Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

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 WIFEI’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 WIFERight.

T.S.F.N.You don’t like movies?

REAL WIFEI 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 HUSBANDAlso, 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 HUSBANDWe 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 HUSBANDWell, 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 HUSBANDI’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 Porterand Elton Johnand 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 HUSBANDYeah. 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 WIFEIt’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 WIFEWell, I’d been there a couple of years, studying painting, and I’d been doing all this, y’know, completely derivative work— Kenneth Nolandrip-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 Josephand 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 Richterexhibit 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 Richterhad done based on photographs of Andreas Baaderand Ulrike Meinhofand their deaths.…It occurred to me at the time that maybe XOXOhad 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 WIFEI 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, XOXOmust 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 WIFENo. Look at the so-called “art world.” Fucking David Geffensells a de Kooningto this hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohenfor 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 Ikegetting 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 WIFEWhen 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.