by Mark Leyner
Ike’s “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” List
Soon after Ike and Ruthie first met (at the A&P where, at that time, Ike was employed as a butcher in the meat department), they had a conversation one spring day in the park about each other’s past relationships and about love and about what one could realistically hope for in a marriage, etc. Ruthie asked Ike if he thought he understood women well. Ike got very quiet and thought about this for a while, as he tossed handful after handful of croutons to the swans and mice that had gathered at their feet. Finally, he told Ruthie that he was going to make a list. “Not a list of which celebrities you think should be guillotined,” she said, coyly averting her eyes and smiling flirtatiously at him. “No,” he said, “a list of ten things that I know for sure about women.” About a week later—to show Ruthie a more delicately registered sensibility than he, a gym-rat and butcher, suspected Ruthie gave him credit for—Ike presented the list (entitled “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” but including an 11th) to Ruthie as they sat on the very same bench in Lincoln Park:
Even little girls, in all their blithe, unharrowed innocence, have a presentiment of sorrow, hardship, and adversity…of loss. Women, throughout their lives, have an intrinsic and profound understanding of Keats’s sentiments about “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.”
This sage knowledge of, and ability to abide, the inherently fugitive nature of happiness somehow accounts for the extraordinary beauty of women as they age.
Women have an astonishing capacity to maintain their equilibrium in the face of life’s mutability, its unceasing and unforeseeable vicissitudes. And this agility is always in stark and frequently comical contradistinction to men’s naively bullish and brittle delusions that things can forever remain exactly the same.
Women are forgiving, but implacably cognizant.
Women are almost never gullible, but sometimes relax their vigilance out of loneliness. (And I believe most women abhor loneliness.)
In their most casual, off-hand, sisterly moments, women are capable of discussing sex in such uninhibited detail that it would cause a horde of carousing Cossacks to cringe.
Women are, for all intents and purposes, indomitable. It really requires an almost unimaginable confluence of crushing, cataclysmic forces to vanquish a woman.
Women’s instincts for self-preservation and survival can seem to men to be inscrutably unsentimental and sometimes cruel.
Women have a very specific kind of courage that enables them to fling themselves into the open sea, into some uncharted terra incognita—whether it’s a new life for themselves, another person’s life, or even what might appear to be a kind of madness.
Women never—no matter how old they are—completely relinquish their aristocratic assumption of seductiveness.
And here is one last thing I know—and I know this with a certitude that exceeds anything I’ve said before: that men’s final thoughts in their waking days and in their lives are of women…ardent, wistful thoughts of wives and lovers and daughters and mothers.
Ruthie found this so beautiful and so moving that she wept as she read it. In the coming weeks, though, she’d discover that Ike had plagiarized it, from beginning to end, word for word, from something that had appeared in the November 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. But by then she’d already fallen deeply in love with him, and not at all in spite of what he’d done, but, in large part, because of it—here was a man willing to steal for her, a man with a big enough nutsack that he was willing to brazenly steal another man’s words, another man’s ideas (his most precious intellectual property)…for her.
Ninety-seven percent of people think that it was SUPER-SEXY of Ike to totally plagiarize that from O, The Oprah Magazine!!
The Club Kids Vs. The Hasids
Ike has suffered from irregular clonic jerks of the head and neck ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old. High on ketamine, wearing silver lederhosen and a hat made out of an Oreo box at the time, he initially claimed he’d been hit by a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type war between club kids and Hasids. Many experts, including Zsófia Csontváry-Horvath of the Institute of Linguistics and Classical Philology in Budapest (who’s slick with sweat and has a spectacular big-ass ass), maintain that those passages in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack about Ike making confusing and patently erroneous claims about a Hasidic ambulance are “noncanonical interpolations” and should be deemed “spurious” and deleted. Csontváry-Horvath contends that these passages were deliberately inserted by experts who, themselves, were trying to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type war between club kids and Hasids. Of course, not only is Ike’s erroneous contention that he was hit by a Hasidic ambulance considered today a totally canonical and authentic part of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but Zsófia Csontváry-Horvath’s assertion that it’s a noncanonical interpolation is considered a canonical and integral part of the saga which audiences expect the chachka-jangling, sightless bards to feature prominently in their recitations. It’s also entirely possible that all this could just be another example of XOXO vandalizing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and trying to confuse people and just fuck everything up. But let’s be absolutely clear: Ike, when he was eighteen years old, on Spring Break, and high on Special K, staggered into the street and was struck by a Mister Softee truck. And ever since the accident, the Mister Softee song loops endlessly in his head. This is not an auditory hallucination. The song is actually in there—i.e., if you put a stethoscope to Ike’s forehead, you can hear the Mister Softee song.
But Ike’s rage and his lust are strong. He’s nursed by the Gods. His honor comes from El Brazo and La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali and XOXO. He’s dear to them, these Gods who rule the world.
Throughout The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Ike is portrayed as the most soft-spoken, self-deprecating man you could possibly imagine—someone, in fact, almost ostentatious in his soft-spoken self-deprecation—and even on those rare occasions when he might come across as vain or a little smug—he is, after all, a super-sexy neo-pagan hero and a transformative human being—he’ll reveal something so disarmingly personal about himself (like his tinea versicolor or his genital psoriasis or his dermatitis herpetiformis, which sometimes requires him to soak for long hours in the bathtub with a vinegar-drenched bandana wrapped around his head) that any hint of hubris is immediately dispelled.
Ike is preoccupied with hidden motives, and nothing makes him happier than when, presented with something fairly straightforward—a bus driver’s request for exact change, for instance—he can burrow into deeper and deeper netherworlds of subtext and sub-subtext, disclosing for himself ever-murkier layers of bewildering intrigue and subterfuge, because he believes that it’s only when confronted with something that completely befuddles us that we experience the sense of “speechless wonder” (thaumazein) that opens us up to a fleeting intimation of the sacred. To Ike, the Gods’ designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles. (Hey, maybe this is why he concocted that whole story about being hit by a Hasidic ambulance years ago when he’d so irrefutably been hit by a Mister Softee truck—to obfuscate the obvious and thus anoint it with a residue of divinity!) So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the guy would eschew books in his native English and opt instead to pore over texts in languages he can’t remotely understand (particularly German). Nor should it come as any great shock that, if he’s not at the gym or making a lewd breadcrumb mandala or feeding his wife a Fig Newton, you’ll probably find Ike (“seething and petulant butcher, coiled with energy”) on his stoop or in the park or at the Miss America Diner “reading” his German books, even though he can’t understand a single word of German (in the strict sense of the word “understand”), because they are, for him, in his own mind, like magical incantations, and he’s able to dist
ill the most essential, the most profound, esoteric, and mystical significance, not from their semantic content, but purely from the sounds of the words, from their music. And so he’ll sit there on the hot subway, hunched over his unintelligible text and swaying with concentration (and missing his stop), mouthing a passage—like the following one—out loud, over and over to himself, like some zealous foreign understudy learning his lines phonetically, or—better analogy—like some super-sexy (and totally shredded!) priest who’s been sent off to a hopelessly remote mission in the jungle, and, sitting on a sweltering train as it steams into the dark interior of the country, is zealously trying to learn the dying language of the head-hunting heathens he’s been sent to proselytize, even though he suspects, and perhaps half desires, that instead of gratefully receiving the sacrament, they might very well flog, flay, boil, and consume him:
Mein Kahn ist ohne Steuer, er fährt mit dem Wind, der in den untersten Regionen des Todes bläst.
Comments (Newest First)
SugarFrosted XOXO is introducing junk DNA into the genome of the story. Don’t panic. Just keep chanting Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike! And keep in mind that even this junk DNA (cunningly disguised as SMS abbreviations) that XOXO has inserted into these comments is now considered an integral part of the epic, and if the vagrant, drug-addled bards were to recite or perform Season Nine without this junk DNA, the audience would feel—and justifiably so—cheated, and probably demand a full refund.
Posted 11:26 AM
Beachgirl What is that? What does that mean?
Posted 11:20 AM
KidComa DYHAB DUM DUWBHTPHFIYAWYC GYPO IWFU DYSL GNOC SMB EWI ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TTG AGT TAT TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG CAC TTG AGT TGT TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC GTG AGT TAT TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TCG AGT TAT ATA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TTG AGT TAT AGA GTG TGA TTA TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG CCA TCG TGA TAT ATA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TTG AGT TAT AGA
Posted 11:17 AM
Beachgirl Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!
Posted 11:13 AM
KidComa FMUTA!!!!!
Posted 11:11 AM
Beachgirl XOXO!! That’s you, right?! You’re vandalizing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack again!!!
Posted 11:08 AM
KidComa ROTFLMAO!
Posted 11:06 AM
Beachgirl You’re a complete asshole!
Posted 11:01 AM
KidComa LMFAO!
Posted 10:55 AM
Beachgirl I hate people who just laugh at everything. Do you think spina bifida is funny or the Holocaust?
Posted 10:53 AM
KidComa Get your pants off!
Posted 10:50 AM
Beachgirl It is not stupid OR pretentious. You have a great deal of LEARNING to do. You’re just too shallow to delve deep into questioning yourself and your life. READ MORE!!!
Posted 10:45 AM
KidComa It’s stupid and pretentious.
Posted 10:42 AM
Beachgirl What’s funny about that? I think it’s so profound. And it’s so beautifully emblematic of Ike.
Posted 10:35 AM
KidComa LOL!
Posted 10:32 AM
Beachgirl It’s from Kafka’s “Der Jäger Gracchus” (The Hunter Gracchus), dickwad. It means: “My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.”
Posted 10:30 AM
KidComa What the fuck does that mean?
Posted 10:24 AM
Showing 17 of 9,709 comments
Instead of a Monocle and a Walking Stick
It’s usually at this point in almost every authenticated version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack—following “Comments (Newest First)”—that Ike strolls to the Miss America Diner (on West Side Avenue, at the corner of Culver), where he engages in an extended adagio with The Waitress, ordering a tongue sandwich, discussing the erotics of second-person POV during endodontic procedures, and writing the lyrics to the narcocorrido “That’s Me (Ike’s Song)” that The Kartons will sing at the “Last Concert.” (In traditional public recitations, the bards—vagrant, drug-addled, and almost always blind, but sometimes just severely dyslexic—are expected to chant all 9,709 of the “Comments,” and not just the seventeen included here, especially if the performance is taking place in a remote, rural area “where the pace of life is unhurried, where the air is fragrant with the aromas of shearing sheds and cattle yards, honeysuckle or corn dogs from some fair, and where the appetite for orally transmitted, maddeningly repetitive epic entertainment remains unsated.”)
The image of “Ike the Flâneur” strolling to the Miss America Diner has become one of the most familiar and iconic representations of the sinewy and reticent hero who, in addition to being convinced that Goddesses are almost continuously leering at him from the top floor of the Burj Khalifa and masturbating, believes that Western materialism—most perfectly embodied by privileged celebrities—is polluting the soul of every living creature in the world (in addition to the souls of human beings, Ike believes that Western materialism is also polluting the souls of animals, especially house sparrows, swans, and mice).
Instead of a monocle and a walking stick, this flâneur sports a tight guinea-T and a baseball bat. But don’t worry—he’s loaded with gem-like aperçus and aphorisms! For example:
—If you give people too many things to remember you by, they’ll forget them. Pick one.
9.
For anyone attending a performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack today, there’s likely to be little if any suspense about what actually happens. The story, with its escalating crises, divine interventions, and hyperviolent denouement, is so well known by now that an audience at a public recitation would not only be able to anticipate every single plot point, but would probably know many of the lines by heart and almost be able to lip-sync along with the bards. And they’d know the history of the making of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. They’d know how each “section” became known as a “Session” and then as a “Season.” They’d know how these Seasons were produced—over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of years—by nameless, typically blind men, high on ecstasy or ketamine, seated in a circle, and chanting for hours and hours on end as they sipped orange soda from a jerrycan; and how every new improvisational flourish, every exegetical commentary and meta-commentary, every cough, sniffle, and hiccough on the part of the bard is incorporated into the story, and is then required in each subsequent performance; and how numerous unrelated episodes have, over the centuries, fallen into the epic’s orbit and gradually become incorporated into the epic itself; and how vernacular variants are incessantly generated in its mutagenic algorithms; how it’s been “produced” through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy, more closely resembling the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional “writing.”
Adults and children alike would be familiar enough with the plot to already know (before the bards even opened their mouths to deliver the first words “There was never nothing ” ) that the saga of Ike begins with him making a lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs for the Goddess La Felina and then engaging in an extended adagio with the waitress at the Miss America Diner and writing his narcocorrido “That’s Me (Ike’s Song)”; they’d already know that Ike gets high with his daughter’s boyfriend, Vance, and makes a list for him called “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F)” and neglects to include the Goddess Shanice, which incurs her eternal wrath (FYI: La Felina was #1 on his list); and that Koji Mizokami, the God who fashioned the composer Béla Bartók out of his own testicular teratoma, helps Ike shoplift an Akai MPC drum machine from a Sam Ash on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey; and that Bosco Hifikepunye begins supplying Vance with the hallucinogenic drug Gravy to sell on the street; and that Ike goes to Port Newark for a tryst with La Felina, who’s transformed herself into a container ship; and that she promises Ike that before he martyrs himself, she’ll appear to him in human form and fuck him; and that she says she’ll get in touch with him on his cellphone and let him kno
w exactly when and where; and they know that he’s photographed there by the ATF; and they’d already know that while Ike is interviewing for a butcher’s job at Costco, a God impregnates his daughter; and that Ike accidentally kills his father as they wrestle for Ike’s cellphone because Ike’s father is trying to change Ike’s ringtone from “Me So Horny” to John Cage’s 4'33"—the composer’s notorious “silent composition” consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing (e.g., a pianist going to the keyboard and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds)—and Ike immediately realizes, to his horror, that having Cage’s 4'33" as a ringtone would essentially mean that he’d have no ringtone, and that he’d almost inevitably miss La Felina’s call, which, for Ike, is literally the booty-call of a lifetime; and they’d already know that on the morning of his father’s funeral, Ike wakes up with a incredibly gross (“grotesquely purulent”) case of conjunctivitis and, after delivering the eulogy (a phantasmagorically anti-Semitic diatribe, akin to Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre), he tries to pull the pillars of the synagogue down and crush the congregation; and that his daughter gives birth to a half-divine, half-mortal infant named “Colter Dale”; and that soon after The Kartons begin their “Last Concert” (which happens to be their first concert), the ATF/Mossad raid on the compound begins; and that after retreating into his two-story brick “hermitage” and reciting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in its entirety to the infant Colter Dale, Ike is killed. (And they know that, in a coda, Colter Dale—who mythologically functions as Ike’s successor—explains how Ike’s so-called “delusions” are actually irrefutable proof of the Gods’ existence.)