The seeping, nocturnal emissions came upon him early -- "probably fourth grade" -- and as he was to recount with characteristic counterculture candor to Screw Magazine in 1972, his first wet dream was to penetrate his consciousness with unusual power.

"And out of the woods suddenly came a nude brown girl who simply rolled down the embankment, came up to me...leaped up...wrapped her legs around me, slid up and down...." and with sinuous quick power drew from him his first orgasmic ejaculation -- and with it, the onset of adolescence.

The photographs on his bedroom wall reflected the passionate urges: his number one sports hero, Shorty Smith, Yankee reliever Joe Page, North Carolina tailback Charlie (Choo Choo) Justice, Columbia's Bill Swiacki negotiating the final catch that meant victory over Army 21 to 20 -- and Marilyn Monroe!

It was any young man's dream of a life.

He was known as Nick in those days. Sports was his occupation and preoccupation, and the camaraderie of friends was everything.

If the truth be known, it was more a case of executing it in his imagination than on the basketball court, with that ultimate finesse and dazzle. He played day and night. He was the heart and soul of the action. His friends would pick him for the spirit he would impart. But he was largely a street player, two on two games, pick-up games in the playground. He was good but not good enough.

His best friends were the Varsity athletes -- Jack Brothers, George Anderson, Alan Keith, who went on to win athletic scholarships to places like Bucknell and Valley Forge Military.

Nick was relegated to becoming the manager of the sophomore basketball team whose task it was to carry the balls onto the basketball court -- not exactly Pat Riley.

Simply put, he did not have the tools to be a Varsity player -- not in basketball, not in baseball, not in football, and it was a source of keen frustration and disappointment, which perhaps explains the fury with which he avenged the dirty tactics of the opposing team by surreptitiously entering their locker room and smashing their electronic scoreboard. Nick was suspended from school and forced to take a part-time job to pay for the damages he'd inflicted.

He did not come out for Varsity athletics after his sophomore year at Manasquan High School.

As his sister Lorraine was to recall, "If he didn't do it best, he didn't do it at all."

"I have the feeling he would have preferred to be a pro athlete than an actor," mused George Anderson, captain of the Manasquan football team and one of Nick's closest buddies of the era. "He wanted to be a jock. But he didn't mature physically in time to do that, I would think."

Pal Jack Brothers: "He was almost like a groupie. 'Oh God, here comes Nick again'" they would kid.

Teacher Harry Morris, Assistant Basketball Coach: "He was among those students with a great deal of interest but they themselves are not excellent players."

The key factor in the agonies of adolescence seem to trace back to the fact that Nick had skipped 7th grade -- a mark of his intellectual prowess -- and was thus a year younger than his peers, chubby and small.

He was to be sure a strong athlete. He was a powerful body surfer, a killer ping pong player, a pool shark, a tennis player of speed and acuity, but baseball, football, basketball, they would elude him. The only team he made was the baseball crew of the Neptune City Boys Club.

And so the young man's fancy turned to the stage, and the Manasquan High School Auditorium became the forum for his explosive talent and energy.

His friends would get a great kick out of his theatrics.

"Hey Nick, you made All-Shore Play?" they'd kid.

All-Shore Football was not to be had.

In truth, it was his mad crush on Sandra Hawes that impelled him into acting.

It was one of those intense, urgent, all-consuming crushes of adolescence, a rapturous, painful, silent crush, Sandra, a chestnut haired, dreamy-eyed drum majorette, co-editor of the school newspaper and the lead actress in the school productions.

But Sandra was enamored of the handsome ["Handsomest Senior"] Alan Keith, star athlete and one of Nick's best friends.

"He felt he couldn't get her because he wasn't an athlete," recalled George Anderson.

"He had a major crush on Sandra Hawes," said Jack Brothers. "But all through high school he was young, still had his baby fat. Everybody loved him but as far as I can recall, he never had a serious girlfriend, not even close. I don't even remember a date. And we were pretty close."

Old pal Billy Snead: "We always had girls. He never had one. He's got all he could handle now."

George Anderson: "Nick had the most tremendous crush on Sandra. He really had a crush. I don't remember any other girl."

She was to become his first leading lady.

He made his big splash in the junior play, "Out of the Frying Pan," unforgettably popping out of a trunk in his undershorts!

It was the highlight of the play, if not the junior year -- and the first in a distinguished career of arresting cameo appearances.

He was to star with Sandra in the senior play, "The Curious Savage," a comic farce which took place in an asylum for the mentally insane. Confined against her will is the stupendously wealthy and eccentric Mrs. Savage, portrayed by Sandra, with Jack as Hannibal, the sweetly deluded madman who fancies himself a great violinist.

It was his first Cuckoo's Nest.

"I had all the classic adolescent anxieties. What kind of a job will I have? Will I be well-liked by women? Have I greatness? Am I pitiful? I felt no one I knew was having any of these problems...Someone like me always worries about the cataclysmic experience that might jerk away the facade and expose you as the complete imbecile that deep in you heart you know you are...."

"I was always a fantasist. I always wrote my way out of trouble in school. I had to stay after class every day in my sophomore year and they would assign you to write a 1,000 word essay story, and I'd write thousands of words... I developed these two characters, a genie and his boy. It's one of the few things I wish I could actually recover. A genie and his boy. God knows what was influencing me at the time."

Miss Giloly, Miss Elizabeth Giloly for one, his young English teacher who encouraged his writing early on, recognized something there, his early work important to him still, his original screenplays, the occasional poem, the cryptic journal he keeps to this day.

"Hot dogs in terms of liking for Miss Giloly to tell us to come up and read our essay. And we'd do it very animatedly," recalled old pal Jack Brothers, the two friends engaged in a fierce and playful competition in the Giloly classroom. "We thought the world of her."

"Pretty face, very bright, never worked at being attractive. We both liked her. Wonderful memory of that lady, always in company with Jack."

"He almost treated academics like a competitive sport," says Brothers. "Good grades. He was capably an A student."

In truth, our genie and his boy was exceptionally bright, didn't do much studying, minimal studying -- his natural intelligence got him through -- won all kinds of merit awards in the academic arena, scored in the top 2 percentile on his College Boards, but never took the intellectual life too seriously, much preferred playing the clown.

He was to find himself senior year in difficulty with Mr. Harry Morris, his American History teacher -- and the Assistant Basketball Coah --, passage of American history a requisite for graduation. Unfortunately, Jack had gym class before history and inevitably came late day after day.

Mr. Morris took to administering a short quiz at the start of class and Jack, not yet arrived, swiftly began to fail. "I got him in History class after one marking period," stated Mr. Morris.

"He used to always claim they'd taken his pants out of his locker. They'd gone someplace else. Always had different kinds of excuses for coming late. Until one day he actually arrived in his gym shorts!" laughed Mr. Morris. "His humor was well appreciated by the class. He was well liked. He'd break up the class."

Buddy Alan Keith: "He had such great ability and talent academically speaking. I wondered why he didn't pursue it with more energy. He had the intelligence to straight A it. Took all the tough courses. Always in the top group. Liked to clown alot. Got himself in trouble with that.

"I know he took the college prep course. It was a consideration of his. I don't know if he really intended to go. It was somewhere in the back of his mind, he hoped he could go to college somewhere."

As it turned out, the University of Delaware offered him a scholarship in chemical engineering,a partial scholarship.

"The partial scholarship was going to be based on my academic performance, which was never too impressive," stated Jack. "The grades and assimilation of information were good, but it wasn't a good performance. It just wasn't what I wanted to do."

"I remember him saying that he took a test for Rutgers," recalled George Anderson. "They told him his fooling around had cost him getting in."

"I'm never going to get a degree," he told George.

"I just hated school," he was finally to admit.

It was the conformist, repressive, mindless, fifties, the Eisenhower years, drugless and Victorian. Nick's greatest act of insurgency was his DA haircut, life on the Jersey shore wholesome as cherry pie.

There were the canteens at Belmar County Center and St. Rose High School, the library in Spring Lake, the Brielle Drive On in the Brielle Circle, and, of course, the boardwalk, the sea and its bracing, exhilarating force. He grew up on the beach, an infant transfixed by the smashing waves, an adolescent challenging them, lifeguarding by day, body surfing after hours with his friends in the twilight.

The winters were brutal, the shore environment raw and cold, but the kids would walk the boardwalk with intensity and vigor, stop for a tomato pie at Mom's Kitchen, embrace the awesome Atlantic.

In the summertime they carried their portable radios everywhere, tuned in to the Yankees or the Top 25, Nick into Johnnie Ray, Ray Charles, and alot of drums, Louis Bellson for one.

"We did everything my friends. We'd go to New York on weekends, get drunk, see ballgames, hang around...School was out. We just went to the beach all summer. And had fun, got drunk every night. It was the age of the put-on. Cool was everything. Collars were up, eyelids were drooped. You never let on what bothered you.

"And when you got to be a lifeguard which I did later, why you were the Prince of Summer. You know it didn't do me much good but a lot of other guys made a lot of hay with it... I didn't think I was adept at anything."

[The Asbury Park Press nevertheless depicts a small act of heroism by our Jack: the photograph of a small boat topping the crest of the waves, its bow pointing skyward, the teenage boy in silhouette at the helm, the caption reading, "Captain risks hurricane surf to rescue five."

"What they didn't see was me puking my guts out afterwards on the shore."

In the end, most importantly, there was the darkened plush interior of the grand Palace Movie Theatre where his imagination could soar and his emotions burst forth.

"I was a tremendous movie fan. I mean I got insane over Thunderhead which was the sequel to My Friend Flicker, [Flicker, a tender technicolor tale of a boy and his devotion to his horse, Thunderhead, a wild white colt foaled by Flicker.] My Mom left a box of pennies and I used to reach in there and take a handful and we went every day. That picture got me. I always loved the movies."

Yes, something was ignited inside the young Jack Nicholson as he sat transfixed through The Babe Ruth Story for the fifth consecutive time, something was silently born.

It was Christmas of 1953 that the Two Jacks -- Brothers and Nicholson -- hitchhiked to Richmond, Virginia to pay a surprise visit on their great pal, Billy Snead. The adventure was duly recorded in the local Manasquan newspaper and was to cause a sensation among their friends.

Nick had a special affinity for Billy Snead, Snead, sharp, witty, hilarious and quite a character himself. "The funniest guy in the world," recalls Jack Brothers.

A resident of Richmond, Virginia, Snead and his family would spend their summers with the Brothers family at the Jersey shore.

Nick was 12 years old when they met. They were riding their bikes then. From the beginning they were kindred spirits, the human comedy their shared perception.

The escapades of youth live on.

There was the summer night that Billy was behind the wheel of the 1937 Plymouth they just about lived in, [belonged to Jack Brothers' Mom], Billy at 16 the only one of the group legally entitled to drive, his permit obtained in the State of Virginia where the legal age was 16. (The permissible driving age in New Jersey was 17.)

And, as on so many other nights, the boys spotted a couple of girls, charmed them onto the running board of the automobile, and gave them a one block ride to the beach, the car tearing up a little gravel as it turned, heading back to town at 30 to 45 miles an hour in a 25-mile zone. They caught the attention of a passing policeman.

The cop pulled them over and examined Billy's driving permit. "You're not allowed to drive in the State of New Jersey. You're not 17 years old," he barked. "I'm going to have to take you all to jail."

"They put Nick and me in the cell and closed the door.

"And there we were, Nick and I sitting in a cell, Nick absolutely furious."

The policeman called the Judge at home. The Judge was asked to rule -- and he ruled in Billy Snead's favor!

For the longest time Snead carried that citation around in his pocket: State of New Jersey versus William Roland Snead, Jr.

The Manasquan High School Yearbook for the Graduating Class of 1954, Treasure Chest, depicts Jack Nichsolson in a flat-top crew cut and ineffable smile, standing beside Class President and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Jack Brothers.

Nicholson was of course elected The Class Clown -- depicted holding a two-fingered rabbit's ears over the girl next to him -- and, in histrionic pose, on his knee with plaintive eyes, holding the outstretched hand of the demure Sandra Hawes -- Jack Nicholson, Best Actor, and Sandra Hawes, Best Actress respectively.

In a surprise poll conducted by The Blue and the Gray, the class newspaper, he is chosen to be both Class Optimist and Class Pessimist, a distinction cleary capturing the quintessential comic paradox of the young man.

"My contemporaries always had the ability to enjoy me."

"Raised a little hell, Jack," comments Alan Keith. "Can't think of anybody that didn't like Jack."

"Never saw him utter an angry word," says Billy Snead. "Don't even recall him getting into a fist fight."

"He was the kind of guy who would lift everybody else's spirits," remembers George Anderson.

Graduation night, a night of passage, the boys staying up all night celebrating freedom and youth and life, Nick and George winding up at a little cabin in Brielle, The Harbor Inn, Open 'til 5:00 a.m., downing night caps, giant paper containers of beer, and retreating giddy and exultant and drunk to a little shack where they philosophized until sun-up, and finally falling sound asleep.

Even now, the moment stands still in George Anderson's mind, the two boys quietly shooting baskets in the twilight, Nick in a pensive frame of mind.

"I saw my old man the other night. Poor guy. Can't help himself," he uttered softly.

George, in his recognition of pain, not knowing what to say, saying nothing at all.

It marked the only time in all the years that Nick had ever spoken of his father.