The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

by Mark Leyner

  Monday: 10 PM Eastern

  “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)”

  Ike discovers that his daughter’s boyfriend, the glassy-eyed, unscrupulous Vance, has been stealing his underpants—two pairs of gray Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs and one pair of smoky blue Calvin Kleins. Later, as Ike and his daughter sit together on the stoop in the late afternoon, he gives her a pep talk about an upcoming math midterm, and then casually broaches the subject of the stolen underpants. “What does Vance want to do, anyway—I mean, as a career?” he asks. “He’s really interested in doing something in music,” his daughter says. “What aspect of music is he interested in pursuing?” inquires Ike. “I think just listening to it,” she replies. Meanwhile, Vance, who was raised by three hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen in a squalid shack under the Pulaski Skyway, is seen tooling around town on a battered red BMX bike, making various stops, selling drugs. (Some experts interpret the threesome of alcoholic lesbian fisherwomen as a mortal analogue to the motif of the “triadic goddess,” i.e., a variant of the three tiny teenage girls in the terrarium who mouth a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and T-shirts that read ‘I Don’t Do White Guys’) and also of the three Gods known variously as The Pince-Nez 44s and Los Vatos Locos (“The Crazy Guys”)). After dinner, Ike resumes work on the fifteen-foot lewd statue of La Felina (“naked, dildo-​impaled”) that he’s begun constructing on the front lawn, adjacent to a jerry-rigged “stage.” Later, just as The Kartons begin rehearsing the narcocorrido that Ike wrote at the Miss America Diner (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”)—with Ike on vocals and Akai MPC drum machine, Ruthie on guitar and vocals, and his daughter on bass—a neighbor calls the police to complain about the noise. Three squad cars pull up in front of Ike’s hermitage, and, after verbal sparring with the cops escalates into a physical confrontation, Ike is pepper-sprayed and Tasered. The next day, when he and Vance drink Sunkist orange soda and get high on a smokable form of Gravy as they sit on the curb in front of a convenience store, Ike confronts him about the stolen underpants. But Vance totally disarms Ike with the remark “Did you know that hiccoughs are a form of myoclonic seizure?” (One may recognize here an epic application of a folkloric motif found frequently in the tales of every continent: a hero confronts his son-in-law or his daughter’s suitor about stolen underpants, only to be disarmed with a fascinating factoid.) Ike confides in Vance that he knows his violent death is imminent.

  “Damn!” Vance says, with emphatic sympathy, shaking his downcast head as he absently spins a wheel of his battered red BMX bike, which lies on its side against the curb, and he lets his empty soda can rattle against the spokes. “How do you know for sure you’re gonna die so soon?” he asks.

  “La Felina came to me in a dream,” Ike says, “and she pretty much promised me.”

  And probably because he’s getting pretty high, Ike tells Vance about the dream, about how there was something dangling from La Felina’s snatch, and how, at first, he thought it was a tampon string, but, as he came closer, he could see that it was a fortune, and he pulled it out and read it, and it said: “You’re going to be assassinated by Mossad in a week or so.” Ike tells Vance that when La Felina spread her legs, it perfumed the room, that it was like the warm smells from a halal truck, and that it made him so hungry that he woke up from the dream with a ravenous appetite and went straight to the Miss America Diner and ate an enormous tongue sandwich. Vance says that if he knew that he was going to die in a week, he’d do every fucked-up thing he could think of. Ike gently admonishes Vance. “That’s the wrong approach,” he says. “Here’s what you’d do: You’d shave every day. You’d keep your shoelaces nice and snug. You’d work on your posture. You see what I’m saying?” Although Ike suspects that beneath Vance’s glazed stupor lurks a reptilian cunning, he senses that the semiliterate underpants-jacker is having trouble with the concept of Bushido asceticism, and proceeds to tell him a story illustrating exemplary conduct in the face of imminent hyperviolent death. How, early one morning in fifteenth-century Edo, a loyal retainer inadvertently offended a thin-skinned and legendarily fastidious nobleman. Stricken with remorse and shame at his conduct, the retainer immediately offered to commit seppuku at dawn the following day. The nobleman, now ashamed of his petulance, attempted to dissuade the retainer from taking such drastic action, but the retainer was adamant that, having offended his master, he must pay the ultimate price. The nobleman, sensing the unimpeachable rectitude and indomitable valor of this man, had no choice but to accept his decision to commit ritual suicide, but he invited the man to be his honored guest at his castle and, for the twenty-four hours before his death, partake of anything he desired—food, drink, concubines, etc. The retainer, bowing deeply, accepted his master’s invitation. Soon after he arrived at the opulent abode of the nobleman, as he wandered the labyrinthine hallways of the castle by himself, the retainer’s nose began to itch. A man of irreproachable manners and discretion, he exerted all his willpower in an effort not to scratch his nose and appear uncouth. But the more he tried to ignore the itch, the more maddening it became. Finally, he furtively reached up to his nose (furtively, even though he was completely alone—such was his rectitude) and felt an overgrown hair curling just a bit out of one nostril. He impulsively yanked it out, bringing tears to his eyes. Now he had the tiny hair between his thumb and forefinger. But so scrupulous was this man that he wouldn’t even consider the possibility of simply dropping the hair and letting it float harmlessly and unnoticeably to the floor. Knowing that his nose hair had befouled the gleaming tile of his master’s palace would have filled him with deep, intolerable shame. So he tried to find a small garbage bin or a pail of some sort or even an ashtray or a chamber pot where he could discreetly discard the nose hair. But the palace of the fastidious nobleman was so exceptionally pristine that there was no such vessel to be found anywhere—all the garbage bins and chamber pots had been tastefully ensconced out of sight. Still, the retainer absolutely refused to litter the floor with this single nose hair. And he spent the next twenty-four hours in their entirety—the very last twenty-four hours of his life—stubbornly, but fruitlessly, wandering the halls of the palace in search of something, anything, into which he could deposit the hair. He ate not a morsel, drank not a drop, and spent not even a single moment with any of the voluptuous concubines who awaited him. And, at dawn, he committed seppuku, solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand.

  “Damn,” Vance says, spinning the wheel of his BMX bike, the spokes rhythmically thrumming the empty Sunkist can.

  Later, Ike tells Vance about his special diet for the week preceding his violent death: two meals a day, each meal consisting of 16 oz of cole slaw served in a “sacred” blue Dansk plastic salad bowl and two rounded scoops (44 g each) of BSN Syntha-6 banana-flavored protein powder mixed into 12 oz of Sunkist orange soda. “The cole slaw is for roughage,” he explains to Vance. “I want to have a clean colon when I die,” he tells him, “because when the Mossad kills you, Israeli law requires them to do a colonoscopy on your corpse as part of the autopsy. It’s this Yid fixation with the gastrointestinal tract.” Ike (SO high) totally cracks up at the sheer perversity of his rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism. And then he tells Vance about how he had an appointment with his urologist the other day, and the Discovery Channel was on the TV in the waiting room, and there was a show about the origin of cole slaw, about how it was originally called “Cossack Saddle Cabbage,” and about how a Cossack horseman would take a razor-sharp hatchet and shred a couple of raw cabbages and pack it into a rawhide sack and actually use that as a saddle, and how, over long distances, the horse sweat would actually pickle the cabbage, producing a version of what we today call “cole slaw,” and how the name “Cole Slaw” is actually the result of a careless transliteration of the phrase “Cossack Saddle Cabbage
” by a harried immigration official at Ellis Island. (Note, here, a foreshadowing of Ike’s discussion about the significance of naming.) Vance (high school dropout) is too gullible and too fucked up to know whether Ike is putting him on or not. Also, some people (e.g., experts) wonder whether Ike, in reality, wasn’t in the living room of his two-story hermitage, watching the Discovery Channel on his own TV, in his wifebeater and night-vision goggles, with his bottle of Scotch, and simply imagined that he was in the waiting room of a urologist. One never knows with Ike, who must perpetually contend with the mischievous and mind-manipulating XOXO, who, in turn, persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha. Meanwhile, in the course of discussing the change in his diet and needing to be strong for “The Last Concert” and his martyrdom, Ike apologizes to Vance for not inviting him to be in the band (The Kartons).…“You’re not a Karton, though,” he says. And Vance goes, “I know, names have talismanic power; when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name; the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name; a person is just a hash of glands and myelin sheathing and electrochemical impulses, but there’s no discernable context, no recognizable pattern, it’s all incoherent, until it’s organized and orchestrated into a story, into a fate, by that name.” (Experts today are in almost unanimous agreement that this scene and the scene that follows it are in the WRONG ORDER! Vance is sarcastically parroting, almost verbatim, Ike’s ideas about naming that Ike hasn’t even expressed yet, and won’t until the next scene. So, unless the Gravy has endowed Vance with uncanny powers of precognition, the two scenes should obviously be reversed. But this remains the canonical sequence, because bards—surprisingly hidebound for drug-addled vagrants—insist on continuing to recite the epic as it’s traditionally been recited for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.) At any rate, there’s something so mocking and provocative about Vance’s tone (probably because he’s SO high on Gravy) that it makes Ike momentarily furious. His great impacted anger flares, his festering Maoist / Mansonesque rage. (In his coiled fury, Ike is like Tetsuo, the Iron Man. He dreams of Red Guard maenads, of flesh-eating Maoist zombies tearing celebrities apart.) And he almost impulsively smashes Vance’s face in with his bat. And he would have done it so quickly and so brutally that Vance would never have had a chance to even pull his Glock 17 from the waistband of his jeans. But La Felina (who, of course, with a Goddess’s telescopic vision, is ogling Ike from the penthouse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) intervenes by swooping down into Jersey City and impersonating a young nanny from Côte d’Ivoire (with a spectacular big-ass ass and big-ass titties), who sashays past pushing a white baby in a stroller, distracting Ike (he imagines that look on the nanny’s face, that moment of surrender to her own indigenous pleasure, etc., etc.), and by the time she passes out of sight, Ike’s temper has cooled, and, high as he is, he smiles and shakes his head abashedly at his own propensity for explosive violence. His lust and his rage are strong. He never dithers. Thrown into this world, he maneuvers himself with the unfaltering aplomb of a somnambulist, but a somnambulist in blazing daylight, in the “blaze of the gaze.” (Whether this scene is intended to augur the hyperviolent demise of Ike Karton or this is merely identifiable with the benefit of hindsight remains a question contested by experts, but it is surely tempting to see in the overt symbolism of Ike’s bat and Vance’s Glock a prefiguration of the epic’s death-drenched climax.) As if to atone for his transient wrath, Ike offers Vance another fascinating factoid: that, in the week before he himself was guillotined, Maximilien Robespierre (another one of La Felina’s “boy-toys”) subsisted on black coffee and marzipan.

  “I may not understand life,” Ike says, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, “but I know how to die magnificently.”

  “For real,” Vance avers, spinning the wheel.

  “I love my fate,” Ike says, channeling Friedrich Nietzsche.

  “If you love your fate so much, why don’t you marry it?” Vance (who’s so high) asks.

  “I’m fervently wedded to my fate,” answers Ike.

  And here, of course, as throughout, you feel Ike’s fealty to his fate in his smile, not in his solemnity.

  “How are things going with you and my daughter?” Ike asks, not using his daughter’s name out of respect for her privacy.

  Vance describes being raised by hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen as “The Vagina Monologues if it were hosted by Jerry Springer.…There was a lot of disclosure, a lot of sharing, followed by a lot of violence…so I’m used to all that obstreperous emoting.…But with your daughter, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her.” (That line, “it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her,” will become critically important relative to the daughter’s impending pregnancy on Thursday night’s episode.) Then, Vance asks Ike how he got his wife, Ruthie, to fall in love with him, and Ike tells him that the first time he saw Ruthie she was thrashing on a patch of grass at Lincoln Park in Jersey City, wearing a see-through prairie dress and no underwear, wildly plucking at a zither. “I was immediately struck by her anarcho-primitivist hypersexuality. Although, she was more petite and hygienic than the women I usually go for, and she seemed educated to me—which I usually don’t like. I usually go for women who can barely follow an episode of Dora the Explorer without becoming hopelessly befuddled and breaking into tears. I just find them, on the whole, more wonder struck (thaumazein).” So he read every book and saw every movie and every play that features a character named Ruthie or Ruth—every single boldface Ruth or Ruthie—including Dr. Ruth Westheimer in Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50: Revving up the Romance, Passion & Excitement!; Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court; Ruth (“a woman in her early thirties”) in Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming; the patio-sealant huffing Ruth Stoops in Citizen Ruth (the Alexander Payne movie starring Laura Dern); and, of course, Ruth in The Book of Ruth, in which Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi (which means “the delightful one”), changes her name to Mara (which means “the bitter one”): “And she said unto them, ‘Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.’”

  “A person’s name is a fate-conjuring incantation,” Ike tells Vance, and then proceeds to tell him a story illustrating the mystical significance of names: “A guy walks into an agent’s office and says, ‘I’d appreciate it very much if you’d consider representing me. I hear you’re one of the best agents in the business and that you could really give my career a terrific boost.’ The agent says, ‘OK, what do you do?’ And the guy says, ‘I do a bit of everything. I sing, I dance, I do impersonations, I act—straight drama, musical theater, comedy, slapstick—the whole megillah.’ And the agent says, ‘That sounds great. What’s your name?’ And the guy says, ‘My name is Penis van Lesbian.’ And the agent’s taken aback for a moment, and then he says, ‘With all respect, son, you’re going to have to change that name.’ And the guy says, ‘Why?’ And the agent says, ‘That name, Penis van Lesbian, just isn’t going to work in show business. So if I’m going to represent you, you’re simply going to have to change it.’ And the guy sighs and says, ‘That’s a shame, because van Lesbian has been the family name for generations upon generations, and it would be terribly disrespectful of me to change it. And my parents gave a lot of thought to naming me Penis, and I wouldn’t want to offend them in any way either. So I’m afraid changing my name is out of the question.’ And the agent says, ‘Well, I completely understand that, and I wish you all the luck in the world.’ And the guy leaves. So, about five years later, the agent’s sitting in his office and there’s a knock on the door. And in walks this same guy, looking a little bit older and considerably more prosperous. And he takes out a check for fifty thousand dollars made out to the agent, and he puts it on his desk. The agent’s totally nonplussed. ‘What’s this for?’ he asks. And the guy says, ‘Well, about five yea
rs ago I came in here and you told me that to make it in showbiz, I needed to change my name, and I said no. And after knocking my head against the wall and getting absolutely nowhere, I finally changed my name, and I’ve been a fabulous hit. You were completely right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘Dick van Dyke,’ the guy says.” As he recounts the parable, Ike’s whispery rasp is almost inaudible against the percussive rattle of the soda can thrummed by the slowly spinning spokes of Vance’s battered red BMX bike and the buzz of several enormous iridescent-winged horseflies who sip at dazzling rivulets of bright orange soda that trickle from the mouths of the discarded cans. Vance, because he’s so high on Gravy, is momentarily fixated on the flies—a surreal tableau of mutant nomadic nymphs feeding on chromium sludge in some postapocalyptic wasteland…he’s thinking. And the horsefly/nymphs seem to be serenading each other in some sort of high-pitched gibberish.…Tiny, voluptuous nymphs plucked out of a painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse and cast in some Disney/Pixar 3-D animation…he’s thinking. The very words he’s thinking—the very language he’s thinking in—scrolling across the bottom of his visual frame…like karaoke, he’s thinking…he’s SO high…

  For Ike, the Gravy seems to have deepened his understanding of his relation to XOXO. Ike is “reading” (i.e., thinking) what XOXO is writing, what he’s inscribing in Ike’s mind with his sharp periodontal curette. Ike’s denken is XOXO’s dichten. XOXO has also has made a series of “drill-drawings,” for which he inserts a periodontal curette into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns in Ike’s mind, thus divorcing the hand of the artist from the work of art. This is what produces the effect that links Ike’s simultaneous enactment of hero and bard to “the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball-dribbling nine-year-old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play.” (A periodontal curette inserted into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns would also explain the epic’s “tail-chasing, vortical form.”)