In which our hero is visited by an exterminator.

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!

Caption for photograph of dog driving automobile: What is the correlation between conscious thought and muscular action?


Letters:
I would like to formally apologize to my oldest and dearest friend, Danny DeVito. It is indeed likely that, as his legal advisors have suggested, I took some “liberties with the truth” […] “in the interest of fantastical erotica or transgressive literature”. I wish to once again remind my readers that the characters appearing in this blog are very much works of fiction.




“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” The exterminator was a Danny DeVito look-a-like and a nose-picker. “Herman Melville from his novel Moby-Dick.” He lifted his eyes to a crumb beside my mouth and had no qualms about picking his nose while I rambled on about the infestation. He pulled out strands of snot to better smell personal relics; but he was careful to appear tactful in the disposal of the findings. Resisting his temptation to eat a sharp lozenge of booger, he examined an anthology of Holocaust poetry for markings of Cragganmore’s teeth and placed the prize within its pages. He tapped the binding against his lip and sniffed in the aroma of antiquated glue tinctured with silverfish droppings.

“I’m a big fan of anything Holocaust,” remarked the exterminator.

“Oh. Are you Jewish?”

“I’m all religion and no religion, everyman yet no man at all. You see, all religions speak to and of me, but none grant me tranquil. I, my boy, am an extrémité incessante!”

“Is that also from Moby-Dick?”

      

He withdrew various poisons from a clunky leather medical bag and noted Cragganmore’s name on a long muster roll within a thick encyclopedic-like book before returning his finger to his nostril. Rather than draw attention with a forceful flick, the exterminator wiped the remains of partly dried mucus from his stubby fingertip onto the unseen back of the refrigerator – his other fingers making like he was occupied with important tasks by flipping through the pages of the immense leather bound book or adjusting the pince-nez on his nose. He opened the refrigerator door to taste every cheese, salami, pickle, both smooth and crunchy peanut butters, whatever he could find to determine what would best lure the rodent to its death. He did all this with the same fever a pregnant woman devours to bring life to her unborn. And when he finished, he inquired about lunch.
“There is no mayonnaise in your refrigerator,” he reported while fixing himself a postprandial sandwich. “Only mustard and horseradish.”

“I’m watching my cholesterol.”

“Sans doubt. But what fowl, I dare ask, can you put on a sandwich without mayonnaise? Ne pas manger ce pain-là. Dare you not profess the condiment rather de rigueur to prevent dryness?” 

The pleasure of eating the sandwich he had prepared was soon abandoned however, as the hypnotic saccade of his eyes suggested a pretzel found in the corner of the room might jump up and scurry off at any moment. With a swiftness that indicated he had been trained for such an occasion, the exterminator dropped on all fours and sneaked the pretzel into his mouth. Like a dog, this somehow made him more human.

Sensing scrutiny in my gaze, his eyes visibly awakened from their trance and froze before he awkwardly turned his stout frame to ask, “Are you in pictures?” Upon confirmation, he confidently returned his finger to his nostril. “I knew I recognized you. You were in that Adam Sandler movie. I knew it. I knew I recognized you. You have a certain je ne sais pas.”

“Je ne sais quoi?”

“Chacun a son gout, I suppose!” Still a dog on all fours, he cocked his head further askew, glistening the sloppily spread rim of wax inside his right ear. “I like the movies. They give a false impression of immortality. But Jack Nicholson would never reside in such a… such a… comme si comme ca abode. Être serrés comme des sardines!” he laughed. “But you were in that Adam Sandler movie, weren’t you”

“Yes, and I am Jack Nicholson.”

“If you like,” shrugged the exterminator, and he officiously picked his nose before justifying his body’s refusal to stand on hind-legs by peeling up a corner of bathmat to sniff an untraceable scent.

More humane than the non-fatal cage described a couple of blogs back were attempts to live harmoniously with mice. But making a pet of a former intruder like Little Orphan Oban had meant droppings on the floor, gnawing at the books, and slippers constantly covering our hero’s feet. Eventually, a cat was borrowed from a teammate on his amateur baseball team. If this cat’s proud march from the bathroom – a decapitated Lil’ Oban hanging from its mouth – was nature in motion, Jack Nicholson was happy to call the exterminator this time around.

Jumping to his feet, he assessed: “She’s an eater! I’ll throw some poison packages around the place. Baby will chew on those and in fifteen minutes… Well… Adieu.” He winked.  “For safe keeping, I’ll lay out a few glue-traps for mon petite poupée to stumble on for easy disposal. After all, we wouldn’t want Baby wandering off to some undisclosed location to pass on to the hereafter, would we? A mouse should die in the home. Before the later part of the 20^th century, we used to die in our houses, surrounded by: family, neighbours, clergy… Mon dieu… those cursed hospitals have taken all the life out of death.” Though he was without tail, it seemed the exterminator wagged his when walking out the door.

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.

In which our hero discusses the works of Anton Chekhov and an Easy Rider remake.

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!

Like a doctor attempting to understand another man’s pain, I have plenty of explanations but know very little about love.

Letters:

I would like to formally apologize to fans of Michael Ironside. He really is a wonderful performer whose work is too often compared to my own. It was never my intention to use the blog previous to undermine his very original work. I don’t treat other actors that way. I am Jack Nicholson. 

After reading my previous blog posting, my good friend Danny DeVito telephoned to inquire if it really was me writing this thing.

Some of you have written in, expressing interest in what my screenplay is about and/or why I have decided to undertake the writing of this blog. The notes you read here contain, of course, the unofficial chronicles of my existence – though he still encourages me to write out my thoughts and feelings, my agent has pulled this blog from my official website. During one of our weekly meetings, while I was rehearsing here (in New York) with Marty Scorsese, my agent explained, “Irony is really hipster right now. Every aging talent is doing something self-reflexive these days.” That got me thinking…

“The studio wants to remake Easy Rider as a western,” he revealed. “They’re gonna put Ashton Kutchner and Shia LaBeouf on horses instead of motorcycles! You’re part is being handed down to that kid from Scrubs. I know, I know… This used to be a helluva good movie! I can’t understand what’s going wrong with it. But, get this, they want YOU to play one of them conservative southern guys who shoots down the hippies at the end. It’s supposed to be ironic.” He referenced Bruce Willis. “You know, it’s like your older self is coming back to kill your younger self! Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of these? Ha!” My agent has adopted the habit of poorly impersonating me when trying to push me toward a particular offer. “It’s fan-fucking-tastic!”


The salary for half-a-day’s work encouraged me to think it over. Then I began to feel pretty miserable with myself. I mean, why was I doing it? How much better could I eat? What could I buy that I couldn’t already afford? “Tell me more about that,” says my agent. Well, that’s about the time when the mice began to appear – first, in the form of twins (Dalwhinnie and Balvenie) –and I was about ready to hop on a plane home to Los Angeles, when my agent says I should stay here in New York and write about it. “Whatever comes to mind...”

Research Notes for a Film:

•         9:30am – Michael Ironside leaves his apartment dressed in kimono.
•        10:06am – Honda Civic gets off Westside Highway and stops on 49^th Street. Ironside pantomimes several exaggerated emotions. Good.      
•        10:12am – I imagine slipping in the shower and landing with my asshole around a hot faucet.

[Similar Imaginings: baseball bat smashing me in the face and lodging teeth down my throat, falling teeth-first onto concrete or cement (often a sidewalk), the aftermath of a car accident in which I am helplessly stuck in a position that holds shards of broken windshield along my gums and around my teeth].

•        10:16am – I-side smears white make-up on his face. He exhales deeply, careful not to cry, fearing tears would make him appear more clownish. What memories does he draw on? Memory of sister washing dishes and flashing him from the kitchen?
•         10:17am – I-side exits vehicle. 9^th Avenue. Enters loft apartments. Good pace.
•        10:19am – I-side frames himself in doorway and contorts his kimonoed arms, flamboyantly holding a picturesque pose. “Ironside!” is shouted with pleasurable recognition.
•         10:22am – I-side has extended conversation with Edith. 

Some time has gone by since The Two Jakes, and I suppose that I just got the itch to have another go at making my own film, so I have begun writing a script. “Who is this Michael Ironweed?” asks my agent. “Never heard of the guy!” I am determined to create a character who can reclaim my image from the American family and give me back to the free-spirited, if alienated, American individual. No more family shit. Just shit. I want to write about shit. I want to portray a human piece of shit, but he will remain endearing because he will be played by Jack Nicholson.

•         Why are flies so attracted to the scent of shit? I read somewhere that female fruit flies deprived of the ability to smell food outlive their peers. The study suggested that our sense of smell might be linked to our cellular aging process. 
  
  
  Someone said of Henry James that he wouldn’t know what to do if a bird should happen to shit on one of his characters during an afternoon stroll through the park. The story would have to end there because James was incapable of describing the shit.
  
  I knew it was over when I saw Edith eating sushi with Ironside. He gave me such a scowl, but it was Edith’s downcast eyes that let me know it was over.
  
  Maybe Dalwhinnie and Balvenie weren’t twins at all. Maybe they were a couple, and the other mice have been their offspring. Is it possible that I’ve killed the father and mother, and that I’m now working my way through their progeny?
  
  DeVito reminded me about something I had confided while rehearsing Hoffa. Something about a Chekhov character whom I had once figured I’d end up like. An older country doctor, somebody’s uncle, who finally finds love after years of convincing himself that it either did not exist within the social realms of reality, or that it simply would not play a role in his own life. I questioned if the Chekhov character ever truly found love. Perhaps the elderly uncle was only coming to accept that his time was nearly up, and falling in love seemed to be the remaining thing to do – love as the consequence of man’s acceptance of his own mortality.

Who knows? Perhaps love is an illusion

I cannot bring myself to accept. One I refuse

to go along with. Like the kid who sticks around

to annoy the magician into revealing his tricks

long after the birthday party has ended.

Cordially,

your Mulholland Man in the Village

(or just… jack)

--- edith beaumont wrote:

> dear jack,

> what have the girls you've dated been like?

We had met on an Internet site for adventurous Jewish singles disinterested in lifetime relationships and long periods of dating. I knew that, as an actor, I could participate in sexual role-playing with ease; but I was otherwise unsure what my fetishes might be. This forum presented itself as a good place to explore. For months, nobody responded to my messages. Until one day, SinGal 128 sent a threatening reply, bringing to my attention that my profile had been interpreted as a joke. Admittedly, the thought of Jack Nicholson joining a sex site – a profile explaining his infatuation with soft rather than hardcore porn as not having to do with sexual prudishness, but an erotic attachment to character and plot – seemed absurd. I responded by posting candid images of myself, but visitors to my online profile assessed me a deranged paparazzi. Edith was the only one willing to carry out correspondence.

> I like walks through parks in the

> winter, along beaches

> in the fall, going to the movies

> in the springtime, bicycle rides

> to nowhere on long summer days,

> and having to find my way back

> home in the evening.

>

We were convinced our letters were destined to be read historically, long after our absence from this world – and not because I am Jack Nicholson, which even Edith did not believe, but because the letters justified it with their own elegance.