"Does anyone ever smoke Crack in 'peace'?"
For some life is meant to be lived; Others feel it is there to be used up. In the book Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes, these two schools of thought come together as author and extreme liver Jonathan Shaw explores his relationship with the willfully self-destructive Nascisa, a crack addicted teenage prostitute he met on the streets of Rio De Janeiro.
According to his own legend, Jonathan is the "bastard product of a brief, surreal, violent and unhappy alcoholic marriage between big band legend Artie Shaw and movie star Doris Dowling." Born in 1953, the Vietnam War served as a backdrop to Jonathan's understandably troubled formative years. Working as a writer for Los Angeles' first alternative newspaper, The LA Free Press, afforded Jonathan the opportunity to run wild with the likes of Jim Morrison, the Manson Family and Charles Bukowski. An extreme life lead to extreme drugs, and our anti-hero fell for the escapist lure of Heroin as the looming seventies chased the fun out of the last throws of the sixties.
Under the apprenticeship of legendary first generation tattoo artist Bob Shaw, Jonathan turned his affection for needles into a positive. After a period spent traveling -- one of many in his gypsy life -- Jonathan moved back east to New York. Always the outlaw, in 1976 Jonathan founded Fun City Tattoo in the East Village -- a decade and a half after NYC had banned such store front parlors (following a particularly virulent outbreak of hepatitis B). Indeed the city only repealed their outdated laws in 1991. The notoriety of the parlor and its proprietor attracted an equally notorious patronage, which included Johnny Depp and Dee Dee Ramone. Sometime around 9/11, tired of his life and his drugs, Jonathan sold his store and retired from tattooing, moving to Rio De Janeiro to begin his next chapter.
HERE Jonathan shares a vignette from his life in South America.
