The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (13 page)

Whether
Magoo
’s wager that he can make more money from the ringtone rights to a single neo-pagan narcocorrido than from the public performance royalties that would accrue to him from thousands of years of spaced-out blind bards chanting a mind-numbingly repetitive fugue-like epic while swilling from jerrycans of orange soda remains to be seen. But financial history has shown that it doesn’t pay to bet against the chubby, pockmarked God of Bubbles.

The A&P will start carrying that Kozy Shack butterscotch pudding you like so much. Your anal fissure will start bleeding again (so don’t wear the tight white jeans, in case you start spotting). Your daughter will get pregnant. You’re going to have dinner with your father to try to persuade him to change his will, and you’re going to get into a really nasty fight with him, and you’re going to say, “You know how they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Well, I’m like an apple that
Vladimir Guerrero
picked up and threw as far as he could. That’s how far from your fucking tree I fell.”

This is the innermost secret of the epic.

Before the arrival of the Gods,
everything
was wildly italicized. This was the time of the so-called “Spring Break.” There were only phenomena and vaguely defined personages, and there was really no discernable distinction between phenomena and personages. There were no “Gods” per se, no dramatis personae, there was only an undifferentiated, unidimensional
T.S.F.N.
—only the infinitely recursive story and its infinitely droning loops, varying infinitesimally with each iteration. But once the Gods arrived and got off the bus, they insisted on being
boldfaced signifiers
.

This whole epic is about the war on the part of
T.S.F.N.
to vanquish the
boldfaced signifiers
and reestablish the “golden age” when things happened without any discernable context; when there were no recognizable patterns; when it was all incoherent; when 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; when 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.

One possible conclusion that could be drawn from this, of course—and it happens to be precisely the conclusion reached by the apocryphal “Justices of the Eighteenth Season” (these Justices who seem almost bard-like in their black hoodies, their scrotums dusted with confectionary sugar)—is that
XOXO
, whose ongoing and indefatigable campaign to undermine context and disrupt cohesiveness (i.e., his vandalism and vajazzlement of the epic) is, by now, familiar to anyone who’s not totally brain-dead, is actually working in collusion with
T.S.F.N.
And, in fact, the majority of the Justices—the vote was 8–1—question whether the so-called “war between
XOXO
and
T.S.F.N.
” might not have always been a front or a pretext for this collusion between
XOXO
and
T.S.F.N.

But this whole notion of “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar” seems suspect. Who are these “Justices”? Are we meant to infer that they are the habitués from the Miss America Diner—
Joe Shmoe
,
John Q. Public
,
Every
Tom, Dick, and Harry
,
Your Average American Sports Fan
, etc.—those men who so shamelessly and ostentatiously flaunt their vaunted anonymity? And what of this so-called “8–1 decision” suggesting that
XOXO
and
T.S.F.N.
are now working in cahoots, that they are, one or the other or both of them, double agents of some kind? Isn’t this all beginning to sound suspiciously familiar? Isn’t it more than plausible that
all of this
is part of the incredibly sophisticated disinformation campaign being waged by
XOXO
? This vexing suspicion is the very basis for the lone, dissenting vote—that lone, dissenting vote belonging, of course, to
Ike Karton
.

The hero
Ike
—unwavering, irreproachably self-​abnegating, aloof, Warlord of His Stoop—offers neither oral nor written opinion. His dissent is mute. He strikes a pose of implacable mute dissent. He just stands there on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, and he strikes that contrapposto pose in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus. (This is the “glaze of the gaze”—the onanistic scrutiny that sugar frosts
Ike
’s every move—which 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
.)

Many of the epic’s most perceptive commentators have underestimated or missed altogether or dismissed as so much incoherent, dilettante bullshit (or as the product of the Brownian motion of
Ike
’s paranoid ideation) the complexities of the
Boldface
v.
Italics
case and this whole notion of “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar” (with its choral judgment of the dissenting voice—that judgment and that doomed voice staking out the dialectical polarities of martyrdom). One expert said, “With most of
T.S.F.N.,
we can sing along by ‘following the bouncing ball,’ as
Mitch Miller
(whom many experts consider to be the ‘inventor’ of karaoke) used to instruct viewers of his 1960s television show,
Sing Along with Mitch
. But in this Season, we’re being asked to follow the red rubber tip of a paranoid flâneur’s walking stick as he jabs it at your head.”

After the massacre of drug-addled, blind bards by jilted husbands (a bloodbath purportedly masterminded by
XOXO
), a shadowy splinter group was formed, calling itself
T.S.F.N.—General Command.
This group, which was fanatically anti-
XOXO
, began recruiting members in the fetid, overcrowded refugee camps to which the surviving bards fled after the massacre. After establishing links with
La Felina
, they forged an unlikely alliance of convenience with the nihilistic, glue-sniffing street punks who’d hacked to death and cannibalized
Lloyd Blankfein
. On an oppressively hot summer night, marked by a bizarre outbreak of ball lightning which left all of Jersey City reeking of sulfur, an assassination commando unit comprised of blind
T.S.F.N.—General Command
bards and glue-sniffing street punks—who’d recently taken to calling themselves
giovanetti martirizzati
(“martyred youth”) from the
zozzo mondo
(“slob world”)—supposedly descended on the Miss America Diner and slaughtered the eight “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar,” in retaliation for their having promulgated the idea that
T.S.F.N.
is working in collusion with
XOXO
.

1. His implacable hatred of the rich is, among other things, what makes
   Ike
   a hero. An anarcho-primitivist, he strives to restore the world to an antediluvian arcadia (what he calls “Spring Break”) where no one man or woman seeks more wealth or notoriety than the next, and where the Gods are content to be indistinguishable from phenomena. And he dreams of a new Jacobinical Terror, of deploying guillotines outside
   Soho House
   (in West Hollywood and New York), of harvesting the severed heads of Hollywood A-listers and dropping one down the chimney of each and every child who’s been good that year (i.e., each child who’s militantly resisted celebrity worship in his or her school and who’s been modest, reticent, and almost naively kind to others, especially the misshapen and the misbegotten).
   
2. Basically, at every moment,
   Ike
   is trying to figure out how to constitute himself and how to situate himself in history. And this, among other things, is what makes
   Ike
   a hero.
   
3. Like all epic heroes,
   Ike
   hears the narration of the epic in his head and frequently mouths the words (sometimes audibly) to himself as he ritually reenacts the epic. This, of course, is what is meant by the term “epic karaoke” or “recursive karaoke” or “karaoke
   mise en abyme.
   ” The ritual reenactment and murmured karaoke recitation of the epic of which he is the hero constitutes
   Ike
   ’s life. This is the life to which
   Ike
   is doomed. This is why he is so frequently described as “death-drenched.”
   
4. This is
   Ike the Chimera
   —the hybrid beast with the severed head of a bard and the sugar frosted nutsack of a hero.
   
5. That statement, “This is
   Ike the Chimera
   —the hybrid beast with the severed head of a bard and the sugar frosted nutsack of a hero,” is considered to contain the innermost embedded secret within the many embedded innermost secrets of the epic, i.e., this is the very moment when the epic most suggests a Russian Matryoshka doll or a Chinese nested box.
   
6. How can
   Ike
   be ritually reenacting something that he appears to be doing extemporaneously and for the very first time? It is because this takes place in the “realm or the zone of the heroic,” on a “heroic plane”—it is fated, choreographed by the Gods.
   
7. Ike
   is the hero of the epic about the bard who simultaneously recites and reenacts the epic of which he is the extemporaneous, albeit inexorably doomed, hero. This is why scholars frequently refer to
   Ike
   as the “Möbius Stripper,” i.e., the man whose lascivious dance (i.e., “his life”) is performed for the delectation of masturbating Goddesses.
   

8. Ike
   ’s ongoing self-narration (which is an echolalic karaoke recitation of what he hears streaming in his head) is extremely similar to—and thought by many experts to actually derive from—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: “…he’s got a lot going on that could potentially distract him…algebra midterm…his mom’s calling him to come inside…his asthma inhaler just fell out of his pocket…but somehow he totally shuts all that out of his mind…crowd’s going
   ca-razy!
   …but the kid’s in his own private Idaho…clock’s ticking down…​badass craves the drama…
   lives
   for this shit…​
   Gunslingaaah
   …he can hear the automatic garage-door opener…​that means his dad’s gonna be pulling into the driveway in, like, fifteen seconds…
   un-fucking-believable
   that he’s about to take
   this
   shot under
   this
   kind of pressure, with the survival of the species on the line…and look at him out there—dude’s
   ice
   …is this guy human or what?…his foot’s hurting from when he stepped on his retainer in his room last night…but he can play with pain…we’ve seen that time and time again…he’s stoic…a cold-blooded professional…
   Special Ops
   …
   Hitman with the Wristband
   …hand-eye coordination like a
   Cyborg Assassin
   …his mom’s calling him to come in and feed the dog and help set the table for dinner…the woman is doing everything she can possibly do to rattle him…but this guy’s not like the rest of us…he is
   un-fucking-flappable
   …he dribbles between his legs…OK, hold on…he dribbles between his legs…hold on…he dribbles…hold on…he dribbles between his legs (yes!)…fakes right, fakes left, double pump-fakes…there’s one second left on the clock…and he launches…an impossibly…long…fadeaway…​
   jumpaaah
   …​​it’s off the rim…but he fights for the offensive rebound like some kind of rabid samurai…throwing vicious elbows like lethally honed swords…the severed heads of his opponents litter the court…spinal cords are sticking out of the neck stumps…but there’s no ticky-tacky foul called, the referees are just letting them play…there’s somehow still .00137 seconds left on the clock…now there’s a horn honking…might that be the War Conch of the Undead?…etc., etc.”
   

9. Ike
   is constantly testing his own self-narration against “empirical reality” (which is itself actually an illusory construct inscribed by
   XOXO
   in
   Ike
   ’s mind, which
   Ike
   realized after being hit by the
   Mister Softee
   truck). So,
   Ike
   ’s tactical response to
   XOXO
   (everyone’s, for that matter) is not far from a kind of delirium.
   Ike
   ’s methodology is to echo the epic: “
   Ike
   ’s doing this,
   Ike
   ’s doing that,” and to compare what he’s saying he’s doing with what he’s actually doing, and see if there’s any “wobble.” This, among other things, is what makes
   Ike
   a hero.
   

10. Ike Karton
    , unemployed butcher, inveterate mumbler, Warlord of His Stoop, believes—and justifiably so—that he’s fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters. And he will stand in front of the Miss America Diner (sometimes in close proximity to this other solitary psycho who angrily paces the perimeter of the parking lot bellowing at passersby, “Are you staring at my girlfriend’s tits?!”) and murmur to himself, “He is fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters,” to which he will almost immediately append, “He is also fated to stand in front of the Miss America Diner (sometimes in close proximity to this other solitary psycho who angrily paces the perimeter of the parking lot bellowing at passersby, ‘Are you staring at my girlfriend’s tits?!’) and murmur to himself, ‘He is fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters.’” These bracketing redundancies, the compulsive conjuring up of these Matryoshka dolls or Chinese nested boxes, can occupy
    Ike
    ’s thoughts for hours upon hours. This is one of the reasons (in addition to the whispering campaign conducted against him by
    Mogul Magoo
    ,
    Shanice
    , and
    Bosco Hifikepunye
    ) that
    Ike
    was fired from his job in the A&P Meat Department, and it is one of the things, among many, that makes
    Ike
    a hero.
    
11. For doomed
    Ike
    , everything—every concept and every percept—is a totem of death. Everything bespeaks evanescence. Even a brand new
    Quiznos
    on the corner of West Side Avenue and Stegman Parkway (a
    Quiznos
    that hasn’t even opened yet!) reeks of
    mono no aware
    (“the pathos of things”) and
    lacrimae rerum
    (“tears of things”).
    
12. Of course, we know that
    Ike
    ’s soul has been repeatedly kidnapped by
    XOXO
    and taken to
    XOXO
    ’s hyperborean hermitage. And we know that
    Ike
    has developed (or is perhaps feigning, as a tactical ploy) Stockholm syndrome.
    
13. Ike
    ’s heroic maneuvering to situate himself in an appositional space vis-à-vis
    XOXO
    —that is, to juxtapose himself somehow in relation to
    XOXO
    , to find a place interior to him or outside of him—may account for
    Ike
    ’s fractured motion, for the sort of cubistic way he has of moving through space (“the feral fatalism of all his loony tics”).
    
14. Ike
    was asked at the zoning board hearing if his soul had ever had a homosexual relationship with
    XOXO
    , and
    Ike
    —ever the discreet, gallant, old-world gentleman—said that they’d merely had “tickle fights.” (And this, among other things, is also what makes
    Ike
    a hero.)
    
15. None of the above.
    
16. All of the above.