Two girls from the hotel just came in the room to change my sheets while I was writing this and while one of them is changing the sheets, the other one is just standing there staring around absently and PICKING HER NOSE, neither of them saying a word and I’m certain that when they go back into the hall they’ll have a good laugh about something they saw in the room, the cigarette butts on the floor or the half empty bottle of rum on my table or my Panama hat on the bed, or some damn thing or another that they would certainly ignore if I were just a Spanish guy like them. Staring, staring, always staring like they’d never seen a foreigner’s face before, like you can feel the heads turning behind you to stare as you walk down the street. I mean it’s not like I got long hair or weird clothes or tattoos on my face or three eyes. What is it with these sheeple? Chicken face with four bottoms. Hahahahaa!!

Oh God where does it all start, how did I ever get here on desperation row and why do I stick around? I’m seeing the world through madman’s eyes– because I’m here now, in the world of limits when my eyes have already seen far horizons apart from this. I see right through the futile ideology of my fellow idiots and their futile contrivances. I am embarrassed for them and shed a silent tear for them– for all of us. For me, to be exact.

Goddamnit this port town, I realize, is just another Central American town where customs like the Holy Church are a straitjacket to the people or at least to me because I am very certainly an outsider and don’t have the background to deal with or get around the taboos and such here. Everywhere ya go there’s pictures of the Pope. That’s a problem I think. I dunno. Maybe it’s not that at all but maybe just a long terrible feeling of frustration after not having a woman for so long. These Spanish girls here just don’t move me though. And I just want to get good and drunk at night and indulge in sad fantasies and even recollections of dead girls back home. Maybe I was better off a crazed junkie in the madhouse of America. I mean, you only live once and it all just comes down to shit in the end.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

10-11-74

I walked up to the first crew member I saw who was a big and friendly smiling, gesticulating guy who obviously loved spaghetti and wine and big families more than anything in the world and who immediately dragged me into the galley (not even asking me if I was hungry) and sat me down before a huge frying pan of octopus cooked in garlic sauce and olive oil and proceeded to talk nonstop waving big hands in the air and looking for the right words to say in English as if his big sweeping hand gestures were way ahead of him all along and giving him trouble, but going and going like “Aw, well, what de hell, ehh? Eat! Eat!” and he goes on telling me about his wife and kids in New York and his brother who has a grocery store and a pastry shop and how Greeks were “shit people” and Greek freighters no good and how he couldn’t believe an American like me was looking for a job on a freighter. “I meena you de American boya.. plenty good job fa you at de home” and truly puzzled like he really couldn’t understand why I wanted to work on a ship, which made me feel bad and want to apologize for the thousandth time for being born in America.

But then he was off on something else and I could see that this big fumbling man was free of any kind of malice and really pure and innocent like a child. A great character really, a big simple Dominick. All he wanted was to be back in Italia bouncing babies on his knee while the smell of garlic filled the room and big white sheets flapping around outside the window. The guy had a lot of soul.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

10-11-74

Why worry anyway? This life is just a crazy old movie and I’m like some mad visionary director who can’t get the actors to do what he wants em to, ahh, but they’re just confused and lost like me and anyway that’s all a part of the movie, some higher plan or something. I don’t know, like me sitting alone at that little bar last night while the rain poured and the ship’s mournful horns boomed in the harbor. No jukebox, nothing, just the old bartender’s wife sitting there in her night gown looking out at the Greek sailors chasing after prostitutes and taxi cabs in the rain, waiting silently for me to finish my drink and go home (home?) Sitting there in her nightgown and big Dostoyevsky boots, just like that. And I did finish my drink and go home and sleep and that was that. And anyway all these visions just look really great sometimes like this morning when I went out on the docks seeking a job and climbed a gang plank of a giant Italian freighter and was stopped at the top by some power-crazy soldier- portcop who was guarding the ship and unceremoniously stuck his hand in my pocket, just like
that and asked me all sorts of silly authoritarian-sounding questions like who I was and what was I doing there and where were my papers etc. In the end he finally just got bored and let me pass so he could go back to talking to his buddy about soccer cuz he was just a typical Central American cop, killing time until he could go home and get drunk and not really give a damn
anyway.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

Port town, Honduras 10-10-74

Listening to classical music on the little transistor radio I bought yesterday. Sitting in candlelight darkness, my lonely pants hanging from a nail by the window (the same pants I wore when they took me to jail in British Honduras- but that’s another story.) Outside it’s pouring rain and I’m thinking the whole world is under water empty and hopeless. I dunno. Maybe I like it that way sometimes. This feeling, comfortable-sad; entirely different from the truly depressing feeling of total despair I got when the ship pulled into this port at first light two days ago and I got a look at the dead industrial wasteland of the docks and the foggy horrible green hills and meadows across the bay. Feeling totally alone and even now when I’ve grown accustomed to this place and even comfortable here, somehow these hills make me feel empty and bad when I look out past the ships and see them over there and know they’ll still be there when I’m dead, grave-rot green and peaceful and horrible. I remember how I almost cried looking across the bay that first damp morning. Aw well, fuck them fuckin hills anyway. Now it’s late at night and I’m sitting at my little desk in my little room by the railroad tracks across from the docks full of ships, big booming monsters from far away, China and Londontown. It’s raining hard and I’m content for now with this happy/sad feeling. Like this classical music I’m hearing now. I don’t need to listen to lively Latino ritmo or go out and get drunk and dance with the girls in the street. I’m just happy right now with my candlelight and my little radio playing sad-static sounds in the endless rain.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010

St Patrick’s Day
2010
Times Square

Fact: Saint Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland. Why then do they all come slither about on his day of honor?
Fact: Holy days are meant to venerate Saints. Last time I checked, vomiting at their likenesses fell under the ‘desecration’ category.

Now that we have the facts straight, this is how my day went. It all started because I found myself enjoying the uncharacteristically warm weather so much yesterday that, instead of descending into the 14th street station and taking the train to class, I followed the glistening sidewalk all the way to Midtown. Of course in my sun-drenched daisy-filled summer-lovin’ mind, I completely forgot the occasion. You know, that day where every asshole is the Irish kind.

Well, as soon as I hit 23rd street, my rose-colored glasses turned into green beer goggles. They were everywhere. I mean everywhere. Crawling out of the sewers, clogging the crosswalks, flopping around haphazardly in front of bars wearing Jerzees with names like McGillicutty across the back in big orange letters. Screeching poisonous renditions of Danny Boy and Kerrick Fergus from these greasy drooling hatches while laying belly up on the gummy dogshit pavement. It was horrifying.

This was some serious shit. Why was I the only person who appeared visibly shaken by the thousands of possessed green gnomes that had taken to the streets in vomit-inducing revelry? What exactly were they celebrating? Did they even know?

I slunk along like a wounded animal, trying to disappear into the bricks of the grime-covered midtown buildings all the way to my class on 35th street. Luckily by the time I got out of class, the revelers had slithered on back into whatever holes they called “bed.” I walked down through the shallow-breathing Chelsea streets back to my apartment, careful to avoid the river of corned-beef vomit that mixed with green confetti as it made its slimy retreat into the underworld– where it belonged, with other green things.

Saint Patrick, wherever you are, please take this as a formal apology on behalf of humanity.

Sincerely,

Alessandra De Benedetti

The blogs that you are about to enjoy in this series have been transcribed from various corresponding napkins and small scraps of waste paper, Mexican product labels and cigarette wrappers that I came across while uncovering new (old) material for Scabvendor. The first entry was written by a frustrated and bored young junkie named Jonathan Shaw shortly before leaving his Los Angeles home forever in the twilight months of 1974.

- AD

July 26, 1974

City of the fallen angel, with your glowing 3 AM streetlights that nobody sees, you lie too still, too still; it’s not a healthy sign.

Where are your street corner musicians, your sidewalk cafes? A truck rumbles by and gone down along the tiny block I’m on, intent on some great and important midnight mission. A cake to deliver. Where is your past, burned out young friend? When do you dream? Or am I but a dream, a figment of your unsure imagination, who is this ragged figure who walks catlike the line of your deception? Mourning the death of the unborn, I am a friend to your crazy ways, so don’t sic your mad dogs on me before I see you all lit up like a Christmas tree in apocalyptic fires of your earthquake Armageddon.

I stop to light a pale cigarette before moving on seeking the eternal fix, the answer to no particular question. Whispered conversations, lines to greater things zigzag your worn-out welcome mat like the directions of a suspended whistle. Where am I to go now? Please show me some sign that you’re alive. You are the great god of madness, gone disturbingly laconic tonight. It’s not right. Give me some great rumble of disaster in the distance, and I’ll leave well enough alone.

© Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010