Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

CALLERBut why is it sex-drenched and death-drenched?

REAL HUSBANDBecause Ikeis obsessed with sex and death. The seventeenth-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, describing the proper attitude of a warrior, wrote, “Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.” The Marquis de Sadewrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Combine the two and you have Ike Karton. (FYI, Vincent van Gogh’s last words before he shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise were “Fuck Kirk Douglas.”)

CALLERThere are just these punishingly repetitive references to anal sex toys and bedraggled, sweaty, chubby, mature, subproletarian women and hairy, Asian, midget, hypoglycemic, type-O-negative plumpers who squirt, etc.

REAL HUSBANDThere is also — and I don’t know if you’re aware of this — a punishingly repetitive use of the phrase “punishingly repetitive.” In fact, the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times (including this sentence) in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLERIs there any mystical significance to the number 251?

REAL HUSBANDNot to my knowledge. But did you know that it’s impossible for a horse to vomit and that Turkish Taffy was Harry Houdini’s favorite candy?

CALLERIt says, “ Ikesuffers from irregular clonic jerks of the head and neck ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old.” What college was he attending at the time?

REAL HUSBAND Ikewas going to F.I.T., but after one semester he dropped out and worked part-time in the meat department at a Gristedes on the Upper West Side.

CALLERYou don’t happen to have the exact address, do you?

REAL HUSBANDWhy?

CALLERBecause I’m planning a weekend where I go and visit all the key sites in Ike’s life, like the barbershop where he went as a kid and experienced “the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid, Jerry Vale(‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties,” and the park bench in Lincoln Park where he read “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” to Ruthiewhen they were dating, and the two-story brick “hermitage” where he and Ruthieand their daughter live, etc. So I’d definitely want to go to the Gristedes where he had his first butcher job.

REAL HUSBANDAll right, let me put you on hold for a moment and I’ll check on that for you.

The REAL HUSBAND’sMOH (Music on Hold) is Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Tristan und Isolde. Several moments pass, and then—

REAL HUSBANDYou still there?

CALLERYes, I’m here.

REAL HUSBANDSorry that took so long. I’m newly sightless. The address of the Gristedes is 251 West 86th Street at Broadway.

CALLER251? You’re kidding.

REAL HUSBANDNo, why?

CALLERThat is so fucking weird.

REAL HUSBANDWhy?

CALLERBecause 251 is the number of times the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. And it’s the address of the first place where Ikehad a butcher job. You don’t think there’s any mystical significance in that?

REAL HUSBANDHonestly, I think it’s a complete coincidence.

CALLERYou seriously think the fact that the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and the fact that the address of the Gristedes where Ike Kartonhad his first butcher job is 251 West 86th Street is a complete coincidence?

REAL HUSBANDI really do.

CALLERYou’re being serious?

REAL HUSBANDYeah.

There’s a long pause…then—

CALLERIt says in the Fourteenth Season, “Even within his small, haimish Jersey City neighborhood of attached two-story brick homes, Ikeconducts himself with the guarded reserve and fateful solemnity of an exile. Doomed hero, dear to the Gods, unwavering, set apart by his fealty and his inexorable fate, but never evincing the hauteur of a freak, he calls his bowel movements his ‘little brother.’” I don’t completely understand what that means.

REAL HUSBANDYou know how some women call their period their “friend”? It’s sort of like that. Ikeis very courtly. He’d never say, “I have to go take a crap” or “a dump” or anything like that. He’d say, “My little brother is visiting.” Or “Excuse me, I think my little brother is here.” Or “Could you pull into that rest stop over there, I didn’t expect my little brother to get here so suddenly. He must have taken an earlier flight.” Or “He must have decided to take the Acela, instead of the regular Amtrak.”

CALLEROh…I get it.

REAL HUSBANDAnd the closer Ikegets to the violent death which is his inexorable fate, the more intensely kindred he feels with things that are considered by most people to be base or odious, which is one of the things that makes him such a hero, I think. So there’s also a symbolic component to his calling a bowel movement his brother. It’s the same sort of thing as in the Fifteenth Season, in that scene where he and Vanceare going to meet the God who’s supposedly selling hallucinogenic Gravy to Vance, and some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and Ikestops, and he kneels down, and he says to the gob of phlegm, “Fräulein, my band, The Kartons, is giving a Final Concert later this week, and I’d be very much honored if you would attend.” This is Ike, with his sort of plainspoken eloquence, expressing the paradoxical nature of his character — destined for the glory of a martyr’s immortality but, at the same time, fervently wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low.

CALLERYou’re the one who’s actually reciting what I’m saying, right?

REAL HUSBANDYes. You’re like a Japanese bunraku puppet and I’m like the chanter (the tayu ) who performs all the characters’ voices.

CALLERSo does it have to say “ CALLER” like that? I don’t feel like being some sort of boldface signifier. Can’t I just be part of your recitation?

“Sure.”

“That’s better. Thank you. It was like being on speakerphone before. I want to ask you a question about these itinerant children who are toting the surplus NBA ball bags around and gathering severed bard-heads and selling them to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Doesn’t this drive home the whole issue of how detrimental cheap foreign labor is to American workers? If you have an unlimited supply of these vagrant kids outside the country who are willing to sell severed bard-heads for several rupees a head, it doesn’t matter to an American severed-bard-head scavenger how quickly our economy recovers or how fast it grows — the market value of a severed bard-head is going to be several rupees.”