Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Later, as she serves Ikehis breakfast, The Waitressasks him if he’s into online porn at all.

“Yes, totally,” Ikereplies.

“Well,” she says, “you know how in porn movies the women always narrate what’s happening to them in the second person? The ‘you’re doing this, you’re doing that’ thing? ‘You’re licking my hard nipples’ or ‘You’re putting your big cock in my juicy pussy’ or ‘You’re gonna pound that pussy, you’re just gonna tear that pussy up, aren’t you?’” (She is so totally flirting with him right now.)

Ikelooks intensely into her eyes for a moment, and then he says, “You’re serving me a hot tongue sandwich; you’re putting the plate right in front of me; you’re setting an ice-cold Sunkist orange soda down right next to my big, crunchy onion rings.”

And The Waitresssmiles. “Second-person present-tense narration makes everything super-fucking-hot. I don’t know why exactly. You know how dentists always keep you apprised of everything they’re doing as they’re doing it, so you don’t get all freaked out? ‘I’m putting a dental dam in your mouth.…I’m making an opening through the crown of your tooth to gain access to the pulp chamber. I’m using an endodontic file to remove the diseased pulp tissue from the root canal.…Now I’m using a plugger to place the gutta-percha points into your empty root canals to replace the pulp tissue which I removed.’ Wouldn’t it be super-fucking-hot in the second-person, if the patient was like, “You’re making an opening through the crown of my tooth to gain access to the pulp chamber. You’re using an endodontic file to remove the diseased pulp tissue from the root canal.…Oh, God, now you’re using a plugger to place the gutta-percha points into my empty root canals to replace the pulp tissue which you removed’? Except that you probably wouldn’t be able to understand anything she’s saying with all that stuff in her mouth.”

Experts have made much of the links between the garbled speech of the dental patient; the mumbled, almost incoherent, shoegazey chanting of the vagrant, drug-addled bards; and the murmured, diffident, barely audible utterances of Ike Kartonhimself. But what implications are latent in these links? (That anagogic significance is not conveyed through discursive meaning, maybe?)

“Second-person present-tense narration somehow detaches the link between your actions and your own volition,” Ikesays, “as if what you think you’re doing spontaneously has already been predetermined, as if it’s been reenacted countless times before. It ritualizes the extemporaneous. It can make every mundane thing you do feel like a dénouement that’s been gestating since the beginning of time.”

“Totally,” The Waitresssays, cracking her gum.

And it’s here, for the first time, that we begin to suspect that we (and Ike, for that matter) may have been had, that The Waitressmay be far less disingenuous and far more calculating than she seemed at first blush, i.e., much more of a professional waitress (perhaps the professional waitress par excellence ) who knows just how to say all the right things and use all that cogent body language and instinctively acclimate herself to all the psychological idioms of her customers, peppering them with risqué innuendos, buttering them up with all sorts of blandishments, and milking them for helplessly exorbitant tips — although, it must be said, that this reading of her as merely Machiavellianis mitigated by the indisputable authenticity of her affect (i.e., her “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.

Whether it’s because he’s genuinely inspired by her or simply avails himself of the opportunity once she leaves to tend to her other tables, Ikenow dashes off his narcocorrido:

That’s Me (Ike’s Song)

Do you hear that mosquito,

that toilet flushing upstairs,

that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?

That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One, Despised

Whore, Lonely Nut Job…

I am looking up at your face

through the chartreuse froth

of your female ejaculate.

I am the sexual messiah

of every bespectacled bipolar girl

in her library carrel,

every lesbian lacrosse star,

every dorm-room slut, degenerate babysitter,

and fat, euthanizing, anal-sex-freak nurse.

I am the sexual messiah of the three-legged,

bulimic crypto-nympho rank and file.

The black cleft between your buttocks

is the primordial vector.

It’s the first line

drawn in the sands of time.

When the waitress returns with another ice-cold can of Sunkist orange, Ikeshows her the narcocorrido. (Compare Ike’s anxiety as The Waitressreads the lyrics of his song to XOXO’s anxiety as Shaniceread his poem.)

The Waitresstells Ikethat the song is totally anthemic and romantic, and that she feels like he wrote it just for her because all her life people have called her a fat bipolar whore. She adds that it’s a little self-vaunting (the sexual messiah part), but that she really likes that aspect of it because it makes it even more super-fucking-hot, but that, to be honest, it did surprise her a little at first because Ikeseems so modest and reserved. Ikeexplains that it’s exaggerated for dramatic effect and that the first-person narrator of the song isn’t him; it’s a character, it’s the persona of a Gravy trafficker (which is what makes the song a narcocorrido, by the way). She says she totally gets that — that Eminemisn’t Slim Shadyand Daniel Dumileisn’t MF Doom. “Exactly,” Ike says. “Take a song like the Bee Gees’ ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.’ You’ve got the narrator of the song who’s a guy who’s about to be executed in the electric chair for killing his wife’s lover, but Robin Gibbnever killed his wife’s lover and he obviously hasn’t been executed in the electric chair. It’s just a character.” The Waitresssays it’s sort of like that Ass Ponyssong “Hey Swifty,” and she recites all the lyrics to the song, which she’s assiduously memorized by heart.

Ikethen tells her that his narcocorrido definitely expresses, in a poetic way, his beliefs about smashing the cultural and sociosexual hegemony of rich, privileged celebrities, and how fervently he’s wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low, to the lumpen, to the misshapen and the misbegotten. Then he says, “I’m sort of surprised you remember an Ass Ponyssong so well,” and she says that she originally just liked the band because of its name, because her father had always called her his “Ass Pony.”

And Ikepauses for a moment (for dramatic effect) and says, “So did mine.”

Some experts contend that showing the narcocorrido to The Waitress—which seems like an overt act of seduction — is actually a means to simply ingratiate himself with The Waitress(and, by extension, the entire waitstaff at the diner) so that Ike’s family can get discounted food there after his imminent death. But this reading of Ikeas merely Machiavellianis mitigated not only by the fact that The Kartonsdo indeed perform the narcocorrido at “The Last Concert” but by the indisputable authenticity of his affect (i.e., his “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.