Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

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.

XOXOis 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 Tourrecreated.

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

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

“Going into the forest to gather wild garlic”

Is a euphemism for those times

When Ikestares off into space,

Listening to the voice of a particular

God who’s speaking to him.

REAL WIFE

Or when he thinks

The writhing Goddesses are

Ogling him and masturbating,

Or when he thinks he hears

The distant whine of a

Drone aircraft circling overhead.

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

Ikehad a dream about La Felina.

There was something dangling from her snatch.

At first Ikethought it was a tampon string,

But as he came closer

He could see that it was a fortune.

REAL WIFE

He pulled it out and read it.

It said, “To propitiate XOXO,

So he allows your story to be told

In a quasi-coherent way,

You must kill your father, etc.

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!

The REAL HUSBANDand REAL WIFEstop tapping their wedding rings on their cans of Sunkist orange soda, and the tempo slows.

The sky darkens.

REAL WIFEI just want to tell you something. We both knew exactly what we were getting into when we signed on to this whole Sugar Frosted Nutsack thing…

REAL HUSBANDI realize that.

REAL WIFEI’m fated to leave you for a blind, drug-​addled bard, and then you have to enucleate your own eyeballs. It’s all foretold in the epic. You have to really do it — I mean, the eye thing.

REAL HUSBANDI know.

REAL WIFENo regrets?

REAL HUSBANDIn the Thirteenth Season, when Iketells The Waitressat the Miss America diner about his intention (and destiny) to commit suicide-by-cop and thus enable his family to collect on his life insurance policy, The Waitresssays that “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.” And I believe that.

(The following is sung to the melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde .)

REAL WIFE

At the risk of hoisting myself

On my own petard,

I’m leaving you

For a blind, drug-addled bard.

REAL HUSBAND

What about Cupid’s Stigmata?

REAL WIFE

My heart’s started an Intifada!

As she departs, he calls out to her—

REAL HUSBAND

Instead of humiliating myself

By begging you to come back,

I’ll devote the rest of my life

To chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack !

He takes a melon baller from the picnic basket…

REAL HUSBAND

’Scuse me while I kiss the sky!

…and blinds himself.

We hear the opening bars of the Mister Softee jingle softly repeating over and over again, as if from a vast distance…over and over and over again…for hours, for days…​months…years…as if for an eternity…

Until—

REAL HUSBANDWe’ve got a caller.

Apparently the Mister Softee jingle is the ringtone for the Husband’s cellphone, which he retrieves from his jacket pocket.

REAL HUSBANDHello, you’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLERHello?

REAL HUSBANDYou’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLERI have a question for Ike.

REAL HUSBAND Ike’s not here. He’s at the Miss America Diner. I can give you his cellphone number or the number for the diner.

CALLERMaybe you could help me.

REAL HUSBANDI’ll try.

CALLEROK. I have a couple of questions, but let me start with this one: why is Ike’s daughter’s name never revealed?

REAL HUSBANDOut of respect for her privacy.

CALLEROK. I know this question will probably make me seem hopelessly provincial, but…why is there so much sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack ? You can’t listen to even thirty seconds of a public recitation without hearing these drug-addled, vagrant bards chanting about cocks and pussies and clits and tits and balls and asses and shiksa asses and spectacular big-ass asses and hot Jew jizz and fucking and masturbating.…​Why?

REAL HUSBANDBecause it’s sex-drenched and death-drenched.