In which our hero remembers Cragganmore.

LATEST NEWS: I’ve had everything a man could ask for, but I don’t know if anyone could say I’m successful with affairs of the heart. I don’t know why. I would love that one last real romance. But I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning.

Letters: I’d like to apologize to my father. My mother.  My grandmother. 

INT. EXTERMINATOR’S APARTMENT – DAY

Bookshelves lined with volumes upon volumes of encyclopedias resembling the large book the exterminator had brought upon his first visit to Nicholson’s New York apartment, and in which he had marked down Cragganmore’s name. They are organized by year, dating back to Ancient Egypt.

EXTERMINATOR

I’m something of a plumitif mal connu.

Finding a shelf indexed Plague Collection (Vol. 1-10), Jack Nicholson opens a book filled with strands of hardened mucous carefully placed over individual names.

               JACK NICHOLSON

There were mice in Ancient Egypt?

EXTERMINATOR

Cockroaches, scarabs, and many frogs…

The scene shifts to Jack Nicholson’s New York City apartment with our hero on his deathbed.

The exterminator is seated and staring at Nicholson’s face. The bespectacled cecum reaches into the black hoodie adorning his head, and he slowly peels off his face – like that fat lady in the scene from the original Total Recall – to reveal his naked skull. And, as if he had peered into the depths of Nicholson’s dream while our hero slept, the exterminator says:  “To produce a mighty script, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the mouse, though many there be that have tried it.”

But this too is a dream. I know it is a dream. I suspected it before, but I know it now for sure.

INTERIOR. JACK NICHOLSON’S STUDIO APARTMENT - MORNING

There is a crumple in the bedspread where Edith once slept – once, as in for one night. Our hero sits on a piece of bed still warm from the night’s sleep and spills the remainder of scotch on the floor in memory of Cragganmore.

After they had a falling out and Jack Nicholson had berated Cragganmore for being a bad roommate and not taking out the trash often enough, the mouse grew accustomed to sneaking in and out of the apartment from corner to corner and by night, so as not to be seen. The more Crag skulked about the place, the more Jack became suspicious. His toothbrush began to taste like toilet mornings; his sleep seemed to be disturbed at the pivotal moment each night; and the food in his fridge was increasingly tainted with germ and disease. Nicholson had decided that if the mouse could not stand to be around him in his own home, if Cragganmore would not pass the remainder of days beside him with love and care, she would have to go. After all, he had only put up the notice seeking a roommate in a naive hope of a romantic meet-cute. If Cragganmore was unable to serve this purpose, the mouse would have to go. He certainly didn’t need anyone to share the meager rent of his tiny studio apartment. Jack Nicholson had millions of dollars. He was a Hollywood star.

Beginning to masturbate to visions of Edith dressed in a mouse costume, he suddenly stops upon noticing her sitting on his toilet. Her face has been replaced by Cragganmore’s. Continuing to play with himself, he is mystified by this human woman quizzically turning her mouse-face to the side. David Lynch. Stanley Kubrick. “Oh my God, I think I just shit my pants…” says she in a mousy New York kind of way.

“Edith, I only love you because you’re there,” says Nicholson. “And you just happen to be there at this moment. I apologize. It ought to be my burden to bear alone.” He tosses the empty bottle into the fireplace, having to imagine a fire since both consideration of tenants on floors above and New York City law prohibits him from actually lighting one. Suspension of disbelief. Just as he opens a new bottle, however, a baby mouse appears. Too small to be Crag.

Perhaps Cragganmore was a woman, pregnant. From an entire family of mice living within the confines of my walls. A happy family. He raised the bottle to the new arrival, baptized the little guy Tiny Talisker, and tenderly kicked the old cage.

The clank of a trashcan and a wretched stench – heavy in the crisp morning dew. Ironside. “You are an abrasion below my knee,” he thought. “I tried not to notice you for too long and you are now an infection I’d like to get rid of; but I fear that I’d have to lose my entire leg in the process.”

In which our hero recites his dream for the exterminator’s analysis:

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.

News: Not crazy, hungry.

Letters: I'd like to apologize to Mr. Ashton Kutchner, who must be going through a tough time right now, and certainly did not need the added stress of appearing in these here pages. 

The exterminator turned off the light to calm his guest. While studying the actor in darkness, he sucked on a marrowbone already stripped of meat and fat. “I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!” It was unclear if his words were directed towards our hero or the marrowbone. “Said Ahab to Pip.” Nicholson was confused. “Melville. Moby-Dick…” Nothing. “Where are your sunglasses?”

"May I confide in you?" 

The exterminator’s nod committed him nothing. Nicholson rested his head on the sofa's chewed up armrest. “An itch on the tip of my penis." When he spoke, he was surprised to find his accent crossing Connecticut with something British settled in America. "The itch crawls into the urinary hole."  Carry Grant. "A burning sensation." James Mason. "Tossing and turning, I attempt to sleep on my stomach, tightening the opening with my body’s weight. Crossing my legs, I hold my testicles together, staunching the blood flow up the shaft in attempt to spew the irritation out the orifice. A catheter up my urethra, I dare say.

"Naturally enough, I press my arm against my penis, and use the palm of my hand to push its tip against my belly. Over my pajama pants, I scratch at the hole. I tear the cotton crotch but keep scratching at it, digging my fingernails slightly at the sides of the surface around the irritated area. Scraping deeper and deeper towards the inner sides, the skin around the hole of my penis begins to tear slightly. The hole widens further along the diameter of its head. Split in half, my fingers open up the tip of my penis to reveal several miniature teeth nesting in a pinkish jelly, lining my urinary track. The tiny rice-like bones spring upwards and, as the crevasse in the head extends down the penis’s shaft, the two halves of skin holding the premature teeth fold out and turn both layers of mouth onto opposite sides of my body. There is a kind of lapse at this point in the dream.[1] 

"The teeth face outward from my penis’s skin, as if they are hidden inside a bloomed flower. But somehow, as the halves unfold further apart, the two sides turn their teeth around and onto my body. What in hindsight can only be imagined as an intricate maneuver – a kind of twisting of the widened penis jaw – I remember as an unnoticed fluid movement – the sequence of the action abided by the same anti-logic as the seamless transition from one dream to the next. Half my penis nibbled its way past my bellybutton; the other half chewed through the crack of my ass – up my spine, between my chest – meeting at my collarbone, tiny razor-sharp white things devoured my flesh, leaving behind only that which was ossified. When they reached the false teeth in my larger head– .” Realizing his fingers were pressing eyebrow hairs together, he dropped them and found an unsettling spread of little hairs stuck to his fingertips and inside his fingernails. He wished he had his sunglasses.

“Well, you certainly are a rum fellow.” Though the room was quite dark, the exterminator’s gestures were so exaggerated that one could not help notice how putout he was by the narrow pews lining the halo of bone clawed between his fingers. “What do you say we put a finis on the subject of penises?” In attempt to shoo the image of sautéed sausages from his mind, he turned the light back on, illuminating a cloud of dust clambering up his abandoned chair. In his evening robe and pince-nez he looked classier than Danny DeVito, an embonpoint Bob Hoskins. “The penis thing does not help me with your poltroon. Fixé sur la point!”

“Poltroon?”

“Yes, the mouse.” The exterminator Al Condor pulled a metallic straw from the breast pocket of his robe and proceeded to tell a story dating from his time living in a Hare Krishna temple. 

“One night, I awoke from a dream in which two wild dogs had been fighting inside my stomach.” The tip of this metallic straw-device had been welded into a scooped knife that he used to gouge all salvageable grind from the barren bone in his hand, carving salient troughs for whatever remained potable. “I called upon my guru in a state of panic, asking him which dog would win. Do you know what the guru replied?”  He placed his tongue inside the ring of bone, bit down, and sucked his tongue back into his mouth to finish, “The one you feed.” Spitting the bone into his palm, the gourmand inquired if his guest had any interest in sausages.  

---

[1] Perhaps lapse is not quite accurate. He did not intend to imply a period of blackness, or anything like it. The moment, both a flash and an elaborate narrative of its own dominion, was somehow separate and co-existent, an intertwined interruption. I can describe it with fair detail as a non-connecting image of a svelte British man in Buddy Holly glasses making a rather effeminate gesture with his arms and swanlike neck. But you can’t explain that. It just doesn’t make any sense. 

In which the exterminator returns.

LATEST NEWS!

Brazil nuts are a natural antidepressant.

Letters:

I would like to formally apologize to the Cannes Film Festival.

Cragganmore had munched on the mail, leaving only a delivery menu from the corner pizzeria in one piece.

Nicholson could see the mouse in the open frame of the semi-attached kitchen, licking a drop of whiskey off the counter. He took a step toward the filthy thing and glowered down at it, baseball bat raised in the air. The mouse paused and offered an obeisance – half wassail and half apology. He couldn’t believe the nerve of the creature! It must have been drunk.

All this nonsense with the mouse had weakened our hero, both psychologically and emotionally, so that when the exterminator arrived, Nicholson found himself opening up to the stranger, almost against his will. He continually referred to the other Jack Nicholson and worried that this lesser more submissive version of the movie star had reduced his legend to a mediocrity he cared not to immortalize.

In response, the exterminator offered a quote from the novel Moby-Dick:

SEAT thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

Jack Nicholson thought this very apt and felt it particularly rung true to our activity in social media sites like facebook.

“Faces lie,” the exterminator explained while picking his nose. “You can think there’s a secret sadness behind someone’s eyes if you like, but it’s probably just gas.” From his medical bag, he took some poison packages labeled MEMITIM in bold caps and tossed them around the apartment. “We go by instinct. Walking, breathing, blinking: that’s what takes up most of our consciousness.” As if reaching some grand conclusion, he waived the pizza delivery flyer in the air. “It’s likely mon petite poupée was trying to tell you something with this. What do you say to calling in a large pie? Just to see what kind of response it stimulates.”

“I don’t think the mouse was trying to tell me anything by leaving the pizza menu untouched. I just mentioned that as an aside.”

“Stop reasoning like a casserole. The worm is in the fruit.” He took great pains to reach down for the lint covered glue traps, muttering various French proverbs: “Retomber comme un soufflé…” and “C’est pas de la tarte, mon amis.” Then he looked me in the eye to conclude, “Si, c’est marche pas… ooo la la, c’est la fin des haricots!” Since I do not speak French, I was unsure if I ought to have assumed a facial expression that encouraged his banter or one that let him know I’d rather he speak to me in English. He responded to my indecisiveness with equal in-betweeness: “You are a bit dans le pâté this morning, no?”

After finding an insect or two on a glue trap, the exterminator began to skip around the apartment, sniffing about for murine odors, pausing each time he found a dead insect in order to swing his hips rhythmically from side-to-side while picking his nose. This dance frustrated Nicholson, and upon the fourth pause for a hip-shake and nose-pick, our hero exploded. 

“These glue traps are useless!”

“Well, they’re not eating any bread, dear Jackie!”

“Who isn’t eating any bread?”

“The glue traps! Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” repeated the exterminator, now with his finger up his nose. “It’s a line from one of your moving pictures! The Batman!”

“Is your work finished here?”

“Tell me, how does one dance with the devil? How would such a dance be performed?” “Look, I don’t know…”

“Well, surely you learned the choreography on set! I know how performance actors research.”

“There was never any actual dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.”

“Well, I have a few ideas. Dance with me.”

“What?”

“Indulge me…”

“No.”

The exterminator angrily stuck his finger up his nose. “There are two things in this world that I truly adore. Eating and dancing! You have refused me both of them today. Cursed be thy name. I challenge thee to a duel!”

Nicholson ordered the pizza.

The exterminator tossed a couple of slices of pizza beneath the furniture and into the corners. He and Jack stretched out on the floor to eat the rest of the pie ancient Greco-Roman style.

EXTERMINATOR

You know those little birds? The little, pretty, delicate ones? What are they called?

NICHOLSON

Robins?

EXTERMINATOR

No, not robins. But they do resemble robins. I imagine them having a smaller sounding name.

            (pause)

The other day I was eating some bread in the park and there was a big group of them. One or two of them would kind of approach me, but then quickly scatter away in flight. So I set aside a few crumbs on the bench beside me. One little guy hops up on the bench – you know, decides to test things out for a bit. He comes a little closer... And just as he’s about to pick up a crumb with his tiny little beak, the fear becomes too strong to bear and he flies away.

(beat)

But this fear… It’s me too. I mean, I also become afraid. What right do I have to fear such a tiny beautiful bird?

            (takes a bite of pizza)

What is this fear? Where did it come from? I so much enjoy their smallness and delicacy. No part of me would want to stronghold it. So, by this logic, the bird has no right to be afraid of me either. And yet, I somehow understand the little birds. There is something in me that must be overcome, handled.

            (pause)

Perhaps man once grabbed small bird at random, took a large bite out of it, swallowed the head in one. Maybe some men still do. There is an instinct that I feel is present, and it makes sense that these small birds feel it too. So, the closer they approach, the more I’m a little afraid and the more they’re a little afraid. There is a fear. But make no mistake, I would never dream of hurting the little things. I rather like them.

NICHOLSON

A sparrow? Yes, a sparrow, perhaps.

EXTERMINATOR

Sans doubt. I’m not really sure what the difference is between the two.

After the exterminator left, Jack felt a warm sort of urge to return to Edith’s emails.

           

--- edith beaumont wrote:

> How ridiculous we must appear to the dinosaurs –

> tiny little things running around to gather their bones for study,

> millions of years after their extinction.

>

> I thought about it while clipping my toenails and examining the nail

> from my big toe, imagining it a good find to something small.

> Something that would understand it differently than you or I.

> Something the size of an ant or a mouse.

> Is it the distance in size or in time that makes all things, all ideas,

> appear fooloish? Or is it just us? And, ultimately,

> what’s the difference?

In which our hero is visited by an exterminator.

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!

Caption for photograph of dog driving automobile: What is the correlation between conscious thought and muscular action?


Letters:
I would like to formally apologize to my oldest and dearest friend, Danny DeVito. It is indeed likely that, as his legal advisors have suggested, I took some “liberties with the truth” […] “in the interest of fantastical erotica or transgressive literature”. I wish to once again remind my readers that the characters appearing in this blog are very much works of fiction.




“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” The exterminator was a Danny DeVito look-a-like and a nose-picker. “Herman Melville from his novel Moby-Dick.” He lifted his eyes to a crumb beside my mouth and had no qualms about picking his nose while I rambled on about the infestation. He pulled out strands of snot to better smell personal relics; but he was careful to appear tactful in the disposal of the findings. Resisting his temptation to eat a sharp lozenge of booger, he examined an anthology of Holocaust poetry for markings of Cragganmore’s teeth and placed the prize within its pages. He tapped the binding against his lip and sniffed in the aroma of antiquated glue tinctured with silverfish droppings.

“I’m a big fan of anything Holocaust,” remarked the exterminator.

“Oh. Are you Jewish?”

“I’m all religion and no religion, everyman yet no man at all. You see, all religions speak to and of me, but none grant me tranquil. I, my boy, am an extrémité incessante!”

“Is that also from Moby-Dick?”

      

He withdrew various poisons from a clunky leather medical bag and noted Cragganmore’s name on a long muster roll within a thick encyclopedic-like book before returning his finger to his nostril. Rather than draw attention with a forceful flick, the exterminator wiped the remains of partly dried mucus from his stubby fingertip onto the unseen back of the refrigerator – his other fingers making like he was occupied with important tasks by flipping through the pages of the immense leather bound book or adjusting the pince-nez on his nose. He opened the refrigerator door to taste every cheese, salami, pickle, both smooth and crunchy peanut butters, whatever he could find to determine what would best lure the rodent to its death. He did all this with the same fever a pregnant woman devours to bring life to her unborn. And when he finished, he inquired about lunch.
“There is no mayonnaise in your refrigerator,” he reported while fixing himself a postprandial sandwich. “Only mustard and horseradish.”

“I’m watching my cholesterol.”

“Sans doubt. But what fowl, I dare ask, can you put on a sandwich without mayonnaise? Ne pas manger ce pain-là. Dare you not profess the condiment rather de rigueur to prevent dryness?” 

The pleasure of eating the sandwich he had prepared was soon abandoned however, as the hypnotic saccade of his eyes suggested a pretzel found in the corner of the room might jump up and scurry off at any moment. With a swiftness that indicated he had been trained for such an occasion, the exterminator dropped on all fours and sneaked the pretzel into his mouth. Like a dog, this somehow made him more human.

Sensing scrutiny in my gaze, his eyes visibly awakened from their trance and froze before he awkwardly turned his stout frame to ask, “Are you in pictures?” Upon confirmation, he confidently returned his finger to his nostril. “I knew I recognized you. You were in that Adam Sandler movie. I knew it. I knew I recognized you. You have a certain je ne sais pas.”

“Je ne sais quoi?”

“Chacun a son gout, I suppose!” Still a dog on all fours, he cocked his head further askew, glistening the sloppily spread rim of wax inside his right ear. “I like the movies. They give a false impression of immortality. But Jack Nicholson would never reside in such a… such a… comme si comme ca abode. Être serrés comme des sardines!” he laughed. “But you were in that Adam Sandler movie, weren’t you”

“Yes, and I am Jack Nicholson.”

“If you like,” shrugged the exterminator, and he officiously picked his nose before justifying his body’s refusal to stand on hind-legs by peeling up a corner of bathmat to sniff an untraceable scent.

More humane than the non-fatal cage described a couple of blogs back were attempts to live harmoniously with mice. But making a pet of a former intruder like Little Orphan Oban had meant droppings on the floor, gnawing at the books, and slippers constantly covering our hero’s feet. Eventually, a cat was borrowed from a teammate on his amateur baseball team. If this cat’s proud march from the bathroom – a decapitated Lil’ Oban hanging from its mouth – was nature in motion, Jack Nicholson was happy to call the exterminator this time around.

Jumping to his feet, he assessed: “She’s an eater! I’ll throw some poison packages around the place. Baby will chew on those and in fifteen minutes… Well… Adieu.” He winked.  “For safe keeping, I’ll lay out a few glue-traps for mon petite poupée to stumble on for easy disposal. After all, we wouldn’t want Baby wandering off to some undisclosed location to pass on to the hereafter, would we? A mouse should die in the home. Before the later part of the 20^th century, we used to die in our houses, surrounded by: family, neighbours, clergy… Mon dieu… those cursed hospitals have taken all the life out of death.” Though he was without tail, it seemed the exterminator wagged his when walking out the door.