The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (22 page)

And on the morning of his father’s funeral,
Ike
is supposed to wake up with an incredibly gross case of conjunctivitis, and then try to pull the pillars of the synagogue down and crush the congregation, and then his daughter is supposed to give birth to a half-divine, half-mortal infant named
Colter Dale
. (“
Colter Dale
’s teenage mom is not even pregnant for two whole days—she got pregnant on Tuesday night and gave birth on Thursday night, about forty hours later. Even hamsters and marsupial cats have longer gestation periods! This preternaturally truncated pregnancy could simply be the result of the exceedingly clever way that episodic reality is edited (see TLC’s
I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant
and MTV’s
Teen Mom
), or it could point to a wider trend that experts are noticing in which very young mothers, after preternaturally truncated pregnancies, are giving birth to precociously mature infants who almost immediately get pregnant or father children themselves, each generation a miniature version of that which preceded them. This is being called
The Russian Nesting Doll
or
Matryoshka Doll Phenomenon
. Shorter and shorter gestation periods for pregnant teens who are giving birth to precociously mature infants may not be the result of endocrine-disrupting chemicals like polybrominated biphenyls or phthalates or high-fructose corn syrup or smartphone radiation, as experts have previously proposed, but may actually be caused by military-grade ass-cheese and Gravy leaching into the water supply.”)

And soon after that, the
The Kartons
are supposed to begin their “Last Concert” (which is also their
first
concert).
Ike
, who has refused to suspend work on his banned monument, his “teetering monolith of marzipan,” wears an impenetrable, bulletproof protective groin cup, fashioned for him by
Bosco Hifikepunye
, the God of Miscellany (Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.), at the behest of
La Felina
. “This is the first single from our new album,
Folie à Famille,
”
Ike
says in his raspy, almost inaudible whisper. “We call it a ‘narcocorrido’ because it’s about mortal men who traffic in Gravy.”
Ike
’s daughter plays her bass guitar tuned to cello standard tuning, in intervals of fifths (C–G–D–A) using a banjo string for the high A. She’s recently been seen using a five-string setup, tuned to C–G–D–A–E, with banjo strings for the A and E.

After the performance of the narcocorrido,
Ike
is supposed to retreat back into his hermitage. Rocking
Colter Dale
’s cradle as canisters of nebulized military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis) shatter the living room window, he taps his ring on the tabletop, and, blind from the gas, begins chanting
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
to the infant, in its entirety, from the very beginning: “There was never
nothing.
But before the debut of the Gods, about fourteen billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent. 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. 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.…” And using his distinctive periodontal curette, the God
XOXO
engraves the epic into the smooth tabula rasa of
Colter Dale
’s mind.…(
Colter Dale
(half-​divine) is immune to the nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl that the Mossad is pumping into the hermitage.)

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.

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.