Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

REAL HUSBANDRight, 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 Ikeand 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 Ikeindicates 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 Felinaat 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 Rikidozenabsently 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 Muñecaturning 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 Hifikepunyemakes Mi-Hyunfifty feet tall and turns Lenin’s corpse and Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head into anal sex toys for her; or when Ikesays 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 Ikegoes, “Yeah, y’know, humorless,” and Doc Hickory’s like, “I know what dour means. I’m just wondering why you’re asking me,” and Ikegoes, “Because I heard that Mogul Magootold Bosco Hifikepunyethat he thinks I’m all, like, dour and shit”; or when Shanicegets Lady Rukiato get XOXOto 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 Hilligossgetting out of the bathtub in Carnival of Souls (to creepy organ music); or Ikeinviting 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 Ikewhen 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” Ikehimself?

The identification of “the one severed bard-head” with Ikehimself 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. The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head