DEDICATION
FOR DORIS, TALITA, ALESSANDRA AND JULIA
EPIGRAPH
“Because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
—Jack Kerouac
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Prologue
1. Prodigal Son
2. First Light
3. Scattered Pieces
4. Shadows of the Past
5. Princess of the Sea
6. The Dakini
7. Futuristic Archeology
8. Savage Grace
9. All About Narcisa
10. Dickless Trick
11. Will to Power
12. Numbing Down
13. Poison Ivy
14. Dancing with Myself
15. Wake-Up Call
16. Insect Talk
17. Born Too Loose
18. All that Glitters
19. Magic Trick
20. Captain Save-A-Ho
21. Fateful Reunion
22. Crack Town
23. The End
24. Falling
25. Into the Wound
26. Jingle Days
27. The Dirty Green Hate Machine
28. The American Dream
29. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
30. Up in Smoke
31. Pets
32. The Kitten
33. Cat Woman
34. TV Honeymoon
35. The House of Love
36. Dark Carnaval
37. The Pussy Arcade
38. War Zone
39. Business as Usual
40. Manic Mode
41. The Ghost
42. Extreme Narcissism
43. Crash Day
44. Shipwrecked Sailors
45. Apocalyptic Smoke Hole
46. Higher Education
47. Toss Up
48. Showdown
49. The Love Trap
50. Sympathy for the Devil
51. Shattered Vessels
52. Ends Justify Means
53. Strange Physics
54. In the Ghetto
55. Holy Armed Harmony
56. Village of the Damned
57. Broken Pickers
58. Tainted
59. Off with Their Heads!
60. Rolling Thunder
61. Other Beings
62. The Whore of Babylon
63. Paving the Road to Hell
64. Fowl Play
65. The Green House
66. The Guitar
67. The Shadow People
68. Hell’s Bells
69. Cupid Gets a Gun
70. Death from Above
71. A Trip to the Country
72. The Big Day
73. On the Road
74. Tangled Roots
75. In the Country
76. Tears of a Clown
77. The Party
78. Queen of the Night
79. Lobotomy
80. Lower Companions
81. Lucky Charm
82. Help from Beyond
83. Mother of the Spirits
84. Vampiros
85. Catch 22
86. The Last Straw
87. Pigeons, Shoes, Love, Pain, Shit
88. End of the Line
89. Winter’s Grip
90. Crime Scenes
91. Into the Void
92. Digging
93. Battle Scars
94. Checkmate
95. Opening the Wound
96. Sister Morphine
97. Back in the Saddle
98. The Thing that Wouldn’t Die
99. She Who Traverses the Sky
100. The Longest Day
101. Our Lady of Ashes
102. Pandora’s Narcissistic Box
103. The Devil’s Kiss
104. Moment of Truth
105. Thunder and Lightning
106. Sound and Fury
107. The Possum
108. Into the Stars
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
You can’t save anyone from themselves. You will lose everything by attempting to play savior. You will never heal the wounded. You cannot repair the damage already done by selfish parents, vicious ex-lovers, child molesters, tyrants, poverty, depression or simple chemical imbalance.
You can’t undo psychic wounds, bandage old scars, kiss away ancient bruises. You can’t make the pain go away. You can’t shout down the voices in other people’s heads. You can’t make anyone feel special. They will never feel beautiful enough, no matter how beautiful they are to you. They will never feel loved enough, no matter how much you adore them.
You will never be able to save the battered from battling back at a world they’ve grown to hate. They will always find a way to pick up where the bullies have left off. They will in turn become bullies. They will turn you into the enemy. They will always find a new method in which to punish themselves, thereby punishing you.
No matter how much you’ve convinced yourself that you have done absolutely everything in your power to prove your undying devotion, unfaltering commitment and unending encouragement, you will never be able to save a miserable bastard from their self.
The wounded will always find a way to spread their pain over a vast terrain, like an emotional tsunami that devastates the surrounding landscape; an ever-expanding firewall that will singe everything and everyone in its wake. The longer you love a damaged person, the more it will hurt you.
They will mock your generosity, abuse your kindness, expect your forgiveness, try your patience, sap your energy and eventually murder your soul. They will not be happy until you are as miserable as they are. Then their incredible self-loathing will be justified by the perpetuation of a cycle from which there is little recourse.
Once you enter their free fall, it will be virtually impossible to turn your back on them. You will be racked with guilt, frustrated by your own impotence and made furious for ever buying into their shit in the first place. Of course the more damaged, the more charismatic, the more brilliant. The more sexually intoxicating. The more dangerous to your own mental health.
Love is a battlefield, a land mine, a slaughterhouse, a refugee camp, a whorehouse, an insane asylum, a prison; a purgatory of abusive repetition rippling off into infinity; a twisted funhouse mirror that mimics Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. A place where the lonely souls of the eternally damned dance a wicked dervish steeped in the desperation of those determined to throw themselves deep into the pit of a flaming volcano, seeking a baptism of fire, in search of paradise, nirvana, heaven, a return to the Garden from which they have and always will be banished.
Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes is a heartbreaking tome of diseased lust that oozes a tortured poetry of bloody sweat and sperm; a grotesquely beautiful love song steeped in the perpetual twilight horror of an unbearable trauma bond. An Odyssey in which the twin Furies of Addiction and Codependency bitch-slap you with a big dick whose own insatiable hunger attempts to feast again and again. And in return it feeds back to the victim-turned-victimizer a mad love, an overwhelming sex-magick magnet to the darkest forces of our own primordial essence.
Narcisa is mandatory reading for anyone who has ever been fucked-up, fucked ov
er or fucked with to their very core in a fit of possession; anyone who’s been blindsided by love and lust and shackled by passion to a lowlife scum-sucking junkie vampire whose devastating beauty and raw animal magnetism painted them as Dark Angel and Ancient Mystic—a purifying fire-breathing, flesh-eating demon, whose warpath and wrath against the world and everything in it, by some twisted kink in our own psyche, became the tortured path we willingly spiraled into, in search of our own redemption, in the desperate hope of saving our mirrored reflection from the bottomless pit of love’s eternal negation.
Lydia Lunch
Barcelona, 2010
PROLOGUE
“DAUGHTER OF BABYLON, WHO IS TO BE DESTROYED; HAPPY IS THE MAN WHO SERVES YOU AS YOU HAVE SERVED US.”
—Psalms 137:8
In Tibetan myth, the Dakini embodies the spirit of female wrath and fury.
She has been known over millennia by many descriptions and names, such as She who traverses the sky or She who moves in space. Sometimes, she is called simply Sky Dancer. Her archetype is of an angry, savage she-devil, dancing across the heavens in a wild frenzy, hell-bent on destruction, chaos and violent upheaval. Naked, but for a necklace of human skulls, in one hand she holds a dagger; in the other, a skull filled with blood, which she drinks.
The Dakini is usually depicted dancing on a man’s corpse.
Journal entry: Rio de Janeiro, 13 April, 2010—It hasn’t rained for over sixty days. Sterile, dumb, cloudless skies; cold and barren as lunar dreamscapes.
Two months into this cosmic indignity, I sit by sad shores of moonless night again, scratching old mosquito scars on my tired, forlorn feet, smoking a cigarette, tasting the bitter chemical burn on my tongue from kissing Narcisa.
Narcisa, my wounded love, her childish pink lips sucking on the crack pipe all day and all fucking night.
She’s off on another mission. Four days running now, sitting up in the attic of that old abandoned house in Lapa, smoking crack in the dark; surrounded by ghosts and spiders and rats and bats, and things that move so fast in the shadows of her disturbed, nightmare vision they have no name or definition—even in her own surreal, supernatural vocabulary.
She came breezing in here last night, belching and farting like a truck driver.
She stripped off her clothes and laid her perfect teenage ass on my worn old leather sofa, snarling like an angry Rottweiler.
“Let’s go, Cigano, let’s fock! C’mon, bro, let’s go, go go!”
I was already hard, working myself deep into that special, ineffable darkness of her, the only place I’ve ever really wanted to be, grabbing that hard, goose-bumpy, candy-apple ass in my hands; clutching her wiry young carcass to me like a life preserver, feeling complete and whole as her long arms and legs wrapped around me, enveloping my soul, like the wings of a giant praying mantis, taking me down, down, down, into realms of peace and comfort and death.
Narcisa. Dakini. The Bitch of a Thousand Whores!
The one I love. The one I hate.
Half an hour later, she was up on her feet again, getting dressed, a soldier suiting up for battle. She stormed across the room, snatching my cash off the dresser like a bird of prey as she flew off into the hot, murky night, yelling over her shoulder in that crooked, singsong acid-chant: “Thank you come again!”
I fell back into a fitful sleep, wondering if that supersonic, screaming fuck was a dream or a nightmare, or some terrible karmic debt I must pay over and over again.
Soon she’ll have to crash, and then I can get some sleep at last—without being awakened every couple of hours to fill her hole with sperm and her hands with cash and coins and candy and bubble gum and trinkets and cigarettes, and a handful of ashes from under my sad old tired gypsy balls.
1. PRODIGAL SON
“YET MAN IS BORN UNTO TROUBLE, AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD.”
—Job 5:7
Rio de Janeiro, March 2006—I came to, bleary-eyed, sitting in the cab of the rusty, faded blue truck I hitched the last ride in, all the way from the south of Bahia. Journey’s end, emerging through the cracked lens of a bouncing, vibrating, dusty, cracked windshield.
Coming home again, at last. After so many years away, I wonder if this might all be just a long, weird dream.
RIO DE JANEIRO—15 KILOMETROS
A sour, nostalgic stench of sewage invades my senses, and I’m wide awake now, squinting into an animated morning dreamworld.
The road signs here ought to say: ABANDON ALL HOPE.
Columns of black smoke rise like witches’ spindly fingers, beckoning across acres of miserable tin-roofed hovels.
The devil’s backyard; faceless, soot-blackened, ramshackle brick buildings and shacks; smoke clouds billowing up from crooked gray smokestacks, against a flat blue sky of circling vultures; desolate fragments of factories sinking into the barren red mud like broken teeth in an undernourished corpse’s gaping mouth; infernal wastelands, sprawling out forever.
This is not the Rio de Janeiro of my youth’s frivolous memory: a wistful city of verdant mountain vistas and smiling, sensuous, Samba-dancing mulatto girls’ dreams. Nowhere to be seen are the sparkling blue waters of those sun-drenched tropical days and humid, blinking whorehouse nights.
No. This is not the place I once knew. This poverty-infested horror show is a depraved massacre of the soul. Black-smoke garbage fires burning alongside a dusty road to hell, like belching farts from a thousand dying assholes. Shirtless skeletons of what used to be men, anthill spirits of the damned, stand hoisting impossible burdens onto defeated, leathery backs from a line of smoke-spewing, idling trucks; scrawny mutts slashing savage red fangs at each other in vicious little circles in the tortured, infertile urban sod.
Hell. I’m thinking of the terrible Inferno of Dante as I look out over the infinity of drab, shit-colored hollow brick dwellings, wondering if I might have died in the malarial, buzzing jungle wastelands, somewhere between Mexico City and here.
Could this really be hell?
Am I a ghost now?
Well, if I’ve finally made it to the Bottomless Pit, God and the devil both know there’s a place here for Ignácio Valência Lobos.
God and the devil know I’ve got a whole gang of friends on the Other Side.
In waves of creeping dread, I look around as we’re sucked into a grinding whirlpool of early-morning traffic, the scenery converted into an eternal rattling swarm of horn-blaring, jittery jalopies, all different hues of speckled rust and dust and decay, darting between rumbling, lumbering trucks and buses packed with dull-faced masses of doomed, eternally damned sinners.
I choke on the acrid hell stench of sulfur and brimstone; poisonous black fumes spurting in clouds of jagged, mufflerless flatulence; a perfect doomsday vision of hell, enveloped in a greasy, toxic gray drizzly mist.
What have they done to my home?
Where the fuck is Rio de Janeiro?
Hell’s early morning; a shitty swamp of drab, oppressive foreboding, trouble and strife, somewhere on the ill-starred, forgotten outskirts of Babylon: Rio de Janeiro, City of God, in the Year of Our Lord, 2006.
2. FIRST LIGHT
“YOU CAN’T GO BACK HOME TO YOUR FAMILY, BACK HOME TO YOUR CHILDHOOD . . . BACK HOME TO THE OLD FORMS AND SYSTEMS OF THINGS WHICH ONCE SEEMED EVERLASTING BUT WHICH ARE CHANGING ALL THE TIME—BACK HOME TO THE ESCAPES OF TIME AND MEMORY.”
—Thomas Wolfe
Rio de Janeiro, March 2006—The ancient red-light district by the port shrugs off another hangover, like a lazy old mulatto whore. I’m trudging up steep, winding streets of broken-down colonial buildin
gs, making my crooked way to the flat where my elderly aunt Silvia lived and died and left me in her will.
The walk is defined by Rio’s teeming favelas—the ever-present, pounding, throbbing shantytown ghettos. Walking sideways like a crab scuttling along these slippery cobblestone paths, I merge with frenzied hawkers of desperate street commerce, as I march through a lunatic flow of human traffic. My bloodshot morning eyes stumble across labyrinthine alleys, winding like hieroglyphics, up, up, up, into the bursting hillside slums, taking it all into my senses again.
Back in Rio de Janeiro after all these years, I pass a decaying Portuguese building, its ornate colonial façade fallen into poverty and weathered decay. Row upon tangled row of clotheslines crisscross a once-stately courtyard, home now to hordes of naked shit-brown children. Weeds growing into small trees jut out of a crumbling brick wall. A marble statue of a pigeon-shit-encrusted angel looks down from its rooftop perch with lifeless yellowed eyes of timeless stone apathy.
I move on, inhaling glimpses of scattered, sun-bleached fish bones lying in the dust; straw hat and parrot-feather detail; smoking meats on grills; scent of garlic and roasting sardines, spilled beer, sweat, piss and exhaust fumes, all stewing together in the pregnant, pounding pre-Lenten tropical air.
Whole families crowd together in the shadows of fading wooden doorways, packed in like dummies, watching me with eyes dull as lead rivets. I look back as I pass, trudging, stumbling over the swarming half-remembered sidewalks of my youth, limping along among zigzagging hot shadows of kamikaze motorcycle boys; horns blasting, engines screaming, drilling into my ears in a cacophony of drumbeats, firecrackers and shouts. Unseen voices from jukeboxes spitting out random scraps of James Brown and nostalgic old Roberto Carlos songs. Radios blaring hysterical soccer games amid the dull electrical hum of traffic, music and rawboned, noisy life. People everywhere.
My people. Cariocas. My lost bastard tribe of Rio de Janeiro.
I drift by neighborhood stores, shabby corner botecos, paderias and lurking alleys full of dark-skinned, gun-toting bandido boys, who smirk and squint and wink and blink into the magical maze of crazy equatorial patterns; lights and shadows and rhythms of a new day’s familiar and baffling old Carioca character.