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.
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I am tired in my soul.
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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.
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| 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.
[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. |
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