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.

LATEST NEWS!

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.

 

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

In which our hero performs a scene with the exterminator’s wife.

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 tired in my soul.

Letters:

Apologies to Sir Bob Hoskins.

In a haste to share with you the contents of my dream, my previous blog entry skipped a whole episode that had passed in the kitchen between myself and the exterminator’s wife. Though not entirely pertinent to our hero’s tale, I’d like to return to those events here:

The following day, Jack Nicholson found himself stripped down to his white underwear and a white T-shirt. Hanes, crew-neck. It must have been the elderly lady with the palsy-shakes who had awakened him because it was she who was now talking.

“By chance, I happened to be carrying a large pad-lock with me. And as he grabbed at my hand-bag, I hit him across the head with it!”

“Good for you!” or “That’s right!” cheer-on the choir of three more elderly ladies sitting with us in the parlor, strong-holding their delicate saucers of tea.

“And, just before a stream of blood comes rolling down his forehead, he looks at me with this horrified and very frightened expression. So I smacked him again Blap! on the head!”

“That’s showing him!” or “That’s what you get!”

“But the bandit would not fall to the ground. So, what am I to do? Just because I’m old, I should stop protecting myself? So boom boom boom, I [makes a motion with fist in place of a word] the youngster’s skull until it breaks… and I see brain.”

“Admirable lady,” sighs the exterminator in a hushed tone before winking at Nicholson.

“You have to keep attacking!” and “That’s why I always carry a small pistol in my purse!”

“Oh, you need to be armed these days.”

“I won’t so much as cross Central Park without concealing some kind of weapon.”

“You must forgive my present accoutrement,” whispers the exterminator Al Condor. “My eyesight is only poor in one eye.”  What Nicholson had taken for a wink was actually his host’s twitching struggle with the monocle over his left eye. “So this pince-nez is really the perfect thing. One of my wife’s incroyable purchases via the ebay.” As if cued in the staging of bad regional theatre, the kitchen light turned on (stage-right and behind the exterminator’s armchair) to reveal a gangrel of a woman with poorly groomed tendrils, a missing left arm, and a missing right leg. Merdel, the exterminator’s wife, seemed the perfect height for the low-ceiled kitchen. “It’s a monocle!” she playfully called out. “A pince-nez is for both eyes!” in a mousy voice, revealing her calcium depleted teeth in a fey smirk for Jack’s benefit. “I’ll eat your eye!” screams back the exterminator.


“I had to knife hoodlums on four separate occasions this November.”
“Well, it’s the holiday season. Four is not so many…"
“Maybe not with a gun, but with a knife is a different story.”

Still in a kind of daze, Jack stares ahead. Sound fades slightly as we move-in towards a black-light poster of a jellyfish hanging on the exterminator’s wall. The caption reads: Turritopsis nutricula; 4.5 millimetres (0.18 in); New Zealand. Tiny holes puncturing the wall surround the poster, a couple of darts sticking out of the black border – somebody must have had trouble hitting his target.

 “Anyone can fire off a shot and be done with it, but to hack away pieces from the face of a thug and really watch him suffer… Now this is something.”

We are pulled back into the action by the exterminator nipping a collop off his blistered foot, a sapour of puss and blood follow. The sound returned to a normal level, the exterminator speaks: “I must attend to this dans la toilette. Can you to stand qui vive in the kitchen?" 

And so, the conversation in the parlor again drifts into the background, as if back into the dream Nicholson had left behind moments earlier, as our hero makes his way into the kitchen. 

Turritopsis nutricula; 4.5 millimetres (0.18 in); New Zealand.

INT. KITCHEN – MORNING

This ovine goddess hovered so closely over a pot on the stove that I could not tell if it was due to her attentive homemaking or if she used the ladle to support her deformed figure. Forcing me to study her broken physique, she repeatedly tottered over the stovetop and adjusted her hipbone to sit on any protruding edge she could find. She was so good at shifting her weight from her remaining leg to whatever counter or table top held up the side of her missing leg that I was able to take in the rest of her without flinching, and an unattached man such as myself needed no excuses to linger. Not too inspiring, mind you. Her behind was nothing more than a flat continuation of her back, her arms were thin and hairy, her bones seemed hollow. Maybe it was due to a kitchen redolent of fried garlic. I wanted her. I wanted to enter her anorexic skeleton, or quarter skeleton. I imagined tearing her shirt open in a rage of passion, but I could only visualize her modest cleavage. I could not picture her bare breasts, her nipples. It was just: her cleavage, her cleavage, her cleavage.[1]

Again, she almost fell. Her clumsiness could have played itself endearingly on a more graceful woman, but the exterminator’s wife made such loud grunts with each folly that one could not help but feel a little put-off by her presence. The annoyance quickly became guilt, however, when she anticipated her husband’s response to her placing a dirty hand on the white wall in order to prevent herself toppling over. 

She hopped a little closer, studied my features gravely, and nearly fell right over, forgetting to brace herself against the wall. “You’re really Jack Nicholson?” she asked, as if searching my eyes through a deep cloud of smoke and fog. “Damn right I am.” She played vixen, closing my lips with her finger, but this quickly turned into her using my face to support her wavering body. She asked me to bite her finger, and I complied – if for not other reason than to steady her rickety frame with the clasp of my jaw. She told me to bite it off, to chew and swallow.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The Noahide Laws do not permit us to eat the flesh of a living animal.”

She licked her thin pallid lips and sounded Polish when attempting a sexy voice. “But I am a woman of science.” She pushed my face away and quickly planted the same palm on the wall, so as not to fall.

“And your husband? Is he also a man of science?”

“Oh, him. Well, let’s just say, I have him eating out of my hand.”

She looked towards her hand to emphasize this, but it was not there and she was embarrassed by the realization that the action of her holding out her open hand on the last sentence had been imagined with a limb she sometimes forgot was gone. “I love my husband, but I don’t like the person I am when I am with him. I want to be with him, but I don’t want to be the person I am when I am with him.” She abruptly turned toward her hand the way a cat turns to its own tail. She hobbled closer, reaching for the back of my chair. “I’m no floozy.” “No. No, I didn’t think you were.” “I feel as if I might just fall into the apples…” She let go, and I stood to catch her fall and brace her brittle bones.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I cannot open my eyes any wider. I just had botox surgery so I have to be careful.” I leaned her against the wall. “I may be flawed right now, but in a week...” I hushed her hammy performance, “I don’t think it’s a flaw at all,” and our dialogue bounced fast, like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn. Me and Faye Dunaway.

A chubby boy with a large bandage over his right cheek, guileless eyes, and smooth skin exuding the aroma of lemon and paprika interrupted the banter. He cleaned his fingers individually with a thin wet napkin torn from something resembling a sugar package – the family had a collection saved from various chicken wing deliveries. The boy darted his eyes to each corner before I noticed the exterminator sneaking up behind him with a vulpine shushing face. When those stubby arms crept around the child, a shriek of terror was emitted to prompt the exterminator to trumpet, “Daddy Bites!” before curling his lips over his teeth to safely nibble the boy’s good cheek. The wife dropped her hand from the wall and fell to the floor, clinging to my ankle and twisting herself into a comfortable position. Animal noises accompanied the next gentle bites, and the exterminator growled as he exposed his teeth for a final vicious chomp at the air beside his son’s face. “This boy! I love him so much, I could make a tart out of him!” He looked the child up and down, and sniffed before reconsidering, “Maybe a quiche.” The boy, still frightened, smiled for my benefit.

The exterminator chuckled, wrapped his arm tight as a papillote around his son’s neck, to reveal rapport, and cradled the boy like an omelet in a gimbol. “Look at you, succulent child! Plein comme un oeuf!” Dragging the boy towards the refrigerator, he opened the door to reveal a glass bowl of leftover spaghetti Bolognese. He peeled back the protective saran, sneaked a handful, and scowled at the rest, warning, “I will eat you later.” The pasta almost whimpered in such a helpless way that he could not resist grabbing another handful before picking his nose and opening the freezer door. Sticking a fudgesicle in his mouth, like he would a cigar, the exterminator made his way over to his wife to now put his arm around her, and the boy ran out of the room, but not without him calling out to the flleing child, “I’m going to kiss your offal!” He laughed and squeezed his arms around his wife before gently kissing the back of her head. “I know what you’re thinking… Sure, she’s no spring chicken. But it often pays to choose a lover who has a little more bottle. And this one did not know what she was going to be eaten with before I got my hands on her!” 

“Me? What am I?” asked the wife. “The leg on which dinner comes to the table!”

“Why must I feel like I’ve entered my own kitchen as a hair falls on soup? Please excuse my wife, Jack. Merdel isn’t quite dans son assiette this morning, is she? I think we are going to have to play some chess later, my little lamb-roast, aren’t we?” The couple simultaneously turned their heads toward a chessboard that remained in mid-game, her with a terrified expression and him with a ferocious one.

The exterminator brought Nicholson back into the parlor, where he assured his old lady guests that his annual Monday morning bal would commence momentarily, and that he would personally be delighted to dance with each and every one of them. He snapped his fingers and his son, decked out in tails, entered the room and sat at the piano to play a piece of music that delighted the elderly ladies. The exterminator Al Condor fixed Nicholson a snifter of whiskey and sank into a tattered velvet easy chair. Because his legs were unable to reach the ottoman, he flailed about like a vole on its back, having to bite the already torn armrest to balance himself. In order to create the appearance of intention behind his awkward movements, he begun to unstitch the chair’s welting with his teeth. Feigning some sort of compulsion he fixed his eyes on his son while pulling at threads with his teeth and drooling onto the manchette.

        “Have you ever killed a child?” asked the exterminator.

        “I don’t know.” replied Nicholson.

        “Have you ever beaten a child to death with a baseball bat?”

        “I’m not sure.” 

        “Are you scared?”

       He took a beat to ponder the question. “No. Not really.” 

       “What was that hesitation?”

       “What hesitation?”

       “The hesitation before you said, No. Not really.”

         

When Jack Nicholson was eleven years old, he convinced himself that he was in love with Samantha Lewis, the eight-year old girl next-door. “Never write a love letter,” his uncle told him, “They only come back to haunt you. No evidence.” When Jack touched her where she did not want to be touched, she told him to stop, called him names, screamed for help, and tried to physically remove his hands. Her resistance infuriated the boy to a point of no return, and realizing that she would probably rat on him, he beat her to death with his Louisville Slugger. He was then free to do what he wanted with her body, but he soon felt the whole episode to be hardly worth the effort. Samantha Lewis was dead, and for what? Her smashed up face, bruised body, and bloody everything stared back at his rushing hormones; but her delicate beauty had left with the first swing of his bat, and the rest served only to anneal his mind.

Later that day, he asked his mother what she would do if he killed someone by accident. Would she tell the police? She never imagined his intent to be anything more than a child’s testing of the boundaries, and, upon hearing her explanation that she probably would inform the proper authorities – but only in an attempt to help him and ensure that he did not get himself into further trouble – he knew that he could never tell the truth about Samantha Lewis. When they found what remained of her body, nobody suspected the girl’s 11-year-old neighbour.

(Mammal, mammal… Mammal, mammal, mammal, mammal, mammal, moon. Moon, mammal)

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[1] Memory of watching his sister wash dishes in the kitchen while his mother lays drunk on the couch. Because his mother is too intoxicated to notice, Young Jack Nicholson’s sister flashes the boy and laughs.  First her breasts and then her vagina.