Excerpts From “Narcisa”

70. TRUE ROMANCE “You’re never too old to grow up.” — Shirley Conran After eating in comfortable silence for awhile, I asked Antonio how he was doing. Suddenly he started confiding to me about his dilemma with the current girlfriend. I’d met the girl with him the last time I’d seen him at the beach […]

Woke up after ten hours on the twelve-hour red-eye flight from Buenos Aires… Sometime around dawn in the dark, dreamlike hum of the airplane cabin I woke with a sudden unearthly chill, my mind filled with strange grey silent movie dreams of Narcisa… Dreams I can’t remember, don’t care to remember, but can’t forget…  ​   Looking […]

Excerpt from the new edition of Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes For a seasoned prostitute, however, Narcisa sure didn’t care much for sex — at least not with men. And she always did whatever she could to procrastinate or outright avoid the dreaded moment of vaginal penetration. She told me of how she would always ask for […]

The following excerpt was taken from the rewrite of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes  The Love House Hotel was infested with roving herds of frightening aging transvestites and their shifty looking tricks. The ‘girls’ there were some pretty surreal creatures. Like a bunch of pot-bellied truck drivers stumbling around the narrow maze of dark halls in their ratty, cum-stained […]

From the opening chapter of the new edition of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes I open the door and step inside my new neat little doll house. It smells of mildew. A putrid, nostalgic scent of the past, scent of memories… I pull the string and turn on the 40 watt light attached to an […]

Here is a short chapter from Jonathan Shaw’s upcoming memoir Scabvendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist: “A man becomes like those whose society he loves.”  – Hindu proverb Voices singing, bottles breaking… A ship blows a horn nearby. A rum-soaked, tropical night emerging from yellow shadows. Lively open-aired cantinas click into focus, eyes clicking new […]

Without ceremony, Mimo and the other two who’d come with him quickly unpacked their instruments and dove right into the impromptu jam session and it was on… Dolo was laughing as he fiddled away furiously, leading the groove as usual. His bow tore at the violin with such fury I expected the thing to start […]

Dolo’s cousin Dimitri was standing on the street waiting for us with a big black umbrella at the gate to the big house. Mimo parked the taxi and we unloaded the instruments and ran up to the the path in the rain under Dimitri’s umbrella. As we approached, I could hear the unmistakable mad bee […]

Dolo was an orphan, like me. Legend had it that he had been taken away from his Calao gypsy people after being caught stealing from a grocery store and put into a reform school in Minas Gerais. From there he was adopted by a respectable local gadji family who had given him an upper class […]

“And Sergei here’s another great violinista,” Mimo went on, gesturing to the other guy. “These guys come all way here now from Para to see Dolo and play with all us together. Big Roma gathering on the weekend… Gonna be ciganos from all the South America, even some come from far away in Europa… Like […]