by Mark Leyner
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
Some scholars have recently compared
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack to Abacus 2007-AC1,
The mortgage investment vehicle which
Goldman Sachs VP Fabrice Tourre created.
REAL WIFE
And which he described,
In an e-mail to his girlfriend,
As a “Frankenstein” creation,
“A product of pure intellectual masturbation,
The type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,”
Which has no purpose,
Which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’”
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
“Going into the forest to gather wild garlic”
Is a euphemism for those times
When Ike stares off into space,
Listening to the voice of a particular
God who’s speaking to him.
REAL WIFE
Or when he thinks
The writhing Goddesses are
Ogling him and masturbating,
Or when he thinks he hears
The distant whine of a
Drone aircraft circling overhead.
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
Ike had a dream about La Felina.
There was something dangling from her snatch.
At first Ike thought it was a tampon string,
But as he came closer
He could see that it was a fortune.
REAL WIFE
He pulled it out and read it.
It said, “To propitiate XOXO,
So he allows your story to be told
In a quasi-coherent way,
You must kill your father, etc.
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
The REAL HUSBAND and REAL WIFE stop tapping their wedding rings on their cans of Sunkist orange soda, and the tempo slows.
The sky darkens.
REAL WIFE I just want to tell you something. We both knew exactly what we were getting into when we signed on to this whole Sugar Frosted Nutsack thing…
REAL HUSBAND I realize that.
REAL WIFE I’m fated to leave you for a blind, drug-addled bard, and then you have to enucleate your own eyeballs. It’s all foretold in the epic. You have to really do it—I mean, the eye thing.
REAL HUSBAND I know.
REAL WIFE No regrets?
REAL HUSBAND In the Thirteenth Season, when Ike tells The Waitress at the Miss America diner about his intention (and destiny) to commit suicide-by-cop and thus enable his family to collect on his life insurance policy, The Waitress says that “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.” And I believe that.
(The following is sung to the melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.)
REAL WIFE
At the risk of hoisting myself
On my own petard,
I’m leaving you
For a blind, drug-addled bard.
REAL HUSBAND
What about Cupid’s Stigmata?
REAL WIFE
My heart’s started an Intifada!
As she departs, he calls out to her—
REAL HUSBAND
Instead of humiliating myself
By begging you to come back,
I’ll devote the rest of my life
To chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack!
He takes a melon baller from the picnic basket…
REAL HUSBAND
’Scuse me while I kiss the sky!
…and blinds himself.
We hear the opening bars of the Mister Softee jingle softly repeating over and over again, as if from a vast distance…over and over and over again…for hours, for days…months…years…as if for an eternity…
Until—
REAL HUSBAND We’ve got a caller.
Apparently the Mister Softee jingle is the ringtone for the Husband’s cellphone, which he retrieves from his jacket pocket.
REAL HUSBAND Hello, you’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
CALLER Hello?
REAL HUSBAND You’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
CALLER I have a question for Ike.
REAL HUSBAND Ike’s not here. He’s at the Miss America Diner. I can give you his cellphone number or the number for the diner.
CALLER Maybe you could help me.
REAL HUSBAND I’ll try.
CALLER OK. I have a couple of questions, but let me start with this one: why is Ike’s daughter’s name never revealed?
REAL HUSBAND Out of respect for her privacy.
CALLER OK. I know this question will probably make me seem hopelessly provincial, but…why is there so much sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack? You can’t listen to even thirty seconds of a public recitation without hearing these drug-addled, vagrant bards chanting about cocks and pussies and clits and tits and balls and asses and shiksa asses and spectacular big-ass asses and hot Jew jizz and fucking and masturbating.…Why?
REAL HUSBAND Because it’s sex-drenched and death-drenched.
CALLER But why is it sex-drenched and death-drenched?
REAL HUSBAND Because Ike is obsessed with sex and death. The seventeenth-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, describing the proper attitude of a warrior, wrote, “Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.” The Marquis de Sade wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Combine the two and you have Ike Karton. (FYI, Vincent van Gogh’s last words before he shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise were “Fuck Kirk Douglas.”)
CALLER There are just these punishingly repetitive references to anal sex toys and bedraggled, sweaty, chubby, mature, subproletarian women and hairy, Asian, midget, hypoglycemic, type-O-negative plumpers who squirt, etc.
REAL HUSBAND There is also—and I don’
t know if you’re aware of this—a punishingly repetitive use of the phrase “punishingly repetitive.” In fact, the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times (including this sentence) in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
CALLER Is there any mystical significance to the number 251?
REAL HUSBAND Not to my knowledge. But did you know that it’s impossible for a horse to vomit and that Turkish Taffy was Harry Houdini’s favorite candy?
CALLER It says, “Ike suffers 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.” What college was he attending at the time?
REAL HUSBAND Ike was going to F.I.T., but after one semester he dropped out and worked part-time in the meat department at a Gristedes on the Upper West Side.
CALLER You don’t happen to have the exact address, do you?
REAL HUSBAND Why?
CALLER Because I’m planning a weekend where I go and visit all the key sites in Ike’s life, like the barbershop where he went as a kid and experienced “the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid, Jerry Vale (‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties,” and the park bench in Lincoln Park where he read “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” to Ruthie when they were dating, and the two-story brick “hermitage” where he and Ruthie and their daughter live, etc. So I’d definitely want to go to the Gristedes where he had his first butcher job.
REAL HUSBAND All right, let me put you on hold for a moment and I’ll check on that for you.
The REAL HUSBAND’s MOH (Music on Hold) is Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Tristan und Isolde. Several moments pass, and then—
REAL HUSBAND You still there?
CALLER Yes, I’m here.
REAL HUSBAND Sorry that took so long. I’m newly sightless. The address of the Gristedes is 251 West 86th Street at Broadway.
CALLER 251? You’re kidding.
REAL HUSBAND No, why?
CALLER That is so fucking weird.
REAL HUSBAND Why?
CALLER Because 251 is the number of times the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. And it’s the address of the first place where Ike had a butcher job. You don’t think there’s any mystical significance in that?
REAL HUSBAND Honestly, I think it’s a complete coincidence.
CALLER You seriously think the fact that the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and the fact that the address of the Gristedes where Ike Karton had his first butcher job is 251 West 86th Street is a complete coincidence?
REAL HUSBAND I really do.
CALLER You’re being serious?
REAL HUSBAND Yeah.
There’s a long pause…then—
CALLER It says in the Fourteenth Season, “Even within his small, haimish Jersey City neighborhood of attached two-story brick homes, Ike conducts himself with the guarded reserve and fateful solemnity of an exile. Doomed hero, dear to the Gods, unwavering, set apart by his fealty and his inexorable fate, but never evincing the hauteur of a freak, he calls his bowel movements his ‘little brother.’” I don’t completely understand what that means.
REAL HUSBAND You know how some women call their period their “friend”? It’s sort of like that. Ike is very courtly. He’d never say, “I have to go take a crap” or “a dump” or anything like that. He’d say, “My little brother is visiting.” Or “Excuse me, I think my little brother is here.” Or “Could you pull into that rest stop over there, I didn’t expect my little brother to get here so suddenly. He must have taken an earlier flight.” Or “He must have decided to take the Acela, instead of the regular Amtrak.”
CALLER Oh…I get it.
REAL HUSBAND And the closer Ike gets to the violent death which is his inexorable fate, the more intensely kindred he feels with things that are considered by most people to be base or odious, which is one of the things that makes him such a hero, I think. So there’s also a symbolic component to his calling a bowel movement his brother. It’s the same sort of thing as in the Fifteenth Season, in that scene where he and Vance are going to meet the God who’s supposedly selling hallucinogenic Gravy to Vance, and some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and Ike stops, and he kneels down, and he says to the gob of phlegm, “Fräulein, my band, The Kartons, is giving a Final Concert later this week, and I’d be very much honored if you would attend.” This is Ike, with his sort of plainspoken eloquence, expressing the paradoxical nature of his character—destined for the glory of a martyr’s immortality but, at the same time, fervently wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low.
CALLER You’re the one who’s actually reciting what I’m saying, right?
REAL HUSBAND Yes. You’re like a Japanese bunraku puppet and I’m like the chanter (the tayu) who performs all the characters’ voices.
CALLER So does it have to say “CALLER” like that? I don’t feel like being some sort of boldface signifier. Can’t I just be part of your recitation?
“Sure.”
“That’s better. Thank you. It was like being on speakerphone before. I want to ask you a question about these itinerant children who are toting the surplus NBA ball bags around and gathering severed bard-heads and selling them to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Doesn’t this drive home the whole issue of how detrimental cheap foreign labor is to American workers? If you have an unlimited supply of these vagrant kids outside the country who are willing to sell severed bard-heads for several rupees a head, it doesn’t matter to an American severed-bard-head scavenger how quickly our economy recovers or how fast it grows—the market value of a severed bard-head is going to be several rupees.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“A tariff. A tariff on foreign-scavenged severed bard-heads.”
“I don’t believe in tariffs or quotas or any form of protectionism. I think that protectionism leads to reduced consumer choice, higher prices, lower-quality goods, and, in the long run, economic stagnation and coercive monopolies.”
There’s a long pause…then—
“What does ‘military-grade ass-cheese’ mean?”
“I’ve always thought that military-grade ass-cheese is just basically the shit that gums up the works in your life. Do you know what I mean? This is just my interpretation, but I think it’s basically the shit that just fucks everything up.”
“OK. Is it true that Ike buys a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner?”
“No, that’s not true. This whole business of Ike buying a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner is what experts call a ‘noncanonical blooper.’”
“But is it in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack or not?”
“It is now. Thanks to you. Thanks to you bringing it up.”
“OK. I guess this is my last question: There’s a vignette involving a pet groomer named Rebecca Nesbit and a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon by the name of Dr. Giancarlo Capella. And I’m not sure why it’s even included in the epic—if, in fact, it is—because it doesn’t appear to involve Ike or any of the Gods. And I was just wondering if it’s also considered a noncanonical blooper. And I’m also curious as to whether you think that noncanonical bloopers are the work of XOXO.”
“First of all, yes, this is an out-and-out noncanonical blooper that was not part of the original epic, although, again—as of right now—it’s considered totally authentic. Rebecca Nesbit was a pet groomer (actually, I think she advertised herself a ‘pet stylist’) who, following her divorce in Jersey City, New Jersey, moved out to Southern California with her kids and had a laser vaginal rejuvenation performed by Dr. Giancarlo Capella in Bev
erly Hills. As a result of the procedure, Nesbit’s vaginal muscle strength was increased so excessively that it resulted in traumatic penile injuries to two of her boyfriends—Donald De Vries, who, during intercourse with Nesbit, suffered a tear of the tunica albuginea (an injury sometimes referred to as a penile ‘fracture’), and Sonny Ghazarian, who, under similar circumstances, suffered a crushed penile shaft with extraalbugineal and bilateral cavernosal hematomas. De Vries and Ghazarian filed a joint medical-malpractice lawsuit against Capella (who was uniformly portrayed in the press as a combination Richard Simmons / Josef Mengele, or luridly compared to the Mantle brothers, the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers, or to Dr. Heiter, the demented surgeon in Tom Six’s The Human Centipede). In a dramatic courtroom demonstration before a rapt gallery, a pneumatic squeeze-bulb dynamometer was used to show that Nesbit now had a vaginal grip-strength of well over 4,500 pounds per square inch (PSI). (Keep in mind that a commercial trash compactor typically has a maximum operating pressure of only about 3,000 PSI.)”
“This is exactly why we need comprehensive tort reform in this country. There’s an epidemic of these frivolous lawsuits and it’s bankrupting our health care system. I have a very good friend who’s a pet stylist in Jersey City, and he’s been doing 2,500-PSI vaginal rejuvenations on some of his dogs, but he told me that because of all the publicity generated by the case in Beverly Hills, he’s had to stop. He can’t afford the insurance anymore or risk the litigation.”
“There are a number of experts who actually think that Nesbit and Capella were impersonated by Fast-Cooking Ali and La Felina.”