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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When I am drunk, pleasure and pain seem to meld.
Letters:
I would like to formally apologize to Tim Burton and his lawyers for writing about him on this public blog. I should have used better judgment, and I would like to take this opportunity to remind my readers that the characters who appear in this blog are not meant to represent any real persons, living or dead.
A word concerning an incident in the previous blog.
Everyone in Hollywood knows I have a thing for foreignish, impoverished, particularly unfamous women – nursemaids, barmaids, chambermaids, housemaids, housewives, mothers and sons – and Edith was all this, but more. She didn’t have aspirations to be an actress, or anything like that. She was nothing like the dream-filled trash I’d invite to my confidential George-Cukor-esque soirees on Mulholland Drive – that is, until Roman Polanski’s swimming pool stunt brought all that to an abrupt halt. As far as I knew, Edith was content doing nothing more than waiting tables in the kosher sushi restaurant where she was designated servant Japanese cashier-girl when customers ordered take-out – which was always.
What a let down to find out that she was born in Greenwich, Connecticut to a Jewish father and a Korean mother; that she pretended to work under-the-table in a restaurant she actually owned because customers found it charming and adorable when the struggling migrant showcased knowledge of the laws of kashrut with an exotic accent; that she managed to whore herself in an all too profitable way. I liked imagining the self-righteous kosher crowd ordering her about. Knowing that she was a grifter playing her role not from financial destitute, but to somehow better herself, ruined that fantasy for me. It didn’t take long to change my lunch spot to the corner delicatessen where a Chinese lady served me New York sandwiches with an authentic accent.
The other day I left my writing desk to pick up my usual lunchtime sandwich, and to my surprise, I found the actor Michael Ironside ordering a sandwich. For those readers unfamiliar with Mr. Ironside’s repertoire (Total Recall, Top Gun, Starship Troopers, SeaQuest DSV), you might know his face because of its remarkable resemblance to my own. Ironside has been described as “a poor man’s Jack Nicholson” (a cheap alternative for studios with yearly budgets not amounting my salary per picture).
I’ve taken the liberty to write out the scene as it unfolded in screenplay form:
INT. BODEGA (New York City) – DAY.
Grease stained headshots of actors who cannot claim C-list celebrity status dress the corroded walls. Their anachronous hairstyles commingle with colours faded to a single yellowish tint. The magazine racks are blazoned with youthful twinkles from the likes of Toby Maguire or Jake Gyllenhaal – covers portraying Nicholson’s devilish eyebrows and surly grin have long-since gone missing.
JACK NICHOLSON
Total Recall. Great performance And that movie where the heads blew up. How did they make those people’s heads blow up like that?
MICHAEL IRONSIDE
(reluctant to make eye contact)
I don’t know. I wasn’t on set that day.
My own name seems out of place on the menu board, between the Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino sandwiches. “Jack Nicholson?” asks the woman behind the counter with an air of recognition, and then a knowing sidelong glance at Michael Ironside. “Shining.” She narrows her eyes, to let me know that she knows, before widening them to ask:
LADY BEHIND COUNTER
Do you have picture? With signature. Put on wall.
(she winks at Ironside, as if to mock me)
JACK NICHOLSON
I’m sorry...
(adopting condescending Jack Nicolson sneer)
I don’t carry those around with me.
She plops down an 8x10 headshot of Theo Jefferson and nods.
Searching my pocket I find a ballpoint pen, but it cannot leave a mark on the glossy photographic paper.
LADY BEHIND COUNTER
Other side. Turn over.
I turn Jefferson’s face towards the scratch-and-win lottery tickets beneath the scratched glass counter, and autograph a space between the actor’s physical proportions and filmography. I catch the remains of some secret code between her and Ironside – a slight bob of her head and a gleeful scrunch of her shoulders with the tip of her tongue curled against her upper lip. I give the lady one of my penetrating stares to let her know that, celebrity or not, I’m not a man to be messed about with.
Ironside stifles an order through his own surly grin:
MICHAEL IRONSIDE
I’ll have the Jack Nicholson.
Exterior. Catholic boys’ school. Day. The same place our hero had eaten his lunch everyday since moving to New York. He liked looking through the fence and watching the boys between the ages of eight and fourteen play in the yard, messing up their uniforms during recess. The fact that he enjoyed it so much terrified him. What was it that brought him to this same bench day after day? When did a convenient spot to eat a sandwich turn into an obsession that could not be avoided?
The wind’s rimy fingers grazed his ears and he imagined smoothing his eyebrows to warmth. Instead, he swathed knots of metal connecting the interstices in the fence with his curled knuckles. Resisting the late November sting against his cheek, he peered through the rusted diamonds of air – something like an image from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (sans toque) – and he searched his worn blood vessels for sensation. It was more than a grown man’s clinging to his lost childhood, but he was never aware of any sexual feelings toward men and was sickened by the idea of hurting children in any physical or psychological way. Jack Nicholson knew what it meant to be molested, and he wanted nothing more to do with it.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” asked the Irish-Italian priest.
“Sorry?” Nicholson asked through the fence.
“Get the fuck outta here. And if you come back here I’m gonna kick your ass.” The priest pushed forward his Irish jaw, and flicked a lit cigarette at Nicholson’s face. The fence broke its flight, but the ricochet spotted his forehead with a smudge of ash from which the priest modestly lowered his Italian eyes.
“I come here to eat my lunch,” explained Nicholson.
“Well go somewhere else to eat your lunch, Hollywood.”
As the priest walked away, Nicholson was confused as to whether or not he really should find another place to eat. When a young boy screamed, “PERVERT!” in his face, he was more confused.
“I only come here to eat my lunch.”
“Why do you like to jerk off to little boys?” asks the boy’s friend.
“I don’t do that. I’ve never done that!”
“We’re not gonna fuck you!” the meaner boy shouts.
“I don’t want you to. I would never expect you to.”
“You might be able to rape me, but my dad could rip your penis off.”
“I’m not a rapist. I would never think of touching you.”
“Prove it.”
“What?” A curt chortle doesn’t help Nicholson’s appeal to reason.
“Come inside the gate.”
“Why should I?” he nervously chuckles.
“What’s a matter? Do you got something to hide?”
“No.” He fills the following pause with a laughing sigh.
“Then come inside the gate.”
Not knowing how else to deal with the abrasive child, our hero raises the latch of the playground gate. Looking around, he cannot detect any livery of the parish. It is as if he is walking in his sleep, almost floating, a parade of boys in uniform slowly guiding his left hand to a discrete spot behind the slide.
“Kiss Tommy.” The meaner boy commands, pointing to the nicer boy.
“What?”
“Kiss Tommy.”
“I don’t want that weirdo kissing me.”
“Shut up Tommy!”
“Now look here, I’m not kissing that boy,” laughs Nicholson.
“Because you rape little boys.”
“This is ridiculous!” (masking his unintentional giggling as an intentional allusion to the preposterousness of the situation).
“You’re afraid to kiss him because you’re worried that you’re gonna rape him.”
“Okay,” he swallows. “I’m leaving-” (just a hint of a titter on the final syllable).
“Rapist!” yells another boy.
“I am not a rapist.”
“Kiss Tommy or I’ll tell Father Anthony that you tried to rape him.”
“Kiss him!”
“Kiss him, rapist!”
“Now stop this,” he laughs.
“Why? Because you can’t stop yourself from raping boys? Kiss Tommy.”
“No.”
“Eric, if he doesn’t kiss Tommy in the next twenty seconds, I want you to go tell Father Anthony that he tried to rape Tommy.” Anxious to direct his attention back to the event about to unfold, a skinny and wide-eyed Eric does not hesitate to silently nod at the bully in order to return his gape toward Jack Nicholson. A soft chant begins: Kiss Tommy. Kiss Tommy. Kiss Tommy. Growing more assertive each time the bully forces the words, it does not take long for the entire schoolyard to join in.
Kiss Tommy! Kiss Tommy! Kiss Tommy!
Nicholson kisses the little boy.
Immediately, dozens of Catholic schoolboys jump on top of him with fists and kicks – the cold dampness of Tommy’s lips escaping with blood. He liked it. He liked the chapped memory of Tommy’s epicene lips against his, and he liked the beating of miniature knuckles against his fully developed ribs. Most of all, he enjoyed the pain that reminded him he was not asleep. The bell rang and the boys ran to class. “If he really is Jack Nicholson, why didn’t his bodyguards come out to save him?” He placed his dentures back in his mouth.
The clunk of my 1948 Louisville Slugger interrupts my writing. Opposite its roll, Cragganmore scrambles through the kitchen and into the bathroom. I stop the bat with my foot and slump into the mattress. The rustling of protective plastic beneath the bottom sheet embarrasses me. Even though I am alone, the sound embarrasses me.
During his youth, Jack Nicholson wet his bed at night. In daylight, his sister carefully caressed the area surrounding his zipper. Her fingers moved in and out, up and down, and side-to-side for what he understood to be beyond the time needed to decipher if his pants were damp with urine; but he assumed his mother instructed her to be thorough because she insisted that the crotch-rot from unattended to urine could cause his penis to fall off. It seemed natural that his sister – who complained regularly that their mother was not doing enough to raise the child – touched him in the most private of places to protect the boy. He never thought it inappropriate until his uncle’s death, when a psychiatrist asked him to demonstrate on a doll if his penis had been rubbed or pulled on it. Apparently there was a difference. At the time, he wondered what pulling on his penis entailed.
