Brett or Something Close

a long time ago, i worked on a movie in houston. i met a few actors on location and hung out with them. the red hot chili peppers were on that shoot too, they were cool, but i knew those guys from l.a. brett was no actor, he was art department.

the man who set fire to his house because of me

there was a man. he lived next door. he was always in my garden. i had been lost and broken at nineteen and came back to my parent's guest house to heal. it was in a neighborhood with security guards around the clock.

i was attending UCLA (the first time) and riddled with the kind of headaches that make you throw up. the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with me. but, i was tested like a lab rat. many days i didn't make it to class because i couldn't see around the cluster of light that was caught in my eye. later i found out i was having some kind of seizure brought on by all the dieting.

anyway, one day the next door neighbors house was on fire. i'd had a premonition about it the night before, but never told anyone because how can you be responsible if you see a thing before it happens? no one would believe you anyway, they'd think you made it up.

i have had a lot of things happen to me that sound made up. that's why it's important to write it all down.

i came outside, like everyone. i got dressed first, because it was back when I still thought it mattered how i appeared to the outside world. the man had set his own house on fire. i remember my parents asking me what kind of relationship i had with the man.

i only said, "you mean the dude in the kumquats? he was on the property a lot and smiled and waved when i left." i wasn't a person yet. i didn't know he wanted to talk to me and i was very sick at the time.

my parents asked a few more times about it. they, or the man, or the wife of the man thought the arson had to do with me. not that i did it, but that the man did it in reaction to his imaginary relationship with me. i never knew what happened to that man or his wife.

they were german. my german neighbors.

Henry Miller to Anais Nin

This is a great letter. Henry Miller, to Anais Nin. A love letter of sorts.

August 14, 1932 

Anais:

Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly—"Some day he'll come!")

I still hear you singing in the kitchen—a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you're happy in the kitchen and the meal you're cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to you rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes.

Anais, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don't find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind. To be blind forever! (Now they're singing "Heaven and Ocean" from La Gioconda.)

I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo's records. "Parlez moi d amour." The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that, but I can't do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe anymore, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will. 

All morning I was at my notes, ferreting through my life records, wondering where to begin, how to make a start, seeing not just another book before me but a life of books. But I don't begin. The walls are completely bare—I had taken everything down before going to meet you. It is as though I had made ready to leave for good. The spots on the walls stand out—where our heads rested. While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We're in Seville and then in Fez and then in Capri and then in Havana. We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. 

I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon's soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience.

HVM

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!!