In which our hero has a philosophical conversation with the rabbis.

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!

God is like Edith’s face: Plain. 

Letters:

I’d like to apologize to John Wayne.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I looked toward the movie, the common dream,

The he and she in close-ups, nearer than life,

And I accepted such things as they seem,

The easy poise, the absence of the knife,

The near summer happily ever after,

The understood question, the immediate strife,

Not dangerous, nor mortal, but the fadeout

Enormously kissing amid warm laughter,

As if such things were not always played out

By an ignorant arm, which crosses the dark

And lights up a thin sheet with a shadow’s mark.

Delmore Schwartz

He craved for her to write something. He wanted to read her words; hear her voice; he wanted to know her her. He wanted to read:

Dear Jack,

I am having a hard time disassociating this strange inner burning with thoughts of you. The flames first ignited in both stomach and chest as a fire of yearning. Your words slowly spread sulphur over organs I believed to be dried stones in the desert – able to sustain conditions of extreme heat. It’s hard to pinpoint when the match was dropped onto my thistle of skin, but it was likely as incidental as a spelling or grammatical mistake on your behalf. An unnoticed folly. And the coil turned red because it could only be yours to miss and mine to embrace. Everything seemed so clear to me, so perfectly matched, as it still does today.

We are meant to be together. Don’t you see that? Some people play the roles of those who love and others take on the characters of those who are loved. You are not a lover, Jack. At first I was angry with you for that. But then I realized that you are a man who needs to be loved.

Eternally,

Edith

And he realized that he didn’t know her. Like Edith in person, her letters lacked both passion and character. It was his own letters he cared for, and his own words were what gave him comfort. 

Still no new messages, he moves to youtube where he finds himself watching clips of Harry Nilsson’s live performances from 1970s and cries at the realization of how cold and dark the times are now. No more hope for happiness, no happiness in depressing loneliness, ONLY defeat and apocalyptic feelings.  These reflections on our times are interrupted by the sound of sobs between his own that could not have come from himself.

Interior. Bathroom.

The three rabbis are crying in Jack Nicholson’s small New York bathroom. The old wise one sits on the toilet, his face burrowing through his wizened hands; the young one dangles his legs off the side of the sink, biting down on his trembling lip and clipping his fingernails; the fat one comically stomps his fists and untied shoes against Nicholson’s dry bathtub.

JACK NICHOLSON

Why are you guys crying?

OLD RABBI

(looking up from his hands)

We cry because we cannot ascend.

FAT RABBI

(bellowing out)

Stuck below because I tied the laces on my left

foot before tying the laces on my right foot!

YOUNG RABBI

(sardonically)

Those fuckers! They got rules for everything…

Apparently I can’t go up because I messed up the

order for clipping my fingernails on Friday while preparing for the Sabbath. Do you believe that shit?

OLD RABBI

If we want messiach, we must follow the rules. There is an order for everything…

YOUNG RABBI

Well, I’m not sure that I even want the messiah to come. It really doesn’t concern me.

OLD RABBI

And me? I’ve been waiting my whole life for him to come…

The old rabbi resigns his face back into his hands.

YOUNG RABBI

You see, I got this theory that all this shit is really about the waiting for the messiah, rather than his actual arrival.  That what differentiates us from the goyim.

FAT RABBI

Oyyyyyy…. I wasn’t cut out to be a fucking rabbi! Aye… I just don’t have the right temperament for it! Ohhh…. I used to dream of becoming a beadle in the synagogue!

(he smiles)

Shushing all who were consumed with idle chatter.

JACK NICHOLSON

Well, you can’t cry here. Go somewhere else.

And with that, Jack Nicholson pushed the three rabbis out of his bathroom.

The bathroom mirror is dirty, but I can tell that my eyebrows are abnormally long. I take out a hair from the left brow with some tweezers and marvel at it. A dead hair. A white hair. A good find. A couple more hairs call out to me, a patch of eyebrow in need of epigamic maintenance, so I clench them between the un-pointed tips and I tug – but I take the wrong strands. It’s painful to pull out soft, youthful hairs, and the rheum over my eyes swells. I remove the correct tuft, and this eases the sting, but the sensation returns when I cannot get a hold of another thatch. More normal hairs taken out. So many that I lose track and wonder if the intended thorn, the messiah hair, can be accounted for amongst the discards.

The peak on my left eyebrow no longer flaunts its summit and, beside it, the right brow looks more ridiculous than ever. To even the keel, I take the tweezers to the right side. The first yank is too ambitious. Many hairs withdrawn, much pain. Tears run down my cheeks, but I am not crying. From the throbbing teems something to push my pursuit, and I occasionally find a hair in actual need of plucking atrophied in the tweezers. The left vertex is exaggerated again. I pull and pull and pull, arbitrarily, like a sniper on a tower. I am crying. An inverted point dips into my left eyebrow. To make everything appear normal, I carefully pluck at both eyebrows, eventually manicuring them into the pencil thin threads I associate with Kabuki theatre. What will become of me with so few hairs remaining above my eyes? What will come of my fingers?

“First cut the nails on the left hand in the order 4, 2, 5, 3, 1, and then the right in the order 2, 4, 1, 3, 5.”  Though he was not a religious boy, our hero practiced the same prescribed order since his father taught it to him as the way a man cut his nails on Friday. He even immortalized the process by using it to inspire the obsessive-compulsive attentiveness of his Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets. “Jews don’t believe in Hell,” explained his father. “You just gotta look around yourself in the now and ask, Is this as good as it gets?” Perhaps I remember the fingernail-clipping pattern so vividly because of the physical awkwardness of my father attempting to teach it after both his arms had been blown off in the war, along with both his hands, along with all ten fingers, along with all their nails. Or perhaps I remember because it seemed, strangely, an attempt to recompense. 

 

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.