The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

by Mark Leyner

  Some of the nymph/horseflies are attracted to Ike’s armpits (which are said to be “redolent of sex and death”).

  Meanwhile, Ike expounds further upon the talismanic power of “the name,” about how—whether you’re mortal (sterbliche) or divine (göttliche); Ike Karton, Vance, or DJ Doorjamb; Mogul Magoo, Bosco Hifikepunye, or Mister Softee—when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name, and about how the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name, and about how 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. “Isn’t what you call something the crucial question?” he asks Vance rhetorically. Certainly, the experts have always maintained that what you call the epic is the crucial question. Is it The Sugar Frosted Nutsack? Is it The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head ? Is it T.S.F.N.? And, at one point, near the finale, swilling Scotch and swinging his bat at flitting nano-drones, Ike calls out “XOXO!” as if that were the title of the epic: Trotzdem schrie Ike noch aus aller kraft den namen, der name donnerte durch die Nacht. (“Nevertheless, with full force, Ike shouted out the name, the name thundered through the night.”)

  Vance—louche, semiliterate, BMX-borne Gravy dealer—was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on a daily dose of 72 mg of Concerta (Methylphenidate) when he was twelve years old, and was kicked out of high school for “habitual truancy.” Because he’s so high from the Gravy and/or because the God XOXO (“The Ventriloquist”) is using his sharp periodontal curette to indelibly engrave these ideas into his mind, Vance now finds himself discoursing upon the “problematics of the name,” identifying naming as both a taxonomy (a “hegemonic system of classification”) and a taxidermy (an “attempt to capture, chloroform, and neuter the referent”).

  He shrugs, befuddled by the stream of high-pitched gibberish that’s coming out his own mouth. Then he loses his train of thought, and they both totally crack up.

  At first, it seems as if Vance is finishing Ike’s sentences, as if he’s able to anticipate verbatim what Ike’s going to say…as if they’re performing some ritual they’ve reenacted countless times before…soon they’re actually riffing back and forth, a spirited give-and-take, the teasing interplay between tabla and sitar in some woozy raga they’ve played countless times before. (Note again here, as throughout, the tellers and the told folded in on themselves.)

  When Vance stops spinning the BMX wheel, Ike’s whispery rasp is suddenly foregrounded in utter silence, imparting great drama to whatever he’s saying. And so too will the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards when they re-create this scene, and cease rhythmically banging their chunky chachkas against their jerrycans of orange soda, and intone, in the sudden sepulchral hush, the words “At dawn, he commits seppuku, solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand,” or “‘You were absolutely 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.’”

  Because he’s so high on Gravy, Ike mentions to Vance that the Goddesses use him as pornography when they masturbate. Ike also makes the curious statement that fate enables a Goddess to know exactly when to watch him. “If I’m doing something, say, at 10:38 PM EST on a Monday night, it’s because I’m fated to be doing it then—it’s precisely scheduled that way so a Goddess can find me easily. These are what they call my listings. Long ago the Gods ordained these things.” If only Vance were his son, perhaps Ike could be even more forthcoming and discuss his impending tryst with La Felina. Nonetheless, he does disclose to Vance that the thought of being shamelessly ogled by writhing autoerotomaniacal Goddesses makes his nutsack tingle as if it were a “sachet of plutonium potpourri.” Vance is like, “Sometimes I get so horny that one of my nuts starts gnawing on the other one.”

  And it’s here that Ike makes the cryptic—and endlessly analyzed—assertion that his scrotum contains two eyeballs.

  The Gravy’s made them both telepathic, so Ike knows that Vance is wondering what it’s like to fuck a Goddess, and Ike tells him—without having to say a word—that the greatest thing about having sex with a Goddess (or a human woman, for that matter) is the expression on her face when she capitulates to her own pleasure. It’s a return, a homecoming, riffs Ike. It’s that sublime moment when she defects to the old country, to her ancestral homeland, to her own private paradise— “where everything was italicized, where things happened without any discernable context, where there were no recognizable patterns, where it was all incoherent; where isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next; where a terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing 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’) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear.” It’s that moment she succumbs to herself, surrenders to her depersonalized, oceanic subjectivity, uncorrupted by the narratives of fathers, husbands, village elders, etc. It’s a renunciation of modernity, thinks Ike—doomed, compulsively hermeneutic, unemployed, anarcho-primitivist, gym-rat. “What does it look like?” wonders Vance wordlessly. “Like the grimace of someone throwing herself on an electrified fence at a border crossing or the imperturbable serenity of someone about to do a reverse three-and-a-half somersault tuck into the abyss,” Ike replies in his thoughts. And Vance wonders whether Ike’s entire hermetically enclosed, paranoid, narcissistic Weltanschauung isn’t simply the fetishization of this single snapshot of female jouissance…but then he shrugs, unable to remember (never mind comprehend) a single word of what he just thought.

  Ordinarily Ike probably wouldn’t be so candid with Vance, except that he’s SO high on Gravy. It’s like military-grade Gravy, and Ike suspects that Vance is being supplied by a God. And sure enough, once Vance describes the “guy” he’s getting his shit from, Ike’s almost certain that it’s someone who’s being impersonated by the God Bosco Hifikepunye. (The incident in which Ike actually encounters this “guy” is the basis for the celebrated and extensively studied episode from the Fifteenth Season, during which Ike will kneel down and say to a 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,” accentuating the dignity he bestows on the lowest of the low. Ike’s suspicion that Vance’s supplier is Bosco Hifikepunye is confirmed when Ike discovers fresh loot drops (or “God guano”) in the vicinity.)

  They are SO high.

  This Gravy is super-potent.

  It’s military-grade Gravy.

  Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins…

  The mesmerizing metronomic tick

  of the spokes thrumming against

  the empty Sunkist can…

  Vance spins the BMX wheel not as if it were a Himalayan prayer wheel (as some shit-for-brains experts have stupidly suggested).…He spins it like Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. Gretchen is singing at her spinning wheel, in anguished erotic contemplation of Faust. “Mein armer Kopf / Ist mir verrückt, / Mein aremer Sinn / Ist mir zerstückt.” (“My poor head / Is crazy to me, / My poor mind / Is torn apart.”)

  Like Gretchen, Vance seems here like someone smitten, someone besotted. Yes, Vance is captivated by Ike’s diffident magnificence, his “death-drenched luminosity.” But there’s something vaguely homoerotic in the way he absently spins his wheel and stares vacantly at his girlfriend’s father, something of the grotto-groping Goddesses’ vacuous gazes, that so perfectly reflects the slack drift of the masturbating mind.

  “Oh my
god, we love the same song!” Vance says at one point, in such a lilting tone of blithe, unalloyed affection that it’s hard not to read at least some element of homoeroticism into the remark.

  Just as the piano in Schubert’s Lied stops as Gretchen becomes completely distracted by the thought of Faust’s kiss and forgets to keeps spinning—“Mein Busen drängt sich / Nach ihm hin. / Ach dürft ich fassen / Und halten ihn, / Und küssen ihn, / So wie ich wollt, / An seinen Küssen / Vergehen sollt!” (“My bosom urges / Itself toward him. / Ah, might I grasp / And hold him! / And kiss him, / As I would wish, / At his kisses / I should die!”)—Vance forgets to keep spinning the BMX wheel…

  At this point, there is a break—a missing section—in the epic of nearly four hours. This has come to be known as The Big Lacuna. Reconstruction of The Big Lacuna can never be more than conjectural, but its contents, at least in outline, are tolerably clear. (Experts consider The Big Lacuna to be over when Vance snaps out of his reverie and asks Ike whom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanford or Silda Spitzer.) Blame for The Big Lacuna obviously and immediately falls on XOXO. Given the tendency of the embittered poet manqué to brazenly interpolate something gratuitously titillating or abstruse or jarringly incongruous, i.e., to preemptively corrupt the epic beyond redemption, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he’d capriciously paralyzed Ike and Vance for four hours. But what other means might XOXO have at his disposal to cause a Big Lacuna in the epic? Well, he could go directly after the bards themselves. He could use a nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis), and he could have any one of those department store perfume saleswomen simply sashay by a group of bards as they recite the epic and casually spray a small amount of the mixture in their vicinity. This would be enough to cause a Big Lacuna. XOXO, who says he’s retired and lives on his pension, dismisses any such allegations as “absolute nonsense.” Speaking by telephone from his hyperborean hermitage, he says, “I have no hand in it.” He adds, “T.S.F.N.—General Command is pulling the wool over your eyes”—referring to the splinter group allied with a radical faction of exiled bards. But we all know what XOXO is capable of doing to the bards. He can make some of their pianissimo phrases breathy. He can cause them to suddenly chant in a laughable falsetto or stutter helplessly. And, of course, he can make them recite high-pitched gibberish. (Because the bards are traditionally blind, drug-​addled vagrants, experts tend to underplay what great shape they need to be in, especially to perform some of the more physically demanding and rigorously choreographed reenactments in the epic, e.g., when Ike is pepper-sprayed at the Miss America Diner or when he chases his daughter’s math teacher around the room or restrains himself from bludgeoning Vance with his baseball bat, etc. A bard’s heart rate can surge from 60 beats a minute to over 240 beats a minute during a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. The lateral G-forces exerted on a bard who’s rocking back and forth to the rhythmic ostinato of spokes against a jerrycan could be as much as 4.5 G, which means about 25 kg of pressure on the neck.)

  Whatever the cause of The Big Lacuna, for the entirety of its duration, Ike remains frozen in one immutable cataleptic posture. This tableau vivant demarcates in physical space the deep authenticity of Ike’s mode of experiencing the passage of time—to strike a single pose under the unflinchingly prurient gaze of the moaning Goddesses, a gaze which casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus, the “glaze of the gaze,” that Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan analyzes in his book The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics.

  Ike presses himself like a gargoyle or a figurehead on the prow of a ship against the onrush of his own fate.

  This tableau of Ike batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world.

  And although the epic reaches a state of absolute stasis here, this continues to be one of the single most popular parts of the epic repertoire. Its hieratic solemnity and magisterial, almost inert choreography have given rise to comparisons with Noh drama, Khmer royal ballet, and Indian classical dance forms, including Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Kuchipudi. Connoisseurs appreciate the degree to which bards are willing to deform themselves into stunted and crippled shapes as they reenact the interminable tableau, risking grotesque injuries (although probably only the most discerning cognoscenti could distinguish these ​stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures from the stoop-​​shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures that the drug-addled vagrants typically assume, even when they’re not performing the epic). A bard is expected to have extraordinarily precise control over every single part of his body. For instance, when reenacting the scene in which Ike is distracted from bludgeoning Vance with his bat by the Goddess La Felina, who swoops down into Jersey City and impersonates 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, the bard, miming Ike with his brandished bat frozen in mid-air, must remain perfectly still except for the gentle rising and falling of his erection which choreographically registers the modalities of Ike’s emotions, achieving a tumescence and a flaccidity that’s precisely synchronized with the narration of the nanny’s approach and recession into the distance.

  Among the world’s most illustrious blind, drug-addled bards, Meir and Aaron Poznak—feral twins abandoned as infants by their parents at Bergdorf Goodman and raised by a wild pack of Yorkipoos near the pond at the southeast corner of Central Park—are especially celebrated for their performances of the “Bat and Nanny” scene, to which they have added their own inimitable flourish. They can actually swivel their testicles from left to right in tandem to signify Ike “watching” the nanny as she sashays by—a sly allusion to, and literalization of, his cryptic assertion that his scrotum contains “two eyeballs.” In addition to their ultrasophisticated interpretations of Ike’s complex and hieratic poses during The Big Lacuna, the Poznak Twins are also renowned as unrivaled virtuosos of “high-pitched gibberish.” (Recently, Meir Poznak has receded from the public eye, purportedly becoming the shadowy leader of T.S.F.N.—General Command.)

  Meanwhile…

  Ike seems to see two suns blazing in the heavens, and new mothers who had left their babies behind at home, their breasts swollen with milk, nestling gazelles and young wolves in their arms, suckling them.

  “Is this a private jihad, or can anyone join?” a nymph/horsefly murmurs to Ike, flitting from armpit to armpit.

  Ike’s aura is sugar frosted.

  Vance is lost in some hallucinatory K-hole of his own.

  The mesmerizing metronomic ostinato of the spokes ticking against the empty Sunkist can…the high-pitched gibberish of the nymph/horseflies (the “Ikettes”)…the buzz of the unmanned drones that represent Ike’s inescapable destiny…

  They are SO high. This Gravy is super-potent. It’s military-grade Gravy. Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins.

  They’re SO high.

  They’re SO FUCKING high.

  According to a report issued by the organization Psychopharmacologists Without Boundaries, the amount of hallucinogenic Gravy which could be contained in the period at the end of this sentence, if ingested on an empty stomach, would be enough to cause a person to mistake a rocket-propelled grenade for a Vietnamese bánh mi sandwich. But is it simply Gravy that Ike and Vance are smoking in this episode? They seem SO high. Well, some experts have concluded that the Gravy Vance is buying from the God Bosco Hifikepunye has been cut with military-grade ass-cheese, which would make it exponentially more potent and potentially neurotoxic. The amount of military-grade ass-​cheese / Gravy blend that you could snort off the hyphen between the words “ass” and “cheese” in this very sentence is said to be enough to induce a full-blown psychotic episode. And, if all the letters in the
sentence This tableau of Ike batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world were infused with the military-grade ass-cheese / Gravy blend and a person were to ingest the entire sentence, that person would almost certainly become an incurable paranoid schizophrenic. (Keep in mind, too, that boldface signifiers like “Ike” and “Vance” contain up to three times the amount of the binary psychotropic drug as words in a regular or italicized font do.)

  Although it’s not the consensus opinion, many scholars suspect that during The Big Lacuna, XOXO has kidnapped Ike’s and Vance’s souls and spirited them off to his hyperborean hermitage beneath Antarctica. Vance’s soul doesn’t know where the fuck it is. And it gets a little agitated. And XOXO starts telling it some bullshit just to calm it down, like “We have a salon on premises and I promise you our stylists don’t push products on the customers. Don’t you hate it when you go get your hair cut and the stylist tries to push a product on you, etc.”—just some bullshit to calm Vance’s soul down. He also tells them that there’s a restaurant at the hermitage: “You’ll love it,” he says. “It’s like a weird version of Hooters.” He takes the two souls out back behind the restaurant where Zaporozhian Cossack cavalrymen are just returning from raiding an Ottoman village with freshly made cole slaw under their saddles. Inside, all the waiters are famous Casanovas who are now impotent, incontinent, doddering old men, traipsing from table to table in diapers, using walkers, enormous hydroceles sagging their scrotums to the floor—Hugh Hefner, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Wilt Chamberlain, Tommy Lee, Julio Iglesias, etc.