For some life is meant to be lived; Others feel it is there to be used up. In the book Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes, these two schools of thought come together as author and extreme liver Jonathan Shaw explores his relationship with the willfully self-destructive Nascisa, a crack addicted teenage prostitute he met on the streets of Rio De Janeiro.

According to his own legend, Jonathan is the "bastard product of a brief, surreal, violent and unhappy alcoholic marriage between big band legend Artie Shaw and movie star Doris Dowling." Born in 1953, the Vietnam War served as a backdrop to Jonathan's understandably troubled formative years. Working as a writer for Los Angeles' first alternative newspaper, The LA Free Press, afforded Jonathan the opportunity to run wild with the likes of Jim Morrison, the Manson Family and Charles Bukowski. An extreme life lead to extreme drugs, and our anti-hero fell for the escapist lure of Heroin as the looming seventies chased the fun out of the last throws of the sixties.

Under the apprenticeship of legendary first generation tattoo artist Bob Shaw, Jonathan turned his affection for needles into a positive. After a period spent traveling -- one of many in his gypsy life -- Jonathan moved back east to New York. Always the outlaw, in 1976 Jonathan founded Fun City Tattoo in the East Village -- a decade and a half after NYC had banned such store front parlors (following a particularly virulent outbreak of hepatitis B). Indeed the city only repealed their outdated laws in 1991. The notoriety of the parlor and its proprietor attracted an equally notorious patronage, which included Johnny Depp and Dee Dee Ramone. Sometime around 9/11, tired of his life and his drugs, Jonathan sold his store and retired from tattooing, moving to Rio De Janeiro to begin his next chapter.

Here Jonathan shares a vignette from his life in South America, but first, a word or two from the man himself to set the scene:

Now after all these years, Narcisa took the Crack Monster on a field trip to the Parque Lage.
Shit.
She got off the bus a block from the park.
She lit a cigarette and walked along the sidewalk at a furtive pace, moving like a shadow toward the gate. Not hearing the riot of birdsong coming from the other side of the tall, ornate wrought iron fence.
Not feeling or smelling the cool oxygen-laden air she once loved to breathe from the many plants and trees, the sprawling mass of jungle deep within.
Narcisa didn't stop to smell the roses. She didn't stop for anything, she couldn't anymore, even if she wanted to.
Maybe she even did want to.
But she was on a mission for the Crack Monster this time.
She walked quickly past the main entrance.
Right past the beautiful old mansion with its high marble columns, the Centro Cultural do Parque Lage where she used to hang around debating philosophy and playing Chess with her peers, listening to Bob Marley, smoking reefer, laughing...
Now she has no peers.
No easy laughter followed her now as she scurried past her old haunts, keeping her head down until she was walking deep into the forest behind the park, deeper and deeper.
Walking along the wild old overgrown jungle trail she once knew well, climbing climbing uphill beneath the placid gaze of Christ the Redeemer.
Climbing climbing, alongside a running stream leading to a waterfall where she used to go skinny-dipping with her young pothead girlfriends.
Lucia. Luana. Silvinha. Vera.
Isabella. Agustina. Alessandra.
Ghosts. Dreams.
Of better times.
Another life.
Ashes to Ashes.
Now the only mission was to find the secluded spot where she could smoke in peace.
Does anyone ever smoke Crack in 'peace'?
Shit.
Narcisa was going to try and find a way.
All alone.
That's the trick.
Total isolation. Away from any trace of people and human society.
Nobody around to get between her and her only goal.
The Perfect High.
She found a cave.
Perfect.
She ventured inside, deep deep into the dark cavern.
She flicked her Bic and found a place to sit.
And there she sat down to smoke in peace.
But there was a Problem.
"Soon I getting com-for-table inside there, Cigano, I make light up an' go for take it one big hit an' then I look him an' he sitting right over there at the rock next for me..."
"Who?"
What the fuck?
"The E'scorpion!"
"What?"
She smoked Crack with a scorpion?
Narcisa.
'I no like him, these e'scorpion, Cigano, no no no."
"So what did ya do, baby?"
"I do no-thing. He pretty cool, I am think. So I just make for sit in there, an' him look on me an' I look on him an' we both look on the other one together inside there an' then I go to e'smoke. Is all cool. But then it get-ted worst, Cigano, then it come all for sudden the big e'sploding with the... morcegos, how you say it? The bat. Bat! Hundred the bat Cigano, an' all come fly fly fly out on the back the cave, hundred the terrible little bat, flipping flipping all over me, squiking like the mouses an' the rats, attack on to my head, flopping flopping squiking an' fly fly all over my eye. These is too much the shit for me. An' then I say, get the fuck out! An' I make e'split, I go out from these place fast now, go!"
She hiked further and further up the hill, deep deep into the jungle.
She stopped and shimmied up into a big tree, climbing all the way up to the top.
Finally, peace and solitude. Nobody around to bother her High.
She took a hit of rock from her pocket and fired it up.
"But is ever'where the conspiracy, Cigano. No place I can go it is safety. I no even can to e'smoke it peace-full at there on the top the tree, can you to believe in these, Cigano? Even on the tree, all way come somebody there for make it the bother to me. On even the tree way way up far on the middle of jungle, they come for tormented to me!"
What the fuck?
"Who, baby? Who came to bother you up in the tree?"
I can't believe I'm having this conversation.
This is what it's come to.
Shit.
Who, baby?
"THE MONKEY, CIGANO!!! SO SO MANY THE E'STUPID FUCKING MONKEY!!!"
Monkeys. I heard her say it.
"Monkeys?" I said, feeling stupid for repeating it.
Her big intense eyes bugging out of her head, boring into me like twin screws, fastening me to that insane moment, defying me to respond, frozen in time and space forever.
I want to laugh.
I want to cry.
I want to run out into the street screaming for the men in white coats.
Monkeys.
Narcisa.
Shit.
"Yes, the monkey, Cigano! They attack-ed to me! An' they all e'stand-ed 'round me all e'scream on me, an' they make the throw the thing on to me, the branch an' the rock, all thing like these. The monkey he very 'gressive, more the worst to even the peoples. So I have for got the fuck out from here, go, very quick go go, an' go 'way these e'shit place, man."
I sat there. Unable to comment, afraid to laugh.
I could see she was upset and I didn't want to rub any salt in the wound.
After a strange silence, tears welled up in her big eyes.
She spoke again in a sad, throaty little voice of doomed defeat that just broke my heart.
"Is no place e'safety for the Narcisa no more. No any the place, Cigano, got it? Ever'body bother to me. Ever'thing. Is these the why I no wan' for living in to these e'shit world no more..."
She started to cry. I held her in my arms, soothing her like a scared child.
"It's gonna be all right, baby, don't worry. Shhhhh. It's gonna be ok."
"I just wan' for go take it the drug like I us-ed to before with-out ever'body make bother an' dis-trac' to me. But is all way some fucking son of the whore mother fuck come for bother an' frustrate it the high an' then I can' no to never got it no peace in the mind. What on the fuck I can to do, Cigano. Tell it to me, please... what?"
I really didn't know what to say.
Monkeys.
Shit. What does one say at such a moment?
But she was waiting, waiting for an answer from me.
Finally I just stammered whatever came into my head.
"Maybe," I ventured, "it's not the people or the places you go that's messing you up, baby... Maybe, maybe it's just the same thing everywhere you go, everybody you see..."
I could feel her start to stiffen in my arms, but I'd already taken the leap.
Now I had to fall. I blurted it out.
"Maybe it's what you're doing that isn't working for you anymore, did you ever think of th--"
She pulled away, wiggling out of my arms like a snake. She twisted around and sat there across from me on the sofa, hissing, looking at me like a bug, an asshole.
An enemy.
I had just said the stupidest, most offensive thing she'd ever heard.
"Menos, Cigano. Meeeenos! Talk less! Make less these talk, less less lesssssss..."
End of discussion.



Excerpts from Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes courtesy of Jonathan Shaw. Text copyright (c) 2008 by Jonathan Shaw. Published by Heartworm Press. Excerpt printed with kind permission of Heartworm Press.

To read more of Jonathan's writing check his blog at: ScabVendor.com/blog/