AD: I know where and when you started writing it, from an outside perspective anyway, because I was around when Scabvendor made the transition into what is now Narcisa, but personally, at what point did you start entertaining the idea of actually writing Narcisa as a completely separate project? You said something just before about the material from Scabvender making the “jump” into a whole other book… How did that jump actually happen?

JS: That’s an awesome question, Sailor, cuz it really takes me back to the time this all jumped off like it was yesterday…  But I’m still not really sure. I gotta think about this for a minute… Yeh, it was right before Carnaval, coming up on New Years 2006-2007, and you had come to Brazil with me to start learning the ropes as a literary editor. Talk about the blind leading the blind, hein? (laughs)... We were sitting at my office at that little shack by the ocean in Ipenema every day writing and reading each other’s shit all day long then for weeks on end. I was working on Scabvender — Confessions of a Tattoo Artist. That project had been sidelined for years at that point because of screenwriting jobs and other random writing projects and I was just getting back into it full time again. It was going along pretty good after a coupla months daily writing there. I’d just gotten up to chapter whatever, where I was writing about a character loosely inspired by this crazy insane psychopath girlfriend I’d had here in Brazil when I was in my twenties… and then suddenly, bam, it’s like she came bursting off the page into my life and it was on. Total obsession… I guess that was it.

While I was in that weird magical daily writing zone working on the other book, suddenly I’d started hanging out around with another girl who reminded me of some girls I’d known and been intimately involved with many years before. It only became clear to me though when I took the first step back into the past through the whole writing process, unraveling these old ghosts and then right in the middle of it all I started going through some old journals I’d found and dug out all those old notes and then all this stuff was suddenly revealed to me from a more objective point of perspective… and from that point on, I just kept going, kept digging into these character’s lives as they mysteriously emerged onto the pages…

Well, with my own long personal history as a drug addict, I just felt an immediate empathy for this character’s plight as I was writing it, ya know, and as one thing led to another, I fell right into the character’s orbit and, well, the rest is pretty much history…  there’s not much I can add to the whole story here. Some of it is derived from true stories and random incidents and other things are made up or taken from other people’s experiences and stories they told me about themselves and other people they knew. The character of Narcisa is definately not based on any one real person, but rather a composite character, a sort of literary Frankenstein monster pieced together out of many people I’ve known or imagined. That’s what makes it fiction in the truest sense of the word, the freedom to mix fact and fantasy and strain it through the artist’s imagination… but I guess what I’m trying to get to is how to answer your question, which was how did I suddenly end up switching channels from the book I’d been writing, Scabvender, and end up writing a totally different book, this whole seven-headed monster that ended up as a two book saga known as Narcisa. That’s a good question. I still wonder how that shit happened myself (laughs)… To answer your question though, I never once really ever consciously ‘entertained’ the idea of writing anything remotely like Narcisa… It’s one of those things that just sorta happens as if by its own accord.

AD: What about the more recent part of the process? The days and nights you spent in over the months of sitting down and writing up to the point where the first rough edition of Narcisa was turned in for publication with Heartworm?

JS: Yeh, well what I described before was only the first stage of the process that had just sorta happened without me even knowing it way way back then… those old survivalist notes I’d taken many years before. Then there was the other present-day phase. I think that’s what you’re talking about now… The real nitty-gritty technical ‘work’ of sorting through all those old yellowed, blood-stained journals and working them into a real book now. The rewrite, the endless hours of editing and polishing and shaping and delving and contemplating and rewriting again and again and again. Putting on an editor’s hat and reading it out loud to other writers and friends like you… then getting some objective feedback and criticism before going back in with a rusty hatchet to murder all my precious little darlings…

That phase was a lot more boring and conventional than the stuff the book is made of which I’d basically lived through as a teenager and scribbled down as journal entries in the middle of that crazy raging shit-storm. When the material from Scabvender made the jump into Narcisa, I mostly spent months and months just sitting at a table in front of a computer, far removed from the time and the scenes of the crimes, writing compulsively, putting all those old hastily scrawled battlefield notes into some sort of literary form and piecing it together with more recent events and impressions…

That’s when I basically dropped off the face of the planet for months on end, sitting at tables in sidewalk cafes in different cities around the world reading and transcribing and writing and rewriting and editing all this stuff compulsively for ten to fifteen hours a day. It’s a very lonely process and a lot of tears were shed as I sat there trying to make sense of my life and all these recurring themes and nightmares and painful relationship issues in that limbo state of deep solitary contemplation. It can be incredibly painful, a real cathartic sort of growing process for a writer emotionally when you’re writing about that sort of shit, whether it’s truth or fiction, because all good fiction has its roots in truth, at least your perception of it on a very deep level. At least that’s been my experience with the whole deal… My friend Joe Coleman, the visionary painter described it as me vivisecting my own soul. It really did feel a lot like something like that… Most of the time I had to write it while sitting in well-lit public places, coffee houses and restaurants surrounded by other writers or whatever. I guess just being around other human beings is a sort of comforting placebo when you’re doing that sort of really deep, painful soul-rending work.

A good chunk of it was written sitting in the back of Kat Von D’s tattoo shop in Hollywood while she carved away at people’s skin. I guess misery loves company (laughs)... At the end of a day’s work, sometimes I’d read the new chapters to her and her boyfriend at the time, Orbie Orbison. They were a great audience and gave me alot of encouragement during a very fucked up, painful time for me. Other times I’d just sit in these coffee houses around Los Angeles with other writers like you and Amy (Jonathan’s ex-girlfriend and best friend, Amy Fields, who’s also a working on a memoir) and we’d all sit there drinking coffee and eating snacks and writing and hanging out together like a bunch of scared children holding hands and humming together in the dark, remember?

AD: Yep. Those were good times.

JS: So there’s a little snapshot of a day in the life of my fucked up little journey…  the dirty work. It ain’t all glamor, baby, I can sure tell ya that!  But you already know that. You were there with me through most of it…

AD: So how did these old journal entries wind up turning into a whole novel for Narcisa? Describe the process for that...

JS: Ok, well, as you know, it all started when I began working on this big long memoir, Scabvender- Confessions of a Tattoo Artist. I’d been working on that book for years, on and off. At some point I was working from this pile of old notes and journal entries I’d written back in the 70’s when I’d been in a really tempestuous relationship with this crazy junkie chick who ended up dying of an overdose. That had really fucked me up back then. I was constantly taking notes while I lived through all that madness back then before she died. Somehow all that writing got saved and I was referring to those old notes and short stories while I was writing Scabvender… I dunno how that shit survived all the years as I traveled around the world like a crazy ghost. But it did. Then all these years later I dredged it all out of an old suitcase that I found stashed in a pile of wierd shit in my mother’s basement after she passed away… Opening up those notebooks more than 30 years later was like opening up the mummy’s tomb or something… In retrospect I think it was almost like some sort of unconscious survival mechanism going on in me back when I’d written all that shit… I never thought I’d live to see twenty back then anyway. My general attitude at the time it was all going on was probably something like, ”ok, as long as I’m going to hell here, I may as well take alot of pictures along the way… leave something behind for posterity or whatever,” ya know?

Those old notes I took were those pictures, so to speak. Then all these years later there they were, as if they’d just been sitting there waiting for me to reincarnate someday and come dig them up and do something with them. So they were all eventually arranged and rearranged into these little literary scrapbooks like a sorta big, bizarre jigsaw puzzle… It eventually all fit together into a sort of roadmap showing me just where to go. Somehow I survived the trip and even got clean and sober and came back to that terrible crime scene to write a book about it all these years later, throwing in bits and pieces of shit I picked up along the way, right up to the present time when I was ordering all these crazy impressions and memories into a work of fiction set in the present…

to be continued

AD: Describe a day in your life as this novel was being written.

JS: I just did!! (Laughs)... Seriously though, I’m gonna give you a quote from the author’s note here and then try and elaborate on it a bit for you to answer that question. (Picks up the manuscript and reads…)

“The characters of Narcisa and her partner in crime, Cigano stormed into my life one day like a pair of angry children demanding to be written. From that point onward I didn’t so much write about these characters as submit to their lives, as in a sort of spiritual surgery… Documenting each character’s ‘experiences’ in a maddening web of surreal shared hallucinations as though following a couple of soot-faced miners going back down again and again into the heart of my own festering, inflamed, infected wounds.”

Personally I was going through alot of the emotions described by the character of Cigano, the first person narrator in the book at the time a lot of the notes for what would eventually develop into the book were originally written over 30 years ago, back before I quit writing and started running around the world, all this crazy day to day stuff that I’d furiously scribbled into these little junkie poetry notebooks I aways used to carry around with me in my back pocket back in the day. I went through a lot of ball-point pens back then…

The book is totally a work of fiction, but like I said in the author’s note, this sort of fiction, like all art, is deeply rooted in real life experience. For me that experience was deeply surreal, disturbing, compelling and absolutely unavoidable at the time I lived it. A day in my life as I wrote most of this shit, at least the initial notes for what would eventually become the book, was like a day in the life of a combat soldier caught in raging enemy crossfire. Very spooky. But fun too. After all, there was always alot of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll going on in my life…

Besides being a junkie I’d always been an adrenaline junkie, always been real attracted to high-risk adventure and extreme experience. The experiences that eventually jumped out of the memoir I was writing and brought this whole seperate book into being were very real and very compelling at the time I lived them. Most of them really took place many many years ago in a different time and place far from the present day setting I put it into when I wrote Narcisa more recently in Rio…

So you could say the bulk of it was mostly written in another incarnation altogether. Unfortunately, I was way too strung out on dope myself back then to ever be able to put them into any sort of coherent perspective, let alone write about them other than the crazy notes I worked from later when I went to finally sit down and write this book. That all came later, came to me in a sort of trancelike series of very realistic sort of déjà vu visions and half-memories, stone cold sober now, but under the influence of something much bigger than anything I would ever deign to try and classify… Hallucinations, albeit persistant ones, to quote Einstein’s take on reality….

to be continued

AD: So would you say that was a pretty significant milestone in your own spiritual journey?

JS: Oh yeh, all that was pretty significant and all… It was like an invitation from the spirit world to pay attention, especially to whatever might be revealed to me through some sort of persuit of the Umbanda. Well, one thing led to another and a year or so later when I moved back to Brazil, I just started getting all these random invitations to visit different spiritist centers and Umbanda terreiros, places which were like high portals to the spirit wold and stuff. And I started going. And right from the jump I learned I was a Filho de Ogum, someone under the care and guidence of São Jorge or Ogum, the warrior spirit of protection and spiritual awakening and realization in the Umbanda doctrine, and I just kept delving deeper and deeper into it with the help of different spiritual advisors here, mostly followers of the Umbanda. 

     I’ve gotten a lot of help and strength through these practices and beliefs over the years, even though I’m not really an expert on it. Some people I know certainly are though and they are my spiritual advisors and daily therapists. But when you start hanging out on the margins of these spirit cults, you kinda get drawn in deeper and deeper and all sorts of strange, wonderful things start to happen.

    Today I have no doubt that I’m being guided and protected and fortified by powers way beyond any human power and I’m really grateful for all the roads they’ve been opening in my life, I really am. And the more I hang out around the people who really practice this stuff, the more I come to realize how little I actually do know. But I keep doing it and studying since I always know full well that more will be revealed to me over time and I’m really not in any big hurry anyway… I’m just glad to be stumbling along some sort of spiritual path that helps me to be a better person, a more effective warrior and servant. And I’ve seen this stuff literally save lives and enrich people’s lives again and again… so for me there’s always a good reason to keep seeking more knowlege and understanding of the Umbanda….

    But on another level, it’s like, be careful what you pray for, cuz when you’ve got as much messed up faulty programming stuck in your hard drive, the kinda warped concepts and surreal logic it takes to make an alcoholic or drug addict tick like a fucking time bomb as the gates to hell and self-destruction creak open, the road back will certainly take you through some pretty uncomfortable, scary territory too… The Umbanda seems to open those healing channels in very dynamic ways… And while you’re going through that whole cleansing process, it really can feel a whole lot like drug withdrawal or an excorcism or something. It’s a very weird process to work your way through, man… like living a day at a time somewhere between a nightmare and a state of Grace…

to be continued

AD: How did you find out that you were ’sensitive’ to the Spirit World?

Well, it was an ongoing process of just, I dunno, opening up the channels to it, maybe sort of spontaneously just going through the creative process itself. It’s a very powerful force once you hit a certain level of willingness to just let go and seek guidance from higher powers, I think, and then all sorts of bizarre things just start to open up, as if you just conjured a genie out of a lantern or something…

Like this one time I was sitting up in this friend’s house in LA way up in the hills there, this place where I’d been staying right after I moved out of Johnny Depp’s house. I was right in the middle of working on this big long outline for my book, Scabvender, which had somehow eventually morphed along the way into this screenplay I was writing at Johnny Depp’s insistence, the one I did a rewrite of with the great Hubert Selby… Anyway that was a very deep sort of digging process, a lot of very heavy writing that was taking me back into some very painful, uncomfortable areas of my past, my fucked up childhood, all that sorta shit and there I was dealing with all these heavy memories, holed up in this empty house up in the middle of the hills above LA, totally isolated from humanity and surrounded by all these terrible trauma spirits from the past nipping at my ass like the cackling demon hordes of hell. I’d never felt so all alone, not since I was a little child, and it was a really scary time for me, like revisiting all those old childhood terrors. But I just felt it was something I had to do for my own recovery, sorta like a big, long exorcism, exorcizing demons of childhood traumas and fears and hatreds or something…

So there I was up there in the hills all alone going through this terrible solitary psychic inventory process. Nobody ever came up there to visit and I’d been staying there for months on end and hadn’t seen a living soul the whole time. Then one Sunday morning really early I was sleeping on the sofa there and suddenly there’s just this knock on the door, really loud. I jumped up and went to the door to see what it was and it was just some random lost guy looking for some other address or whatever. After he went away, I tried to go back to sleep, but as I lay there on the sofa, I just kinda heard this little inner voice in my head, very clear, telling me that this was something important, like an omen or something, a call to get up right away and get out of there… It was a very clear intuition I had right then, telling me I was supposed to stay awake and go out onto the street.

Well I’d been doing a lot of praying and asking for guidence over the few months prior as I was going through this whole process and reading and studying a lot of heavy metaphysical texts and so on, so I didn’t even question it. I just got up and threw some clothes on and stumbled right out the door. I got in my car and started it and just drove down the hill, still praying the whole time for direction and orientation, for guidence, having no idea where I was going or anything like that.

It was Sunday morning, really early in the morning and the streets of Echo Park were completely deserted. When I got down to Sunset Boulavard, I hung a right and just drove down this big empty deserted avenue, praying for guidence and driving along with no particular destination…

AD: This was when you were staying up at Billy Shire’s house up in Echo Park, right? (Billy Shire, owner of the infamous La Luz de Jesus underground art gallery in Los Angeles)

JS: Yep, that’s the place. Well, Billy was mostly staying with his girlfriend at the time and he had kindly lent me his house to sort of hole up in and get away from the world there for a while. A really great friend. But, man, what a lonely place to be, especially at that particular time in my life. It was like a horror movie, a haunted house or something. Creepy… No wonder he never came home (laughs)... Shit like that, Los Angeles has always just given me the creeps, all these big lonely isolated homes up there in the hills, nobody even knows anybody there. Not my kinda place… I prefer action. I’m one of those people who can’t get to sleep without the sound of screams and gunshots and breaking glass (laughs)...

But anyway, there I was just driving along with nowhere to go and suddenly the car I’m driving just goes ‘CLUNK’ and stops right there in the middle of the street. What the fuck? I try starting the motor and nothing… it’s just completely dead. Shit.  So I get out of the car there and lift the hood. Nothing. I was never much of a mechanic. So there I am scratching my head in the middle of this big empty avenue at like 8 o’clock in the morning and it’s this gloomy Sunday and there’s absolutely no sign of life anywhere, like one of those old Charlton Heston movies, last man on earth kinda thing… and I’m looking up and down the avenue, asking God to tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do next, just feeling totally retarded, right?

Then suddenly I see this big red pickup truck coming along down the road. I’m standing there next to this burned out car with the hood up and this big red pickup truck with Texas plates pulls right up to me and stops. Well I go up to the driver’s window to see if they can give me a hand, and I see it’s this lady and she’s smiling at me, asks me if I need some help. Well I sure did. LA is one city you don’t wanna be stuck without wheels, believe me, anybody who’s ever been there knows what I mean, so I asked her if she could just give me a push with her truck to move the dead car over to the side of the road and she does. Once the thing’s parked there at the curb, she asks me if I needed a ride somewhere. Well I remembered I had my motocycle still parked over by Johnny Depp’s house and I asked her if she could give me a ride over there to get it. She said sure, get in and I did.

Well as soon as I got into the pickup truck with her I noticed for the first time that there was something strange about her. She was this blond, blue eyed white woman, but she was dressed all in white flowing gowns and wearing a lot of guias, the long glass beads necklaces they wear in ceremonial Umbanda rituals. She had a white scarf tied around her head and just carried this whole otherworldly aura, it was very strange. Well we started making small talk and she told me she’d just that minute arrived in Los Angeles after driving all the way from Texas. Sure enough the back of the pickup truck was packed with all her stuff and she had a couple of really big dogs back there. She told me she’d just come from to Texas from Haiti, where she’d been studying with a heavy voodoo cult, something like Umbanda and had gotten some guidance to just pack up and go to Texas and drive to the west coast and that’s just what she’d done. I told her I recognized her as a spirit worker, that I’d kinda grown up in Brazil and so on. Suddenly she just pulled the car over to the side of the road and… started to incarnate some other being. Then she started talking to me, like this other spirit was just talking to me through her, telling me all sorts of heavy things, giving me answers to some of my deepest questions and doubts and conflicts…. amazing!

We musta sat there for hours like that by the side of the road as she basically told me all this really heavy stuff about my life and my own spiritual destiny. I had my little pocket note pad out and was scribbling it down like crazy, trying to get it down, cuz I intuitively knew it was some really important stuff I was being told. And it all made perfect sense. All of it. After that she just dropped me off and rode away and I never saw her again. Oh yeh, another detail… she had told me she was a recovering alcoholic too, right before she shape-shifted into this crazy clarvoiant spiritual entity or whatever…

to be continued

AD: Tell me about your real life involvement with the Umbanda spirit cults I know you are a part of there in Brazil .

FOR BACKGROUND INFO ON UMBANDA CLICK HERE

JS: Well, that’s sort of related to your last question in a lot of ways, I think. Because once the channels started to open up for me from studying first the Twelve Steps that led me to The Artist’s Way, and then all of a sudden it was just really on, rolling like a snowball picking up more and more momentum, ya know? And then all these crazy mysterious little things started happening more and more. One thing lead to another and they’re still happening today. Big time…

In that book she (Julia Cameron) talks a lot about synchronicity, synchronicity… And suddenly I started to really experience that firsthand in all these weird, mystical happenings taking place in my life that sort of let me know I was really on to something and it was slowly coming together, like some higher destiny unfolding as I moved forward with my recovery and my writing. The two things are pretty much inseparable to me now. Writing is my primary spiritual practice, my closest contact to God or whatever you wanna call it…

As far as the Umbanda, I don’t really know as much about it as some people think I do. A lot of my Umbanda practice is by way of a sort of intuitive blind faith, rather than any specific knowlege of the secret arts. I’ve always had a certain fascination with that kinda stuff and I’m always willing to learn as much as I can about it. But when it comes to secret sciences and specific metaphysical doctrines, I’ve always been sort of a spiritual nomad, just kinda going with the flow and following my heart and intuition wherever it leads me.

Iemanja. Goddess of the Ocean

Now I’d already lived on and off in Brazil for over 30 years by the time I ended up consciously seeking the Umbanda as a spiritual path… And being basically  Brazilian at heart, I’d always been marginally exposed to the Umbanda, Macumba, Candomblé and all that sort of voodoo stuff, mostly just because it’s just so much a part of the day to day culture here, it’s pretty hard not to have some sort of casual exposure to it… But until then I’d never really gotten into any of it, not consciously anyway, even though it was always around, like a sort of invisible network of invisible spirits you just sort of feel in the air if you’re in any way sensitive to that kinda stuff…

São Jorge slaying the dragon

to be continued