by Mark Leyner
Vance’s soul is like, “I thought he said this was like Hooters.” And Ike’s soul says, “I think he just meant that there’s, like, a theme going on with the waiters.”
The waiters are all suffering from dementia and can’t remember your orders (never mind their grandchildren’s names or the last movie they saw), so you have to write down what you want directly on their grotesquely exposed cerebrums with a sharp periodontal curette.
The allegorical interpretation of XOXO’s hermitage as hell and Ike and Vance’s brief sojourn there as some sort of perilous infernal descent, which dominated the critical debate about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for, like, five minutes in the late ’80s, is now widely discredited. Yes, the hermitage is underground—miles beneath the surface of Antarctica. And yes, Ike refers to it as unten—literally “under” or “below.” But, hello, it’s “hyperborean”—of or relating to the arctic, frigid, very cold. The opposite of infernally hot. Well, what if it’s WAY underground down near the inner core of the earth, where it’s like 10,000 degrees? Well, what if it’s up your ass where it’s like 10,000,000 degrees? Well, what if you’re a cocksucking dwarf racist retard midget dickwad? Well, what if you’re a fucking scatological-bakery urinal-cake-boss motherfucking fist-fucked cow-pie anal-fissureman motherfucker?
…And so this debate, rendered incontrovertibly moot years ago (if not tens of thousands of years ago), curiously rages on.
Ostensibly a sequence intended to reinforce the scope of XOXO’s omnipotent mischief (his mojo) and/or the super-potency of the hallucinogenic Gravy that the God Bosco Hifikepunye is selling Vance, the so-called “Playdate at the Hermitage” (whether apocryphal or not) has the perhaps unintended consequence of showcasing, of all things, XOXO’s tenderness (an anomaly in the epic, with the exception of his ill-fated literary courtship of Shanice). The big fuss he makes about the cole slaw behind the restaurant is clearly XOXO’s way of winking at Vance and sympathetically acknowledging that he knows that Vance was sort of punk’d by Ike re: the Cossack Saddle Cabbage and the harried immigration official at Ellis Island, etc. More significantly, in this scene (and again, experts are divided about whether it’s an authentic scene or a noncanonical blooper), XOXO clearly conveys a strong ideological solidarity with Ike via the abject humiliation of the celebrity Casanovas at his Dantean “Hooters.”
Whether this perhaps vindicates some experts’ queasy faith in XOXO has yet to be determined, but it surely feeds a growing suspicion that XOXO may have a more sympathetic if not a distinctly symbiotic relationship with Ike (and with the epic itself) than previously thought—something that even XOXO’s most indefatigable detractors may have to wearily concede.
Suddenly, the following (“without any discernable context, etc.”):
Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2 Derek Jeter Yankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…pink fingernail polish, blue toenails, gold sandals…huge face…HUGE…almost like the kid in that movie Mask with Cher…not with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, just a really, really big face…and hot fleshy freckly chubby thighs.…The other three have knockoff Marc Jacobs bags…but the chubby one with the Burger King shake and the thighs and no underwear has the real deal: a $45,000 Hermès black crocodile Kelly bag.
Here, many people (e.g., audience members at public recitations, experts, metaphysicians, etc.) are like:
“Huh? ’The fuck just happened???”
This has gotta be XOXO totally fucking with the epic, right? Plying the epic with drugged sherbet. Shooting it up with military-grade ass-cheese, right? XOXO—who persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha.
Well, not so fast, contend some scholars. In a scrupulously researched monograph coauthored by V. S. Naipaul and C. C. Sabathia, a cogent case is made for the possibility that there is no Big Lacuna (i.e., that this is not XOXO vandalizing the epic), that during this mute interstice, Ike and Vance are simply too fucked up to talk and that Vance keeps up the tranced-out empty-can-against-the-spinning-spokes rhythm while Ike just stares off into space (a whole desultory lifetime tacitly exchanged between them, as if between two dogs) and that, at some point, Vance, emerging from some hallucinatory K-hole of his own, is like, “Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2 Derek Jeter Yankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…” In other words, that it’s simply his spacey elliptical reportage of something he observed recently (probably apropos of something Ike had been saying before about how sexy he thinks sweaty plus-size women are) and not just a piece of completely incongruous bullshit that XOXO plopped in to gum up the epic (perhaps at the behest of the flagrantly snubbed and pissed-off Shanice). Other experts, though, contend that the V. S. Naipaul / C. C. Sabathia monograph itself is a crude forgery, an obvious noncanonical blooper lobbed in by XOXO to gum up the epic. (It bears repeating that all noncanonical bloopers are almost immediately subsumed into the realm of the canonical and are, at the first opportunity, dutifully chanted by vagrant, drug-addled bards.)
As the individual earlier identified as “REAL WIFE” said (this is the woman who attended the public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack with her husband but then ditched him for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, the one who gave up painting when she saw Gerhard Richter’s paintings of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof), “It’s too easy for people to always blame things on XOXO.” Although, clearly, XOXO is perfectly capable of turning the epic into a celebrity gossip magazine or TV listings if he feels like it, so why not a Big Lacuna? Question, though: Might not the chubby girl in the subway without underwear be La Felina? Wouldn’t her fabulously expensive Hermès Kelly bag in this context signal a theophany—the appearance of a deity? A message to Ike re: their tryst, maybe? Or is the meaning of the Big Lacuna—this stand-alone mini-epic—ineffable? (Or, perhaps, as one noted metaphysician put it, simply too stupid for words?)
It’s at this point, during a public recitation, that a bard will stand and hysterically exclaim:
XOXO’s got the epic by the nutsack!!!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
This chant, accompanied by the frenzied banging of gaudy rings against jerrycans of orange soda, continues unabated for a stupefying four hours, at which point (in almost every credible version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack), Ike, in response to the defibrillating incantation of his name (“Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!”), finally snaps out of his cataleptic reverie and addresses his galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards”—“apostrophe” because the bards are not literally present (in the epic dimension which Ike inhabits), although the fact that they respond (echoing Ike’s words, but backward) suggests that they are present (perhaps in some purely metaphysical sense) but not proximal. Salinger/Foyt will later suggest that the bards here are hyperproximal, i.e., present in a purely intracranial sense. This is difficult to understand. When experts talk about the bards’ “hyperproximity” to Ike, about their presence being “intracranial,” they are correlating the motif of Ike’s head (filling with the perpetually inscribed narration of the epic and the ever murmuring voices of masturbating Goddesses) with the motif of the minibar at the Burj Khalifa (the underlying notion here being that all of the Gods actually compress or collapse themselves within the minibar itself ). This is what some highly regarded pseudo-intellectuals mean when they speak of Ike’s head as minibar. These interlocking motifs represent something that is simultaneously infinitely small and infinitely capacious.
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “HEY!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
YE
H!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “AHH!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
HHA!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “Tuer tous les célébrités!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Sétirbéléc sel suot reut!
Ike
Cut their motherfuckin’ heads off!
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Ffo sdaeh ’nikcufrehtom rieht tuc!
Ike
Death to every name on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list.
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Tsil 001 Ytirbelec Sebrof eht no eman yreve ot htaed.
Ike
Guillotine Jerry Bruckheimer, James Cameron, Bono, Simon Cowell, and Elton John.
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Nhoj Notle dna, Llewoc Nomis, Onob, Noremac Semaj, Remiehkcurb Yrrej enitolliug.
Ike
Guillotine Spielberg. Guillotine Jennifer Aniston and Michael Bay. Guillotine Coldplay.
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Yalpdloc enitolliug. Yab Leahcim dna Notsina Refinnej enitolliug. Grebleips enitolliug.
Ike
Guillotine fucking Jerry Seinfeld. Guillotine Tom Hanks and Ryan Seacrest and Brad fucking Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio and Dr. Phil and Judge Judy and Alec Baldwin and Bethenny Frankel!
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Leknarf Ynnehteb dna Niwdlab Cela dna Yduj Egduj dna Lihp Rd. dna OirpaCid Odranoel dna Ttip gnikcuf Darb dna Tsercaes Nayr dna Sknah Mot enitolliug! Dlefnies Yrrej gnikcuf enitolliug.
Ike
Long live the flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita!
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
Ativ id izzagar nairatelorpbus, gnitae-hself eht evil gnol!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from the Upper Peninsula say “HEY!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from the Upper Peninsula
YEH!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from the Upper Peninsula say “XOXO—we takin’ our motherfuckin’ epic back!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from the Upper Peninsula
Kcab cipe ’nikcufrehtom ruo ’nikat ew—OXOX!
In a provocative (though virtually incomprehensible) essay titled “Memory and Obsolescence,” first published in the August 1958 edition of the children’s magazine Highlights, coauthors J. D. Salinger and A. J. Foyt analyze this mirrored call-and-response between Ike (doomed introvert, implacable neo-pagan, coy Taurus, Saint Laurentian fusion of the tough and the tender) and the bards, which is driven by the mesmerizing beat of empty soda can against BMX spoke. Salinger and Foyt explain the incongruity of Ike’s profane, clamorous exhortations (“a full-bore venting of all his fevered antipathies toward celebrities and, implicitly, an impassioned avowal of his devout affiliation with the humble and abject”) by suggesting that they are “whispered, if not wholly tacit”—after all, if you’re addressing bards who are “hyperproximal” or who reside “intracranially” (i.e., in your “minibar”), there’s really no need to raise your voice. Salinger and Foyt go on to claim that “the fact that the bards are represented here as repeating what Ike says but backward means that, essentially, Ike is continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out.”
“Ike is continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out” is another way of depicting the inside-outness of Ike’s simultaneous narration and enactment of the epic. When you think (and you don’t have to actually say it out loud) “I am a hero,” you immediately become a karaoke bard because you’re simply reading what XOXO is inscribing into your brain. But because the epic subsumes everything extrinsic to it, the karaoke bard is instantly turned back into content, i.e., back into a hero. Salinger and Foyt call this unending process “enveloping inversion.” And they liken the inside-outness of Ike’s simultaneous narration and enactment to the In-N-Out Burger “secret menu,” and specifically the “3x4”—three beef patties, four slices of cheese. Not only do the alternating layers of cheese/beef/cheese/beef/cheese/beef/cheese parallel the alternating inversions of hero/bard/hero/bard/hero/bard/hero, but the 3x4 configuration corresponds to the three letters in the name “Ike” and the four letters in the name “XOXO” and, most significantly, to the license plate HPG-XOXO, a license plate analyzed in stupefyingly granular detail over the course of an essay that runs some thirty thousand words (every one of which audiences expect the vagrant, drug-addled bards to recite verbatim).
Ike’s “Apostrophe to the Bards” could also be “A Cry from the Smallest Box,” i.e., a cri de coeur from the depths. What Salinger and Foyt mean here is that Ike could be calling out from within XOXO’s hyperborean hermitage or, more likely, that in The Big Lacuna, Ike finds himself in an extreme spiritual state, in the innermost embedded place, in the innermost and smallest of all the epic’s ever-diminishing Chinese nested boxes or Russian Matryoshka dolls (or “M-dolls”). The smallest, most deeply embedded version of the “Ike M-doll” (which is a purely practical construct—in theory, of course, there is no terminus in an infinitely recursive reductio ad infinitum) is basically a freeze-frame at the very threshold of existence which is called “The Minibar.” This is why the Gods are sometimes said to reside in “The Minibar,” which is sometimes likened to an infinitesimal zero-dimensional point called a Severed Bard-Head, and which is sometimes thought to symbolize Ike’s head. The amplitude of the vibration of a “terminal” infinitesimally recursive Severed Bard-Head is referred to as “high-pitched” or “HPG” (“High-Pitched Gibberish”). And, of course, HPG-XOXO is the license plate of the Mister Softee truck that hit Ike during Spring Break and the final license plate that traverses Ike’s field of vision as he orgasms at the precise moment of his assassination by the ATF/Mossad.
Most original, though, is Salinger and Foyt’s theory that has come to be known as “Rapunzel’s Braid,” in which they contend that the images of wafting armpit hair (“look how beautiful Ike’s abundant chestnut-color armpit hair is, how lustrous and soft and fluffy. It almost looks as if he blow-dries it for extra volume!”), the tampon string and Chinese fortune-cookie fortune in Ike’s dream of La Felina, the pendulous breasts of the ubiquitous “chubby middle-aged women,” even the hanging hydroceles of the decrepit waiters in XOXO’s Dantean Hooters, represent “lifelines,” i.e., means of extricating the hero from some underworld (i.e., from death or from some perilous spiritual journey). “Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!”—the incantatory concatenation of the Name—is a string of words (analogous to a tampon string or a paper fortune or a loyal retainer’s nose hair) upon which the hero can climb back into the world of the living. Ike configures himself as an in-and-out alternation of bard/hero, which constitutes a kind of “braided identity.” When we chant “Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!” (the first Ike in the string a hero, the second a bard, the third a hero, the fourth a bard, the fifth a hero), we are forming a plaited lifeline that Salinger and Foyt refer to as “Rapunzel’s Braid.” And isn’t Ike’s vaunted tongue sandwich, they proceed to ask, the figurative instrument par excellence for depicting the inside-outness of chanting the braided name (the bard) and of being consumed (the enveloped hero)? This is the “Swallowed Tongue”—a metonymic symbol for epilepsy. So clearly, according to Salinger and Foyt, the epic intends to associate Ike’s “pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out”—his perpetual high-pitched oscillation between bard and hero—with a form of seizure (e.g., “the feral fatalism o
f all his loony tics—like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids and the Mussolini torticollis of his Schick-nicked neck”).
Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it’s upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order. It’s also worth noting that Salinger and Foyt were the very first experts to notice a change from Ike’s Spartan premartyrdom diet of cole slaw and protein shakes to a more epicurean regimen of salami and provolone sandwiches, egg rolls, Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts, Kozy Shack Butterscotch Pudding, and Absolut Peppar vodka shots.
For deliberately demented gobbledygook, nothing tops a group of experts who call themselves “Chineans” after Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the mob boss who wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in an act to avoid prosecution. The Chineans maintain an evangelical belief in the surpassing significance of Vance and swear allegiance to the nose-thumbing, mind-fucking God XOXO, for which they have earned the implacable enmity of the reclusive, shadowy paramilitary leader Meir Poznak, who has placed a high-price bounty on the head of the equally reclusive and shadowy impresario of the Chineans—a man called The High-Talking Chief (and who is also known as “The Craziest of the Crazy,” “The Pazzo di Tutti Pazzi,” and “The Capo di Tutti Frutti”). Meir Poznak has threatened The High-Talking Chief of the Chineans with the ritual punishment of eye enucleation by melon baller and guillotining. No one’s ever seen The High-Talking Chief. There are no official photos of him. And the authenticity of existing images is debated. Apart from the fact that he is already missing one eye, accounts of his physical appearance are wildly contradictory. Some people who have met him describe him as having the voluptuous curves of a Beyoncé or a Serena Williams, while others describe him as more closely resembling Representative Henry Waxman. The High-Talking Chief has said, “We did a complete simulation of The Big Lacuna and sliced the code to its deepest level. We have studied its protocols and functionality. We’re convinced that XOXO has nothing to do with it.” The High-Talking Chief of the Chineans has also said that the most serious attacks on the epic have been mounted not by XOXO, but by Fast-Cooking Ali (supposedly acting out of jealousy, because his girlfriend La Felina has such an obsessive crush on Ike Karton). The High-Talking Chief of the Chineans has said that what Fast-Cooking Ali does is “ramp up the frequency of the epic, so that it spins faster and faster, causing it to hit 1,410 Hertz (or cycles per second)—just enough to send it flying apart.” Although this is all self-serving and unsubstantiated bullshit, it is upscale, artisanal self-serving and unsubstantiated bullshit of the highest order, and the Chineans are responsible for certain findings which have broadened our understanding of the epic immeasurably. For instance, it was the Chineans who uncovered identical e-mails sent by Ike, on the night before his death, to the three top heavyweight competitors at the Women’s Sumo World Championship in Warsaw, Poland—Anna Zhigalova of Russia, and Svitlana Iaromka and Olga Davydko, both of the Ukraine. Although their precise content is unknown, they are said to be lengthy and unusually coherent, alternating between crude sexual bravado and weary resignation. Ike purportedly quotes Thomas Hardy (without attribution, of course): “Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good.” It was the Chineans who discovered numerous inscriptions in Ike’s Snyder High School yearbook reading “See you at Rutgers!” irrefutably debunking the myth that Ike ever attended the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.). The Chineans were the first experts to grapple with the question of why Oprah Winfrey’s name is conspicuously omitted from the roster of those sentenced to the guillotine in Ike’s galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards.” She is, after all, #1 on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. The Chineans contend that the answer lies in Ike’s habit of plagiarizing from her magazine and his self-professed fondness for the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies. And it was the Chineans (who claim to “strip away the accretions of the epic”) who determined that the definitive title of the epic is—and always has been—The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack.