled happily.
I grinned back at her, flashing my gold teeth in her shiny bright eyes as I grabbed that fine, crack-smoking ass and worked it on home again.
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.
