The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

by Mark Leyner

  During a hiatus of Hmm Uh’s reality show, Meir Poznak clandestinely rendezvouses with the Goddess of inarticulation and nonlexical vocables at her dacha in Paramus, New Jersey, and, for hours, pleasures her with his fingers and his mouth and the veiny two-headed latex toys he brings her.

  The Gods (except for Hmm Uh and La Felina, who are out partying) have temporarily relocated from the top floors of the 2,717-foot, 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai to the bowels of the Compact Muon Solenoid, a particle detector buried in an underground cavern beneath the Large Hadron Collider in Cessy, France, just across the border from Geneva, as they await the construction of the next world’s tallest building, either the 3,284-foot, 250-story Burj Mubarak al Kabir at Madinat al-​Hareer (Silk City) in Subiya, Kuwait, or the 3,200-foot, 166-story Miapolis on Watson Island in Biscayne Bay, just west of Miami Beach—whichever goes up first. The Gods and Goddesses ride the particle accelerator, like kids on the Bizarro megacoaster at Six Flags New England—over and over and over again—and each becomes a subatomic, one-dimensional oscillating string.

  Thursday: 8:00 PM Eastern

  “Fucking the Mind of the Mind-Fucking God”

  Ike is standing on his stoop, staring off into space, thinking about which heavyset, hairy Goddesses he’d like to fuck.…Ike—who never curdles into the comprehensible, whose willful anonymity and implacable hostility toward celebrities and desire for the bodies of women who dislike their bodies make him the favorite of La Felina, the patron Goddess of street scum and sans-culottes—is now exquisitely aware of the imminence of his fate. And there he stands on his stoop—alone, somber, dignified.

  A distant cackling Popeye (“Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike”), the Mister Softee jingle, the sound of the fetus Colter Dale singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from within the womb of his teenage mom…it’s all speeding up now, this fucked-up caffeinated cacophony, in reverse, as XOXO tries to expunge the epic—with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion—faster than the last surviving bard can recite it.

  The spokes of the spinning BMX wheel hitting the empty can, that accelerating beat, the high-pitched gibberish of the horseflies (those buxom nymphs) and the transported babel of all those gasping, orgasming Goddesses…

  Meir Poznak walks past the Miss America Diner, east on Culver Avenue, turns right on Towers, strides up the stairs to the stoop of the two-story brick hermitage, pulls out a semiautomatic pistol, and shoots Ike Karton in the face.

  At that moment, war conches are sounded. Ike searches for his Goddesses, readjusting his gaze with three sharp, reptilian ratchets of his head, first toward the Large Hadron Collider in Cessy, France (just across the border from Geneva), then toward south-central Quebec, then a Chevron station in Nogales, Arizona. At that moment, Meir Poznak, first-​person shooter, pupils dilated, trained by Russian Spetsnaz forces, a guy who is determined to fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God, a guy who, after a clandestine tête-à-tête with Hmm Uh—the Goddess of Inarticulation and Nonlexical Vocables—fully commits himself to consummating his love for Ike Karton, strides up the stairs to that stoop, and shoots and kills Ike Karton. At that moment, the war conches are sounded, and the high-pitched gibberish of tiny iridescent-winged nymphs and nano-drones and swarms of bold-faced notables (with their rising chorus of nonlexical vocables) is like a hissing crescendo of white noise.

  The Ballad of the Last of the Severed Bard-Heads

  Oh fuck, Ike Karton est mort!

  Pa rum pum pum pum, rum pa pum pum.

  Got shot point-blank with a Glock 34!

  It’s all about the dum dum de da dum dum!

  Ike Karton is dead.

  Schlemiel schlimazel! Hong Kong ping-pong!

  The 9 mm round entered his eye and exited out the back of his head.

  Ding a ding a dang a dong dong ding dong!

  Ding a ding a dang a ding dang dong!

  Highest Rated Comments

  I had a threesome to this song.

  Svetlana Stalin 1 month ago

  Wow…Even though it uses nonlexical vocables, it’s REALLY moving…I’m actually crying. Takes me back in time to better days. Thanks for posting this.

  Mark McGuire 10 months ago

  Lick my legs, I’m on fire.

  PJ Harvey 19 years ago

  Where are my shoes? I’ve got to see the Captain.

  Harvey Cheyne Jr. (played by Freddie Bartholomew)

  in Captains Courageous 75 years ago

  Kill the white man, and take his women.

  Dr. Fu Manchu (played by Boris Karloff)

  in The Mask of Fu Manchu 80 years ago

  Friday: 10:00 AM Eastern

  “Ike’s Funeral: Live Coverage”

  A small group of mourners attends Ike’s funeral: Hadassah Lieberman, Barry Bonds, SAG president Ken Howard, Andrew Cuomo…

  Several eulogists wistfully remind the thin trickle of mourners (basically Lieberman, Bonds, SAG president Ken Howard, and Cuomo) that Ike “never congealed into the comprehensible” and “liked the bodies of women who didn’t like their bodies” and was “perpetually flinging himself toward his fate.”

  And they reminisce about how Ike used to sit at the kitchen table in the early morning, not writing letters or composing narcocorridos, but making lists—lists of which celebrities he thought should be guillotined, which should go to the gulag, which should be rehabilitated, etc. This was also called Ike “going into the forest to gather wild garlic,” Ike “soaking in his own marinade” or Ike “drinking his own bath water.”

  Excerpts from the Eulogies

  “Ike is on a bus headed uncannily for the abyss—such is his largesse, his desire to share his death wish with others, i.e., his brothers, who dig his maudlin quest for martyrdom and queue up to join him literally loin-to-loin in stardom, his weary one-way ride to his last stop, his long-awaited suicide-by-cop, much ballyhooed in Bollywood and headed straight for the vicinity of infinity.”

  “Ike’s eyes roll back in his head as he’s ravaged—the conquistador as comestible, like Magellan devoured by cannibals and savages.”

  “Those moaning, self-flagellated phantasms, having all their apocalyptic orgasms, those marathon sessions of seizures, those deathless, mirthless masturbators, so provocatively posed in their marble pantyhose.”

  “This was just the aristocratic, autoerotic attitude of those whose hot buttocks were the pure products of the imagination of the God who’d invented the platitude.”

  “Ike—marionette, umbilicated to his Goddesses, murmuring in a language garnished with umlauts.”

  “His birth as an object of divine desire, and his death—the Goddesses sated—supine and on fire, hated by his neighbors.”

  “This shit’s retarded. It’s The Ballad of the Last of the Severed Bard-Heads. ‘It’s not toasted, it’s Pop-Tarted,’ Ike boasted to all his drug-addled, big-dick bards (the Ultra-Penis Committee) from the Upper Peninsula and Jersey City. Denken und Dichtung, that high-pitched drone. ‘It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known,’ he says, quoting Dickens, quieting down Colter Dale, quaffing Dewars, getting tight, looking radiant in night-vision goggles and a ‘tight T-shirt’—‘TTS’ on the Missouri license plate, which has a light-blue gradient and says ‘Show-Me State.’ He hates celebrities and all their wealth, and he flexes his biceps and he flagellates himself. He secretly ate flanken, like an Inquisitor and a Marrano both wrapped into one, which is why it says that ‘suicide-by-cop sounds fun.’”

  “The quintessential heroic visionary, quiet and quick to violence, brainstorming with mice and swans in Paranoid Park, near a man-made hill. ‘Remember,’ he says, without moving his lips, even keeping his Adam’s apple
still, ‘when all the old, decrepit waiters at XOXO’s Dantean Hooters were summarily shot to death by Mossad sharpshooters?’ And some weird little guy whom one of the mice glimpses out of the corner of his eye—some fat little spy on a bicycle path, snapping photos—hunches over to laugh like Quasimodo getting a Gatorade bath on the sideline. And Ike, like stone, like a scrimshaw statue honed out of white whale bone, cataleptic but analytic, and incredulous at his own indigenous Jersey City perspicacity, thinks to himself, Once I get all my guillotines deployed and rendezvous with my producer, Fast-Cooking Ali, let’s see who calls me paranoid and the inducer of a folie à famille.”

  “Ike dreams of surprising La Felina in a Korean sauna, or the subproletarian wife of some bard, or coming upon any matronly lady marbled with lard, sweating in a place that’s sweltering, any place where there’s no tradition of air-conditioning or adequate ventilation, where there’s a draconian prohibition on deodorant and showering, like a women’s penal colony on a former coffee plantation, where the rich aroma of large, self-pleasuring women is overpowering and intoxicates Mossad sharpshooters in guard towers, and where even a hydrocephalic moron can get a hypertrophic hard-on lasting more than four hours.”

  “The jubilant blaze of masochistic martyrdom and orgasm, like some fabulous hissing centripetal fireball of molten marble, forms a high-pitched, accelerating vortex of seizures and spasms that pulls this clique of masturbating Goddesses from the Large Hadron Collider into Ike’s sugar frosted nutsack, like a highly concentrated, coruscating cascade of hypothetical particles, these Goddesses who are masturbating to naked photos of Ike, even though they say they’re just reading the articles, into Ike’s sugar frosted nutsack, where, like an interlooping troupe of parasitic worms or writhing embroidered runes, they agree to synchronize the oscillations of their original orgasms, so as to produce ever more seizures and more spasms.”

  This final section the mourners chant backward, in memory of Ike having “continuously pulled himself out of his own ass, inside-out”:

  Smsaps erom dna seruzies erom reve ecudorp ot sa os, smsagro lanigiro rieht fo snoitallicso eht ezinorhcnys ot eerga yeht, senur derediorbme gnihtirw ro smrow citisarap fo epuort gnipoolretni na ekil, erehw, kcastun detsorf ragus S’eki otni…

  In an interview after the funeral, Hmm Uh, the Goddess born of hawked-up phlegm and risen from the lowest-of-the-low to become the single most influential Goddess in the pantheon (“that moaning menagerie”), is asked whether Ike Karton and Meir Poznak (seemingly so different—Ike austere, taciturn, inscrutable; Meir flamboyant, loquacious, explicit) could, in a sense, be considered one and the same person (since they abet each other’s fates with such uncanny reciprocity). The divine celebutante answers, “Hmm…uh…kinda, I guess.”

  Experts were abuzz recently over a video that was posted online purportedly showing Ike Karton and Meir Poznak as teenagers at the Newport Mall in Jersey City: both boys were wearing black pants, identical padded and oversize cargo coats, and matching brown fur hats. The date of the video is unknown, although judging from the horses tied to posts and the honky-tonk piano version of “The Ballad of the Last of the Severed Bard-Heads” that’s audible every time the doors of the saloon swing open, it appears to have been shot in the late 1870s.

  Saturday: 3:00 AM Eastern

  “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva): The Fitted Cap”

  The most enduring legacy of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva)—which is what most experts now consider to be the authentic title of the epic—may well be the fitted cap.

  This unique, custom-fitted cap (95% wool, 5% cotton) features a gleaming “textured” white crown and visor—a trompe l’oeil corrugation (think super-close-up of a Frosted Mini-Wheat, abstracted into a scrotal topography). Embroidered (raised) over this glittering, puckered white dome (signifying, of course, “the sugar frosted nutsack”)—and foregrounded in such glaring contradistinction that they seem to float over it, like 3-D—are the words “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3” in a shade of dazzlingly vivid, preternatural blue (think Gatorade Frost Glacier Freeze or Frost Cascade Crash or Pine-Sol Sparkling Wave). Embroidered below, in an equally vivid, man-made shade of red or pink (think Ajax Ruby Red Grapefruit Dish Liquid or Pepto-Bismol), is the subtitle: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva).

  Beginning on the underside of the visor and continuing to concentrically wind around the circumference of the inside of the cap, inscribed in the tiny, maddeningly meticulous hand of XOXO himself, is the looping, recursive epic in its entirety, with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion…

  …culminating in the final words of the epic (as Ike Karton peers deeply into the fiery eyes of his lover/doppelgänger/killer, Meir Poznak, in which, of course, he sees the reflection of his own fiery eyes, in which are reflected the fiery eyes of his lover/doppelgänger/killer, Meir Poznak, which again, of course, reflect his own fiery eyes, etc., etc., etc.…two fiery orbs becoming smaller and smaller and smaller with each mirrored iteration…receding into the infinite depths of this mise en abyme…of course, like the red taillights of a bus receding into the farthest-flung depths of a fathomless distance…disappearing into the scintillating somethingness of the nothingness that never was…), Ike Karton’s cryptic dying words, which are, of course, “One size…fits all.”

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  The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

  A novel by

  Mark Leyner

  A conversation between novelists Rick Moody and Mark Leyner

  Rick Moody: So, I think it’s twelve or fifteen years since your last novel, correct?

  Mark Leyner: I don’t know exactly. Some gaping period, some inexplicable period of time.

  RM: The obvious question is: Why did it take so long to write The Sugar Frosted Nutsack? Part of that has to do with what you did instead for a while. But from the point of view of fiction writing, did you do other things because you felt like the form wasn’t amenable to you after the last novel?

  ML: When you say, What took so long?—that’s a beautiful way to phrase it, because I like to think of it now as some sort of necessary exile that resulted in this book. But some of the reasons for taking that break were aesthetic, and some were practical. I had done a number of books then, starting with I Smell Esther Williams and ending with The Tetherballs of Bougainville. And I thought at the time that I had thoroughly explored a series of issues about writing fiction, and I wanted to take a break because I wasn’t feeling a kind of urgency or avidity about it anymore. When I say “explored,” I don’t necessarily mean I worked from a more primitive exploration in the first book and then peaked with the most sophisticated in the last. I’m not even sure that’s the case.

  But when I started publishing, I was woefully naive about the career of a writer. I didn’t know you had to put a book out every couple of years to renew your membership in the club of writers. I just thought you did it because you were overtaken by a burst of enthusiasm about venturing into certain places. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea that this is what you have to do to make a career. And then my wife and I had a kid, and I started to think things through more practically. I had a little bubble of public attention at that time, and I already knew that wasn’t going to last forever. So there were two factors simultaneously: one was a certain fatigue with this automotive model of putting out a book each year or two, and the other was the desire to try some other things that might be lucrative, like journalism or teaching. I mean, I could go on about why I didn’t end up doing those things, why I didn’t teach, if you’re interested.

  RM: Well, what I’m really curious about is how this book called to you out of the s
ilence. Was part of the twelve years thinking about how to write this book?

  ML: To some degree I live like a kidnapping victim: just someone who is blindfolded and put in a trunk, and then the car stops and I’m let out. And if you look at any one period of time in my life, it seems like there’s some plotted trajectory, but it’s much more sporadic and random than that.

  I think that a lot of the time was spent—again, some of this is very mundane—a lot of that time was spent working with other people on various things, like going back and forth to Los Angeles and working on all sorts of movie projects, some completely misbegotten and futile, some not. Different things like that, but all very collaborative projects.

  I’m a very shy person who took to writing because I like being by myself, and in those years I found myself in a life that required such a degree of social activity that, eventually, it pressed me back into just wanting to be by myself. Certainly being confined within one’s thinking is one of the subjects of the book, you know, living within the universe of your own cognition. I wrote this book in such isolation. I had never written anything like this before. I didn’t show a sentence to anyone, from the beginning to the end. I didn’t do readings. All of those things can be comforting. You’re writing and you flash a little of it to someone and they appreciate it, and you think, OK. But I didn’t want that kind of comfort this time. I believed I needed to be steeped in the real, intransigently pure, lone wolf world of this book, that it would make this book such a strange piece of work if I had to just finally, truly trust myself about it the whole way through. It changed the taste of the book for me. And I love that so much more than any other thing—the feeling I get when I’m most involved in working, when writing this book. I feel the most vivid sense of being alive I have as a human being. And that’s what I had been away from for a long time, and it really did feel like a ridiculous exile, but one that was necessary when I look back on it.