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 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.
