12/20/11

In which our hero performs a scene with the exterminator’s wife.


Welcome to my blog. Previous readers have expressed confusion as to whether the narrator of this blog – or what Henry James refers to as the center of consciousness – really is Jack Nicholson. All I can tell you is that I, the writer of the blog, am indeed Jack Nicholson. However, I should mention that the characters in this rather disjointed chronicle are NOT intended to represent any real people, living or dead. And so, I felt this preface necessary.

LATEST NEWS!
I am tired in my soul.

Letters:
Apologies to Sir Bob Hoskins.

In a haste to share with you the contents of my dream, my previous blog entry skipped a whole episode that had passed in the kitchen between myself and the exterminator’s wife. Though not entirely pertinent to our hero’s tale, I’d like to return to those events here:

The following day, Jack Nicholson found himself stripped down to his white underwear and a white T-shirt. Hanes, crew-neck. It must have been the elderly lady with the palsy-shakes who had awakened him because it was she who was now talking.

“By chance, I happened to be carrying a large pad-lock with me. And as he grabbed at my hand-bag, I hit him across the head with it!”

“Good for you!” or “That’s right!” cheer-on the choir of three more elderly ladies sitting with us in the parlor, strong-holding their delicate saucers of tea.

“And, just before a stream of blood comes rolling down his forehead, he looks at me with this horrified and very frightened expression. So I smacked him again Blap! on the head!”

“That’s showing him!” or “That’s what you get!”

“But the bandit would not fall to the ground. So, what am I to do? Just because I’m old, I should stop protecting myself? So boom boom boom, I [makes a motion with fist in place of a word] the youngster’s skull until it breaks… and I see brain.”

“Admirable lady,” sighs the exterminator in a hushed tone before winking at Nicholson.

“You have to keep attacking!” and “That’s why I always carry a small pistol in my purse!”

“Oh, you need to be armed these days.”

“I won’t so much as cross Central Park without concealing some kind of weapon.”


“You must forgive my present accoutrement,” whispers the exterminator Al Condor. “My eyesight is only poor in one eye.”  What Nicholson had taken for a wink was actually his host’s twitching struggle with the monocle over his left eye. “So this pince-nez is really the perfect thing. One of my wife’s incroyable purchases via the ebay.” As if cued in the staging of bad regional theatre, the kitchen light turned on (stage-right and behind the exterminator’s armchair) to reveal a gangrel of a woman with poorly groomed tendrils, a missing left arm, and a missing right leg. Merdel, the exterminator’s wife, seemed the perfect height for the low-ceiled kitchen. “It’s a monocle!” she playfully called out. “A pince-nez is for both eyes!” in a mousy voice, revealing her calcium depleted teeth in a fey smirk for Jack’s benefit. “I’ll eat your eye!” screams back the exterminator.


“I had to knife hoodlums on four separate occasions this November.”
“Well, it’s the holiday season. Four is not so many…"
“Maybe not with a gun, but with a knife is a different story.”


Still in a kind of daze, Jack stares ahead. Sound fades slightly as we move-in towards a black-light poster of a jellyfish hanging on the exterminator’s wall. The caption reads: Turritopsis nutricula; 4.5 millimetres (0.18 in); New Zealand. Tiny holes puncturing the wall surround the poster, a couple of darts sticking out of the black border – somebody must have had trouble hitting his target.

 “Anyone can fire off a shot and be done with it, but to hack away pieces from the face of a thug and really watch him suffer… Now this is something.”

We are pulled back into the action by the exterminator nipping a collop off his blistered foot, a sapour of puss and blood follow. The sound returned to a normal level, the exterminator speaks: “I must attend to this dans la toilette. Can you to stand qui vive in the kitchen?" 

And so, the conversation in the parlor again drifts into the background, as if back into the dream Nicholson had left behind moments earlier, as our hero makes his way into the kitchen. 
Turritopsis nutricula; 4.5 millimetres (0.18 in); New Zealand.


INT. KITCHEN – MORNING
This ovine goddess hovered so closely over a pot on the stove that I could not tell if it was due to her attentive homemaking or if she used the ladle to support her deformed figure. Forcing me to study her broken physique, she repeatedly tottered over the stovetop and adjusted her hipbone to sit on any protruding edge she could find. She was so good at shifting her weight from her remaining leg to whatever counter or table top held up the side of her missing leg that I was able to take in the rest of her without flinching, and an unattached man such as myself needed no excuses to linger. Not too inspiring, mind you. Her behind was nothing more than a flat continuation of her back, her arms were thin and hairy, her bones seemed hollow. Maybe it was due to a kitchen redolent of fried garlic. I wanted her. I wanted to enter her anorexic skeleton, or quarter skeleton. I imagined tearing her shirt open in a rage of passion, but I could only visualize her modest cleavage. I could not picture her bare breasts, her nipples. It was just: her cleavage, her cleavage, her cleavage.[1]

Again, she almost fell. Her clumsiness could have played itself endearingly on a more graceful woman, but the exterminator’s wife made such loud grunts with each folly that one could not help but feel a little put-off by her presence. The annoyance quickly became guilt, however, when she anticipated her husband’s response to her placing a dirty hand on the white wall in order to prevent herself toppling over. 


She hopped a little closer, studied my features gravely, and nearly fell right over, forgetting to brace herself against the wall. “You’re really Jack Nicholson?” she asked, as if searching my eyes through a deep cloud of smoke and fog. “Damn right I am.” She played vixen, closing my lips with her finger, but this quickly turned into her using my face to support her wavering body. She asked me to bite her finger, and I complied – if for not other reason than to steady her rickety frame with the clasp of my jaw. She told me to bite it off, to chew and swallow.

“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“The Noahide Laws do not permit us to eat the flesh of a living animal.”


She licked her thin pallid lips and sounded Polish when attempting a sexy voice. “But I am a woman of science.” She pushed my face away and quickly planted the same palm on the wall, so as not to fall.
“And your husband? Is he also a man of science?”
“Oh, him. Well, let’s just say, I have him eating out of my hand.”
She looked towards her hand to emphasize this, but it was not there and she was embarrassed by the realization that the action of her holding out her open hand on the last sentence had been imagined with a limb she sometimes forgot was gone. “I love my husband, but I don’t like the person I am when I am with him. I want to be with him, but I don’t want to be the person I am when I am with him.” She abruptly turned toward her hand the way a cat turns to its own tail. She hobbled closer, reaching for the back of my chair. “I’m no floozy.” “No. No, I didn’t think you were.” “I feel as if I might just fall into the apples…” She let go, and I stood to catch her fall and brace her brittle bones.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I cannot open my eyes any wider. I just had botox surgery so I have to be careful.” I leaned her against the wall. “I may be flawed right now, but in a week...” I hushed her hammy performance, “I don’t think it’s a flaw at all,” and our dialogue bounced fast, like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn. Me and Faye Dunaway.


A chubby boy with a large bandage over his right cheek, guileless eyes, and smooth skin exuding the aroma of lemon and paprika interrupted the banter. He cleaned his fingers individually with a thin wet napkin torn from something resembling a sugar package – the family had a collection saved from various chicken wing deliveries. The boy darted his eyes to each corner before I noticed the exterminator sneaking up behind him with a vulpine shushing face. When those stubby arms crept around the child, a shriek of terror was emitted to prompt the exterminator to trumpet, “Daddy Bites!” before curling his lips over his teeth to safely nibble the boy’s good cheek. The wife dropped her hand from the wall and fell to the floor, clinging to my ankle and twisting herself into a comfortable position. Animal noises accompanied the next gentle bites, and the exterminator growled as he exposed his teeth for a final vicious chomp at the air beside his son’s face. “This boy! I love him so much, I could make a tart out of him!” He looked the child up and down, and sniffed before reconsidering, “Maybe a quiche.” The boy, still frightened, smiled for my benefit.

The exterminator chuckled, wrapped his arm tight as a papillote around his son’s neck, to reveal rapport, and cradled the boy like an omelet in a gimbol. “Look at you, succulent child! Plein comme un oeuf!” Dragging the boy towards the refrigerator, he opened the door to reveal a glass bowl of leftover spaghetti Bolognese. He peeled back the protective saran, sneaked a handful, and scowled at the rest, warning, “I will eat you later.” The pasta almost whimpered in such a helpless way that he could not resist grabbing another handful before picking his nose and opening the freezer door. Sticking a fudgesicle in his mouth, like he would a cigar, the exterminator made his way over to his wife to now put his arm around her, and the boy ran out of the room, but not without him calling out to the flleing child, “I’m going to kiss your offal!” He laughed and squeezed his arms around his wife before gently kissing the back of her head. “I know what you’re thinking… Sure, she’s no spring chicken. But it often pays to choose a lover who has a little more bottle. And this one did not know what she was going to be eaten with before I got my hands on her!” 

“Me? What am I?” asked the wife. “The leg on which dinner comes to the table!”

“Why must I feel like I’ve entered my own kitchen as a hair falls on soup? Please excuse my wife, Jack. Merdel isn’t quite dans son assiette this morning, is she? I think we are going to have to play some chess later, my little lamb-roast, aren’t we?” The couple simultaneously turned their heads toward a chessboard that remained in mid-game, her with a terrified expression and him with a ferocious one.

The exterminator brought Nicholson back into the parlor, where he assured his old lady guests that his annual Monday morning bal would commence momentarily, and that he would personally be delighted to dance with each and every one of them. He snapped his fingers and his son, decked out in tails, entered the room and sat at the piano to play a piece of music that delighted the elderly ladies. The exterminator Al Condor fixed Nicholson a snifter of whiskey and sank into a tattered velvet easy chair. Because his legs were unable to reach the ottoman, he flailed about like a vole on its back, having to bite the already torn armrest to balance himself. In order to create the appearance of intention behind his awkward movements, he begun to unstitch the chair’s welting with his teeth. Feigning some sort of compulsion he fixed his eyes on his son while pulling at threads with his teeth and drooling onto the manchette.


        “Have you ever killed a child?” asked the exterminator.
        “I don’t know.” replied Nicholson.
        “Have you ever beaten a child to death with a baseball bat?”
        “I’m not sure.” 
        “Are you scared?”
       He took a beat to ponder the question. “No. Not really.” 
       “What was that hesitation?”
       “What hesitation?”
       “The hesitation before you said, No. Not really.”
         
When Jack Nicholson was eleven years old, he convinced himself that he was in love with Samantha Lewis, the eight-year old girl next-door. “Never write a love letter,” his uncle told him, “They only come back to haunt you. No evidence.” When Jack touched her where she did not want to be touched, she told him to stop, called him names, screamed for help, and tried to physically remove his hands. Her resistance infuriated the boy to a point of no return, and realizing that she would probably rat on him, he beat her to death with his Louisville Slugger. He was then free to do what he wanted with her body, but he soon felt the whole episode to be hardly worth the effort. Samantha Lewis was dead, and for what? Her smashed up face, bruised body, and bloody everything stared back at his rushing hormones; but her delicate beauty had left with the first swing of his bat, and the rest served only to anneal his mind.

Later that day, he asked his mother what she would do if he killed someone by accident. Would she tell the police? She never imagined his intent to be anything more than a child’s testing of the boundaries, and, upon hearing her explanation that she probably would inform the proper authorities – but only in an attempt to help him and ensure that he did not get himself into further trouble – he knew that he could never tell the truth about Samantha Lewis. When they found what remained of her body, nobody suspected the girl’s 11-year-old neighbour.
(Mammal, mammal… Mammal, mammal, mammal, mammal, mammal, moon. Moon, mammal)





[1] Memory of watching his sister wash dishes in the kitchen while his mother lays drunk on the couch. Because his mother is too intoxicated to notice, Young Jack Nicholson’s sister flashes the boy and laughs.  First her breasts and then her vagina.


12/2/11

In which our hero recites his dream for the exterminator’s analysis:


Welcome to my blog. Previous readers have expressed confusion as to whether the narrator of this blog – or what Henry James refers to as the center of consciousness – really is Jack Nicholson. All I can tell you is that I, the writer of the blog, am indeed Jack NicholsonHowever, I should mention that the characters in this rather disjointed chronicle are NOT intended to represent any real people, living or dead. And so, I felt this preface necessary.
News: Not crazy, hungry.
Letters: I'd like to apologize to Mr. Ashton Kutchner, who must be going through a tough time right now, and certainly did not need the added stress of appearing in these here pages. 

The exterminator turned off the light to calm his guest. While studying the actor in darkness, he sucked on a marrowbone already stripped of meat and fat. “I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!” It was unclear if his words were directed towards our hero or the marrowbone. “Said Ahab to Pip.” Nicholson was confused. “Melville. Moby-Dick…” Nothing. “Where are your sunglasses?”

"May I confide in you?" 
The exterminator’s nod committed him nothing. Nicholson rested his head on the sofa's chewed up armrest. “An itch on the tip of my penis." When he spoke, he was surprised to find his accent crossing Connecticut with something British settled in America. "The itch crawls into the urinary hole."  Carry Grant. "A burning sensation." James Mason. "Tossing and turning, I attempt to sleep on my stomach, tightening the opening with my body’s weight. Crossing my legs, I hold my testicles together, staunching the blood flow up the shaft in attempt to spew the irritation out the orifice. A catheter up my urethra, I dare say.

"Naturally enough, I press my arm against my penis, and use the palm of my hand to push its tip against my belly. Over my pajama pants, I scratch at the hole. I tear the cotton crotch but keep scratching at it, digging my fingernails slightly at the sides of the surface around the irritated area. Scraping deeper and deeper towards the inner sides, the skin around the hole of my penis begins to tear slightly. The hole widens further along the diameter of its head. Split in half, my fingers open up the tip of my penis to reveal several miniature teeth nesting in a pinkish jelly, lining my urinary track. The tiny rice-like bones spring upwards and, as the crevasse in the head extends down the penis’s shaft, the two halves of skin holding the premature teeth fold out and turn both layers of mouth onto opposite sides of my body. There is a kind of lapse at this point in the dream.[1] 

"The teeth face outward from my penis’s skin, as if they are hidden inside a bloomed flower. But somehow, as the halves unfold further apart, the two sides turn their teeth around and onto my body. What in hindsight can only be imagined as an intricate maneuver – a kind of twisting of the widened penis jaw – I remember as an unnoticed fluid movement – the sequence of the action abided by the same anti-logic as the seamless transition from one dream to the next. Half my penis nibbled its way past my bellybutton; the other half chewed through the crack of my ass – up my spine, between my chest – meeting at my collarbone, tiny razor-sharp white things devoured my flesh, leaving behind only that which was ossified. When they reached the false teeth in my larger head– .” Realizing his fingers were pressing eyebrow hairs together, he dropped them and found an unsettling spread of little hairs stuck to his fingertips and inside his fingernails. He wished he had his sunglasses.



“Well, you certainly are a rum fellow.” Though the room was quite dark, the exterminator’s gestures were so exaggerated that one could not help notice how putout he was by the narrow pews lining the halo of bone clawed between his fingers. “What do you say we put a finis on the subject of penises?” In attempt to shoo the image of sautéed sausages from his mind, he turned the light back on, illuminating a cloud of dust clambering up his abandoned chair. In his evening robe and pince-nez he looked classier than Danny DeVito, an embonpoint Bob Hoskins. “The penis thing does not help me with your poltroon. Fixé sur la point!”

“Poltroon?”

Yes, the mouse.” The exterminator Al Condor pulled a metallic straw from the breast pocket of his robe and proceeded to tell a story dating from his time living in a Hare Krishna temple. 


“One night, I awoke from a dream in which two wild dogs had been fighting inside my stomach.” The tip of this metallic straw-device had been welded into a scooped knife that he used to gouge all salvageable grind from the barren bone in his hand, carving salient troughs for whatever remained potable. “I called upon my guru in a state of panic, asking him which dog would win. Do you know what the guru replied?”  He placed his tongue inside the ring of bone, bit down, and sucked his tongue back into his mouth to finish, “The one you feed.” Spitting the bone into his palm, the gourmand inquired if his guest had any interest in sausages.  




[1] Perhaps lapse is not quite accurate. He did not intend to imply a period of blackness, or anything like it. The moment, both a flash and an elaborate narrative of its own dominion, was somehow separate and co-existent, an intertwined interruption. I can describe it with fair detail as a non-connecting image of a svelte British man in Buddy Holly glasses making a rather effeminate gesture with his arms and swanlike neck. But you can’t explain that. It just doesn’t make any sense. 

11/16/11

In which our hero films the Easy Rider remake and returns home to find his computer hacked.


NEWS: The papers described the performance as passionate and enraged but this they had only come to by watching my films.
LETTERS: I’d like to apologize to the Honda company.

INT. EASY RIDER (remake) – FINAL SCENE – DAY
Ashton Kutchner and Shia LaBeouf ride their horses side-by-side down a country dirt road. They are young and free.

Danny DeVito drives his pickup truck and I ride passenger (shotgun) position. We are old and conservative.
DANNY DEVITO
Hey, hallo-loo-lee-lims!

JACK NICHOLSON
Pull around the side, we’ll scare the Hell out of them.

I reach for the shotgun behind us and take it off the gun-rack.
We drive up beside a mustachioed and long-haired Ashton Kutchner.

JACK NICHOLSON
Want me to blow your face off?

DeVito laughs, and this makes me proud.
Kutchner flips his middle finger up at me.

JACK NICHOLSON
Why don’t you get a haircut?

He don’t respond. Pussy. I shoot. You know, just for shits and giggles.
But his horse goes all crazy. It falls, and the cowboy is crushed under the thing.
We drive past the other one (Shia LaBeouf) and he gives me a look like he just don’t understand. Gets a good look at me too.

In a panic, Shia LaBeouf rides back to the fallen young hero, Mr. Kutchner.

ASHTON KUTCHNER:  I got punked.
SHIA LABEOUF:  I my God. I’m going for help.
ASHTON KUTCHNER:  I got ‘em! I’m gonna get ‘em!

MEANWHILE:
JACK NICHOLSON
                                                We gotta go back.

CUT BACK TO:
LaBeouf putting his American flag leather jacket over Kutchner’s face.
He jumps back on his horse.
DeVito’s pickup drives towards him.
LaBoeouf’s horse.
DeVito’s pickup.
LaBoeouf’s horse.
A shot and a cloud of smoke coming from my window.
LaBoeouf’s horse goes flying through the air in pieces. A leg. A head. Where’s LaBoeuf? Presumably he is in pieces too.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you’re not wearing your sunglasses this morning, Jack.” My agent can sound so damn smug. “I think it’s good that you learn to live without them. Don’t you?” I choose not to respond. “It’s a sign of making real progress.” He allows me to think this over. “Just imagine all the possibilities, all the new and interesting roles that might open themselves up to you if you approach them without relying so heavily on your sunglasses.”

"Did you have a chance to read my script yet, Mitch?"

“I was confused by the kabuki sequences. Why are they in there?”

“That’s an homage to Japan. You know, after the earthquake…”

“I’m not sure why you feel something like that belongs in this film.”

“That’s the problem with you Hollywood-types, the aesthetics always take precedent over the ethics.”

“That’s very interesting. Tell me more about that.”

Upon returning home, Jack Nicholson found a passive-aggressive note posted to the front door interior of his apartment building.

To the man who attempted to lure my 12 year old daughter into his apartment… blah, blah, blah.

He tore it down and threw it on the floor.

Strange happenings seemed to emerge from his computer once he connected online. Various cease and desist messages from Danny DeVito had now progressed to death threats; his facebook account had become temporarily suspended; and when looking through his correspondences with Edith, he first noticed several references in her emails to comments he had no recollection of making and then words and sentences randomly inserted to his own messages that he had positively never written.

jack nicholson < robEdupea > wrote:
Dearest Edith,
I thought about you again this morning when listening to that song
by Leonard Cohen. You know the one…
“There is a crack in everything… That’s how the light gets in…”
I have developed a diet which has allowed me to only diarrhea
for the past week. With that diarrhea, I have filled an empty bottle
of whiskey. It is my intent to make you drink it. Why?
Because I would like to fill you with my fluids. Not just my cum, but
I also prefer his earlier work, but there are certain songs from his later
period that are just so close in taste to my bowels that I need you to
swallow them.

Had he been hacked? First his sunglasses stolen and now this!

Too tired. Too tired to figure things out. Too tired to even think about things. And so, his head already sinking to his chest, our hero marched the slender path to bed and attempted sleep. There was another body beside his. There had already been another human being in his bed, and Jack had been too exhausted to even notice until now.  The other body seemed to belong to a man, and so he shook the hairy shoulder aggressively enough to let the stranger know that nothing sexual could be interpreted about the two men in bed together. The other man turned his face toward our hero and, even in the darkness, he could see that it was Jack Nicholson.  They both did. Nicholson – the other Nicholson whom he had found in his bed – howled into the night, played fisty-cups and punched at shadows in the black air. Then he laughed and wept without transition. Nicholson was a little jealous of this Jack Nicholson, who so embodied emotion, but he dared not confront the crazy man. Instead, a strange sort of embarrassment took hold of him, freezing him, and he chose to fake sleep until it became a reality. He was soon awakened, however, by a soused Crag sneaking into his pillowcase to curl beside his warm breath. After scaring the pest away, he drifted back to sleep and each nerve ending felt the vibrating tap-dance of multiple Cragganmores stepping across the bumps on his brain.  In a cold sweat, he ran out of his apartment building.

At the pizzeria, he found a payphone. “You have to help me. I can’t live with it anymore. I’m not used to this… this feeling.” And why was he at the pizzeria anyway? “I want to kill it! This cute little thing. (hint of laughter).” Why? Because Cragganmore wanted it! Because Cragganmore left that flyer from the pizzeria uneaten!  “I want to hurt it. That’s not normal. (slight laughter). It’s so small. It’s disgusting.” Mozzarella! He spit out the pizza from his mouse (mouth). “It’s disgusting! It’s disgusting!! Ignore this. (sharp, single laugh). It’s not me.” The exterminator was bothered – more by the alluring sound of masticated pizza than anything else – and casually told the caller to bring a couple of slices to his private residence.

Rubbing his eyes in want of his sunglasses, Jack Nicholson looked up and down the list of residents and buzzer numbers. To the side of that list was a handsome brass door-plate inscribed: Al Condor – Exterminator of rodent and insectual beings.