Read The Sugar Frosted Nutsack Online
Authors: Mark Leyner
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (9 page)
T.S.F.N.
Why’s that?
REAL HUSBAND
Have you ever heard of Cupid’s Stigmata?
T.S.F.N.
No, what is that?
REAL HUSBAND
It’s a term they use in online dating. It’s when two people share some uncommon anatomical feature with each other, which usually means that they’re sort of predestined to be together. And my wife and I both have double ureters draining one of our kidneys (which is an anomaly occurring in, like, 1 in 150 people), and we both have port-wine stains in the shape of Nike swooshes on the smalls of our backs (which is, like, 1 in 10 million people), so…
T.S.F.N.
Is that true? That’s amazing!
REAL HUSBAND
(totally cracking up) No, I’m kidding. I’m busting your chops, man. But seriously—we’re really close. Really
really
close. And I think that what they say about
Ike
and
Ruthie
is sort of true about us too—that we’re utterly inscrutable figures who, paradoxically, understand each other perfectly well. And we’re both lifelong connoisseurs of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
T.S.F.N.
You’ve been going to recitations your whole life?
REAL HUSBAND
Absolutely. And I was in one when I was a kid! In, like, fourth grade. It was a school recitation. I played a fuckin’ bard! I probably still know the lines…
T.S.F.N.
Do it. Do a little for us.
REAL HUSBAND
I don’t have a jerrycan of Sunkist to tap my ring on, but…
T.S.F.N.
C’mon, do some.
REAL HUSBAND
OK.…This is, like, totally from memory…and it isn’t verbatim, it’s sort of paraphrasing…
T.S.F.N.
Go for it.
REAL HUSBAND
OK…
Ike
is strolling down to the Miss America Diner. Instead of a monocle and a walking stick, this flâneur sports a tight guinea-T and a baseball bat. Uh…he’s loaded with gem-like apercus and aphorisms.…He enters the diner and…no, wait a minute…
REAL WIFE
Doomed, elusive
Ike
, Warlord of His Stoop…
REAL HUSBAND
Doomed, elusive
Ike
, Warlord of His Stoop…never ostentatious, self-righteous, or flamboyantly narcissistic, enters the diner…as if in a trance…a trance abetted by the obbligato of miscellaneous conversations, which is akin to the drone of the bards. “It’s his favorite restaurant!” a friend of the hero tells
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
in an exclusive interview. No, wait—that’s not right…” There are two opposed facets to
Ike
’s character, a friend of the hero tells
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
in an exclusive interview. “He abhors celebrity and yet covets immortality.”
Ike
himself is said to be troubled by the ambivalence in his character. “I dwell in anonymity. How is it, then, that I am enchanted by eternal renown?” One of the things about
Ike
that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn’t leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.…Uh—
REAL WIFE
Three crazy things to report…
REAL HUSBAND
Three crazy things to report:
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
has received a letter demanding that
Ike
be replaced by actor
Chace Crawford
…six bards were hacked to death by jilted, machete-wielding husbands whose wives had been seduced at a public recitation…we are now learning that the bards have been decapitated, and that the severed heads of the bards continue to cacophonously chant
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
…hold on…we have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting—let me repeat that: only
one
head is still chanting…we are now learning that drunken Ukrainian Cossacks, Mexican banditos wearing sombreros and crisscrossed cartridge bandoliers, khat-chewing Somali pirates, Indian Maoists (i.e., Naxalites), and Punjabi Taliban are playing
Buzkashi
with the headless carcasses of the slain bards. OK, we have just received word that all hell has broken loose. Children all over the world are now strangling their fathers with the intestines of their mothers. A single Chinook helicopter has been sent in to evacuate the loyalists, but its blades have been immobilized with what experts are calling “military-grade ass-cheese.” Ladies and gentlemen—we have just received an important clarification: all of this is apparently just part of a
Cirque du Soleil
show. Let me repeat that, for the benefit of those of you who are just tuning in: all of this is apparently just part of a
Cirque du Soleil
show. No one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds—
REAL WIFE
Even though this all turned out to be just part of a
Cirque du Soleil
show, this notion of severed bard-heads was like a remark stricken from the record in a courtroom—no one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds…
REAL HUSBAND
Right, right.…Even though this all turned out to be just part of a
Cirque du Soleil
show, this notion of severed bard-heads was like a remark stricken from the record in a courtroom—no one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds. In fact, in the
Twelfth Season,
some experts begin referring to the vagrant, drug-addled blind bards simply as “Severed Bard-Heads.” And a strange idea began to take root in the public imagination—that these severed bard-heads are gathered by itinerant children toting surplus NBA ball bags and sold to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Then the severed bard-heads are crushed in a kind of wine press, resulting in a “juicy pulp,” to which is added the spit of the horniest, hairiest, chubbiest, and most uneducated subproletarian women in that particular town or village (aka “
La Felina
’s Angels”). Enzymes in their saliva catalyze various chemical processes that culminate in what we today call “hallucinogenic Gravy.”
Some experts devote entire careers to the study of a single scene. For example, the unusually lachrymose (albeit highly ritualized) scene between
Ike
and his father at a restaurant, when
Ike
’s father says to him something to the effect of “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but your mother was a fat, sweaty, uneducated, subproletarian woman who didn’t have clue
one.
” And
Ike
indicates that he is weeping by slowly touching his sleeve to his forehead. And the father, noting this, says, “You know, I just realized something.…My father said almost the exact same thing to me at a restaurant when I was your age.” And then the father slowly touches
his
sleeve to
his
forehead. Or
Ike
’s lengthy and disjointed conversation with
La Felina
at Port Newark about whether
Rachel Lee
, the Korean-American mastermind of the “Bling Ring” (the gang of well-off Valley kids who burglarized the homes of
Paris Hilton
,
Lindsay Lohan
,
Orlando Bloom
, and
Audrina Patridge
, a regular on the reality show
The Hills
who famously complained after the burglary that “They took…jeans made to fit my body to my perfect shape”), constitutes a new kind of anarchist insurrectionary, a “Neo-Bandito” representing perhaps the new “lumpen celebutante,” or whether she’s just someone slavishly in thrall to the celebrities she admired, etc. (This colloquy all by itself is considered by some to be a stand-alone mini-epic.) And there are some experts who devote entire careers to the study of a brief vignette or a single passage: the God
Rikidozen
absently tapping a Sharpie on the lip of a coffee mug, and the unvarying cadence of that tap-tap-tap becoming the basis for the standard 124 beats-per-minute in house music; or the Dwarf Goddess
La Muñeca
turning her mortal girlfriend, Chief Warrant Officer
Francesca DiPasquale
, into a macadamia nut, a jai alai ball, and then 100,000 shares of Schering-Plough stock; or when
Bosco Hifikepunye
makes
Mi-Hyun
fifty feet tall and turns
Lenin
’s corpse and
Ted Williams
’s cryonically preserved head into anal sex toys for her; or when
Ike
says to the God of Money,
Doc Hickory
, “Can I ask you a stupid question? You don’t find me
dour,
do you?” and
Doc Hickory
’s like, “Dour?” and
Ike
goes, “Yeah, y’know, humorless,” and
Doc Hickory
’s like, “I know what
dour
means. I’m just wondering why you’re asking me,” and
Ike
goes, “Because I heard that
Mogul Magoo
told
Bosco Hifikepunye
that he thinks I’m all, like, dour and shit”; or when
Shanice
gets
Lady Rukia
to get
XOXO
to sabotage
Ike
’s daughter when she’s taking her tenth-grade math final and answering the question “If each of ‘Octomom’
Nadya Suleman
’s octuplets also have eight children and then each of their children have eight children and each of their children have eight children, etc., how many offspring would there be in eight generations?”; or
Candace Hilligoss
getting out of the bathtub in
Carnival of Souls
(to creepy organ music); or
Ike
inviting a gob of phlegm to a concert. And then there are those experts who devote entire careers to the study and minute exegesis of a single line. And among these particular experts who were entranced with the phrase “severed bard-heads,” there were several who became fixated upon the significance of the line “We have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting—let me repeat that: only
one
head is still chanting.” Contrary to their colleagues, who’d confected a theory of myriad free-floating severed bard-heads—that is, swarms of airborne anthropomorphic “scrubbing bubbles” or “nano-drones” whose punishingly repetitive high-pitched chants comprise what we think of today as
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
—these experts contend that there is, in fact, only
one
severed bard-head. These experts—who collectively have become known as the “Jersey City School” because most of them actually reside in Jersey City and are, in fact, all people who babysat or taught or coached
Ike
when he was a child (including his driver’s ed instructor and the chubby babysitter with the big-ass titties who “mildly molested” Ike while they watched
F-Troop
together)—believe that “the one severed bard-head” is inhabited by all the Gods, which accounts for the polyvocal buzzing or droning quality of the head. They have determined, allegedly through the use of spy satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and information provided clandestinely by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, that “the one severed bard-head” containing the Gods is kept in a minibar on the top floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. All of which leads inevitably to the question: Is “the one severed bard-head”
Ike
himself?
The identification of “the one severed bard-head” with
Ike
himself is persistent and completely understandable. Of course, one can hear in the cacophonous buzz that emanates from
Ike
’s head an echo—an analogue—of
Claude Lévi-Strauss
’s enigmatic dictum “the myths think themselves in me.” Also, the bards’ recitations are garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible.
Ike
’s continuous self-narration is garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. They are analogous. But are they one and the same? Isn’t
Ike
’s self-narration (and, of course, this very speculation, these very sentences) instantly and retroactively incorporated into the epic
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
and dutifully transmitted from generation to generation of chanting, drug-addled, blind “severed bard-heads” who maintain their trance-inducing beat by banging their chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda? An infinitely recursive epic that subtends and engulfs everything
about
it (i.e., everything extrinsic to it), and that has, for tens of thousands of years, at any given moment, been subject to the impish and sometimes spiteful corruptions and interpolations (or the out-and-out sabotage) of
XOXO
, presents a phenomenon that’s difficult to get your mind around.
REAL HUSBAND
He abhors celebrity
And yet covets immortality.
What is the meaning of the paradox?
What are its latent properties?
REAL WIFE
These portions can seem hopelessly corrupt.
XOXO
is winning the battle to ruin the book,
But he hasn’t won the war.
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the
Cirque du Soleil!
Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
When you need one!
REAL HUSBAND
Some scholars have recently compared
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
to Abacus 2007-AC1,
The mortgage investment vehicle which
Goldman Sachs VP
Fabrice Tourre
created.
REAL WIFE
And which he described,
In an e-mail to his girlfriend,
As a “Frankenstein” creation,
“A product of pure intellectual masturbation,
The type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,”
Which has no purpose,
Which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’”
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE