In which our hero goes to the bathroom.

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 often find the chore of taking a shit much less burdensome than I initially expect. 

Letters:

I’d like to apologize to Kevin Spacey. I think he’s a fantastic actor, and it would be both an honor and a privilege to watch him re-create any of my performances.

INTERIOR. MEN’S ROOM. – MOMENTS FOLLOWING NICHOLSON’S MEETING WITH HIS AGENT (DEPICTED IN MY PREVIOUS BLOG ENTRY).

Someone is in the stall beside mine and I fear that my urine flowing into the toilet is too loud, so I redirect the stream towards the inner porcelain wall of the bowl. I raise my penis further to warm the inner left of my thigh (a secret pleasure). After misfiring onto the backside of my underpants, I firmly hold my penis back in place.

My shit is large and its tip resembles the head of a circumcised penis bobbing in the water. It is long and fat, and I can’t help thinking, “I just had a big boner up my ass.”

Where does the word boner come from? I have a theory: 

The French word bonheur means happiness. I imagine a lanky Frenchman, a troubadour, strutting a medieval palace with an erect penis visible in his tight leggings. He smiles while crooning a princess, and another Frenchman turns toward me, an Anglo Saxon visitor, and says something like, “Il est bonheur!” The Anglo Saxon returns to England misusing the word bonheur, or boner, to describe erect penises. The term catches on.

There is some graffiti scribbled on the leg of the stall:

Tap foot twice for BJ. A stupid joke. I can see my neighbour’s shoes. Rockports. I am also wearing Rockports. His have brogues. I wonder if he also thinks it’s a stupid joke. What if he taps his foot? The idea seems wrong. I am not gay. 

Perhaps there is hidden truth in the jest of the graffiti. If I play along with the joke, will his Rockports kick down the wall that separates us? Will those shoes genuflect their brogued toes against the urine-stained floor while lips and tongue aggressively suck on my dick? Tap foot twice for BJ. A similar scribble behind my head is probably directed at standing urinators: DISCRETELY tap foot for BJ. A thumb of black skin between his sock and cuff. What was meant by discretely? A Black man. Does discretion demand less of a tap? A subtle raise or repositioning of the foot? I am not racist. Perhaps any number of slight movements would be misinterpreted as a discrete tapping of my foot: a toe flex, the shuffling of my heel, leaning on the outer pinky edge of my foot to air its sole. Black, black, black, black, black, black. Wait – is my foot actually following the list of slight physical adjustments? My shitting neighbour – he’s Black – clears his throat and blows his nose. Tap foot twice for BJ. Was the bringing forth of mucous an attempt to signal some sort of ‘discretion’? Tap foot twice for BJ. Is their mucous the same colour as ours? Tap foot twice for BJ.  I loudly think:

HOW CAN STUPID WHITE MEN LIKE ME BE SURE THAT MINDREADING IS NOT A SUPERIOR GIFT OF THE MIGHTY AFRICAN BLACK PEOPLE?

Did I move my foot? Maybe just a blink, but could it have been interpreted as a tap? A discrete tap? Tap foot twice for BJ. Is Black reading it too? Tap foot twice for BJ. Why isn’t there any other graffiti to focus my eyes on? Tap foot twice for BJ. A dirty joke. A phone number. Tap foot twice for BJ. Something racist. Tap foot twice for BJ. HOW CAN STUPID WHITE MEN LIKE ME BE SURE THAT MINDREADING IS NOT A SUPERIOR GIFT OF THE MIGHTY AFRICAN BLACK PEOPLE? HOW CAN STUPID WHITE MEN LIKE ME BE SURE THAT MINDREADING IS NOT A SUPERIOR GIFT OF THE MIGHTY AFRICAN BLACK PEOPLE? Tap foot twice for BJ. In simple bold Sharpe between two pairs of feet – white and black – both dressed in Rockports: Tap foot twice for BJ. Tap foot twice for BJ. Tap foot twice for BJ. I inch my Rockport a touch further from his Rockport and tap my foot two times.

After a pause: the flush of his toilet; his shoes promptly exiting the stall; the men’s room door swinging shut behind them. The faucet is not turned on to provide running water for washing hands and the sensor that ignites the hand dryer is left without a signal for reception. Alone, under the silencing hum of fluorescent lights, my Rockports plant their soles to the cold tiled floor of the locked stall and avoid the random stains of yellow. It helps to tap my foot repeatedly during the long push of shit from my ass.

Cragganmore popped his little head out!! He popped his head out! I’ll kill the bastard.

Fade to BLACK…

The sound of tiny wheels rolling against the tiled flood. A skateboard comes to a halt. The large Star of David sticker on its underside is flipped up in the camera’s lens.

Our hero lays passed out on the bathroom floor.

A young Hasidic Jew dressed in baggy jeans, rod laver sneakers, and a vintage Batman yarmulke spits and looks Jack Nicholson up and down. The bare beginning of a grown out beard and lack of formal black attire affirm that God is a recent discovery for the boy. An older zealot-bearded Hasid slowly raises a container of smelling salt – sitting in his jacket pocket since Yom Kippur – and holds it shakily beneath Nicholson’s nose. The old Jew resembles Cragganmore. “I’m awake. I’m awake.”

In which our hero takes a meeting with his agent.

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There are two types of people in this world: heart attack people and cancer people.

Letters:

I would like to apologize to Adam Sandler, whose image appeared in this blog without my first obtaining his permission. He is in no way affiliated with the words printed here.

Ain’t It Hip: What made you choose to do Bucket List?

Jack Nicholson: Morgan Freeman.

Ain’t It Hip: Really?!

Jack Nicholson: Yes, I was very excited at the opportunity to work with a Black.

Ain’t It Hip: He is a very accomplished actor.

Jack Nicholson: Yeah, Rob Reiner came to me with the script and I wasn’t interested. But when he said that Morgan Freeman was going to be in it, I went hmm… You know, I’d never really worked with an African before… or rather, a Black American.

Ain’t It Hip: Did you see this project as a chance to personally confront getting older?

Jack Nicholson: I saw it as a chance to confront my fear of black people.

Ain’t It Hip: And what about old age? Or maybe, like, death?

Jack Nicholson: They scare me. And I don’t mean that in a racist way. They’re just more frightening than white people. You know, I have trouble relating the people in my own life to black people, or relating black people to the people in my own life. Genetically we have 99 per cent in common with a banana, never mind Morgan Freeman. Or even Adolf Hitler!

Ain’t It Hip: Are you afraid of dying?

A midtown Manhattan office building. Men in grey flannel suits and women resembling Hillary Rodham Clinton – and with names resembling Hillary Rodham Clinton’s – come and go in a ceremonial manner. We have a black president. I am awkwardly alternating between a run and a slow walk because I have to take a shit. A homeless black man once called me a tighty-whitey in Brooklyn because I walked as if I were an uptight white man. He didn’t know that my uptight walk was attributed to holding in a shit.

Moving in past desks of ringing telephones, beneath the buzz of fluorescent lights, we find a closed door inscribed: Mitchell Scapinelli – TALENT. My agent resembles a supporting but recognizable character actor one might find in a Cohen Brothers movie; he adopts mannerisms that are simultaneously absurdities out of nowhere and familiar clichés; he talks fast and brash, wearing the effects of one too many cups of coffee; and he is Jewy, but without God.

I am seated firmly, so as to push back up the shit trying to sneak out my ass. He reads from his ipad, so as to pace his office to better emphasize his frustration. “You say, and I quote: ‘Sometimes when I walk in public, I think black people can read my mind.’ What is that? Like a secret genetic power they keep quiet in fear of a racist backlash? ‘I am very careful about what I think when black people are in close proximity. Even when my internal monologue addresses the possibility of their racial ability to read my thoughts, I try to think about that possibility in a non-racist way.” He hands me the ipad, and as I reach for it, the tip of my shit pushes against my boxer briefs. Calvin Klein. It tickles the cotton, marking it like crayon.

That time in Brooklyn, the shit burst out. I remember the warm mass between my ass and underwear; thinking I’d really have to scrub the back of my thighs in the shower when I got home; wondering if little turds would tear away and drop down my pant leg; deliberating how to subtly abandon the fallen pieces on the street; hoping people around me would assume they belonged to a dog; balancing the mother-load that now shifted on the seat of my underwear, its umbilical cord cut from my asshole.

That must be why people say Oh Shit! when something bad happens, like just before a car accident or when you drop something on the kitchen floor. That’s what I said when I shit myself: “Shit!” And the shit was sitting in my underwear to confirm it. The whole process was: a pain in the ass. Where do these expressions come from? My theory is that they originated with people who shit themselves. Accidents, burdens, grievances: they’re all associated with, described as: shit.

“Nowhere in the interview do you feel it necessary to discuss the actual production of the film! For Christ’s sake, Jack, we’ve talked about this. Do you have any clue how much work it took to twist this thing into: Jack Nicholson is the last honest man in a world gone mad with political correctness? Do I need to be worried about you, Jack? What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin’? Well you’re not! You’re not! You’re no crazier than the average asshole out walkin’ around on the streets, and that’s it.” 

An awkward pause follows, in which my agent tries to fill the dead air by making an elbow gesture and a nip-nip noise as if he has just taken a shot of Jim Beam (in reference to my alcoholic lawyer from Easy Rider who will next be portrayed by Zach fucking Braff).

“My advice to you: don’t be hostile to the bottle.” His thumb and index finger reach into the desk drawer to pull out a mickey of prune schnapps – his other fingers extended as if delicately flaunting a cup of tea. “Best godamn drink in the world, dontcha think?” He takes a swig and punches out his elbow, making more nip-nip noises. “I am the motherfucking Easy Riding Nicholson, motherfucker. I AM the motherfucking Nicholson. Now give this man a SLIVOVITZKA!” Drinks are poured.

I learned my sister was really my mother from a Time Magazine researcher who discovered the truth when writing a story about me. She died of cancer – my sister, or mother, not the reporter.

“Your mother never got the irony of calling you a bastard!” jokes my agent. He dims the lights and takes the most recent draft of my screenplay from my hands to read under the warm glow of his desk lamp.

“No, but seriously, tell me more about that. I’m listening.”

My father died of a heart attack a month preceding my Bar Mitzvah. I hadn’t seen the man in eight years.

He fixes us two more drinks, lights a cigar, and encourages me to put my feet up on his leather sofa.