2/24/12

In which our hero defecates on his agent’s floor.



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.

LATEST NEWS!
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me… 
   - Cary Grant (of his charming screen persona). 

Letters:
I’d like to apologize to Nancy Reagan and Jack Palance.


INT. WAITING ROOM OUTSIDE AGENT’S OFFICE – DAY.

Jack Nicholson meets a hustler. Not a mover and shaker, like a big Hollywood agent, and not a crafty conman – just a young flexible fellow who learned how to place his penis inside his own mouth while practicing yoga in India with the original intention to learn how to levitate. Although our narrator chooses not to respond to the young hustler, his new friend grows increasingly defensive.

HUSTLER
I can suck my own dick! What the fuck can you do? What right do you have to be a movie star? You don’t even have a skill… Me, I have a trade, man…
(pause)
A man can always survive off the ability to suck his own dick. Even after the apocalypse.

Dirty and skinny, he claims to have nourished himself for years by cutting his fingernails into rice.



INT. AGENT’S OFFICE – DAY.

The agent wants the actor to remain in New York, “to do some character work, or whatever. You know, like method,” but confesses that after watching the rushes from the new reality TV series, the studio was concerned about Nicholson’s health. Our hero explains that his body is tip-top. The agent repeats that the studio was concerned about his health, tapping his head to emphasize the final word of the sentence.

Sprawled out on the carpet, Jack Nicholson moves plastic toy soldiers here and there in a seemingly random fashion. When he begins to align the tanks for attack, however, the agent takes ferociously detailed notes about each thing the movie star does.

AGENT
You know that you pay me for this, Jack. My time is expensive. Don’t you think we should be talking rather than playing with these toys?

Jack pretends to be more involved in the staging of the combat scene in order to tune out his agent.

AGENT (cont’d)
Why don’t you tell me more about your screenplay? Or what kind of projects you would like me to look for?

JACK NICHOLSON
I am searching for a comedy without irony, and I’d like to pursue this ideal without being a God-damned misanthrope about it.
(beat)
I should just make a buddy movie with Danny DeVito, for fuck’s sake! Two old men chase a mouse around a house! Something for the kids. Why can’t I do something children might enjoy?


The agent asks about Edith, and I have a memory of Edith dressed in a mouse costume and continually saying, “Oh my God, I shit my pants!” She didn’t really shit herself. It was just a strange expression that she kept using. “Then he comes at me with this enormous thing, and… oh my God, I shit my pants!” or “And when I found out the Knicks won, oh my God, I shit my pants!” or “Ha, ha, ha… Oh my God, I shit my pants! That’s hilarious!” Whatever the context, Edith would somehow manage to work in the expression Oh my God, I shit my pants! And inevitably I’d imagine her in the physical act of shitting in her pants.


INT. AGENT’S OFFICE – MOMENTS LATER.

After a brief ellipses, Jack Nicholson finds himself shitting on the agent’s floor. A deer in the headlights, he turns to his agent in embarrassment and panic.

AGENT
Don’t worry about it. You can shit here.
The agent crawls down on his hands and knees with a tweezers and bobby pin to quickly dissect the piece of shit staining his carpeting. Danny DeVito.

Nicholson has shit out the exterminator, Al Condor.

EXTERMINATOR
They now have evidence that your stomach can think too. Something about the digestive process resembling the nerve endings in your brain. Puts a whole new twist on the Hobbesian idiom: man is a walking stomach, no? Food for thought!

The Al Condor shit laughs largely before searching himself for orts of corn. Nicholson tries to push him back up his asshole.

AGENT
(screaming)
No!!!!  Audiences are not interested in seeing you in these romantic comedies anymore! There is a financial crisis going on! We’ve just lost a war in Iraq! Americans want to see a return to your shit…

The agent frantically presses down on a button beneath his desk, and with each press a buzz can be heard coming from the waiting room outside.

The rabbis enter, restrain Nicholson, and put a tiny camera tube up the hole of JN’s penis to view his soul. “Souls sell…” says the agent. The rabbis are amazed and ecstatic, but do not reveal any details. The piece of shit on the floor, meanwhile, winks at Jack Nicholson’s agent.



 
My role in Easy Rider has been given away. They’re going to re-shoot the scene. At first I think it’s going to Ironside, but then my agent informs me that it’s actually going to Craggamore. Crag is trying to replace me. The studio is trying to turn me into a mouse because it came out online that I’m Jewish. They’re antisemites. Where are the rabbis?

My agent tries to appease me. “An actor of your status will always have work. I mean, you’re an icon, you’re immortal for fuck’s sake!” To prove his point, he pulls out a gun from his desk drawer and shoots himself in the head.

The actor was more interested, however, in the dissipating cloud of niter blue smoke and a poster depicting naked Polish geriatrics on Pluto. He found it odd that the foreground of the movie poster was consumed by his own image, shrugging shoulders and grinning back at him. It appeared to be from a motion picture he had no recollection of having made. Meet Archie Fiend. The photograph, wide and from a distorted high angle, presented our hero in his famous sunglasses, a green suit purposefully clashed with a fluorescent orange tie and a tapered mustache, sleeker than his Man Trouble whiskers.  

Regrets: I am Jack Nicholson and not Cary Grant.