In which our hero studies himself in the mirror and takes a shower with Danny DeVito.

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 an anachronism.

Letters:

I would like to formally apologize to Bruce Willis. I rather enjoy his tongue-in-cheek portrayals of characters referencing other characters from his higher grossing films of yester-decades. I applaud his ability to continue to find work by any means necessary.

--- edith beaumont wrote:

> I think Jewish men look more Jewy as they age.

> Don’t you think? Actually, I think all old people look like jews.

> But that’s not a bad thing. I like it.

> Guys like you and Monte Hellman keep looking better and better.

> and jew gals like Lauren Bacall and Barbara Hershey look

> classier and classier.

> can I be your jewess?

> can we get drunk on schnapps and wrap each other in tefillin?

>

> I want to be your warm and I want your warm to be in me.

> like shit

>

jack nicholson < robEdupea > wrote:

Sometimes I sit down at my computer having to shit.

Just so it reminds me to get up after some time.

Otherwise I’d waste away this existence

reading and re-reading your emails…

Oddly this has led me to associate my feelings

for you with the feeling of having to take a shit.

“Is it that you’re too lazy to go to the bathroom,

or is it that you take pleasure in the feeling of shit

inside your asshole?”

The question posed by my childhood psychiatrist has

matured into something of a recurring dilemma in my

adult life.

Cragganmore has been in the white of my eye since the morning – maybe not the rodent itself, but its shadow, its little tail slipping beneath the bookshelves.


Wasted time, my dear Edith.

It keeps moving faster. When Monte and I

shot those westerns for Roger Corman we often

discussed how seasons took longer to pass

when we were children.

At some point Monte noticed that

summers got shorter

and shorter each coming year.

Will future generations remember my Easy Rider character as that brat from Scrubs?

The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

For me, there was little difference in the years between

The Missouri Breaks and The Witches of Eastwick.

It feels as if I can count the seasons of that decade

on the fingers of one hand.

But these are clichés I'm sure you've noticed too.

Why is that? How is time so relative and universal at once?

 The Missouri Breaks (1976)

Here I stand, naked before myself. My body appears almost feminine. The muscles on my upper half have relaxed into breasts and love-handles. Even my upper arms seem to have melted into a sagging excess of colorless skin. My prostate also hangs lower than it used to – I sometimes touch it when I wipe my ass. Gravity marks the years on: my neck, my chin, my jowls, my jaw, – and, by consequence, the bottom opening of my mouth, – the corners of my lips, the tip of my nose, any indentures found around my eyes, the lids that now too well cover my eyes, the slight flaps of skin running above and beneath the pews on my forehead, and my general posture – it’s all sinking with time. My pallid torso is lined with brumal goose bumps that protrude from my skin like the calcium deposits beside my eyes. I’m constantly finding calcified skin on myself – even inside my bellybutton. I think I’m dryer than most. My eye doctor says I have dry-eye and has prescribed artificial tears. Strange, the same condition that attributes to my more engaging performances on camera, by resisting the need to blink and therefore allowing me to hold a gaze for longer, also requires artificial tears – a prop of shame for actors unable to flush out real waterworks. I have to put Vaseline up my nose at night. Otherwise I get nosebleeds. Flakes resembling dried sugar fall from the thin crust glazed over my scalp. The white of my hair is stained yellow; but the sharp quills that poke out of my face – like those carelessly left behind on the kosher chickens from the butcher shops of my youth – lead the way towards that world where nothing sallows. Like the butcher’s wife, I allow these rigid dead hairs to remain. But the receding peaks of my ashen eyebrows need be plucked into Nicholson formation in order to make a face out of all this dull hanging. Bulging from this motionless form, my remaining features seep through the hoar of shower steam to reveal what the characters in my last few films had seen when they looked in the mirror: an old man.

A very strange thing happens…


Fearing the faint sensation of mouse beneath my callused foot, I resist stepping behind the shower curtain.


The same peeling scurf that was once confined to the bottoms of my feet and fingertips has spread across my body, forming a kind of bark over my loosened innards. I can describe it for you here because I can see it. I can see it all: my head to my toes, including parts of myself from behind that I’ve never seen before because no mirror can reveal them to my eye and no director cares to photograph them. I can see these parts due to the strange thing that has occurred. My mirror image has stepped out of the mirror and stands before me.



Interior. Shower. Moments Later. Skulking the shaft of his penis within his shampooed palm, our hero remembers a young Danny DeVito.

“But there’s no soap.”

“Just use shampoo. It does the same thing.”

Young Nicholson watched pre-teen DeVito wash his hairless chest with shampoo. The boy turned around to reveal how he cleaned the nape of his neck, stretched his fingers towards the unreachable center of his back, and laughed before asking Young Nicholson for help. Scrubbing light circles around the middle and lower parts of his new friend’s back, our hero sneaked lingering peeks below.

Jack Nicholson (in interview):

We both won our first jobs in front of the camera thanks to my uncle. He was a war photographer who had returned from Japan with a pretty shabby film script, and a few connections abroad – the same people later credited as the forerunners of the Pinku eiga film genre. Danny and I spent all day and night with this entire cast of boys our age. We all ate together, swam together, and went to bed together at outrageous hours of the night. We was something like that Warner Brothers team “the Dead End Kids” only more controllable – New Jersey’s answer to the Bowery. 

I call those days my dragonfly memories, because that summer I discovered a longish blue dragonfly engaged in sexual intercourse with a green dragonfly on my forearm. Mouth agape, I stepped out of the pond during our skinny-dipping session and Uncle Peter, clad in nothing except his Cooper A-2 flying jacket, insisted that, in all my nakedness, I hold my arm still while he photographed this natural beauty of creation in motion. But, after firing a few shots off his twin-reflex, Uncle Peter paused to stare at my still open mouth, and my face reddened at the realization that he had an erection.

“Do you put the shampoo on your privates too?”

“Anywhere you’d clean with soap.”

“Show him, Danny.” Uncle Peter directed between drags of his cigarette.


Sliding his hands up and down his penis, Danny DeVito smiled awkwardly at Uncle Peter and then at our young hero, welcoming him into this new worldly knowledge of using shampoo not just for hair, but for his body as well. “No, Danny. Show him on him.” A slow head movement, Danny DeVito’s nod could no longer be inferred anything but a confirmation of Uncle Peter’s desires. Uncle Peter adjusted the focal length on his 16mm Arriflex motion picture camera and dragged a comb across his head. As the camera rolled, the boy he liked to call his Italian Tom Sawyer carefully squeezed more shampoo into his hand to gently clean Young Nicholson’s penis. His hands were steady, but his eyes trembled with fear.



The doorbell. I throw on a robe, but I’m not sure what to do with Nicholson. As I write this, he – and by he I mean me – is twisting a longish hair at the tip of his left eyebrow. I touch him. He is real. I am real. He doesn’t do anything. Neither do I. The doorbell again.



I give him my robe to cover his naked body, but now I am naked. I open the closet door to find another robe – not a bathrobe, but the silk kimono draping a plastic hook. Perhaps Nicholson can fit inside the closet. He falls over my shoes. Rockports. Doorbell.

Allowing the kimono to lead, my movements follow the grace of autumn gossamer in morning mist as I dance towards the door.

My Bar Mitzvah photograph is facedown on the floor. Crag must have knocked it off the wall. I imagine the crack of mouse spine – branded with the Rockport trademark engraved on the sole of my shoe. [Folly sound by breaking sticks of celery]. Edith told me that I looked like Cary Grant in this picture. Camera moves in on Nicholson raising his eyebrow with charming swarm. He replies, “You know… I am a submissive.” The doorbell.