Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

The men who do attend public recitations of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack tend to be academic experts, connoisseurs by avocation, or individuals who aspire to be bards. Audiences, though, are composed predominantly of working-class, middle-aged women with little education, who are seeking to establish romantic relationships with the bards. These women chatter, eat, drink, smoke, spit betel juice and pumpkin seeds on the earthen floor, call raucously across the auditorium to each other, and, in imperious voices, order vendors to bring them fried chicken, beer, tampons, whatever they need at the moment. They frequently demonstrate the warmth of their feelings by giving small gifts to bards during the course of a performance. A “donor” will toss them gifts of cigarettes, candy, cologne, or a small amount of money. A gift is often wrapped in a note, requesting a favor of the bard in return. A bard may be asked, for instance, to perform a private recitation. In some cases, bards receive quite large sums of money or valuable gifts ranging from expensive toilet articles and wristwatches to flat-screen TVs, Mercedes-Benz cars, and luxury apartments — anything to pamper them. Often there is a sexual attachment between the donor and the bard. Liaisons between lusty middle-aged women and handsome young bards are especially common. Some of these women are widows, some are still married. They love to make a show of themselves at the public recitations and squander their husbands’ money on bards with whom they’ve become infatuated.

Most of the blind bards were, at one time, sighted audience members whose wives left them for the bards they met at public recitations. These distraught men, suddenly bereft of their spouses, then blinded themselves and, in turn, became itinerant bards, traveling from town to town, chanting what they remember hearing or think they heard at recitations, although they, too, mumble in such an incomprehensible manner (the traditional style) that it’s truly remarkable they convey anything at all to their audiences, one member of which will invariably include the sweaty, lusty middle-aged woman with the spectacular big-ass ass who will become the bard’s new wife, leaving yet another jilted man to gouge out his eyes. This is the endless reproductive cycle of the bard.

An Inside The Sugar Frosted Nutsack reunion season finale features an exclusive interview with a real husband and real wife who’ve just emerged from a public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (an interview which is, of course, immediately incorporated into The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and which experts today consider an integral component of the epic itself, and which audiences naturally expect the bards to ritually chant in its entirety). The real husband and real wife spontaneously perform a power ballad (with its shades of George Jonesand Tammy Wynette) and a Wagnerianduet. This combination of declaimed passages (in which the blind, vagrant, drug-addled bards attempt to realistically imitate the voices of characters) and sung passages of greater (or lesser) lyrical beauty provide an enjoyable variety, keeping the recitation — even of long, mind-numbing exegetical monologues — from becoming tedious. Keep in mind that almost immediately after this interview is conducted, the woman leaves her husband for a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard she met at the very performance she just attended, and that her husband promptly enucleates both of his eyeballs and becomes — what else? — a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard.

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 HUSBANDThe 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 Spearsat the MTV VMAs or Japan’s Minister of Finance Shoichi Nakagawaat 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 HUSBANDDyslexic, 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 WIFEWell, 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 XOXOinscribing 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 WIFEAbout 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 Ikeso 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 WIFEThere 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 WIFEThe “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 WIFENo, 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 Ikeis 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.