1/20/12

In which our hero embraces reality television and envies the happiness of an obese couple.

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 can no longer distinguish between loneliness and horniness. 

Letters:
I would like to apologize to the French author and ethnologist, Michel Leiris. 

Notes on How to Exist in the Civilized World (by my uncle):
1.     Never openly fornicate or publicly admit desire to fornicate with whom you would actually like to fornicate with, nor where you would like to fornicate inside of X.
2.     [More of an appendage to the first rule, rather than a new one]. If fornicating urges become too intense to behave civil-like (i.e. nervous ticks, misplaced aggression, a stutter, etc), self-fornicate in private – preferably at a time when you are socially permitted to be alone (in the dark, before going to bed at night) – and do so in a reasonably clean manner while thinking about reasonably civil modes of fornication with socially acceptable fornicating partners (gender, age, race, socio-economic status)*
3.      Brush your teeth once before bed and once in the morning (either before or following breakfast, depending on if you are from Germanic/Slavic or Greco-Roman ancestry).
4.      Scrub the insides of your fingernails before searching for dried berries of feces in your anus. You are permitted to continue your day without soaping the insides of your nails afterwards as long as you do not inform anyone – though not a necessity, it is recommended to clean your nails of all fecal matter before eating in order to prevent disease.
5.      If, while self-fornicating, you find your thoughts moving in the direction of the rear opening rather than a vaginal one, try distracting yourself with thoughts of entering the oral cavity instead.
6.      Do not draw on the head of your penis (especially mean or angry faces).
7.      Never hide your feces in another man’s underwear in attempt to prove that he has befouled himself. This can and will prove to be disastrous for all citizenry involved. Remember that our feces are nothing more than a bohemian rebellion against the bourgeois family.
8.      There is nothing sexual about the scent of cedar wood, cherries in June, a woman’s heels walking down an empty corridor, or satin sheets. These are all sensual pleasures. Remembering the difference is imperative to leading a civilized existence.

If you follow these eight simple rules, you will find yourself to be quite at home in this, our civilized world.

Daydream of knocking my teeth out on a curb. Either by falling down suddenly, or by Nazi skinheads forcing me to bite a concrete curb and kicking the back of my head with their combat boots.

These flashes usually occur during moments when I am overcome by the creeping guilt. The nauseating, senseless, pathetic one.

Example: after putting a balloon up my shirt to perform a single-breasted Nancy Reagan impression for Jack Palance on the set of Batman, I find out his wife is undergoing chemotherapy for her own breast cancer treatment. I imagine a swinging baseball bat knocking out my teeth. I replay this image several times in my mind.

Sometimes I even feel the guilt over things I have not done. The lies written about me in the newspapers. The false accusations brought to my lawyer’s attention. The libelous claims found on the internet. I was shocked to read lies about my attempts to gun Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio with my semen on the set of The Departed, my abusive relationship with Angelica Houston, and an episode in which I urinated on the rear window of another actor’s car. 

I never wrote those emails to you Edith! I don’t know how the ended up in your inbox and my outbox.

 I came home the other day and found Crag limping and with a black eye. Somebody has been mistreating the mouse in my absence.

When I told my agent about all this, he suggested having cameras follow me around. Evidence. Later I realized he had organized this as a concept for a new reality television series. So Jack Nicholson kept hamming it up for the cameras, if you know what I mean… Playing Jack Nicholson.

But during breakfast at a very American diner, Jack Nicholson observes a real American couple, a happy fat American couple, and things begin to get real. Not real real, but reality television sentimental real. You know, with the music. Still, there’s something real about it. He is envious of what they have. Happiness? Fat American happiness.

Jack Nicholson can see the pleasure received in cushioning their plump palms on top of each other – their fleshy fingers lost, intertwined in each other’s excessive chub, a jiggling sea of corpulence. There is something beautiful about two grotesquely overweight people shacking up, knowing that each is too large for anyone else to love and too large to confidently seek another’s company. Perhaps love, like politics, is a game of compromise. Each can gaze into the eyes of the other – assuming eyes can be made out through the several layers of needless skin overflowing around them – and be just as repulsed as he or she is when looking in the mirror. For some time, they successfully kid themselves about some kind of inner beauty, until the easiness of politely humoring each other becomes something of a self-fulfilling-prophesy. Happily ever after…. Not that after will last so long the way they’re so supportive of each other when stuffing their faces and arteries.

Jack Nicholson often wished he had been born ugly, with some sort of deformity, so that he could have settled down with someone equally hopeless. Instead, he was given the illusion of hope only to realize later in life that there never had been any. He envied the DeVitos. Where was his Rhea Perlman? To have found a truly wonderful person to be with for life, Jack Nicholson would have had to have been a truly wonderful person. I’m not a bad looker, or at least I wasn’t, but wonderful I also am not. I’ve never been fat enough to love someone else.


An American family enters the diner and Jack Nicholson notices a pair of oversized adult sunglasses on the young boy. His sunglasses. The Jack Nicholson sunglasses. Giving the child the benefit of the doubt, Jack suggests that perhaps he had lost his sunglasses and the boy found them. He questions the boy. And because there are cameras documenting the interrogation, the boy’s parents are okay with it. Until Nicholson begins to strangle the kid. But before the parents manage to become visibly frantic, he laughs and makes like he’s just putting on show for the cameras.

It all happens too fast for the American family, and they cannot stop the action to get the sunglasses back from our hero before the fat woman shrieks, “Jack Nicholson!” suddenly recognizing the movie star, now that he wears his famous sunglasses. “You can’t handle the truth!” yells out the bovine beast. “Oh, oh, oh! We’re in a dinner! Let’s do the scene from Five Easy Pieces! Come on over here, Jack!”

Occupying the capacity of their four-person booth, the obesity of the couple is only matched by their love. Nonetheless, it is difficult to find a place to sit. 

Bobby: I'll have an omelet, no potatoes. Give me tomatoes instead, and wheat toast instead of rolls.

Waitress:
No substitutions.

Bobby:
What do you mean? You don't have any tomatoes?

Waitress:
Only what's on the menu. You can have a number two - a plain omelet. It comes with cottage, fries, and rolls.

Bobby:
Yeah, I know what it comes with, but that's not what I want.

Waitress:
I'll come back when you make up your mind.

Bobby:
Wait a minute, I have made up my mind. I'd like a plain omelet, no potatoes on the plate. A cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.

Waitress:
I'm sorry, we don't have any side orders of toast. I'll give you an English muffin or a coffee roll.

Bobby:
What do you mean, "you don't make side orders of toast"? You make sandwiches, don't you?

Waitress:
Would you like to talk to the manager?

Bobby:
You've got bread. And a toaster of some kind?

Waitress:
I don't make the rules.

Bobby:
OK, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.

Waitress:
A number two, chicken sal san. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee. Anything else?

Bobby:
Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.

Waitress:
You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

Bobby:
I want you to hold it between your knees.

As they perform the scene together, Nicholson decides to improvise a little. Unsure what to do with his arm – because there is no room between him and her fat, and she is too large to put his arm around her – he places his hand between her thighs and fondles her during the scene. He is unsure if she feels him beneath all that fat, but he continues to fondle every piece he can grab. He fondles her happiness. Her thinking the whole time: “Jack Nicholson… I’m being fondled by Jack Nicholson…” The fat husband watches, eating more diligently than ever. Does he eat from pleasure or misery? He no longer knows. Just eating, compulsively. Devouring. Eating to this man is what fucking is to Jack Nicholson.

They’re getting up to leave now. Taking their sweet obese time about it too. Heavy breathing, like that of a body builder, seeing as every slight movement demands the continual lift of massive weights with every muscle hidden beneath them. Like being up close at the ballet. They take the required pause to breath loudly and avoid collapsing. Their turkey-necked under chins roll in unison, one layer into the next. Breathing harder, hanging cheeks swaying and rippling. Their lower lips quivering, in that moments before a heart attack kind of way. Quite beautiful, the flow of fat in perfect synchronization. Can you imagine the exhaustion of it all? Heaven must be touched with each chance to sit down.

I can see the large imprint her ass has left across the leather bench for two. I would like to sit in it, my own rear end feeling the warmth she has left behind. The indentation is almost large enough for me to curl up inside it like some kind of fetus in her anus. Either a fetus or a feces. How nice it would be to lift her coffee mug to my lips, sipping on the drops of unwanted cold coffee left behind for the bottom. Her ass against mine; her mouth to mine; me lost in her enormous warmth. A curious sort of pleasure. I wish that I had slept with a fat woman when I had the chance. When I was in college for two years before joining the navy. Perhaps one of my great regrets in life. 










* unattainable ideals, like celebrities and royalty, are permitted once in every five fornications – assuming said icon is a communally shared desire amongst those within your peer group.

1/5/12

In which our hero kills a child.



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 am particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I consider it a piece of pop art.

Letters:
I would like to formally apologize to Faye Dunaway and Shelley Duvall - two wonderful performers, neither of whom belong in these sordid pages. 


I slam the baseball bat into the boy’s hip, shattering the bone.

The exterminator’s spats flap loose as he leaps into the air – with surprising élan for a man of his proportions – and brings the bat down on the boy’s knees. 

The rope squeezing the child’s etiolated ankles scratches the rust beneath the chipped white paint on a contorted metal hook hanging from the high-ceiled Brooklyn loft. 

Steadying the straphanger, Nicholson thumps him in the same crenellated spot of his spine four times. 
The invigorating rhythm is brought to a rolling halt by the caving in of the little guy’s vertebrate – the bat’s weight lost in its final beat against the loosened skin of a bedraggled drum. 


IMAGE of a blanket flapping in the wind. 
Memory of an idyllic picnic with Uncle Peter and French anthropologist Michel Leiris .



Film is better than theater because when someone dies on stage, you have to repeat the killing every time the piece is staged. The performance therefore need be faked with the same actor over and over again each evening, or the producer must go through the trouble of finding a new child to be slaughtered for each night's show. In film, however, when a little boy is murdered, we all bear witness to the sensuality of a real virginal kind of death. Yes, a camera, a projector, a screen separates us from the killing but, still, I feel his soul drift away a little bit more... Is it not so?

(Michel Leiris in conversation with Uncle Peter as they played with his motion picture camera in the presence of a young Jack  Nicholson)



The three Hasidic Jews (the old one, the fat one, and the young one) are staring at me. Somehow they have matured since we last met them, and they now stand before me as fully ordained rabbis. 

“Don’t bruise the meat...” 
The old one says in a wise voice insisting on tranquility. 

The exterminator pokes the boy’s meager love-handles, 
“Eh, the kid’s a bad egg anyway,” 
and he shrugs before inserting the same finger in his nostril.
  “Meaty without softness.” 

I raise the bat, but the fat rabbi holds my arm in place. 

“Stop... Stop…" 
he says in an irritated but still calming voice. 
"You can’t turn second-cut lamb chops into first-cut 
with a mallet. This boy is too lean to eat!” 

Half Cary Grant at his most orotund and half Jack Nicholson at his most Charles Grodin, I lower the bat to sneer at the fat rabbi. 
“I had no intention of eating the child.” 

The open-mouthed rabbis look me up and down as if I am some sort of monster. 

“Then why, Baruch HaShem, would you 
so savagely beat the poor boy?” 
asks the young rabbi, not quite grasping the proper context of when to casually slip a quick blessing of God into the middle of a sentence.

“Rawhide?!”
suggests the exterminator.

Along with their rabbi status, the Hasids had been given lordship over various loft apartments in Brooklyn - one of which housed the scene presently unfolding between our hero and the exterminator Al Condor. With this lordship came the absolute moral authority of determining the conditions under which a child ought or ought not be killed. 

The process in which the rabbis make such decisions is highly secretive, but it is said to be heavily influenced by the code of conducts set by mashgiachs  in determining if a meat meets the approval of the Glatt Kosher seal.

The exterminator Al Condor lowered the boy and dandled him gently on his knee before testing for signs of life. He did so by sprinkling pepper and releasing drops of vinegar from a pocket-sized glass vile into the corpse’s mouth. He reached for a red hot poker and applied it to the child’s feet and rectum. Then he decidedly pulled his finger from his nose with brass aloofness and ceremoniously straggled the boy’s belly, caramelizing his navel with a silk trail of mucus. 

“Good. Now everyone will know that this is my work. 
And I will be famous just like you, Jack.” 

I am not famous for being a killer of children. 

“Don’t judge.” 
The exterminator gently placed two dried boogers over the child’s eyes before expressing revulsion to a smell. The pooling stain from the boy’s ass was shit, not blood. 

When he was the bully’s age, Jack Nicholson experienced difficulty holding his shits in and knew that if he entered his uncle's film studio with the shit sneaking out of his asshole, the others would have smelled it. They’d be able to prove he shat himself by making him take off his pants and reveal his soiled underwear. Danny DeVito might put his nose up to Nicholson’s asshole, smelling it accusingly. 

From the window, Jack Nicholson watches the exterminator ride away on a horse and carriage, headed for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The carriage proving to be problematic, the exterminator hops onto a single pale horse and gives it a large kick with his spats.