On The Floor of the Closet

On the Floor of the Closet

I guess I’m writing this for someone other than whoever I am or have become. I tried to explain this before, but I have experienced it already and the shrinks know about it only in the tiny glimpses that I tell them, which is how I remember it, as if it were a giant kaleidoscope and everyone was on acid only I was only five. To my memory.  None of my friends know, this story is untold virtually to anyone, but the occasional lover that scratches their head and falls asleep holding me.

When I was four or five, my parents went antiquing across America. For reasons unknown, cause I can never get a straight answer out of anyone----where did the millions of dollars go? What kind of mental hospital was dad in? How did my mother’s father die---choking on a sandwich or drunk? All stories true and false have been altered and fed back to me wherein I must live in this mythology of the white trash family who made good but still had white trash family violence and Jerry Springer type lies.

Here we go---somehow my father was a doctor and somehow my parents were in a cult and in this cult they learned things and one of the things they learned was that you never play with a Ouija board, only they did anyway cause they fancied themselves the intellectual rebels of the era.

So it goes that they played with this Ouija board and asked it if we would have to go to Ohio where my father would be stationed serving as a physician in the military, I have no idea what branch? Please. I can’t even find out where the three million dollars went or if my dad was schizophrenic or just had a nervous breakdown. So really, how I’m going to tell this to you is my reality mixed in with my mother’s version of reality which usually at this point I have come to believe is entirely made up or at least mostly.

They asked the Ouija board if my father would have to go away or if we could stay, and the Ouija board to this day is why we had to go, my mother swears the bad spirits made us go.

I remember us leaving in the middle of the night. There is too much to tell you, my sister was violent but it was before Aspergers was a thing. My parents wouldn’t pull over to let me pee while we drove across America. It was always, can you wait FOUR more hours. And until I burst out crying and they let me pee in a field it wouldn’t happen.

We get there, it is bleak. A ghost lives in my room. He is not a bad ghost but has followed me from apartment to apartment or I have the unique insight to see ghosts. The one that used to live in my current apartment left after my ex was on heroin. So really, there are no more ghosts except of my memory and you know those are the most pernicious.

So, we get to Cincinnati and move into the largest farmhouse I had ever seen. Keep in mind I am small. There are lots of adjustments. I am shy, I have to make friends and such and my sister is a monster who tells me everyone hates me so I am continuously paranoid when I meet new people--- I mean then, not now, so don’t freak out or anything.

Anyway, there was my dog Bambi and this ghost and I stood up and talked to it cause I was so lonely. My sister was mean all the time and I was afraid of the neighborhood kids but when I met them they loved me and I loved them and we sled around on those trashcan lid type sleds screaming and laughing. It was so much fun even though my sister was a constant factor in my being uncomfortable. Like there would be a party and she would tell me I wasn’t invited and I would go home and my mom would be all, dude, why are you back and I said, Dina said I’m not invited and now it’s too late and I’m too afraid and I would just play with bambi or read a book.

Now, at some point, my mom and dad decide to fill our home with antiques. Someone involved in the cult back home had hooked my dad up with this man that knew lots of stuff about antiques and they decided to leave me and my sister with these people who they had never really met and go looking for treasures across America. I’m figuring this is either after we’d been there awhile or on one of my Dad’s two week or month breaks. I’m not sure.

So, they take us and they drop us off in this house that was tiny and filled with kids who didn’t take care of themselves. They were dirty and loud and most likely had some form of retardation like all kids from that section of the world do. Just go watch that Appalachia documentary and you will understand. So, here I am with a proper speaking voice and a huge vocabulary thrown in with kids that play in the mud and while I have always loved playing in mud I didn’t like these children and couldn’t pretend to.

My sister isn’t like me, she can’t control herself and that isn’t saying much when you look at my arrest record, but I know when I’m in danger and I know when someone can kill me and I know how to act so that I don’t get killed. My sister lacks this skill, which might actually make her a less likeable personality but a more authentic human being.

In this house there were rules. I just know the rules were don’t touch anything or take anything and what would we touch, these people were dirt poor and lived in the way where if you touched almost anything, you would have to go wash up because of the sticky film from the children and the mess and the neglect.

Like I said, my sister can’t control herself and likes sugar. My parents are hippies and intellectuals and crazy, so they didn’t allow sugar---I think that made my dad go crazy when I think about it.

Anyway, my sister crawls up and gets into the cookie jar the first day we were there and eats cookies and then knocks over the jar and it shatters and it’s a mess and I’m thinking to myself can’t you just be cool, these people are going to fuck you up. I could just tell, there was something bad about them. I hadn’t been around a lot of bad people in my life. I’ve been around gangs and did drugs with some dangerous people, but they weren’t true sociopaths, they were just as fucked up as I was from a violent upbringing. There was no danger there---they were family---but at this tiny house. I knew we could die.

The first time my sister knocked over the cookie jar she got beaten for so long and so loudly that I begged god to help us and asked god to let her live and to save her life.

The next day she was unchanged---covered in bruises, but still going to steal food cause we were practically starving. She got beaten that night and the next night and the next night. I remember sleeping on the floor of a closet crying and begging for god to help us. I have a vague memory of trying to be quiet or transmit to her that she had to behave. I don’t know if she was being raped, but the screams were so intense, I will never forget it and still have the guilt of whatever happened to me was not as bad.  I have been to therapy my whole life cause I had a bad drinking issue and eating disorders and all the stuff that people have when they are fucked up sexually or have been tampered with, but to my memory all I remember of the house was that they beat my sister continuously and told us my parents weren’t coming back and that they didn’t love us, but if we told they would come and kill them.

I don’t actually remember what happened to me there. I’m sure it wasn’t good or I wouldn’t be this fucked up now, but this is only one story in many where I was placed in a violent situation with no parental supervision. I don’t know if my parents cared or if they knew because my sister and I were so frightened and we didn’t like each other all that much, but we made a pact to never tell to protect our family from being slaughtered.

When my parents finally came to get us, we ran outside, I don’t remember ever being allowed on the front yard the entire time we were there. We had to go to the bathroom but lied about it we were so afraid to go back into the house. I remember that much. We stopped at a gas station and it was ruined like no place to go to the bathroom and we swore we’d never tell.  This is gross and I’m sorry, but I used a trashcan and my sister used the sink. We cried in there that we had escaped our torture.  We said stuff like, we’ll never tell about this bathroom or those people. We were just little kids. I remember we couldn’t get out cause the door was stuck and we were so scared my parents would leave us there after what had just happened.  We screamed until someone freed us and my parents were in the car totally geared to leave. I remember that they weren’t even concerned that we had been trapped in the bathroom. By that point, we were free. We didn’t hate each other for a few weeks cause we weren’t going to die, but we always kept the secret.

Then one day when I was 17, I came home and I was so sick of my dad having to drink out of gourds and face east while drinking his weird water---it was thanksgiving and I just wanted to be normal, not weirdoes. Can’t we just be normal? I was drunk, maybe a few beers maybe a whole lot of mixed stuff out of Tupperware, who can remember that kind of detail, what I said was—what happened to dad and why did you leave us in that house where we were tortured.

My mother always tried to say, what house? What do you mean what happened to your father. Like she was protecting this grand secret. I don’t think she hated me, I think it was protection in some way I will never fully understand.

The story up until that point was my father had been traveling. He came back months later on Thorazine and I kept asking what was wrong with him and my mom just said, “He doesn’t feel well, leave him alone.” That’s why when someone stops talking to me I always think it was something I did. That leave him alone comment. So my mom lies and I’m screaming, you left us and they tried to kill us and what happened to DAD. I was screaming until everyone sat down and my mom told me my dad had a psychotic break and or schizophrenia, that night the story was both, but I still don’t really know what my dad has or had.  I think his eyes were closed as he was trying to quiet his brain. My Nana was there and said to me later, “How do you survive this?” I shook my head. 

My parents said that they didn’t know the family had hurt us. I told them that I had to listen to them beating my sister nightly and I couldn’t remember what happened to me, but why would they leave us with these people.

“But did you know them?”

“No, they were just trying to make some money.”

Narcisa is not for weaklings or idle spectators. This book is for the kind of trail-blazing rebels who make our world memorable.

Have you ever been with a new lover, someone you found on a beach somewhere, and they scare you? But you take them to your blanket anyway? And you gaze into their eyes anyway? And you give them your body, inch by spectacular inch? Anyway? Well, there is this moment when you realize you are about to lose yourself in the Other, so you hold hands to try to stay on this earthly plane. But you cannot, because, by now, their spirit has overtaken you, gotten inside of you, and started to rearrange things. Tiny animal noises emanate from your mouth or their mouth—you cannot tell whose anymore, because, at this point, you are one being.

It is not that way with all lovers, of course. And it is not that way with all books. But with Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa, it IS like that---it takes you beyond your mundane, day-to-day life, and plummets you straight into the Abyss, where Satan is your only tour guide and his sprung angels attend your wounds.

You become something else after being with such a lover---and after immersing yourself in such a book. You become a person who was once predictable and easy to define, but is now someone beyond description or comprehension.

You can’t really transmit something like this to anyone with mere words—they must fully experience it for themselves. There are things one simply cannot tell another person. They must have their own first-hand knowledge. Prison. Jail. Obsessive love run riot. Sex. Drugs. Murder. Betrayal. Love. Addiction. The Bottomless Pit. The Dark Night of the Soul. You get the picture.

Jonathan Shaw’s Cigano and Narcisa are two lost souls, living in the gutter, but staring at the stars. These characters come from that special place where the animal meets the divine; the place where one fights the other for their stake in unspeakable things. Things at once profane and sublime. These characters are both entertaining and tragic. They are the train wreck you cannot look away from, because to miss a single crucial detail would be a disservice to your own soul.

I always say school gave me back my brains. It also did something to my nervous system that no amount of sex or accolades or external validation could ever do---Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa gives you back your soul and your heart in that same special way. It is a must read for anyone who struggles on this earthly coil with questions of sincerity, the search for God, or the tragic-comical, angelic and delusional quest for new life through another's body, mind and soul; questions whose answers are so disappointing and uninspiring, we might even consider death itself a worthy alternative.

Jonathan Shaw deals fearlessly with such questions, and hands them back to us in a way we can understand, and thereby be freed of our need to self-destruct in the face of such a drab disappointment of a world.

We are yours Jonathan. Do whatever you want with us. Your book is not only life-changing, but might even teach us all how to be more bravely authentic. How to be courageous, even at the precipice of death. We are with you. We are you.

Do not look away from this book, dear reader. If you are of mediocre stock, of course, that would be the only way you ever could look upon such a harsh vision of Truth. But even if you have a suspect genetic lineage, this book has the power to restore whatever you were initially meant to be.

Narcisa is not for weaklings or idle spectators. This book is for the kind of trail-blazing rebels who make our world memorable.

 Jonathan Shaw is at his finest and darkest here, but holding up a literary torch so blindingly bright, the reader can fight his own demons with it, while seeing exactly where, what, and who they are.

- Lisa Douglass
SALVE OGUM!!

to all my friends and frenemies---at least i have the balls to stand for something

to all my friends and frenemies: a note about the human condition. the only reason a frenemy is in your life is to teach you about yourself or to awaken the parts of yourself that are dormant--to remind you of your own dreams your own lack of integrity, your own shady shit---get fucking angry---gossip, do your very worst, cause the brightest lights cannot be diminished--they just burn bright so you can see yourself and remind you of who you really are---underneath all that phony posturing. and you can resent them all you want, but in the end, if you really get that---you'll love yourself more by knowing all the people that bug you and call you out and annoy the fuck out of you--cause they are just mirrors of you. that's all they are there for, so you can love yourself in all your glorious flawed fuckedupery. those are your friends. 

your frenemies are the ones that fake smile at your face so they can be liked but then talk shit behind your back or fuck your dude or jack your shoes when you aren't looking. 

one dude said to me today that i was terrifying to him. he was secretly in love with me but i was in all my uncensored glory, cause most of the time i don't say what i think cause it's too much and people find me to be "too intense." some days i don't care that much. i'm like, oh yeah? like cause i did drugs with dangerous people and i know that they always had my back cause i was for real, that makes me terrifying? and he's like, no man, you say the honest thing. i only said it cause there was a girl in the room who was hallucinating and i wanted her to know i hallucinated for my first two years in the fucking thing that i won't name to not be boring to the rest of you.  my friend is all----you've been to dark places and have no shame about it. actually, i can't remember what he said cause i was thinking of how i was going to return shoes and go to unemployment today and how i was going to start my life over just like the rest of you. but, i was listening sometimes going--most of the time, i edit it down cause i know you don't like it. and that's as shady as fuck to not just be whatever i am and say the real thing all the damn time. but, i gotta exist with the rest of you shut down, dishonest motherfuckers and i get lonely up here thinking all these crazy thoughts all by myself. 

i'm in these self help groups. and i won't advertise or say which one it cause for me it's touch and go. i never know if i'm going to stay or not cause if i decide to stay, i'll just leave. i do that with relationships, once i define it i'm out. so, i don't decide on it, i just keep going there--if i define it i feel trapped and my mind will find flaw with whatever thing it is. anyway, it's kind of a trendy thing to do in LA, but i don't know if using drugs is a disease or if it's just we like to get off. i don't decide that shit. i just don't like how much money it costs going to jail and i don't like how i act. and i don't like how i cut out all the people that love me, which i do a fair amount of drunk or sober. i don't like how i'm cut off from my own heart and have no more voice in the world. so there, we are in this vast movement trying to help others and ourselves, but what we have is an excluding fucked up hipster thing. 

it's like you get invited if you be gay and out. or you get invited if you keep your mouth shut or if you have a famous last name or if you can kiss the asses of the people around you better than i can. you get univited if you don't play by the rules and don't know how to talk to people or are a little bit shy. you get univited if your clothes don't look right or your bone structure isn't blue blood. fuck that. dudes. if drugs kill you, how you gonna pick and choose this shit? i think it's weird. it haunts me cause i have seen people die, kill themselves on purpose and on accident. i have seen dumb people say stupid shit like if you are on meds you aren't sober and then watch a beautiful 19 year old boy hang himself because that dude was under a doctor's care and needed to stay on the meds that kept the voices at bay. listen. i'm no advocate for anything except check yourself motherfuckers. we are in this fucking thing to stay alive. i never like to out myself about it cause i'm not a bastion of anything about it. i'm not all fucking spiritual, cause that shit almost killed me dead. i'm not all social there either, so what? i went back to school and i lost friends when i did it and going back to school was worth it dudes. that shit changed my DNA and my nervous system. so fuck.

fuck gender segregation that was a made up thing back in the day. talk to whomever you want to. you might save a life just by saying to a dude--you might be crazy, but i hallucinated and told someone who thought i was crazy and i don't hallucinate now. and if i OBEYED THE RULES, i would have said, you need to be talking to a dude. what kind of shit is that? plus, stay away from creeps but they ain't all creeps and it isn't fair to judge it like that.

there's this dude standing outside this morning this program of altruism. he is just learning to read and he was reading the other day and all these people were like--why the fuck are we having to wait while he reads---well---because he is changing his life--he is learning to read---no one speaks to him---no one says hi to him cause he doesn't look cool and he has two bags with him----and a fucking hope in hell that glows outside of him that his life can be different and he is going to make it so---that shit breaks my heart. he is full of love---last night when i ran into him he said he is learning to read by reading comic books and the little bubbles and i said---fuck the haters dude--you are doing it--you're doing great--don't give up. he is trying. shame on you for that shit and shame on you for hating anything that you don't understand. ain't we all just people anyhow? just be authentic. if you authentically hate a dude who is learning to read or do you hate him cause he don't look cool? or cause he's a little fat? or lives out of two bags--that dude has more class than the rest of us cause he's willing to look like he is, not a pretender---just being real about it, yo. go do something you can't do and let yourself be humiliated. that's why i go to dance class---to be lame out loud and to sometimes be brilliant and either way my spirit is happy---i'm not in a writing class to be the best in the room either. my ego gets enough food. fuck all that. do something you are totally fucking scared to do today and i will too.

i know i know, we're all scared of each other and it's just easier to talk to the people you know. i swear this is just cause that little dude today made me cry at my own lack of humanity. my own fucking lack of humility. my own lack of actually noticiing him today and saying hello. i'm yelling at me more than at you. 

why is it so easy to like the good looking successful people but not one person was talking to this sweet dude? i'm embarrassed for all humanity and embarrassed for my little tiny problems that are all made up anyway. fucking hell. there's my rant.