AD: Where Narcisa “stormed into your life…”
JS: Right… I remember one night this friend of mine, Inger Lorre, another recovering junkie and a real wild punk rock legend in her own right was hanging out at my place in Hollywood and she asked to read the Scabvendor book I was working on… I gave her the manuscript to read and then I went to bed. When I got up in the morning, I went into the other room and there she was with this crazy look on her face… Turns out she’d sat up all night on my sofa and read the whole fucking thing in one sitting. Her only comment was, “Wow, the book really picked up speed in the last few chapters. You know, where you started writing about that crazy chick… Is that based on a real person you knew? Cuz it’s really powerful and dynamic. Definitely the best writing in the whole book…”
That sort of got my attention, alerted me to the fact that there was some strange powerful thing going on there where I was writing about this fucked up relationship from years before that sort of crossed over into some more recent things too… Then just about the same time, I started corresponding with another writer friend of mine back in Rio. This guy was another recovering junkie who was heavily involved in the Santo Daime, an ayawaska oriented spritist psychedelic plant-eating Umbanda white magic cult here in Brazil. For some reason, I started transcribing more and more of those old journal notes and then one day I just sent him an email with a bunch of these random ‘Narcisa’ stories, mostly just
for shits and giggles sake cuz I just felt like sharing it with someone, and this guy and me always had a lot of stuff in common as far as being whore-loving fuck-ups and oddball spiritual seekers and writers and so on…
Well, just a few days after Inger made that comment about those last Scabvendor chapters, this guy suddenly writes me back saying that this shit I’d just sent him was the most bad-ass, compelling prose he’d read in a long time and telling me that I must put it all together and publish it immediately! He was really adament about it, really laid the praise on hard and heavy, and that sort of blew my mind, especially because this guy was a real professional journeyman writer who I really respected, and not at all the sort of guy to just blow alotta wild smoke up my ass like that just for the fuck of it.
So I guess that’s when Narcisa ”stormed into my life” demanding to be written… That’s when I really first started to think of pulling those chapters out of Scabvendor and putting them all together with the old notes and stories into some sort of linear format and maybe working it up into maybe like a little 50 page novella or something like that… So then I took another break from the memoir again and started massively transcribing all the rest of the scribbled notes from the old days and trying to vaguely format them into a little story set in Rio in the present time, closer to some of my recent experiences or whatever…
Then one day right around that time, this other writer named Max G. Morton who was just putting out his first book heard that I was in town and reached out to me through Howie Pyro, a mutual friend, to ask me to write a little blurb for his new book. I guess this guy was a fan of mine from the old days when I was tattooing in NYC… Well I told Howie I’d be glad to write something for the guy and to have him send me some of his book for me to read. He did and I read it and I liked the writing and I wrote up a little blurb saying something nice about it. After that me and this guy Max started corresponding and he asked me what I was working on and I sent him some of the random notes I’d been transcribing there, and the next thing I know, he writes back and asks if I’d mind if he let his publisher see it.
To be continued…