Narcisa- Nossa Senhora Das Cinzas

by Jonathan Shaw The first time I saw the kid, he was sitting in the front row of the smoking section of the midnight AA meeting downtown. The only reason I even noticed him at all when I walked in the door was probably because he was sitting there, legs sprawled across the floor, leaning […]

Rio De Janeiro, 1973. I suddenly felt myself becoming perceptive to the unseen wave lengths around me, like a baby cockroach testing its antenna. It wasn’t a sense of immediate danger or even subtle menace that struck me, so much as a sense of a new kind of awareness that had suddenly sprung up inside […]

Rio De Janeiro, 1973 Not knowing or really caring where I was, or having the slightest idea where to go, I simply chose a direction and started walking, instinctively choosing the shady side of the street, slowing down briefly here and there to glance in a shop window. One place in particular that caught my […]

Veracruz, Mexico. 1974. Her mom had basically told her to bring home the bacon or not come home at all. And for a while she didn’t. She ran the streets and did what she wanted in a spell of adolescent rebellion, turning tricks for food and shelter and spending the rest on drugs, mostly pot […]

     God is in the details. Ash Wednesday, party’s over. But the bright yellow flowers on my porch are all wilted and limp now from the obscene, senseless heat of the day. Hasn’t rained in over a week now. The same dreary pre-Lenten dry season that surrounded all my frantic comings and goings two years ago […]

     A crazy fog has just rolled in off the sea, suddenly converting Copacabana into a humid surreal night time nether world of terror. As if it wasn’t ugly and strange enough to begin with in the middle of this dark carnival of lost souls. Actually the fog seems to have even taken some […]

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 […]