AD: Just to give the title switch a little background for anybody who might eventually be reading this, I should say for the record that the original title of the book was Savage Grace. Unfortunately when a movie was released with the same name, you backed down and changed it. As poetically appropriate as that title once was, I can’t imagine it being named anything other than Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes now either…. Where did this title come from? Our Lady of the Ashes… I was driving down the 101 freeway the other day and passed an “Our Lady” church and it made me wonder if that sparked the thought.

JS: It was really more about the name “Narcisa.” The “Our Lady” thing was just something I tacked on later for no particular reason other than that I kinda always envisioned this Narcisa character as like something very iconic, mythical, mystical and… transcendent. Like a real religious sort of icon, a kinda biblical figure almost, in her absolute tragedy and power and violent, crazy uncompromising quest for… redemption… 

     And since this character was a crack addict, the way they smoke crack in Brazil and other places too, I guess, is with a coke can they punch holes into and then pack cigarette ashes around the little holes to use as like a sort of filter or screen to carborate the crack rock when they light it up to smoke… 

    So this Narcisa character would always have like three cigarettes burning at the same time for the ashes she was saving to use as a crack smoking screen, and she’d always have all these little piles of ashes all over the place that she would use to smoke crack with… And it just seemed to be a logical sort of title for this strange, tragic, self-crucifying Christ-like being, representing the sins of humanity and its fumbling stumbling search for Salvation, the search for God. Pretty deep stuff, hein? (Laughs)... So I guess I just wanted to give her a sort of religious-sounding title and it just sort of fit… Our Lady of the Ashes... then there’s the whole image of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes, the whole concept of rebirth and redemption, I dunno…

AD: I always wondered where you came up with the title. You may have told me already, but if you did, I’ve forgotten…

JS:   That name came about as a sort of epiphany in the sudden quest for a new title, remember? I was really attached to my original title… Savage Grace was originally supposed to be the title, and it seemed so appropriate to the book I was writing. But I had to change it due to circumstances beyond my control… Now I’m really glad I did change it, cuz now it seems almost corny. Now I couldn’t imagine having a better title than Narcisa… 

to be continued

AD: When did you know there was really no turning back?

JS: What? You mean there’s no turning back? Shit. (Laughs)… I guess at some point somewhere along the way as I surrendered more and more to the whole process, I just sort of realized one day that I was on some sort of journey and there really was no turning back no matter what, and whatever, I just kept going ahead… Life is sure a lot stranger than any fiction, at least my fucking life, that’s for fucking sure…

>AD: His publisher being Heartworm, of course, right?

JS: Right. But I had no idea what that was at the time. I just said‘why not?’and then the next thing ya know I get this email from this guy Wes who’s the owner of Heartworm Press and he tells me he wants to publish all this rough, unstructured shit right away and suddenly he’s all stoked about it…. I was totally blown away! This is like just a coupla days after Inger told me how powerful the last chapters of Scabvender were, and a couple of days more after my writer friend in Rio sent me the email telling me I had to publish this shit immediately… It was just all snapping into place effortlessly, like boom, bang, bam… You gotta remember that the whole thing still just consisted a couple of rough chapters in Scabvender and a bunch of random notes, maybe like 5 or 10 pages of very sloppy, disjointed prose, like some really crude old writing from those old junkie journals I used to keep…

So I asked Wes, the publisher to give me a coupla weeks to at least finish transcribing the rest of the old journals and try and polish it and clean ‘em up a bit and then he could publish it maybe as a short little novella. What the fuck, right? He said he was ready to go and publish the shit just the way it was, that he really liked it all crude and fucked up like that. But I told him I just wanted to edit it a little more and then I’d give it to him in a few days, and he said ok…

That’s when I sat down and started working on Narcisa full time. I still had no fucking idea what I was getting into. I really thought I was just polishing up some random and shit to make some little punk-prose thing out of to give to this guy to put in some ‘zine kinda thing. I had no idea how well respected Heartworm Press was, didn’t know any of their background or whatever, other than Howie Pyro, who I trusted, telling me they were pretty cool and stuff…But then as I sat down with all this shit and started working on it on a computer, it suddenly just started to take on a life of its own. Fuck me!(Laughs)…

Well one thing led to another and suddenly the coupla weeks I’d asked for to finish transcribing all these little stories and notes turned into like four months of obsessive fulltime writing and editing, and before I knew it I was working on it like 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, writing this huge ass 400 plus page novel and putting it out in a big hurry on Heartworm, just like my writer friend in Rio had told me to do, to publish it immediately… It’s like Narcisa just totally took over and from then on I became it’s slave. I guess I still am pretty much. Two years later and I’m still working on the final edit of the original book and I’m half way through a fucking sequel. When does this shit end, dear Lord?(Laughs)

AD: Where Narcisa “stormed into your life…”

JS: Right… I remember one night this friend of mine, Inger Lorre, another recovering junkie and a real wild punk rock legend in her own right was hanging out at my place in Hollywood and she asked to read the Scabvendor book I was working on… I gave her the manuscript to read and then I went to bed. When I got up in the morning, I went into the other room and there she was with this crazy look on her face… Turns out she’d sat up all night on my sofa and read the whole fucking thing in one sitting. Her only comment was, “Wow, the book really picked up speed in the last few chapters. You know, where you started writing about that crazy chick… Is that based on a real person you knew? Cuz it’s really powerful and dynamic. Definitely the best writing in the whole book…”

That sort of got my attention, alerted me to the fact that there was some strange powerful thing going on there where I was writing about this fucked up relationship from years before that sort of crossed over into some more recent things too… Then just about the same time, I started corresponding with another writer friend of mine back in Rio. This guy was another recovering junkie who was heavily involved in the Santo Daime, an ayawaska oriented spritist psychedelic plant-eating Umbanda white magic cult here in Brazil. For some reason, I started transcribing more and more of those old journal notes and then one day I just sent him an email with a bunch of these random ‘Narcisa’ stories, mostly just
for shits and giggles sake cuz I just felt like sharing it with someone, and this guy and me always had a lot of stuff in common as far as being whore-loving fuck-ups and oddball spiritual seekers and writers and so on…

Well, just a few days after Inger made that comment about those last Scabvendor chapters, this guy suddenly writes me back saying that this shit I’d just sent him was the most bad-ass, compelling prose he’d read in a long time and telling me that I must put it all together and publish it immediately! He was really adament about it, really laid the praise on hard and heavy, and that sort of blew my mind, especially because this guy was a real professional journeyman writer who I really respected, and not at all the sort of guy to just blow alotta wild smoke up my ass like that just for the fuck of it.

So I guess that’s when Narcisa ‘’stormed into my life” demanding to be written… That’s when I really first started to think of pulling those chapters out of Scabvendor and putting them all together with the old notes and stories into some sort of linear format and maybe working it up into maybe like a little 50 page novella or something like that… So then I took another break from the memoir again and started massively transcribing all the rest of the scribbled notes from the old days and trying to vaguely format them into a little story set in Rio in the present time, closer to some of my recent experiences or whatever…

Then one day right around that time, this other writer named Max G. Morton who was just putting out his first book heard that I was in town and reached out to me through Howie Pyro, a mutual friend, to ask me to write a little blurb for his new book. I guess this guy was a fan of mine from the old days when I was tattooing in NYC… Well I told Howie I’d be glad to write something for the guy and to have him send me some of his book for me to read. He did and I read it and I liked the writing and I wrote up a little blurb saying something nice about it. After that me and this guy Max started corresponding and he asked me what I was working on and I sent him some of the random notes I’d been transcribing there, and the next thing I know, he writes back and asks if I’d mind if he let his publisher see it.

To be continued…

AD: Is that what you’re talking about when you say in the introduction that Narcisa “stormed into your life.”  Could you elaborate any further?

JS: Well, cuz it’s really strange how that all just came about. A strange, synchronistic confluence of events… In retrospect it seems like some sort of Destiny shit… 

    When I first left Rio and went up to Los Angeles right in the middle of the early stages of writing this, I still had no idea what I was going to do up there, all I knew was that I hadda get away from Rio for a while for personal reasons. I was in another crazy relationship there with another crazy girl with serious problems that didn’t seem to be going anywhere good, so I split and went up to LA, to try and get some distance and perspective and see about promoting the other book in progress, Scabvendor, trying to get a book deal with what I had already written so far and so on. 

    Well, as soon as I was up in LA, one thing led to another and then suddenly all these weird things just started happening, ya know. At first I just spent most of my time there still working on the original book, the memoir, Scabvendor… but then in the later chapters, I’d ended up incorporating those old notes from journal entries I’d written decades before when I was sort of living a similar experience with an old junkie girlfriend who had a lot of Narcisa in her. Do you sense a pattern here? (Laughs)... Crazy chicks seem to have always been drawn to me like magnetic shavings. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Whatever… Freud would have a field day with my shit. It’s pretty significant to all the issues that eventually come out in the book too, especially since my mother, the first woman I ever knew and loved, was a hopeless alcoholic and a drug addict. I guess this is also gonna elaborate on my last answer to your last question, about where the transition segued from the Scabvender book I still thought I was writing into Narcisa… 

The following excerpt was taken from the rewrite of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes

 The Love House Hotel was infested with roving herds of frightening aging transvestites and their shifty looking tricks. The ’girls’ there were some pretty surreal creatures. Like a bunch of pot-bellied truck drivers stumbling around the narrow maze of dark halls in their ratty, cum-stained lingerie. Too destitute to ever dream of getting real breast implants, some of them had reputedly resorted to injecting themselves somehow with industrial truck tire silicone pilfered from the flat repair joints in the neighborhood. Or so the stories went…

      Outside Narcisa’s window there, a long winding mosaic staircase led up into the crooked maze of Santa Teresa, the rundown old colonial bairro in the hills surrounded on all sides by its teeming, crime-infested favelas — the everpresent rambling hillside shanty towns. Right at the bottom of the stairs just across from the flop house there was a notorious little open-air bar. That place was like the unofficial borderline between the asphalt world of the city and the lawless underworld other city within the city; The world of the
favelas where all the usual urban street codes and social norms were automatically and drastically reversed, replaced with slum world codes, unwritten, inflexible and deadly — strange  random laws rigidly enforced by packs of machine gun-toting teenaged bandidos. Minions of the shadowy Donos, the Drug Bosses, the only de facto government up there in those endless ghettos sprawling like a human cancer of septic poverty across the once verdant hills of the city of my youth.

      That shabby outdoor boteco below Narcisa’s window at the Love House Hotel was also a well known distribution point for drugs. All kinds of unsavory characters gathered around the pool tables and rickety wooden stools there at all hours of the day and night, drinking, smoking weed, dancing and sniffing cocaine in paranoid little clusters at the end of the dirty clamorous bar. Samba and Forro music blasted constantly from big weather-damaged speakers in a surreal pounding blurry muddle of perpetual noise, a constant blaring soundtrack for the many loud arguments and heated discussions raging in that marginal netherworld of petty crime and sleepless vice.

      In the pre-dawn hours there, the boisterous barroom debates raging beneath Narcisa’s window would slowly escalate, steadily rising in crescendo like a chaotic pounding doomsday symphony, often culminating in a pop of gunshots, bottles falling off the rickety tables, breaking like crashing cymbals as the bar’s ragged denizens scrambled like giant rats for cover.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009