The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

by Mark Leyner

  Ike is then supposed to go back outside, “opening the front door onto his stoop, stepping into the maddeningly bright klieg lights of the Mossad,” take out his pistol, wave it—making looping figures in the air to signal all his Goddesses that his “climactic moment is nigh”—and fire wildly into the treetops.

  There are supposed to be scores of Mossad sharpshooters, hundreds perhaps—they were supposed to have been abseiling onto rooftops and into the trees from black helicopters. They each aim for the hero’s sugar frosted nutsack, and Ike, laughing, whistling the Mister Softee jingle (“those recursive, foretokening measures of music; that hypnotic riff ” ) over and over and over and over again to himself, amid this fusillade of gunfire…until a sniper’s coup de grace to the head.…This was supposed to be Ike Karton’s fate—dying to an orgasmic chorus of masturbating Goddesses. This was a scene that had replayed in his mind over and over and over and over again since he was a boy. Ike Karton—riddled, infested, consumed, devoured by Gods.

  Experts wonder if Ike thinks his neighbors will rise up on his behalf. (“What does he imagine? Cheering crowds? Fluttering flags?”) But they don’t. They shutter themselves up in their identical, brick, two-story houses and peer out from timid apertures in their drapes and blinds and watch Ike, the pariah, haranguing the Mossad and murmuring lascivious things to all his heavyset Goddesses, as bullets bounce off his magic groin cup, creating a mesmerizing beat…until a sniper’s coup de grace to the head.

  And then, years later, seated at the kitchen table, Colter Dale is supposed to compose his “Coda”: “To Whom It May Concern: That the Gods only occur in Ike’s mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in Ike’s mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative. Yours, Colter Dale, aka Ahab, King of the Ants (Reichsführer of the Upper Peninsula), age nine.”

  And none of this is going to happen, of course, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, because it all has to be set in motion by Ike making his list of Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), which XOXO is thwarting in his effort to sabotage the epic.

  In place of this traditional sequence of events (foretold and guaranteed by blind, blitzed-out bards for thousands of years) XOXO nonchalantly interpolates a miscellany of spurious scenes:

  Paratroopers, in hooded leather S&M bondage outfits and armed with automatic weapons, are dropped into Jersey City one night.

  While batting flies (and imagined nano-drones) from his armpits, as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel, Ike mentions the fact, apropos of nothing, that “Hanukkah menorah” and “labia minora” rhyme.

  Ike goes in to see his urologist to get his prostate biopsy results. The urologist tells Ike that he has low-range prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 3/3 in one out of twelve cores. Hilarity ensues. When the urologist tells Ike that it’s a slow-growing cancer (“You’ll probably die of something else long before this”), Ike tells him, “Yes, I’m destined to be killed by Mossad sharpshooters this Friday.” The urologist then advises “Active Surveillance”—a term used for a conservative treatment modality that Ike misinterprets as proof that the urologist is a Mossad agent. After threatening to sodomize the urologist and, for several side-splitting minutes, chasing him around the office, Ike settles for giving him a “taste of his own medicine”—an extremely rough digital exam during which Ike actually detects a hard nodule in the urologist’s prostate. The urologist has a follow-up biopsy, which yields a Gleason of 1/5 in seven out of twelve cores, etc.

  A Goddess helps Ike shop for jeans. (Ike holds two pairs up to the sky: “Do you like these or these?”)

  Ike sneezes so hard that it momentarily unfurls his rectum out his asshole like a New Year’s Eve party blower.

  La Felina, watching Ike do a set of lat pulldowns, produces an orgasmic torrent of paraurethral fluid so forceful that it reminds many baby boomers of the water cannon used to disperse civil rights marchers in southern states during the 1960s.

  Three bearded, bare-chested men in cargo shorts come up to Ike. “We’ll give you all the gold in the world in return for your daughter’s firstborn baby.” Ike kills them and bakes them into pies, which he puts on the windowsill of his hermitage to cool. When he returns from the gym, there are only two pies. “Who stole my pie?!” he thunders.

  Ike has a long, Pinteresque dinner with his elderly father (“like two stammering antagonists in a Pinter play”), who’s wearing a red lucha libre mask. (It’s hard to imagine Ike’s favorite topics of conversation—masturbating heavyset Goddesses, the interpenetration of sex and death, Ukrainian women sumo wrestlers, the demise of the Professional Women’s Bowling Association, how sexy Kim Clijsters looks at the end of a hard-fought third-set tiebreaker, etc.—holding any interest for a man like his father.) “You don’t think that being the inducer of a form of folie à famille makes me a more interesting person?” Ike smiles wolfishly, an incisor gleaming in the candlelight, then bats his eyes coquettishly, trying to make his father laugh, trying to defuse the situation. Ike waves the fork crazily in his father’s face, “I’ll gouge out your eyeballs, you senile fuck.” “Is that any way to speak to your father?” he replies. Waitress: “Would the schizo with the spasmodic torticollis like another whiskey?” “Ikie want whiskey?” parrots the father, who’s brushing his teeth at the table, the senile old man in a red lucha libre mask. His mouth is foamy. There’s an occasional squeal of feedback from his hearing aid. (“Of course Ike had been drinking, which clouded his thinking, and though his judgment was impaired, none of his feelings were spared…”)

  XOXO kidnaps Ike’s and his father’s souls and takes them to his hyperborean hermitage, where he plies them with drugged sherbet and gives their souls innumerable little hickies, like little chigger bites. Ike is presented with the coveted Sugar Frosted Nutsack, which is usually represented as either a military medal similar to the Croix de Guerre or the Iron Cross, or an entertainment industry award, like the Golden Globe or the People’s Choice Award statuette.

  La Felina tells Ike that Fast-Cooking Ali is gay (a “couturier”). Only a gay man could have designed Woman’s Ass. She denies ever having been sexually attracted to him. “He’s too sophisticated. His mind is too agile and nuanced, his sensibility is too refined and delicate. He’s too petite. Too ethereal. Too patrician.”

  Far from finding such scenes stupefyingly disjointed (and, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, these are exactly the sort of stupefyingly disjointed scenes that XOXO delights in recklessly strewing throughout the epic), audiences at public recitations demand that vagrant, drug-addled bards (those dwindlingly few vagrant, drug-addled bards who have survived all the Chinean-inspired anti-bard violence) chant these very noncanonical bloopers in their entirety, demanding, in fact, that the surviving bards belt them out like the cast of some Broadway musical to the exclusion of the rest of the epic (i.e., the canonical bloopers), prompting one expert to describe this “neo-epic” (that is, this version of the epic purged of everything but noncanonical bloopers) as a “labyrinth of corridors invariably culminating in a flooded men’s room.”

  Vance spins the wheel of his BMX bike, and in the blurred strobe of its spokes, as Vance spins faster and faster and faster, you can just barely discern the inchoate contours (i.e., “early drafts”) of everything that’s about to happen.

  The mesmerizing metronomic beat of the spokes ticking against the empty Sunkist can.…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.

  Along with the humming hyperreality of being so high in the glare of a midsummer’s day, there’s an unmistakable overtone of impending violence and revelation.

  They’re SO high.

  They’re SO FUCKING high.

  Wednesday: 8:00
PM Eastern

  “A Mule with a Red Bonnet”

  Three more cars go by. License plates: AGV-66N, OAM-17W, RMP-45Y.

  AGV: A grainy video

  OAM: of a man

  RMP: resembling Meir Poznak

  A grainy video…of a man…resembling Meir Poznak…

  A grainy video of a man resembling Meir Poznak, ex-bard and leader of the hard-line anti-XOXO paramilitary organization T.S.F.N.—General Command, based in Jersey City, has surfaced on the Internet in recent days and shows him announcing his retirement in favor of a mule in a red bonnet.

  The man, bearded and wearing fatigues, is shown seated in a wooded area, next to a mule in a red bonnet, identified as his successor.

  In December, Poznak was nearly assassinated by a nanny from Côte d’Ivoire pushing a stroller rigged with explosives.

  A few of the dwindlingly few vagrant, drug-addled bards who have survived all the Chinean-inspired anti-bard violence are partying at a crowded club in West Hollywood (Les Deux). Throbbing dance music.

  “Quiet!” one hisses to the others, covering his cellphone. “It’s Meir Poznak!”

  Poznak recites the following lines:

  Everything that’s screwed in

  Or glued together

  Is coming apart

  At the same time.

  The next day, The Capo di Tutti Frutti is found dead in the underground parking lot of his apartment complex. His hands had been bound and his head bludgeoned with a bat. His entrails had been eaten. Police suspect that a God ate his entrails because fingerprints on packets of tartar sauce found near the body were not human, and because fresh mounds of loot drops (or “God guano”) had been discovered in the woods nearby.

  Wednesday: 9:00 PM Eastern

  “The Ascendancy of Hmm Uh”

  Hmm Uh, who inauspiciously began her career as a gob of phlegm on the street (“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’”) and then inexplicably reappeared in the guise of a “speech disfluency” or “verbal placeholder,” has suddenly (within, say, the past two minutes) become perhaps the single most influential Goddess in the history of the Sugar Frosted Nutsack pantheon (that “moaning menagerie”). “Impertinent with the scope of her new power, she burns with the inferiority complex of a former hawked-up gob of phlegm and speech disfluency.” She’s now the paramount Goddess. Elected to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Goddesses, Hmm Uh requests several days’ leave to engage in a celebratory series of drunken bisexual orgies, conducted first in one of the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mines in a town in south-central Quebec called Thetford Mines, and then in a succession of squalid gas station lavatories along Interstate 19 in Arizona. The Goddess La Felina, “champion of the sans-culottes and scum of the earth,” is said to be partying with Hmm Uh. Other debauched participants in the drunken bisexual orgies are said to include: creepy, unsavory looking porcelain Hummel figurines brought to life, leprechauns with disproportionately large, erect phalluses jutting out from their green breeches…and…umm…Transformers robots with huge, unruly tufts of fern-like pubic hair sprouting from their crotches like weird fucking Chia Pets—although, according to an updated report in USA Today, this is not true.

  Hmm Uh looks half-Russian, half-Korean. She has a perpetually salacious grin on her big, round face. Big-haired, buxom, retroussé-nosed, she is simple and unlettered (and depraved).

  It’s amazing how prescient the Chineans were, how uncannily they anticipated the ascendancy of a Goddess like Hmm Uh. Yes, Hmm Uh is zaftig, hairy, and uninformed, but she is refreshingly young (early twenties) and much, much more cheerful than the gloomy and world-weary “chubby, sweaty, hairy, unkempt, and uneducated middle-aged women” who’d habituated the epic up until now.

  Now Hmm Uh—patron Goddess of Inarticulation and Illegibility, of High-Pitched Gibberish, Nonlexical Vocables, and Hysterical Spastic Aphonia—is the star of her own reality show. She’s the only woman on an offshore drilling rig, thirty miles out in the Kara Sea, an icebound Arctic coastal backwater north of central Russia. Total darkness engulfs the region in the winter. Hilarity and puerile boorishness ensue as Hmm Uh entertains fifty super-horny, frequently drunk, and stir-crazy Russian oil workers. “The waters of the Arctic are particularly perilous for drilling because of the extreme cold, long periods of darkness, dense fogs, and hurricane-strength winds. Pervasive ice cover for eight to nine months out of the year can block relief ships in case of a blowout.…Until recently, Russia regarded the Kara Sea as primarily an icy dump. For years, the Soviet navy released nuclear waste into the sea, including several spent submarine reactors that were dropped overboard at undisclosed locations,” according to a report in the New York Times by Andrew E. Kramer and Clifford Krauss.

  Hmm Uh, who used to spend Spring Breaks at Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic testing site for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, says, “Radiation isn’t so bad. I think it makes men better at sex.”

  Wednesday: 10:00 PM Eastern

  “Meir Poznak: Behind the Music”

  Meir Poznak begins to seriously, almost obsessively, ponder the idea of “fucking with the mind of the mind-fucking God.” He begins to think about whether it’s somehow possible to subvert XOXO, the God who subverts almost everything we think. He wonders whether it might be possible to inoculate the epic against XOXO with denatured infusions of XOXO, or whether a form of mithridatism might actually be feasible (i.e., protecting the epic against the poison of XOXO by gradually administering nonlethal amounts of XOXO). Of course, he has to concede, there are myriad enemies, real and perceived. The world of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack is a world of paranoia. There are endless provocateurs. Endless spies and traitors. Double, triple, and quadruple agents. But behind it all, pulling the strings and tying it all into knots, is XOXO. Vance and Ruthie and the Daughter (whose name is withheld because she’s a minor) and her unborn son, Colter Dale, have all been suddenly and unceremoniously “deported” from the epic and turned into football hooligans. (Vance because Mogul Magoo bristled at the notion that a street-level Gravy dealer was thought to be a God by the Chineans. Ruthie and the Daughter for their own protection? Or because they became superfluous? There’s no consensus among the experts.) Vance ends up in Serbia, where he joins the Grobari (“Gravediggers”), a gang of violent thugs associated with the Belgrade club FK Partizan. Colter Dale, a Liverpool Football Club fanatic, actually strangles his unborn twin brother (a Manchester United fan) to death in utero, using their mother’s umbilical cord. Put a stethoscope to the Daughter’s pregnant belly and you can hear a drunken Colter Dale singing the Liverpool FC anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” over and over and over again (“When you walk through a storm / Keep your chin up high / Etc., etc.”). XOXO’s “disappearing” of Vance, Ruthie, the Daughter, and Colter Dale guts the band The Kartons, leaving Ike a solo act, which, at the end of the day, is what he so quintessentially is anyway. Meir Poznak, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, is seriously, almost obsessively, pondering all this…pondering exactly how he might fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God.

  He’s skinny and fidgety and humming constantly, he’s only eating fish food (the red and gold flakes). In a conversation with his brother on the morning of Super Bowl LVI, he says he’s lost his interest in listening to music and talking to people. He says he might castrate himself (i.e., explore “nongenital sexuality”). He complains bitterly about “the whole balaclava/baklava thing” and says that XOXO is making everyone connected with the epic “look bad.” When his brother asks what he’s been doing with himself lately, he says “checking my ant traps” and “analyzing adjourned positions” (i.e., grappling with the ramifi
cations of fucking with the mind of XOXO). He says that he wants to tear himself in half like Rumpelstiltskin. Aaron Poznak describes his brother as being “extremely, extremely disturbed by the proximity of the words ‘balaclava’ and ‘baklava.’”

  Later that day, an expert cadges a lone cigarette from a vacant-eyed dockworker and tentatively approaches. “Meir Poznak was especially upset and angry about the proximity of those words, which he said were part of a smear campaign against the epic, and he wanted to do something about it, by which I assumed he meant do something about XOXO,” says the expert, who speaks on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy in discussing a major mind-fucking God’s mind possibly getting fucked.