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.
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.
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