“When I was little, Cigano, my mother was a very very pretty girl! Really she was! She was like de muse for me. She was so-oo beautiful, so pretty young geer-ool, Cigano, even more e’skinny long leg an’ more prettier even than de Narcisa! An’ I use to got it so much de excitement, you know, when I look on her an’ go close to her. De e’smell of her, ahhhh . . .”
She fell silent again, lost in thought. Then, her face grew hard as a machete blade.
She kicked at some imaginary obstacle in the sand and wailed. “Then she go an’ get e’stab by de e’stupid focking trick! Filho da puta! An’ then she get de big depression, just e’stay in bed all de day an’ take de crazy medicine! Now she nothing but a big fat old e’stupid e’sheet cow Baby Maker monster! Only e’sleep an’ go talk with de e’stupid Je-sooz! Vaca inútil! E’stupid cow! I hate her! I wanna choke her neck like a big fat focking chicken!”
She stopped yelling. We walked along in silence some more. I felt so bad for Narcisa. She was struggling with her past, drowning in a poisonous whirlpool of her own hate, lost in a dark, unhappy dungeon of memory; trauma, betrayal, disappointment.
She turned and asked the question again. “What it is these thing they call ‘mother,’ Cigano, hein?”
I didn’t answer. I had my own dark ideas about the concept of motherhood.
She spat in the sand and stormed off down the beach, screaming. “Is de big focking galinha! Hah! Big e’stupid old chicken! Coo coo coo! What de focking mother ever do, hein? She only exist for hatch de focking egg! All she e’stupid little eggs! An’ then she gotta sit on de egg! Sit. Sit all de day! Bo-ring!”
I followed along, a silent witness to her battle with sullen old ghosts.
“Confuse an’ e’stupid an’ ignorant! Angry! Violent! Crazy! What de fock do she ever know, hein? What do a cow know about her own existence, hein? Moooo! Do she ever look up to de e’star an’ e’say, ‘Is that my place, de place of my origin? Where do I come from? Where I am going? Why I am here in these place? Who all these peoples who wanna eat me, eat my little egg that I sit on for so long? For what? Who I am eating, hein? Why?’”
She stopped and threw her hands up in frustration. “Porra, Cigano! Nobody deserve these kinda focking mother! Why me?”
I shrugged and said nothing.
Her face took on a confused, anguished expression. “You know, I e’still remember it, de first time I come these place, Cigano, de day when I was borned, an’ I see her face looking me, an’ I already thinking, ‘Fock! I never shoulda gone out from my daddy dick!’”
I looked at her and burst out laughing.
“Poisé, mermão, I better off to just e’stay up inside there so I never gotta end up in de ridiculous uterus of these ridiculous e’stupid cow woman! Serio, mano! An’ you know, when I borned, I can remember it, bro, very first thing I look up an’ see these earth woman ugly face, she ridiculous cow eye looking on me. Porra! I know it right then that I make, how do you e’say it, I make de wrong turn, an’ go de wrong place, an’ I really gonna get focked here!”
“You remember your birth, Narcisa? Como? Nobody remembers that!”
“These why I remember all, Cigano! Cuz I am Nobody here, got it? Really Nobody! I remember I e’start cry so loud when I come these e’stupid planet, cuz I wan’ only go back up inside my daddy dick, safe an’ warm so I no gotta exist here. Just wanna go back to de Alpha Centauri! Got it?”
I got it. I could relate to Narcisa’s anger, her sense of betrayal; the rage and indignation of an abandoned, neglected, abused throwaway child.
I knew.
Even with her difficulty communicating with the world from the barren terrain of her mind’s brutal landscape, Narcisa often coughed up these odd, bitter little scraps of venom, coming from some deep, primal need to simply exist—despite her avowed aversion to the whole concept of existence.
As she was sucked deeper into the swirling haze of her addiction, coughing and spitting would become Narcisa’s only voice. And I would be left struggling to translate her escalating weirdness into words.
26. JINGLE DAYS
“WE DON’T LOVE QUALITIES, WE LOVE PERSONS; SOMETIMES BY REASON OF THEIR DEFECTS AS WELL AS OF THEIR QUALITIES.”
—Jaques Maritain
The weeks rattled by like a long, surreal funeral procession.
With the cash I gave her in my well-intentioned efforts to keep her off the dirty old pista, Narcisa unleashed a full-blown Crack Monster. The self-destruction derby was on full blast now; a blazing, white-knuckle marathon race to hell.
After each brain-battering new run, Narcisa came back looking like a once-superfine fashion model who’d been dead for days. Her long, elegant fingers were blackened witch claws of burned, ashy filth, crowned with cracked, yellowed nails. Her crystal-clear, haunting brown eyes were bloodshot and blurry, bulging out of her head like a pair of putrid grapes, framed with puffy, sunken bags of sleep-deprived dementia, giving her the overall appearance of a distempered ferret.
Narcisa was a mess in a dress. Her face was covered in ugly purple malnutrition blemishes, those regal, high cheekbones riddled with pimples and leprous-looking blotches from digging her septic claws at infected crack sores, trying to pick out the hidden “microchips” the “Shadow People” had implanted in her flesh.
Her sweet baby-doll mouth and pouty pink lips were chapped and cracked and burnt from sucking on a blazing stem all day; her teeth turned a ghastly yellow-brown, glazed with a sickly patina worthy of a decaying sea lion’s skull.
One night, I watched in horror as she sucked so hard on a burned-out crack pipe, she inhaled its red-hot molten metal filter, vacuuming a blazing lava orb straight into her lung. That little mishap sent her into a bug-eyed state of shock, almost killing her dead as a roach. It was really something to see!
Narcisa was about as hopeless an addict as I’d ever known; and I’d known plenty over the years—including myself. But back in the days of my own drug addiction, for the most part I’d been a junkie; a simple, garden-variety heroin addict. That had been my high for years. Decades. Of course, I’d consumed plenty of liquor and cocaine over the course of my career too, and I loved shooting speedballs into my veins—a deadly thrill-ride mixture of heroin and cocaine. Like any well-rounded addict, I’d smoked my share of crack too. But my first love had always been the opiates; Sister Morphine and Queen Heroin were my favorites—until I’d kissed the gutter and thrown in the towel for good.
I’d thought I knew all about addiction. Firsthand. What I didn’t fully get still was that a heroin addict is like a sedated, punch-drunk old tree sloth, compared to a hyperactive ring-tailed monkey of a supersonic crackhead like Narcisa.
Junkies can go on circling the drain for years. Not so with crackheads. Crackheads, man, you just got to just take the poor devils out and shoot them!
Even before teaming up with Narcisa, I knew that smoking crack is like taking the express lane on the road to hell. But seeing it firsthand, living with it up close and personal, that was something else. My heart went out to her. She loved that song by Lenny Kravitz, “Fly Away,” and would sing it out loud while we fucked, or flew through the humid tropical nights on my motorcycle, her voice breathing the familiar lyrics into my ear . . . “I wan’ ta get away, I wan—na flyyyy a—wayyy, yaaahhh yaaahhh yaaahhhhhhh!”
Those were the only times poor Narcisa ever seemed happy; briefly released from the constant screaming torture chamber of her own unfortunate existence.
For the most part, though, she was just miserable; disgruntled and crabby—pissed-off because she couldn’t find a way home from this stifling, stupid hell-planet she’d somehow ended up on. Narcisa really wanted out. I could relate.
As our haphazard union picked up momentum, Narcisa and I jumped right into each other’s battered old souls, without a care; without a backward glance. We became inseparable, following each other around town like a pair of alley cats; and, like cats, wherever we went, we just belonged. We trudged the crowde
d city streets together, like a pair of shell-shocked soldiers in some desperate, undeclared subterranean war, observing the dramas of the metropolis unfolding, like our own personal television novelas.
Jingle days. One long, hazy afternoon, we stopped to watch a battalion of hard-faced gray-clad military police thugs pushing a crowd of bearded Fidel Castro clones against a wall plastered with communist slogans. We laughed as their thin paper fliers floated through the air like huge albino butterflies.
Around another corner, a gang of ragged street kids descended from the sweaty shadows like a flock of angry bats. They tripped up a sluggish, white-haired businessman carrying a briefcase, then plucked him like a chicken. The old guy just lay there on the dirty sidewalk, yelling, flailing around helplessly, as he lost wallet, watch, money, hope, dignity. Then, as quickly as they’d appeared, the tiny goon squad scattered off into the lumbering cattle crowds of indifferent downtown shoppers.
“Hah! Look look lookit, Cigano!” Narcisa cackled. “Caralho! They take even de guy e’shoes! Hah! Ha ha! Perfect, Max! Thank you come again! Next?”
And so we moved through the throbbing human herd, observing the world like a pair of invisible visitors from outer space. Magical times. Those long, hazy, lazy, crazy days and nights with Narcisa all blended together in a consuming, kaleidoscopic collage of indelible, dreamlike visions of my prodigal return to the steamy tropical homeland of my youth. One at a time, new déjà vu moments were being tattooed onto my soul in a slow, surreal cascade of details.
Details: A colorful Candomblé shrine in a cramped, dusty old shop window. The musky scent of ritual incense. Sights and smells, dark, antique wooden hues of long, aimless afternoons out on the prowl together, drifting like spirit wanderers through a twisted, mystical maze of shared hallucinations.
Jingle days.
Narcisa and I wandering through a deserted cemetery; dusty acres of dingy graves and murmuring phantom sensations; trudging through the quiet, empty old monument gardens, searching for a spot to fuck. Narcisa smoking the last of her stash behind a crumbling, moss-covered tombstone.
Details: Plodding along in lengthening afternoon shadows, inhaling clouds of tiny corpse-feeding insects hovering in the heavy air. Sickly-sweet-smelling flowers for the deceased wilting by gravesides, rotting away in gloopy little piles under the pounding South American sun. A blackened mass of melting candles burning like a funeral pyre at the rusty, ancient ironwork gates as we emerged from the rambling metropolis of the dead, bickering like a pair of angry ghosts.
Narcisa and I fought often, right from the start. Sometimes we argued violently, trading insults, slaps, curses, blows, howls and kicks; often in public—because that’s the way we lived now, like a pair of feral street urchins. But the storms would always pass as quickly as they flared up. And then the sun would emerge again, steam rising from the sizzling asphalt of our passionate, wrathful, lightning-bolt outbursts.
Sometimes the force of our combined rage drew other troubled souls into our ceaseless battles, like magnetic shavings attracted to a dark, unwholesome nucleus.
Late one foggy night, we ended up in a rock-throwing fight with some drunken businessmen on an empty downtown street.
Crazy, jingle-jangle summer days and long, steamy Carioca nights.
Narcisa and I running from the cops together, merging into humid nighttime shadows, hand in hand, laughing through it all.
Jingle days.
Times to remember forever.
27. THE DIRTY GREEN HATE MACHINE
“HE THAT IS NOT JEALOUS IS NOT IN LOVE.”
—St. Augustine
Time passed. Life went on. Things got weirder.
One night, a couple of months after her return, Narcisa was sitting on my sofa, cracked out of her skull, seeing things only she could see. Then, out of nowhere, she started bombarding me with an insane barrage of bitter verbal abuse.
At first, I couldn’t believe my ears as she railed away without pity or respite, spitting and cursing at me for hours on end, calling me “old” and “fat” and “ugly,” again and again, insisting that I needed to “lose weight.”
Assuming she was just pissed-off because I’d dared to suggest she give the crack pipe a rest, maybe even eat something before her eyes popped out of her fucking skull, I just laughed and told her she should try to get some sleep.
That did it. Narcisa blew her top.
“Porra! Que sono? What focking e’sleep, hein?! Fala serio! Better for me to e’smoke more crack! I don’ wan’ sleep an’ eat an’ get all retard an’ obese like you e’stupid fat ass focking clones peoples! Nunca!”
I gawked at her, speechless, as she railed on.
“You so-oo focking fat, Cigano! Obeso! Why you look me so, hein? Better you watch you own self, mano! Lookit you big old ugly fat self! Ugghh! Pigman! You hurt my focking eyes, got it? You think I e’stay here together with you ’cause I like you, Cigano? Hah! Forget it! You too ugly an’ fat an’ old!”
Ugly? Fat? Old? What the fuck?
Clearly, Narcisa was hallucinating again. I’d never been called “old” or “fat” or “ugly” by a girl before. I stared at her in shock.
“Why you e’study me these way, like e’stupid old pig, Cigano, hein? I don’ like de mans! Only one man I ever attract to my husband! Because he de beautiful, innocent young boy, got it?”
I got it. My guts went cold with the bitter green sting of jealousy.
Sensing she’d touched a nerve, Narcisa went right in for the kill, rubbing my nose in it hard. “An’ you know, Cigano, I really miss him so-oo much! I use to got ever’thing I ever wan’ with him! Porra! We got de good good life together in de New York . . .”
As I stared at her, Narcisa’s expression changed. “Fock! Then I gotta go to throw it all away, porra! Just for go get addict to these e’stupid droga!”
I smiled. “Well, it doesn’t gotta be a death sentence, y’know. You don’t have to keep smoking that shit forever. An addict can get clean, Narcisa.”
Oblivious to my words, she started talking to herself, seething with angry remorse, as if arguing with some invisible accuser. “Não importa! Soon, very soon now, my husband gonna come an’ look for me an’ he gonna carry me back there . . .”
Then, leveling her eyes at me like a pair of flaming daggers, Narcisa focused all her spite and regret on me again. “ . . . An’ then I gonna get out from these e’sheet life an’ you finish forever, Cigano, got it? I e’stay here only cuz you de most convenient trick, got it?”
I got it. Like a knife in my chest. I stared at her, baffled and hurt.
She spit on the floor and glared back. “Is truth, porra! Is only cuz I too much tire now for go out an’ make it de real trick on de Copacabana! Is all you fault, e’stupid fat old fock monkey! Cuz I too tire from listen you always criticize an’ e’say how I gotta e’stop e’smoke, an’ eat an’ e’sleep an’ all you e’stupid talk!”
“Fuck, man, I was just tryin’ to tell ya—”
“Well, fock all you e’stupid clones peoples’ conspir’cy! I don’ wan’ nothing with you, Cigano! Nada! No way! You old an’ ugly an’ e’stupid an’ fat! Soon as I get better, I gonna go away, back de New York with my husband, an’ forget you!”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Narcisa.” I sighed, fighting to remind myself that it wasn’t her talking, but the Crack Monster. Still, her words had the power to hurt me, to make me feel insecure, worried, jealous.
I looked at her, scratching my head. “Jesus! We used to be friends, Narcisa! What th’ fuck happened to you, huh? You know ya don’t mean that shit . . .”
“Hah! If de truth she hurt you, Cigano, is no my problem, got it? All you e’stupid peoples so hypocrite! No me! Narcisa is authentic! These why you all hate me for e’say you de truth! But I am honest, got it? An’ you fat an’ old an’ you ugly! These is truth! You don’ like it, then you can go sue me, got it?”
I got it. She was losing her fucking mind, and there was nothing
I could do.
She got a greedy, spiteful, faraway look in her eye. “My husband take so good care of me! In New York, I got de who-ole big walk-inside closet, just for all my e’shoe only. My husband mother, she really hate de Narcisa, cuz she jealous. Hah! She know he e’spend more money on me than de mommy an’ daddy all time e’spend with him for whole two year de NYU business e’school an’ apartment rent an’ ever’thing! Hah! Perfect, Max! Thank you come again! Next?”
I looked at Narcisa in disgust as she beamed, shamelessly bragging of her perverse accomplishment in New York; how much destruction and devastation she could inflict on one unfortunate family in so short a time.
To hear her tell the story, it was a matter of honor.
Like winning a big shit-throwing contest or something.
For Narcisa, it seemed, the more unhappiness she could spread to others, the more she loved to revel in the results.
28. THE AMERICAN DREAM
“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT A MAN, IF HE SHALL GAIN THE WHOLE WORLD, AND LOSE HIS OWN SOUL?”
—Mark 8:36
The next night, after seriously considering giving Narcisa a break for a while, in the end, I caved in to desire. Like a man in a trance, I rode over to Copacabana. Snatching her up off the pista, I brought her home.
After another long, crazy fuck, she settled herself on my sofa, like a queen ascending the throne. Then she got out her stash, leaned forward and took a hit.
Silence.
I watched her eyes bug out as she held the lethal smoke in. The lazy ceiling fan stirred the smoky, dark, demon-choked air.
After a long while, she exhaled, then started in on another mad, torrential stream-of-consciousness rant, as if she were continuing a long-standing dialogue, picking up some weird conversation with someone else.
Narcisa was talking to herself, rambling on and on about her adventures in New York and Israel. As her bizarre pipe-dream discourse unfolded under the spell of the drug, I listened, fascinated, trying to decipher the intricate alien code behind her words. And all the while, it seemed she was still trying to inflict pain on me somehow, striving to break me under a stinging lash of jealousy. For reasons only the Crack Monster could know, she kept insisting how much she missed her wonderful life back with her long-gone Golden John.
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