Everyone just went about their business and the man continued to read his flaming paper, though by now it was just a mass of smoldering black embers burning in his hands.

I couldn’t understand… I looked out the window then back to the man in front of me. The newspaper was nothing but grey ashes floating in the air and now his hair was on fire! I listened to it sizzle and pop and burn. The stench was overwhelming… But still he just sat there looking straight ahead like nothing was happening.

People sat in their seats talking naturally, casually, calmly looking out the windows. Meanwhile the bus was getting hotter and hotter and hotter.. I had to get out. I stood up…

I reached up and pulled the cord. It fell off right in my hand… Burned in two.

I walked quickly down the aisle to the door. I could smell burning flesh and hair. Droplets of sweat drenched my body. As the bus pulled up to the next stop, I pushed the exit button and glanced across the aisle. A chubby young woman with long dark hair noticed me looking and winked… Then her hair burst into flames! She started laughing. She kept staring at me as the door hissed open… I could feel her eyes burning after me as I staggered out onto the wet pavement.

I stood there and breathed and l watched the bus roll off. I could still hear her awful laughter rolling away with it… I stood watching the bus until it turned a corner and disappeared.

Then I felt the first drop. I looked up and saw the rain suddenly coming down over my bare head… I looked around. It was suddenly dark as night and the streets were deserted. The pavement was slick with rain and it reflected a beautiful shimmering greenish blue light… A neon sign blinking steadily on and off halfway down the block.

I pulled my thin wet jacket up around my neck and walked down to where the sign was. It said BAR.

I pulled the big wooden door open and stepped inside.

There were about fifteen men sitting around at different tables in sweaty undershirts and short sleeves. I sat down at the bar and ordered a double bourbon. As the bartender made out my change, he looked up.

“Hot enough for ya?” he said.

I ignored him and sipped at my drink and he walked off down the bar, polishing a glass.

There were two men sitting at the other end of the bar drinking beer. I watched them distactedly. One man turned to the other with a cigarette in his hand.

“Got a light?” he said.

“Sure,” the other man said.

I watched as he reached into a briefcase sitting on an empty bar stool beside him. He pulled out a huge blowtorch and aimed it at the other man’s head and turned it on full force. There was a big whooooosh as flame consumed the other man’s head.

I looked down and drained my glass. I heard what was left of the man with the cigarette say “thanks, pal.”

I bolted for the door and ran off down the street into the rainy world.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

“It’s raining again today,” someone said.

Raining, I thought. Yeh. Raining. Right. Raining P’s a Q’s all over the world. Cats & Dogs. Cadillacs and Spaghetti Westerns. Whatever…

Actually, it wasn’t at all the kind of day you’d expect any talk of rain… It must’ve been over a hundred degrees in Downtown Los Angeles, and if it was raining anywhere, I sure as shit didn’t notice in the surging heat of the moment. I’d already set fire to my bathroom earlier that afternoon, but that’s another story…

As if that wasn’t enough, Wilshire Boulevard was absolutely glowing now, completely bathed in this terrible apocalyptic red hot mist shimmering from building to building like a mirage all the way down the line.

As I stood waiting for the bus, every breath I took was like a burning dry gasp of Moroccan desert dust. Armageddon… And some idiot on the bus stop thinks it’s raining…

“Well, maybe it is,“ I muttered to myself, handing the bus driver my two bits. Maybe it is raining in Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong or Madagascar…

The driver flashed me a strange glance as he handed me the ticket and the bus took off into the traffic. I walked up the aisle and sat down in an empty seat near the back by the window and waited.

I didn’t think of rain anymore as the bus rolled along the hot shiny black asphalt. I looked out the window. People scurried about like flaming red ants. It was quite a spectacle. The bus rolled on and it seemed to get hotter and hotter as I sat there watching the world burn outside.

People got on and off at different stops. They sat talking and reading newspapers as it got hotter and hotter and hotter in there. Pretty soon the heat was absolutely stifling. It began to make me nervous. Suddenly, FOOOF! A newspaper flares up in a man’s hands right in front of me, burning up as if a torch had been set to it from below.

to be continued…

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

by Jonathan Shaw

One day he decided that the room was too much for him to take anymore. It wasn’t even a conscious decision on his part; he just woke up that morning (afternoon really) and scanned the bile-colored
peeling green walls and something quite apart from his rational mind said “Enough.”

A half an hour later he was walking quickly down the busy street he’d come to know so well. Little suitcase in hand, he knew exactly how far he was from the bus station. And he was feeling better already. Lighter somehow, and more awake than he had felt in months. Months and months. The months were suddenly and quickly buried behind him like a serial killer’s murder victims now, and he was glad as he strode into the little Greyhound Bus station on Vine… Behind him, his room with two months rent unpaid, his cheap Salvation Army typewriter and twenty pounds of paper: aborted short stories, unremarkable poems, rejected novel… all behind him now.

He sat down in the small dark bar across the street from the station, waiting for the bus that would take him away. Away from his one dirty window’s view of the alley full of trash and rusty shopping
carts and broken bottles and grey, wandering winos. Away from the lonely nights of cheap wine and impossible dreams and the peeling wallpaper that had been his life, his entire stay in Los Angeles.

And he felt glad as he sat there sipping his bourbon and water. Glad that he was getting out at last. Glad that he wouldn’t have to listen to the landlady screaming and her husband’s lumbering drunken curses as he beat her late at night. He was especially glad that he’d skipped out on the rent, the typewriter, the whole fucking show. It was over now and he was very very glad.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim, morbid lighting of the bar, he could make out the figure of a young Mexican girl standing by the jukebox, lingering like a shadow. She looked crazy. Like all the girls he’d known in Los Angeles… He gulped down the rest of his drink and slapped some change down on the counter. He took one last glance around the bar, the dirty mirror and the rows of watered-down rat poison, the crazy girl, the monkey-faced bartender…

Then he got up and walked to the door. The smell of stale piss and dried up death lingered in his nostrils as he hit the street, smiling.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Rio De Janeiro, 1973

As if on cue, a loud discussion broke out among the guys playing cards at the table off to the back as one guy with an enormous gut protruding from a frayed open shirt produced an enormous butcher knife and began waving it around drunkenly.

The two armed guys who’d been standing talking easily said something derisive and walked out into the street waving their arms in disgust as if the whole scene was beneath their dignity. I figured that was as good a time as any to take my leave too and stood up, paying the poker-faced barman who gave me a quick mechanical thumbs up with out taking his hooded eyes off the ensuing confusion at the back as though he’d seen it all before.

So had I, I thought ironically now as I walked out into the dirty night.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Rio De Janeiro, 1973.

I suddenly felt myself becoming perceptive to the unseen wave lengths around me, like a baby cockroach testing its antenna. It wasn’t a sense of immediate danger or even subtle menace that struck me, so much as a sense of a new kind of awareness that had suddenly sprung up inside me. I sensed my surroundings and the sudden knowing that I was in a place here where life was very cheap.

But I felt comfortable, even slightly elated as I casually slid onto a battered stool in a sordid little shack of a bar where a bunch of men sat openly snorting cocaine at a folding tin table littered with glasses of rum and playing cards. A couple of skinny black guys stood against a back wall and I noticed the telltale bulges of rusty revolvers tucked in their waistbands. They gave me an easy, knowing nod as I sat, downing my cheap rum and that was that. Bandits or not, it was obvious from their easy confident stance that one of the unwritten codes was not to shit where they lived. When I ordered a bottle of beer to chases what was left of my cheap rum, feeling a pleasant buzz now and deciding to splurge, the pock-faced barman casually offered me a small cellophane packet of white powder to go with it. I politely refused and the man sitting next to me, a light skinned shirtless flat-faced mulatto casually produced a rumpled bill and handed it to the barman who wordlessly slid the packet to him across the bar.

As easily as that he tore open the packet and emptied the contents, about a gram I guessed, into his glass of rum, stirred it with his finger and then downed the lot in one gulp, cool as a cat. That was a new one, I thought to myself as he slid off the barstool and dropped a coin into a battered jukebox that responded with a scratchy distortion of some otherworldy ancient Brazilian rock and roll. He smiled dreamily, eyes glazed over now as he swayed back and forth.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Rio De Janeiro, 1973.

I stood watching it cross the straight little bridge high up in the air and clatter off rhythmically around a corner up a windy street into the hills and on the other side, disappearing behind an ancient faded yellow building that emerged through a jungle of banana trees and billowing clotheslines. An old negro lady stood surrounded by a group of ragged kids playing on a cluttered open veranda in the humid rum soaked twilight. It was like a camera shutter snapped suddenly behind my eyes and the image was engraved indelibly on the landscape of my soul, never to be forgotten, as though I’d been standing there all along, like an Easter Island statue since before time began.

I stared dumbly into the hills in the growing dusk in the wake of that joyous clattering contraption from another era and I thought of Black Orpheus at the helm of his poetic destiny, rattling up those timeless streets on that very same street car or something very much like it, a ghostlike freeze frame stopped in the time warp of a vagabond heart.

And so I wandered, aimless, through the humid dusty winding streets of shabby neighborhoods, eventually skirting one of the foul-smelling, garbage-strewn rag-tag alleyways that gave entry to a long dusty path leading up into the sprawling squalor of a looming favela beyond, where skeletal shadows of men and women bearing unfathomable burdens began the nearly straight ascent up precarious endless steps up into the crowded miserable shantytown lining the hillside. At the entrance stood a battered black and white paddy wagon where a group of shabby looking grey-uniformed officers lounged smoking cigarettes, compact and menacing little battered black machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. Ghostly dirt patina-ed naked children played mechanically in oblivious patterns of faded joy and ball-chasing frenzy in the septic dusty, shit-stained dirt plaza.

Venturing a hundred yards or so into the low lying part of the favela, I soon sensed myself in a strangely organized sub-world. A weirdly structured “other” city within a very strange city, a place with its own rules and unspoken codes of conduct. The general sense was somewhat mundane, that of normal people living normal lives, but in a totally alien setting, wholly on the black margins of a half crazed society… the outside world beyond. It was hard to fathom something so curious yet unintrusive in the way you could feel, rather than see people’s eyes on you as you strolled along, as though trying ever so subtly to divine your purpose in being there, not unlike the feeling I’d become so used to over so many years of travel when walking the strange but endlessly familiar streets of small villages in the middle of nowhere. But it was much different here, more casual, more disguised, none of the usual gawking stares of children and adults. More of just a vague feeling as the whole place was made of unseen eyes and as the feeling was absorbed and assimilated I could actually feel myself adapting, feel new eyes growing and opening in the back of my own head.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Rio De Janeiro, 1973.

Losing all track of time in my aimless wandering, I soon found myself on a series of winding labyrinthine narrow streets in picturesque Bohemian-looking quarter, bordered on one side by the looming shadows of imposing 1930’s style office buildings. A real old-time flavor… businesslike efficient shoeshine stands, snack bars with a colorful variety of fruits and strange bottled concoctions on shelves behind ancient tiled counters.

I turned a corner and made my way up a heavily vegetated overgrown path that led up the steep hillside and was by now bursting with lively activity. There was of course the impromptu sidewalk gatherings in the shadows of the playful dusk abounded about these walkways, in front of open air bodegas. The smokey smell of grilled sardines and garlic filled the air along with the sweet/sad plaintive sound of unmistakable chorinhos mixed with mingled voices and peals of animated laughter.

Looking up into the hills I saw clusters of ornately-façaded weather-beaten colonial houses surrounded by wild haphazard vegetation and helter-skelter wormy cobblestone paths. Off on a slightly more distant hillside I saw the teeming ticky-tacky cluster of shantytowns, the inevitable and barely accessible favelas, the oddly constructed slums of Rio which dotted its verdant hills like complex ancient tattoos, unfathomable hieroglyphics on the corpse of a sacred mummy.

Walking along I came to an intersection and, looking up, I saw what looked like a long-arched aqueduct spanning a wide plaza and dividing the bustling downtown area from the old imperial neighborhood that disappeared into the lush tropical hills. Glancing up at the expansive old bridge I suddenly realized with delight that it wasn’t an aqueduct (though I’d found out later that it originally had been, back in Imperial times) but indeed a functional viaduct. I spotted an ancient toy-like blue and yellow electric streetcar crossing over it noisily, packed with passengers and raucus shirtless young children hanging from the side-rails like so many playful monkeys jumping up and down with the sheer joy of being alive.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.