The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (20 page)

Monday: 11:30
PM
Eastern
“The Stone Mind”

Most Chineans and Some Chineans contend that
Ike
is a
statue.
This is, of course, the theory with which the Chineans are most notoriously associated. There’s always a suspicion about the Chineans that their most wildly preposterous assertions are simply part of their act to “avoid prosecution” (i.e., to evade or confound critical scrutiny). But what had once seemed beyond the pale—
Ike
, a statue? An inanimate object?—has steadily gained credence.

The idea that
Ike Karton
—valiant, brooding neo-​pagan, “despot of his stoop (
n’est-ce pas?
),” with his pomaded pompadour, hazy and queasy from the Gravy, whose “rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism” is “just a way to stick it to his dad,” who’s beloved by
La Felina
for his loathing of celebrities and plutocrats and for his ardent solidarity with the lowest of the low, who likes the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies, who’s continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out—is actually in an advanced state of petrifaction (i.e., that he’s a statue, a stone homunculus, a lawn jockey) may have initially been broached for sheer shock value, but it soon developed into a finely calibrated theory which today is widely considered the finest calibrated theory for which the Most Chineans and the Some Chineans (aka the
These Chineans
) are most notoriously associated.

Could they mean all this figuratively or metaphorically—that
Ike
is simply
statue-like
or
statuesque
?
Well, maybe at first. It’s easy to see how, given the fact that
Ike
’s been in a sort of dissociative fugue state ever since he was hit by a
Mister Softee
truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old (“high on ketamine, wearing silver lederhosen and a hat made out of an Oreo box at the time, he initially claimed he’d been hit by a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type war between club kids and Hasids”), and that the Some Chineans surmise that he’s been mute (not just reticent or soft-spoken, but mute!) since the
Mister Softee
accident, and that, for most of the epic,
Ike
stands on his stoop, “on the prow of his hermitage, striking 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 gasping, masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus,” they might conclude that
Ike
is
like
a statue or
like
a lawn jockey.

After all, he
does
seem to largely exist in a state of suspended animation, and his “taunting, lascivious dance along the precipice of incoherence”
does
make him “a frozen figure in a tableau vivant,” “a taxidermied gym-rat in a habitat diorama,” “a paralyzed player,” “a cataleptic kike,” etc. This is, of course, why
Ike
is so frequently called a “Nude Descending a Staircase”—because he is a static image of movement (“a ruptured contraption,” “a clutter of spasms and ticks”).

But the Chineans have gone way beyond the mere kinesics of
Ike
’s vaunted inertia.
Ike
literally goes nowhere, they claim. His birth and his death are the only real (i.e., the only
measurable
) events in his life and, thus, constitute the true polarity of the epic. These two events, though antipodal, simultaneously occupy one point in space.
Ike
is born (in the heroic sense) in the arousal of the gasping Goddesses’ desire, and he dies (heroically) in the self-satisfaction of that desire. In other words, he is born on his stoop and he dies on his stoop without having traversed any distance, without having moved a muscle—ergo,
Ike
the Statue. Everything in between his heroic birth and death (if anything can be said to be “between” events which coincide) is represented by an ellipsis. In other words, each dot in the ellipsis is made out of a zero-dimensional dollop of military-grade ass-cheese that’s been extruded from what the Chineans call “the pastry bag” (i.e., from a God’s ass). These are also called “loot drops” and “God guano.”

The Chineans don’t mean that at some point in recent history a statue of
Ike Karton
was erected in Jersey City to commemorate the hero of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack.
They mean that
Ike Karton
, the hero of the
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
is, literally, a fucking statue.

Ike
the hero—porn addict, Taurus, marionette of his Gods—is sculpted in time, in vectors of time, veering inexorably inward, inexorably toward his fate. Although his martyr’s death (at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters perched in trees) is a hyperviolent implosion, a convulsive centripetal rupturing, it is imperceptible to the external observer. Yes,
Ike
subjectively experiences it as “driving a Pagani Zonda into a concrete wall at 300 mph,” but his neighbors perceive the hyperviolently imploding
Ike
as basically the same
Ike
they see every day (“on the prow of his hermitage, striking 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”).

Ike
is riddled, infested, consumed,

Devoured from within by Gods.

Only Gods can inhabit a stone mind.

So this whole massively involuted epic, which has variously been called
Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
and, finally and definitively,
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
, 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…is essentially, at the end of the day, about a man who just stands on his stoop, rooted to the spot, making cryptograms out of passing license plates, watching a kid tooling around the block on a BMX bike. (What’s interesting is that you never really know with overwrought angst or heavy-handed, stilted tropes—they can seem terrible on the page, but
totally
work at a public recitation. Same’s true with cringe-inducing smuttiness and off-putting adolescent scatology—it can seem lame on paper, but completely come alive when delivered by vagrant, drug-addled bards banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda.)

FYI: The Chineans also believe that
Ruthie
and the
Daughter
and
Colter Dale
are “superfluities,” i.e., later additions (noncanonical bloopers) which were inserted to “mainstream” the figure of
Ike
—to create a more normative version of
Ike
, i.e., to give
a famille
to his
folie
.

And they believe that if you put a stethoscope to the stone head of
Ike
, the Lawn Jockey, you can hear, against that endlessly looping sample from the
Mister Softee
jingle…

And finally, the Chineans ask: Do the
Kartons
comprise an organized crime family? According to the federal law against organized crime in Mexico, “when three or more people make an agreement to organize or form an organization to engage, in an ongoing or reiterated fashion, in activities that by themselves or together with other activities have as a goal or a result the commission of any or several crimes, they will be legally classified and penalized because of these actions as members of organized crime.” Clearly, the Chineans assert, the
Kartons
have engaged in a conspiracy to build a dildo-impaled statue without a permit and a conspiracy to perform a narcocorrido (“Do you hear that mosquito / that toilet flushing upstairs / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) in a residential area.

The Chineans are part of
Vance
’s reverie. Since many people believe that
Vance
is a God (significantly,
Vance
himself happens
not
to believe that he’s a God), this means that the Chineans are part of a God’s reverie, which confers enormous prestige upon them at least for the duration of the reverie, but consigns them to oblivion once
Vance
“snaps out” of his reverie (an event said to be augured by “the mysterious appearance of a mah-jongg tile on the floor of some cabana”).

It goes without saying that all of this could simply be another case of
XOXO
slipping something into the epic’s drink (i.e., drugging its sherbet).
XOXO
is forever doodling on
Ike
’s mind, and on the minds of bards (doodling on
all
our minds) with his sharp periodontal curette, and forever feeding “the apophenic mania of experts to find hidden and farfetched links and correlations. Is it possible to predict
XOXO
’s behavior toward human beings based on his alliances with other Gods? For example, what is his position vis-à-vis the
La Felina
/
Mogul Magoo
schism?
Shanice
had, from the beginning, cliqued up with
Mogul
Magoo
, so
XOXO
(after
Shanice
’s withering critique of his poem) had naturally cliqued up with
La Felina
. But
XOXO
is too intractable a nihilist to ever be considered aligned with any single faction. And it always bears repeating that the Gods view human beings with a fundamental detachment, almost as if they were characters in a video game. They are
entertained
by humans. Sure, they have their favorites (
Ike
is famously
La Felina
’s
favorite
), but the Gods basically
love
to fuck with people—literally, in the sense of having sex with them (e.g.,
Bosco Hifikepunye
with
Mi-Hyun
and
Ike
’s daughter), and in the sense of fucking with their minds (e.g.,
XOXO
).

A Chinean comandante decries what he calls “the self-​flagellation over our affinity for
XOXO
.” The shadowy death-squad leader says that, although experts routinely call
XOXO
“a resentful poet manqué who plies the epic with drugged sherbet and shoots it up with military-grade ass-cheese,” what the God has actually done is taken a single static tableau (that of
Ike Karton
“standing on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, striking 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”) and, thanks to all his filigreed interpolations (i.e., noncanonical bloopers), turned it into a massive, stupor-inducingly redundant epic, and he deserves major kudos for that. (As he’s giving this interview, the severed heads of fifteen vagrant, drug-addled bards, strung together with coaxial cable, are found floating in the Passaic River under the
Pulaski
Skyway. These fifteen bards had recently signed a statement which urged aficionados of the epic to rapidly chant “
Ike
,
Ike
,
Ike
,
Ike
,
Ike
!” (“it should sound like
Popeye
laughing, or like
Billy Joel
in ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)’—‘But working too hard can give you / A heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack’” as a way of “fucking with the mind of the mind-​fucking God”—an obvious reference to
XOXO
). The notorious Chinean death-squad comandante (whose nomme de guerre is “
lol
”) quickly issues the following addendum: “Don’t want my previous statement to be misconstrued in any way as a condemnation of self-flagellation. If it’s inconvenient to have someone else flagellate you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with flagellating yourself. It’s an excellent way to relieve tension, which can increase your risk of stroke or heart attack.” “When I was a kid,”
lol
reminisces later, over coffee, “most of my friends loved the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I preferred the Shia Day of Ashura processions in which young men ceremonially whip their own backs with barbed chains and razors.” He says that the first movie scenes that gave him a hard-on were when seaman
John Mills
(played by
Richard Harris
) gets flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails in
Mutiny on the Bounty
and when
Lucrèce Borgia
(played by
Martine Carol
) is whipped by her brother,
Cesare
(played by
Pedro Armendáriz
), in
Lucrèce Borgia
(aka
Sins of the Borgias
). Favorite poem? The poem
XOXO
wrote for
Shanice
about the businessman who became so terribly aroused when he was flogged in the woods by some of his colleagues (“They gang up on the ‘new guy’—someone who’d only recently been transferred to their division—and, in what appears to be a sort of hazing ritual, they tie him to a tree and whip him with his own belt. His pants fall to his ankles, and it’s obvious that he’s aroused.” Reminded that most experts interpret the poem to mean that the protagonist is aroused not by the robust flagellation, but because he sees an ineffably beautiful butterfly flit by,
lol
shakes his head vehemently. “I think he’s aroused by the robust flagellation.”)