Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

So audiences do not necessarily have to concentrate on each word, gesture, or nuance of meaning that comes from the bards. If your neighbor talks, you don’t try to quiet him. The overall impression at most recitations is chaos, as food vendors, children, and adults ceaselessly move up and down the aisles. No one can be expected to sit through an eight- or nine-hour performance without talking, eating, or getting up. Young children romp in the aisles, and when the action gets exciting they mass by the footlights like moths drawn to a flame. The predominantly female audience will continue to talk long after a recitation has begun. Many people doze during less interesting scenes and, in fact, bring their own straw mats on which they sit and sleep.

But when the bards’ recitations get particularly lurid (e.g., the scene in the Tenth Season in which Ikegoes to his daughter’s school to have a meeting with her math teacher, loses his temper, and threatens to sodomize the teacher if he doesn’t agree to give her a passing grade), spectators leap to their feet and the children howl with uproarious laughter, clap, whistle, and yell out encouragement. It may shock some people unfamiliar with orally transmitted epics that audiences would find men threatening each other with anal rape so entertaining. Perhaps it’s not hard to understand why uneducated, working-class, middle-aged women might find homoerotic sadism wildly diverting — but children? It could very possibly be that the children don’t even understand the content of what’s being chanted here at all (the language in this Season is almost impenetrably thick with de Sadeanbombast) and are being whipped into paroxysms of excitement by nothing more than the hysterical cacophony of the bards. Also, the scene has an undeniable slapstick quality, with all its tumultuous, pants-at-the-knees, chase-me-around-the-office antics. And usually bards portray the math teacher as such a stock commedia dell’arte villain — i.e. the sanctimonious martinet moonlighting as JV basketball coach and driver’s ed instructor, etc. — that it’s easy to cheer on Ike, even if you disapprove of his cell-block bluster.

There was one prominent and controversial expert who actually believed that the traditional style of the bards (i.e., slurred, mumbling, etc.) so garbles the content of what they are chanting that almost no literal meaning is actually ever transmitted. Jake S. Emig, in an erudite and exquisitely reasoned treatise, only slightly marred by vitriolic ad hominem attacks on several female colleagues (who’d reportedly objected to explicit photographs of himself that he’d texted them), contended that since audiences can’t understand anything that the bards are chanting, they are creating each time, almost out of whole cloth, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for themselves, out of what they think they hear. After subjecting thousands of hours of taped recitations to sophisticated audiological analysis, he wrote, “It is more than likely that there is no originative, coherent epic, that there is merely a succession of misinterpretations of the bards’ muffled cacophony, of their static, their white noise.” Emig, an enigmatic figure, started his career as a semiprofessional hockey player. For several years he was a forward for Thetford Mines Isothermic, a team in the Ligue Nord-​Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), which is generally considered the most violent hockey league in the world. Emig’s teammates on Thetford Mines Isothermic included veteran NHL defenseman Yves Racineand right winger Gaetan Royer, who played games with the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2001–02 season and also played for the Bartercard Gold Coast Blue Tongues in the Australian Ice Hockey League (AIHL) in 2008. Emigwas forced to retire from professional hockey as a result of post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and a succession of DUI arrests. It was then that he became interested in the field of forensic audiology, received his Masters of Applied Science degree several years later, and soon thereafter became an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Forensic Audiology at Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida. Almost immediately upon publication of Emig’s study, “Castles of Hardened Bullshit,” his work was completely discredited by discoveries that he’d crudely altered much of his audiological research to suit his thesis. Less than a week after these revelations surfaced, Emigwas found dead at his gym, Bodies-N-Motion, on East Main Street in Leesburg. At first it was naturally assumed that Emig, distraught over the self-inflicted damage to his academic reputation, had committed suicide. But forensic allergists were able to determine that the scholar had succumbed to food-associated, exercise-induced anaphylaxis. Emig, who was allergic to shellfish, was also receiving weekly immunotherapeutic injections of dust-mite extract to treat his chronic allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. On the afternoon of his death, he’d ordered a bowl of num pachok chon (a Cambodian freshwater-snail noodle soup) from a food truck parked near campus. He’d been intrigued by a photograph of the dish taped to the truck, but was completely unaware of its ingredients. After consuming the soup, Emigwent to the gym and began a vigorous session of aerobic exercise. Within a half hour, he reportedly broke out in giant hives, began to wheeze, vomited, collapsed across the elliptical, and died. There’s a significant cross-reactivity between house dust mites and snails, and the combination of dust-mite extract in the immunotherapy injections with the shellfish in the noodle soup and the strenuous exercise proved to be too much for Jake Emig’s system to withstand. Soon after his death, a law was enacted — known today as “Jake’s Law”—that makes it a federal crime to knowingly sell any noodle soup containing freshwater snails to anyone receiving immunotherapy injections of dust-mite extract.

Intriguingly, when volunteers at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, Florida, who’d been locked in sweltering Porta-Johns and subjected to bards chanting the words “sugar frosted nutsack” nonstop for twelve hours, were asked what visual images occurred to them most frequently, the majority reported envisioning a white planet with a kind of scrotal topography (i.e., “ridged,” “wrinkled,” “corrugated,” etc.). Some simply saw the planet spinning in empty space. Others saw themselves actually on the planet, in a car on an empty highway traversing a desolate, bluish-white, furrowed landscape which radiated out infinitely to the horizon. One of the students ( Heidi, a junior majoring in Public Safety Administration / Homeland Security who “loves Godiva chocolates and champagne”) visualized herself standing on the planet, disproportionately large, “like The Little Prince.”

The phrase “sugar frosted nutsack” occurs 3,385 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (including this sentence). Scholars suspect that this number corresponds to Section 3385, Title 8, of the California Code of Regulations: “Appropriate foot protection shall be required for employees who are exposed to foot injuries from electrical hazards, hot, corrosive, poisonous substances, falling objects, crushing or penetrating actions, which may cause injuries, or who are required to work in abnormally wet locations.” It’s thought that this mystical numerological correspondence might derive from the concern that bards have traditionally had about maintaining the health of their feet, since they are peripatetic and spend the preponderance of their lives walking from village to village. (There are many other eerie mystical numerological correspondences. The flight distance between San Diego, California, and Bogotá, Colombia, is 3,385 miles. The date 3/3/85 is the birthday of Lithuanian supermodel Dovile Virsilaite. The sum of the digits—3+3+8+5—equals 19. The smallest number of neutrons for which there is no stable isotope is 19. The composer Béla Bartókfinished his Opus 19 in 1919 when he was 38 (twice 19). The product of the digits—3x3x8x5—equals 360. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Petition for Amerasian, Widow(er), or Special Immigrant is I-360. The area code for most of western Washington State, including the city of Bremerton, is 360. Ben Gibbard, the lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie, was born in, believe it or not, Bremerton! There are actually so many mystical numerological correspondences that you’re like, this is so fucking weird.)