70. TRUE ROMANCE

“You’re never too old to grow up.” — Shirley Conran

After eating in comfortable silence for awhile, I asked Antonio how he was doing. Suddenly he started confiding to me about his dilemma with the current girlfriend.
I’d met the girl with him the last time I’d seen him at the beach and was duly impressed. A gorgeous, well-known Brazilian supermodel whose picture was on the cover of all the fashion magazines. She’d seemed like a pretty good egg to me at the time. Real down to earth and very spirited and natural for such a high class bitch. She had an open manner and an easy laugh to offset her almost intimidating beauty. A class act. I told him she seemed pretty sweet to me.
“Well that’s the problem, Cigano. This girl’s driving me crazy. She’s a little too sweet! And too open with her manners for my liking sometimes, flirts with other guys right in front of me. She was raised without any social graces. Very low class upbringing. And she’s bossy, faces me head on. Like a man.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, man,” I said. “Sounds like the girl’s just got some spirit.”
“Yes, well it’s a little too much spirit for me,” he lamented. “She curses like a sailor, and she eats with her mouth open. No class at all. And she has so many goddamned opinions about everything.”
He looked like a little boy who didn’t get what he wanted from Santa. I could sort of relate. Still I chose to play the devil’s hand.
“Opinions. Hmm. Sound like anybody you know?” I said.
“But I’m a man, Cigano. I’m very well educated. It’s different. It’s just not right, it’s not a woman’s place.”
“I never knew you were so old fashioned, Antonio,” I laughed.
“It’s not about being old fashioned, Cigano. But there are limits! Standards! She’s a pig!” He cried.
I laughed out loud.
“Seriously, Cigano! Before she began seeing me, she’d already spread it around to every other guy in the world. I’ve heard all sorts of things.”
“Promiscuous, hein? Hmm. Sound like anybody you know again?” I said again.
“Mother of God! Its not the same. I’m a man.” He whimpered.
I laughed. He looked at me with that good old ‘poor me’ hang dog victim look I know so well.
“So why do ya keep going out with her then, hein? Ever ask yourself that?” I said.
He looked around the little restaurant as if making sure nobody was listening. Then he looked at me again with a look of desperation.
“She’s got me, Cigano,” he whispered. “I am. Screwed! Please pardon the expression. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I suppose I’m sort of in love with this damned vixen. God help me.”
He really looked as if he was telling me he’d just been diagnosed with rectal cancer. I could understand. His whole world was going down the shitter. A confirmed card-carrying old-school Brazilian playboy can’t afford to fall in love with one of his “conquests.” It just goes against the whole program.
“So why don’t you just dig in and enjoy the ride, man?” I said, smiling widely. “Shit, Antonio, it’s good to be in love. It’s the best fucking thing in the world! What’s the big problem here?”
“That’s the point, Cigano,” he said. “I don’t want to be in love! Not with someone like her.”
“Why the hell not?”
“She’s just not my type.”
“And what’s your type, hein?”
He shrugged helplessly.
“Maybe she is your type and ya just didn’t know it before she came along.” I suggested.
That drew a blank, so I dug in a little deeper.
“Antonio, if you’re so hung up on this chick, there’s gotta be something going on.”
He was quiet again for a moment, seemingly lost in thought this time. Finally he looked at me with a bewildered expression.
“Maybe there is,” he said. “But, there’s just something missing.”
“Such as?”
“A certain innocence,” he said. “I want a girl who has … purity.”
Purity?
“You’re a sick fucking pervert!” I screamed, laughing till my eyes watered.
Antonio started to laugh too, despite himself. I’d got him. Takes one to know one.
“Jesus, Antonio, look at you, man! Ya meet a fucking soul mate, a beautiful intelligent famous young supermodel who fucks like a demon and hangs out like a man, who can drink you under the table, and she’s your equal in every other way too, a fucking female version of you. And she’s even got her own fame and fortune, so ya know she’s not some fucking gold digging whore! And you’re still not satisfied? Just because she was born below your fucking social class and had to hustle her way up? What? That’s not enough character for you? What the fuck? You should be thanking yer lucky stars, man! But no!! Now the first thing you wanna do is swap her in for some clueless beige little upper class doll-face virgin schoolgirl who you can stick your dick into her eyeball and destroy her and sully and corrupt her life and move on again! Just so you can feel like you’re in control. Control what? You are an evil old pedophile, my friend! You are a very bad man! Repent!!”
I howled with laughter. He looked at me with a look of horror that confirmed I totally had his number.
“But I’m not cynical like you, Cigano,” he pleaded. “ I still believe in true love. True romance, courtship.”
That one set off a new burst of hysterical laughter. Finally I caught my breath.
“You’re a fucking sex-crazed perverted old pussy fiend and a drooling love junkie. Just like me. But when the game goes to the next level, then suddenly ya don’t wanna play anymore. I can sure relate to that shit. This is exactly what me and Narcisa are practically killing each other over, trying to end the fucking thing. Neither one of us wanted to fall in love. Love is bad for business for people like us. We’re loners. But we couldn’t kill each other and we couldn’t kill the fucking thing either. No matter how hard we’ve both tried. And believe me, we’ve tried. Shit. It’s like were stuck with each other now. Fuck, man, that shit has really had me thinking a lot.”
“So what did you figure out with all this thinking, Cigano?” Antonio asked.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

Here’s another outtake from the new edit of Narcisa

69. Lunch With Antonio

“In my friend I find a second self.” Isabel Norton

I got the call right after she crashed the next afternoon. My friend Antonio.
“Wanna join me for lunch, Cigano?”
Antonio was the notorious black sheep of a very powerful and influencial family in Rio de Janeiro, something like the Brazilian equivilant of the Rockerfellers or Rothschilds. Masters. Rulers. Empire builders. Captains of Industry. High-ranking Freemasons. The Hidden Hand. Politics. Banking. Wealth. Power. Influence. The works.
For all that though, Antonio was a pretty nice cat. A hard drinking bon-vivant bohemian Brazilian playboy with a glad eye for lots of top shelf pussy. A big fan of writers like Keroac, Bukowski, Baudeleire and the like too. And, like so many people of his privileged rank and status in life, Antonio was an avid people collector.
We’d met through a mutual acquaintance at a party up in Santa Teresa back while Narcisa was still away, missing, married to the gringo in New York. Once Antonio had established that I was an authentic “beatnik,” an eccentric world traveling half gypsy ex-con and a lowbrow poet and aspiring novelist to boot, it didn’t take him very long to add me to his private collection of exotic people.
We’d run into each other a few more times at the beach after our first meeting and he’d invited me to a few exclusive parties and elite intellectual social gatherings. Then over time, a strange, unlikely friendship had developed between two people from very different worlds. Eventually I became almost like a sort of fucked up father figure to the guy. For some reason he respected my opinions about life’s larger issues.
I’d even attempted to maneuver him into an A.A. meeting once after he’d called me in the middle of the night drunk, crying, all messed up and completely demoralized, having gotten beaten up and robbed after going out drinking with the wrong people. The next morning after he sobered up, hung over and repentant, he’d called me again to apologize for the night before. I took the high road and jumped on an opportunity to try and help him out with what I suspected his real problem was.
I’d told him some more of my own hard luck drinking stories, freely stressing my recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous for him this time around. Why the hell not just give it to him straight? The worst that could happen was he’d just tell me to fuck off and then find a new kook for his collection. Then at a strategic moment I’d lowered the net and asked him if he’d like me to take him to “one of those meetings.”
Somewhat reluctantly he’d conceded and away we went. He’d sat there for the obligatory hour, listening politely. But, with all his wealth and power and powerful connections, Antonio had a problem with the concept of his being “powerless” over anything, much less his ability to control and enjoy his chosen hard-drinking, coke-sniffing playboy lifestyle. I guessed he was still having a pretty good time with it all, even with his heavy drinking which sometimes got a bit ‘out of hand.’ But all in all, my friend Antonio was obviously a long way from hitting any real bottom. So of course A.A. hadn’t taken for him, and he’d just continued to fry his high-class liver to a crisp at high-class social gatherings all over town. Meanwhile though, from that day forward an even deeper bond of trust and complicity had developed between us and our friendship had quickly taken wings.
Antonio was already sitting at the crowded lunch counter of a neighborhood seafood joint when I arrived.
“Fala, Cigano!” he shouted gleefully, rising to greet me with a warm embrace and a beery sandpaper kiss on the cheek.
We sat and talked of this and that as the counterman filled his glass with beer and both our plates with spicy exotic crab dishes from the indiginous Amazon Basin.
He asked how I was doing and why I’d effectively disappeared from the beach and everywhere else for the last several months. I filled him in, sharing some of my more dramatic trials, tribulations and high-risk dramas with him. And as we sat there eating, I told him all about Narcisa.
“That’s some crazy stuff, Cigano,” he said, shaking his head in a mixture of shocked humor, disbelief and awe.
“Only you for an adventure like that, man. I can’t believe she actually smokes crack. That’s insane! You are the sickest person i’ve ever known!”
“Hey, amigo,” I said, feigning indignation. “I resemble that remark!!”
“But that’s what I like about you too, I guess, you crazy gypsy” he laughed. “Seriously though, wouldn’t you like to find a better girl? Somebody more on your own level?”
“You mean like ‘the sickest guy you ever knew’ level?” I growled.
“Touche, brother,” he said laughing.
“My pleasure, Antonio,” I said.
“Well, the best of luck to you with her anyway.” He shrugged magnanimously. “Looks like you really got a live one there. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“i’ve never known what the fuck I’m doing, man. But I guess i’ll find out, right? Anyway, a live one beats a dead one, Antonio. What the fuck else am I gonna do, hein? Go sit around a buncha boring high class Ipanema social gatherings with you and yer fancy friends and try to score with some nice little well-bred milk-fed rich patricinha girl?”
“Works alright for me, my friend,” Antonio shrugged, taking another slug of his beer.
“Yeah, well, not all of us can be millionaire playboys, amigo. Shit, their rich mafia politician daddies would have my dirty old gypsy ass kidnapped and fed to their pedigree Rottweilers. Anyway, I kinda like fishing in the poluted waters of the love pond.”
“I guess it’s alright if you don’t mind eating three headed fish that glow in the dark.” He laughed.
“Keeps my life interesting at least,” I conceded.
“You will never die of boredom, Cigano!” He declared.
“Amen, brother!” I said. “And that’s all i’ve ever fucking wanted for Christmas.”
We sat there and ate. The food tasted especially good after weeks of subsisting on cold pizza and stale crackers with Narcisa.

Hey Guys- Just pulled an excerpt from Jonathan’s new edit of Narcisa for a sneak peak.

CHRIST THE REDEEMER-

“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”  – Carl Jung

She had another freaky vision later that day in the park that slowly blossomed into a full-blown obsession. Suddenly she’d gotten it into her head that the gigantic white statue of Christ the Redeemer watching over Rio from Corcovado Mountain was made of solid crack cocaine rock. That’s right. She’d managed to convince herself that the drug was cleverly hidden there by the evil Freemasons she’d been obsessed with ever since her surreal childhood.

When she first told me that shit, man, I just looked at her the way you look at some terrible calamity, with a mixture of disbelief, shock and pity. She caught it. Narcisa missed nothing.

“Why you look it me like the crazy peoples, Cigano, hein? This is real truth I e’say it to you man, believe it!”

I listened as her delusional vision unfolded.

“Why the fock you think it is so many the gringo an’ the policia an’ the tourista van, all the time these peoples go go go always up to there, hein? For look on it the vista? These e’sheet e’stupid man. Nobody gonna go on the big airplane for go so far to here from the Europa an’ the Ja-pon only for go look it e’stupid vista. They only come to here for get it the drug, man, for take it away to they home. All the South America freebase crack rock!”

She told me that the real reason for all the interest in the statue of Christ was the international drug trade. Hundreds of sinister foreign agents and globe-trotting James Bond-like drug traffickers disguised as silly tourists with cameras and back packs and stupid shorts and t-shirts, all going back and forth, to and from the huge white statue of Cristo Redentor. Taking all that crack away on all those big jet airplanes flying around overhead. Away to strange malevolant underground compounds in Japan and Europe and the United States. Aliens. Secret Societies. Satanic Rituals. Ungodly Hybrid Breeding Experiments. Secret Things.

I asked her how she explained the fact that the statue had been there for almost a century. How would it still be there if they were selling it off piecemeal to her sinister legion of foreign drug runners?  She was ready for me there.

They simply replaced all the original pure crack with this new laboratory manafactured, transgenically engineered toxic mind control substances. That’s the shit they’re really selling up in the favelas now. Which also conveniently explained why she’d been having so much trouble lately – mental trouble. The same reason that everybody was shooting each other up there in the hillside ghettos. The so-called Drug Wars are really just a neurotic side effect of the Bad Gringo Replacement Substance in the drugs. Fucking up everybody’s buzz, turning all the normally passive, peace-loving crackheads and drug gangs all stressed out and homicidal now. Damn!

And she soon became totally obsessed with finding some way to bypass the thundering armies of police and tourists and secret government agents. A way to tap into the dwindling mother lode of crack up there. Before it was completely depleted. It even got to the point over time where whenever we went near Copacabana or any other place there were tourists, she flew into a big frenzied panic, convinced all the crowds of bumbling lost-dog gringos were really all sorts of malevolent secret agents, CIA spies and rival drug dealers and shit. All part of a complex plot to suck away all the drugs hidden up there on the mountain top, cleverly camaflauged as a statue.

The statue of Christ is visible from pretty much everywhere in the city, sitting on top of the highest peak in Rio. Soon she began watching it intently from my balcony. Then one day she looked up and pointed frantically at some sightseeing helicopters buzzing around the statue.

“Look it! Now is almost finish, Cigano. Only remain it the good drug now she on the head! These why they gotta bring it the helicopter, they got it now the e’special machine for es’tract it from the head. Oh Fock! What I gonna do? Make think, man. Think, go go.”

She was really falling. Stark raving mad, crazy. She needed to get to the head of Christ, no more time, go go go! The head of Christ.

I thought about the odd signifigence of her latest psychotic meltdown.

The head of Christ.The Godhead. Enlightenment.

She’d been up for five days this time, absolutely refusing to sleep or even rest for a few moments. She cried big tears of frustration that just broke my heart.

She had to get to the head of Christ!

Finally after all the usual delicate and complex trials and torments of trying to get her to sleep, she just raved and ranted about the Christ Head some more and then suddenly went Tilt. Passed right out in mid-rant, light snores coming from her gaping snout.

I thanked the Gods of Chaos who ruled our lives for allowing me to survive yet another day. I fucked her slowly as she slept. Then I rolled over and passed out beside her sleeping carcass, thinking how a man will put up with just about anything as long as his fucking sex drive is satisfied.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

 Pushing past me she tore through my kitchen like a prison riot, banging drawers, slamming cupboards, silverware clattering skittering across the floor, plates and glasses breaking, shattering, crashing as she ripped her way like a maddened baboon through the whole agonizing feeding process. Finally she emerged with a plate overflowing with cold pizza, chocolate cookies, cheese, olives and the usual sticky goo of sugary doce de leite topping off her Daily Mess. She plopped down on the sofa like a stuffed bag of garbage and began tearing through the food.
Crumbs were flying as she talked a nonstop stream of incoherent shit, olive pits scattering to the four winds of hell. Even the roaches on the wall seemed to back off to give her plenty of space.
   “You’re gonna fucking die if ya eat all that shit, baby,” I pleaded.
    “You gonna die you don’ shut the fock up Cigano! Go down the boteco an’ get to me the Coca Cola. Go!”
By now I knew better than to argue when she was recovering from a mission. I moved towards the door.
. “Get to me the packet cigarette too… The good one, you cheap gypsy e’sheet,” she shouted behind me, blowing huge scraps across the room like a witch’s curse, even as she shoveled more gobs of food into her demented little face. I had my hand on the doorknob.
   “An’ da morthes,” she said.
   “What?”
      Was it Portuguese or some weird new favela hooker slang I’d never heard before? You always had to wonder with Narcisa. I looked at her, a standing question mark. Swallowing a mouthful of food with petulant determination, she looked at me like I was an imbecile.
    “The matches, you e’stupid e’sheet, matches! You have go deaf, retard like e’stupid old man, Cigano…”
   As she rolled her eyes like lemons in a broken slot machine, I beat it out the door.
   When I got back she was passed out again. Face up on the sofa, snoring. Her mouth open like a gaping grave, big dirty feet pointing toward the ceiling like a pair of crooked tombstones. I stood over her, holding the sweaty coke bottle like a wilted bouquet, a jilted love-struck farm boy standing there. A survivor in a tornado’s wake, surveying all the damage… Pizza crust and candy wrappers, ashes, cigarette butts littering the floor, the sofa. At least the plate was still intact. A small miracle in itself, I thought gratefully… And she was still alive too.
   There was still hope. I cracked open that blue book called Alcoholics Anonymous and read for many hours, spellbound… The book seemed to be all about Narcisa. And me. Finally I fell asleep…

   Twenty-four hours later she came to. While I was still sleeping, of course. Groggy at first, soon the orders flew at me like squawking birds of prey across the room as I tried to sleep on, covering my head with the pillow. It was no use. Like a foot soldier booted out of his bunk with angry shouts and orders, I was up on my feet running before I was even awake… Back and forth to the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets like an overworked short-order cook in the Devil’s Diner… The feeding frenzy was on again. She finished the last of my food sitting on the toilet, crapping.
    “Today’s the day, Princesa!” I said beaming despite my exhaustion. I opened the shuttered windows to a beautiful sunrise, suddenly grinning at the idea of our long-awaited trip to the Country. The Beginning of
a New Life for us.
   “Shut the fock up, go, e’stupid e’sheet! Close it these focking door an’ get the fock out from here, Cigano, go!” She snapped. “I trying for def’cate. Go!”
    I slunk away like a wounded mutt, started clearing the table and sofa of her latest wreckage. I went into the ravaged kitchen and got busy with that battlefield. Death and devastation everywhere. Many casualties.
   Soon the infernal maddening idiot chatter of the TV filled my ears. I looked back into the darkened room. She’d pulled the shudders tight again and was sitting there like a dummy, hypnotized before the giant glowing eyeball. Zoned out, totally absorbed in a moronic hellscape vision of inane children’s programming. Animated
teddy bears with screeching rat-like voices squeaking lunatic phrases, people dressed as clowns, farmers, witches and goons, all running around squeaking like deranged rodents and butchered pigs. Sweet
bleeding Jesus!
  I watched on in horror as a giant cockroach pranced into the center stage. All the other repulsive creatures made a circle around the wretched thing and began singing, squealing in infuriating high-pitched shrieks. I felt a red cauldron of hate well up in my chest. She just sat there riveted before the screen, sitting in the darkness picking her nose, wiping a cocaine-encrusted booger on the arm of my sofa. Bitch.
    “Baby… We should probably be leaving soon,” I reminded her.
     She responded by throwing the nearest object at me.  An overflowing ashtray, scattering butts and ashes all across the floor I’d just finsihed sweeping clean.
    “Shut the fock up, Cigano, go! Moo-oove, e’stupid! I watching these–”
    That was it. She didn’t finish her sentence before I shot across the room like a disturbed alligator and grabbed her by the throat. I hauled her up off the sofa and pinned her to the wall. Shocked, hateful eyes of outrage popped out of her pimply face as I banged her head against the wall, screaming, spitting in her mug.
   “You have gone too far, bitch!”
   It was on. She fought back and we struggled, knocking plates and furniture asunder. I pinned her to the floor, putting both knees on her arms, gripping her throat firmly in my hands. Finally she relaxed, gave up. She knew she was no match for me. Not when I was pissed like that, anyway.
  But I got over it soon enough. Like I always got over it… Suddenly I felt bad sitting there on top of her. I told her I’d let her up if she promised to stop breaking shit and screaming her lungs out at me.
  She nodded. I let her up… For once, she even kept her word. Maybe she had a headache. But she still wasn’t done.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

Woke up after ten hours on the twelve-hour red-eye flight from Buenos Aires… Sometime around dawn in the dark, dreamlike hum of the airplane cabin I woke with a sudden unearthly chill, my mind filled with strange grey silent movie dreams of Narcisa… Dreams I can’t remember, don’t care to remember, but can’t forget… 

​   Looking out the plane window at dawn, I saw the landscape below, and for a moment I thought of other planets, and now I sit here blurry-eyed and I wonder where on earth this could be… Cold, lunar, alien, miles and miles of eerie, unfamiliar, uninhabitable, inhospitable terrain. Endless craggy hills forever for as far as I can see, and that’s pretty fucking far from ten thousand meters up in the goddamned air… It’s the surface of Mars I see down there… Alpha Centauri, whatever… Not a sign of human life or any other kind of life anywhere below. 

     I search for the map in the magazine on the back of the seat, trying to calculate where in hell this plane could be flying right now. I narrow it down to the interior regions somewhere off the Pacific coast of Mexico. Somewhere over the state of Guerrero maybe. And just that word,Guerrero... It means Warrior, it brings back all the years of memories, stories, songs, sights and smells, tastes and sounds and flavors and sensations of places, people, events. Spirit Music… Things vaguely remembered and carved deep into the fabric of my soul, indelible as hieroglyphic markings on shiny stone pyramid walls of lost Mayan tombs in dark jungles… 

    I look down out of this plane window now but I see no place that in any way resembles that Mexico I once knew so well, the riotous tropical roads traveled by a ragged teenage gypsy hitchhiker running from the Curse, and years later by a road-worn alcoholic biker wearing out the road to hell again and again and again. 

​   Desolation is the only word to describe what I see down there from this surreal vortex, the groggy hangover haze of jet travel limbo… Desolation. A perfect place for a human being to simply disappear and die without a trace and quickly, quietly be absorbed right into the core of this great and terrible Earth… Bones flesh teeth face thoughts eyes heart memory swallowed up like so many base minerals to feed and seed the merciless soil of Nowhere… 

    Lands of boundless dirt and sand and ashes and dust and craters and spirits… Spirits of Indians and Entities and light and shadow falling falling falling down down down with the smell and taste of Nothing… Nowhere. Nothing. The perfect place for Nobody…

    And again I think of my poor Narcisa so far away, so hurt, so damaged and pissed off…Nobody. With the smell and taste of Nothing now. 

copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

Excerpt from the new edition of Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes

For a seasoned prostitute, however, Narcisa sure didn’t care much for sex — at least not with men. And she always did whatever she could to procrastinate or outright avoid the dreaded moment of vaginal
penetration.

She told me of how she would always ask for payment in advance and usually get it, especially from the generally clueless high-rolling gringo tricks she went with in Copacabana and Ipenema. Well schooled in innovative ho-stroll scams by the street-wise punk anarchist squatter girls of the Casa Verde, she told me how, once inside a gringo’s hotel room and having secured her cash up front, she would begin to undress — or at least pretend to. Then, at a strategic moment, unnoticed by the unsuspecting trick, she would reach into her panties and carefully extract a “bloody” tampon soaked in red wine
which she kept stashed there in a ziplock bag.

Then, right before the astonished gringo’s horrified gaze, she would hurl the disgusting wad of wet cotton against the spotless white hotel room wall, where it would stick with a resounding ‘FWAP!’ Narcisa would stand there grinning sheepishly as the bloody-looking red liquid trailed down the wall and her disgusted victim scurried to the door, holding it open for her to leave the room immediately untouched.

“Hah! Perfect, Max! Thank you come again! Next? These e’sheet always work every time for me, Cigano.” she exclaimed, proudly gloating over her clever tricks of trade.

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