In which our hero has a philosophical conversation with the rabbis.

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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God is like Edith’s face: Plain. 

Letters:

I’d like to apologize to John Wayne.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I looked toward the movie, the common dream,

The he and she in close-ups, nearer than life,

And I accepted such things as they seem,

The easy poise, the absence of the knife,

The near summer happily ever after,

The understood question, the immediate strife,

Not dangerous, nor mortal, but the fadeout

Enormously kissing amid warm laughter,

As if such things were not always played out

By an ignorant arm, which crosses the dark

And lights up a thin sheet with a shadow’s mark.

Delmore Schwartz

He craved for her to write something. He wanted to read her words; hear her voice; he wanted to know her her. He wanted to read:

Dear Jack,

I am having a hard time disassociating this strange inner burning with thoughts of you. The flames first ignited in both stomach and chest as a fire of yearning. Your words slowly spread sulphur over organs I believed to be dried stones in the desert – able to sustain conditions of extreme heat. It’s hard to pinpoint when the match was dropped onto my thistle of skin, but it was likely as incidental as a spelling or grammatical mistake on your behalf. An unnoticed folly. And the coil turned red because it could only be yours to miss and mine to embrace. Everything seemed so clear to me, so perfectly matched, as it still does today.

We are meant to be together. Don’t you see that? Some people play the roles of those who love and others take on the characters of those who are loved. You are not a lover, Jack. At first I was angry with you for that. But then I realized that you are a man who needs to be loved.

Eternally,

Edith

And he realized that he didn’t know her. Like Edith in person, her letters lacked both passion and character. It was his own letters he cared for, and his own words were what gave him comfort. 

Still no new messages, he moves to youtube where he finds himself watching clips of Harry Nilsson’s live performances from 1970s and cries at the realization of how cold and dark the times are now. No more hope for happiness, no happiness in depressing loneliness, ONLY defeat and apocalyptic feelings.  These reflections on our times are interrupted by the sound of sobs between his own that could not have come from himself.

Interior. Bathroom.

The three rabbis are crying in Jack Nicholson’s small New York bathroom. The old wise one sits on the toilet, his face burrowing through his wizened hands; the young one dangles his legs off the side of the sink, biting down on his trembling lip and clipping his fingernails; the fat one comically stomps his fists and untied shoes against Nicholson’s dry bathtub.

JACK NICHOLSON

Why are you guys crying?

OLD RABBI

(looking up from his hands)

We cry because we cannot ascend.

FAT RABBI

(bellowing out)

Stuck below because I tied the laces on my left

foot before tying the laces on my right foot!

YOUNG RABBI

(sardonically)

Those fuckers! They got rules for everything…

Apparently I can’t go up because I messed up the

order for clipping my fingernails on Friday while preparing for the Sabbath. Do you believe that shit?

OLD RABBI

If we want messiach, we must follow the rules. There is an order for everything…

YOUNG RABBI

Well, I’m not sure that I even want the messiah to come. It really doesn’t concern me.

OLD RABBI

And me? I’ve been waiting my whole life for him to come…

The old rabbi resigns his face back into his hands.

YOUNG RABBI

You see, I got this theory that all this shit is really about the waiting for the messiah, rather than his actual arrival.  That what differentiates us from the goyim.

FAT RABBI

Oyyyyyy…. I wasn’t cut out to be a fucking rabbi! Aye… I just don’t have the right temperament for it! Ohhh…. I used to dream of becoming a beadle in the synagogue!

(he smiles)

Shushing all who were consumed with idle chatter.

JACK NICHOLSON

Well, you can’t cry here. Go somewhere else.

And with that, Jack Nicholson pushed the three rabbis out of his bathroom.

The bathroom mirror is dirty, but I can tell that my eyebrows are abnormally long. I take out a hair from the left brow with some tweezers and marvel at it. A dead hair. A white hair. A good find. A couple more hairs call out to me, a patch of eyebrow in need of epigamic maintenance, so I clench them between the un-pointed tips and I tug – but I take the wrong strands. It’s painful to pull out soft, youthful hairs, and the rheum over my eyes swells. I remove the correct tuft, and this eases the sting, but the sensation returns when I cannot get a hold of another thatch. More normal hairs taken out. So many that I lose track and wonder if the intended thorn, the messiah hair, can be accounted for amongst the discards.

The peak on my left eyebrow no longer flaunts its summit and, beside it, the right brow looks more ridiculous than ever. To even the keel, I take the tweezers to the right side. The first yank is too ambitious. Many hairs withdrawn, much pain. Tears run down my cheeks, but I am not crying. From the throbbing teems something to push my pursuit, and I occasionally find a hair in actual need of plucking atrophied in the tweezers. The left vertex is exaggerated again. I pull and pull and pull, arbitrarily, like a sniper on a tower. I am crying. An inverted point dips into my left eyebrow. To make everything appear normal, I carefully pluck at both eyebrows, eventually manicuring them into the pencil thin threads I associate with Kabuki theatre. What will become of me with so few hairs remaining above my eyes? What will come of my fingers?

“First cut the nails on the left hand in the order 4, 2, 5, 3, 1, and then the right in the order 2, 4, 1, 3, 5.”  Though he was not a religious boy, our hero practiced the same prescribed order since his father taught it to him as the way a man cut his nails on Friday. He even immortalized the process by using it to inspire the obsessive-compulsive attentiveness of his Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets. “Jews don’t believe in Hell,” explained his father. “You just gotta look around yourself in the now and ask, Is this as good as it gets?” Perhaps I remember the fingernail-clipping pattern so vividly because of the physical awkwardness of my father attempting to teach it after both his arms had been blown off in the war, along with both his hands, along with all ten fingers, along with all their nails. Or perhaps I remember because it seemed, strangely, an attempt to recompense.