The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (8 page)

T.S.F.N.
If we were to ask you to pick the one thing you liked most about the performance of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
you just listened to, what would it be?

REAL HUSBAND
The sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of it. And the almost unendurable length. At first I wanted to just walk out—the bards seemed drunk or fucked-up on something, and I figured, OK, here we go, this is gonna be like
Britney Spears
at the MTV VMAs or Japan’s Minister of Finance
Shoichi Nakagawa
at the 2009 G7 meeting in Rome. But then once it got started, I really got into the way the bards kept up that mesmerizing beat by banging their rings on those metal jerrycans of orange soda. And I really like the way that they wander around from place to place…their vagrancy. And I love how they’re actually blind—I mean in
real life.
Although, it seemed like a couple of them could see but were…what’s the word?…Shit, I’m completely blanking out here.…Sweetie, what’s that thing where you see words backward or reverse some of the letters?

REAL WIFE
Dyslexic.

REAL HUSBAND
Dyslexic, right. And there was something about their completely mumbled, uninflected delivery that made it…even more sort of mind-numbing. It felt like it was just going around and around in circles and it felt like, at some point, I don’t know how to put it…maybe you should talk to my wife, because she’s so much better at articulating things like this—she was an arts major (and she has a spectacular big-ass ass, thanks to
Fast-Cooking Ali
).

T.S.F.N.
OK, how would
you
describe the effect?

REAL WIFE
Well, I don’t know how much better I am at articulating any of this, but, to me, that sense of it just going around in circles, in these sort of endlessly spiraling recapitulations—it felt like, at some point, it was just going to drive me crazy. And then I thought, like, duh, this is what it feels like to have
XOXO
inscribing your brain with a sharp periodontal instrument.
This
is what it feels like to be
Ike
. That was one of those epiphany moments, for me at least.

T.S.F.N.
An epiphany about what exactly?

REAL WIFE
About how—and I think you could say that this is what
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is fundamentally about, I mean, this is my interpretation anyway—about how we each have this ridiculously finite number of things inscribed in our minds, and that what we do, moment by moment, is continuously postulate an extrinsic “world” for ourselves by reshuffling and recapitulating these ridiculously finite number of things. But it’s a completely closed system—there’s no “world” actually extrinsic to it. What makes
Ike
so magnificent is that he’s pared down his deck to a single card,
The Hero
—a man 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.”

T.S.F.N.
Your husband wasn’t kidding. That’s some straight-​up hyperarticulate, high-pitched shit!

REAL HUSBAND
(gushing) I told you! She’s
pissah smaht!
She’s phenomenological!!

T.S.F.N.
What else did you especially like?

REAL WIFE
There were these two tiny, busty bards with the T-shirts that said “I Don’t Do White Guys.” I
loved
them. They reminded me of
Snooki
.…Like weird little twin
Snookies
.

T.S.F.N.
What else?

REAL WIFE
The “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” list made me cry. It’s so beautiful.

T.S.F.N.
It doesn’t bother you that it was plagiarized from
Oprah
’s magazine?

REAL WIFE
No, are you kidding?! I think that for a man to steal something from
Oprah
’s magazine and say he wrote it—to do that for a woman you’re falling in love with—that is just the most romantic thing in the world. Seriously. I think
Ike
is super-sexy. Every time the bards describe his body and talk about his guinea-T and how he’s completely shredded and his vascularity and how you can see his butt-crack when he genuflects toward the Burj Khalifa, that kind of thing, it’s a
huge
turn-on for me. It makes me sweaty. I have to start fanning myself with my program.

T.S.F.N.
That’s funny. Wouldn’t you rather see a reenactment of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
than just hear people reciting the story? Wouldn’t that be even more powerful?

REAL WIFE
I’d rather listen to something than see it. It says in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
in
Season Eight:
“The Gods’ designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles.” And I believe that. And I’d certainly rather hear a story told by spaced-out blind bards than see it acted out by celebrities.

T.S.F.N.
You mean like in a movie?

REAL WIFE
Right.

T.S.F.N.
You don’t like movies?

REAL WIFE
I don’t particularly want to see two hours of
George Clooney
playing
a human resource specialist or
Gwyneth Paltrow
pretending
to die of the plague or
Ben Stiller
portraying
some disaffected slacker, no. When we come to hear a recitation of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
we’re not coming to hear fucking rich celebrities pretending to be bards. These are
real
bards. They are
really
blind. They are
really
itinerant. They are
really
high on ecstasy or psilocybin mushrooms or hallucinogenic borscht. They are not
playing
fucked-up bards. They
are
fucked-up.

REAL HUSBAND
Also, we love the whole ambience here, the whole scene—the way people bring their families, and their straw mats and folding chairs, and sit out here for hours, and bring food. And the way they chant along. It’s a little like mass karaoke.

T.S.F.N.
What did you guys bring?

REAL HUSBAND
We packed a lunch. We brought, let’s see…we brought shawarma, tongue sandwiches, Fig Newtons, orange soda, of course.

T.S.F.N.
How did you and your wife meet?

REAL HUSBAND
Well, the funny thing is—we’re both from Jersey City, but we met in Manhattan. I was working as a waiter at this place on Seventh Avenue and Nineteenth Street. And my wife was going to Parsons at the time. We met at the Limelight, actually.

T.S.F.N.
So you were waiting tables and…anything else? Trying to become an actor? Musician? Putting yourself through school?

REAL HUSBAND
I’d actually enrolled in a songwriting workshop at The New School. But I got terminal, fucking insurmountable writer’s block immediately. Like the first day of the class. And it was crushing because I’d really made up my mind that I wanted to be a songwriter, even though I’d never written a song before. I’d never really written
anything
except lists, actually. I was a great list maker. So, anyway, I decided—and this is going to sound crazy, but it’s the Gods’ truth—I decided that I’d try to become gay, because so many of my favorite songwriters were gay, like
Cole Porter
and
Elton John
and the
Pet Shop Boys
, and I was thinking that might sort of jump-start me creatively. So I went to one of those Christian therapists who “cure” gay people, and I asked him if he’d take whatever he says to them, y’know, whatever secret incantation he uses, and say it to me
backward,
so I’d actually become converted to being gay.

T.S.F.N.
That’s
so
funny.

REAL HUSBAND
Yeah. Well, it didn’t work anyway. And then the two of us met at the Limelight and started dating, so the whole gay conversion thing became moot. And it’s probably a good thing I never became a lyricist or a jingle-writer, because she has to help me finish my sentences all the time!

T.S.F.N.
How about you? What were you doing at Parsons?

REAL WIFE
It’s an interesting question because, during the recitation, my husband and I were talking about how people sort of “abuse”
XOXO
, and it made me think about something that had happened to me at Parsons.

T.S.F.N.
Tell us about that.

REAL WIFE
Well, I’d been there a couple of years, studying painting, and I’d been doing all this, y’know, completely derivative work—
Kenneth Noland
rip-offs, imitation
Agnes Martins
, second-rate
Peter Halleys
, all this shit. And then I came up with this idea, which was to use photographs of very grim, morbid sorts of things and make these kind of unfocused, blurry paintings out of them. Really cool idea, and I’d never seen anything like it. So, I’m thinking, y’know, finally,
here I go.
So I did this huge, unfocused, blurry painting of
Joseph Goebbels
’s family, based on a famous photograph of
Joseph
and
Magda Goebbels
’s dead children’s pajama-clad bodies (
Helga Susanne
,
Hildegard
,
Helmut Christian
,
Hedwig
,
Holdine
, and
Heidrun
) after they’d been put to sleep with morphine and poisoned with cyanide by their parents. And I showed the painting to one of my instructors at Parsons, and he was like, that’s amazing, that’s brilliant, that’s a completely new, unprecedented idea. And I was just totally euphoric. And then, a couple of days later, the same instructor comes up to me and says, you better go check out the new
Gerhard Richter
exhibit at MoMA. And I was like, why? And he said, just go. So I went to MoMA and there’s this fifteen-painting cycle of unfocused, blurry paintings that
Richter
had done based on photographs of
Andreas Baader
and
Ulrike Meinhof
and their deaths.…It occurred to me at the time that maybe
XOXO
had taken the idea from my head and given it to
Gerhard Richter
. It crossed my mind. I’ll be honest. And I pretty much gave up on painting after that.

T.S.F.N.
What did you mean about people
abusing
XOXO
?

REAL WIFE
I think it’s too easy for people to always blame things on
XOXO
. Everyone’s always, like, oh, sorry for what I said last night,
XOXO
must have kidnapped my soul and plied it with drugged sherbet, y’know? I think sometimes people just use that as a way of avoiding responsibility for what they say—it’s like the equivalent of—oh, I was drunk or I was so tired…

T.S.F.N.
Was it a huge disappointment to you that you didn’t eventually become an artist?

REAL WIFE
No. Look at the so-called “art world.” Fucking
David Geffen
sells a
de Kooning
to this hedge fund billionaire
Steven A. Cohen
for 137.5 million dollars. Such “art lovers”! Right? It says in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
that a time will come when all fettered monsters will break loose and the plutocrats will be dragged out of office buildings and guillotined on the street. That includes the “art lovers.”

T.S.F.N.
Some people think that that whole business about
Ike
getting hit by a
Mister Softee
truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen but initially telling people he was hit by a Hasidic ambulance to foment some apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type global war is
really
confusing. Do you agree with that?

REAL WIFE
When I went to my first recitation and I heard the bards chant that part, I thought to myself, I don’t see how a dispute between club kids and Hasids could set off any kind of apocalyptic global war.

REAL HUSBAND
What about World War One? Who was that guy…the Bosnian Serb…the nationalist? Uh…oh fuck!…What was his name, sweetie?

REAL WIFE
Gavrilo Princip
?

REAL HUSBAND
Yeah,
Gavrilo Princip
.
Gavrilo Princip
assassinates the
Archduke
Franz Ferdinand
in Sarajevo, right? And it sets off the whole fuckin’ First World War. I mean, that’s a pretty apocalyptic war. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.

REAL WIFE
I’m not sure that’s the best analogy.

REAL HUSBAND
You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic global war?

REAL WIFE
That’s not what I mean.

REAL HUSBAND
You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic fucking global war?

REAL WIFE
I never said it wasn’t.

REAL HUSBAND
Trench warfare. Poison gas. Fifteen million deaths.

REAL WIFE
The
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. There was an extremely complicated situation…

REAL HUSBAND
I’m just sayin’.

REAL WIFE
…with all sorts of interlocking alliances.

REAL HUSBAND
I’m just sayin’. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.

T.S.F.N.
You seem to really identify with
Ike
.

REAL HUSBAND
People tell me I sound like him—y’know, the raspy, whispery voice and everything. And I have the same kinds of fantasies he does about big, sweaty, uneducated, working-class women, and about being ogled by masturbating Goddesses…

T.S.F.N.
Do you think your wife is a Mossad agent?

REAL HUSBAND
(looking askance at his wife with mock suspicion) Hmmm…

T.S.F.N.
Possible?

REAL HUSBAND
(laughing) Seriously, I tend to interpret that whole “everyone’s wife is a Mossad agent” thing in a more sort of metaphorical way—that people you’re intimate with might be, like, “double agents,” y’know? It’s a weird kind of paranoia you get about people you love—that they might turn out to be completely different from who you think they are, that it’s all been some sort of diabolically patient plot against you. I think that’s a pretty normal fear you have in any serious relationship. And that’s why it’s such a popular part of the epic, because so many people can relate to that fear. But personally I don’t really worry about it too much.