In which our hero battles Cragganmore to a final resolution.

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 would wish it on no one to be me.


Only I am capable of bearing myself.


To know so much, to have seen so much, and


To say nothing, just about nothing.

   - Robert Walser 

Letters:

I’d like to apologize to the people who brought us Mouse Hunt. 

CLERIHEW 1:

Jack Nicholson

lived under a fickle sun.

For him it seemed to shine

until he appeared in Blood and Wine.

CLERIHEW 2:

Michael Ironside

suffered from a dire pride.

With every autograph signing

he’d break at the mere mention of The Shining.

CLERIHEW 3:

Danny DeVito

ate every last dorito.

When he finally farted,

he was ready to watch Jack Nicholson in The Depated.

OR

Danny DeVito

drank one too many a mojito.

When he moved onto cider,

he was ready to watch Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider.

CLERIHEW 4:

Cragganmore

did not know what was in store,

until out of the shadows appeared Nicholson’s double,

more frightening than his mustache in Man Trouble.

Like oakum in tar, several eyebrow hairs had been culled on a glue-trap beside the toilet.

Remembering the corpse of Lady Laphroaig floating in the toilet.

 

 

My apartment building was constructed in the 1920s, and perhaps this is something normal with these old apartment buildings, but it seemed strange to me: there is this small, plastered grill plating in the wall between the bathroom and the building’s exterior. Actually, there’s two of them – one on my side, in the bathroom, and one on the building’s outside wall – and there is a kind of triangular stage between them. I believe my bathroom was at one time a kitchen, as I have no sink in my kitchen, and that this contraption was probably conceived as a security measure in case someone left an oven on. It’s a kind of suicide-proofing, like the windows on tall buildings that cannot open enough for my body to squeeze through.

On the little triangular stage between the two grill plates, I imagine Cragganmore doing a little dance. Trapped within the building wall since it’s construction, he pleads to me – not for freedom, but for food. “Come on, Man…” he groans, “Tenants in this apartment have been feeding me to keep me alive since Day One.” And I look at him. I study him. And he does look rather skinny and pale, malnourished with a little protruding mouse-belly to prove it. The grill plates have made some sort of cage, or prison, and Crag reminds me of some sort of human rights cause I ought to be using my celebrity to advocate. Then I wonder why I don’t pull these grill plates off my wall, why I don’t smash the wall in, and I realize that I am not his advocate. There is nobody else around, so I must be something more like his guard.

> i love writing to you so much. 

> i'd like someone to make it my job,

> and i would like to be paid 367-thousand

 > dollars to

=== message truncated ===

A shrill pierce. Small enough – and in my heart – to be a song.

In its move towards the peanut butter pabulum, Cragganmore’s body attached itself to the fresh sheet of glue beside the fridge. The fucking exterminator was wrong! The mouse never reached the poison before finding the trap.

When Cragganmore first heard him enter the apartment, the mouse played dead, but once Jack was out of sight, she gave into panic and frantic breathing – lungs and heartbeat were all that remained in the creature’s control. Though her skin would not permit the flipping of her body off the glue-trap, her insides persisted in attempting to raise their constraining chassis. The purple-pink of her lungs pushed through her rib cage, thumped against the thin layer of grey skin that withstood the break free from herself, and undulated back to the start position. The whole thing again. These operose efforts grew increasingly futile until a bronzing cinnamon light swept the floor and crawled like early mold on cheese toward the eye not concealed, not sealed, by the glue-trap, her open eye. That same eye widened with fear and beseech for two, and the nocturnal creature embraced the peremptory option: slow and painful starvation. What kind of human being would I be to neglect responsibility at a time like this? And so, the mouse regarded the supernal approach of her landlord’s Rockport shoes as an intrusion of aide rather than rapine. Upon the release of Crag’s final squeal – the whistle of a broken kettle giving into a puff – Jack Nicholson understood that there was no one else to hear the creature’s cries.

If he only had a bucket, he could drown it. Flushing it down the toilet would have been the easiest solution – I once found a baby mouse floating in my toilet (Lady Laphroaig), either from suicide or desperate thirst due to the ingested poison – but Crag’s glue-trap was too big and sticky to make its way down the bowl and through the waxing. Stepping on the mouse would be far too yucky. He could smash it, crush it – with a frying pan! But with Cragganmore’s umbra stained to the pan, he’d never be able to cook in the thing again. Best to first cover her with a plastic bag. And in the speed by which this task was completed, a loose electrical cord attached itself to the glue-trap.

Shifting movement of the glue-trap beneath the bag. Nicholson gently held the bag down, and forcefully pulled the cord off the trap opposite the mouse.

           

A drink seemed to be in order. He plucked a stiff, deep hair from his eyebrow.

           

Unfortunately, in the process of freeing the cord, his foot found its way onto the glue-trap. After hobbling a couple of steps and dragging the trap, bag and mouse with one shoe – hoping I could just walk the thing off, miraculously proving the glue faulty – he nearly stepped on the recalcitrant coating with his right shoe while attempting to release the left. Thankfully he thought better of it, choosing instead to stare at his left and debate if he really needed the Rockports.

My sister, my mother, drunk on the couch and playing with herself before giving in to one of her erotolepsy-induced fits.

 

Smoking cigar in mouth, Nicholson took the plastic bag past the courtyard to the haphazardly stacked garbage cans. If he were a cowboy, like in Ride the Whirlwind, the awaiting action would be very matter-of-fact and easy as pie. He placed the plastic bag under the heaviest trashcan. He raised the can high into the air and looked the other way before squishing Cragganmore’s body. He gave the can a little twist. He lifted it again, and hammered it down three more times. Five more times. He wanted to be sure the thing was dead – it would have been awful to let her live in that condition, and I didn’t want to look inside the bag to check. Six. Seven.

John Wayne.

The mouse didn’t climb up. It didn’t fly.