Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

“Damn,” Vancesays, spinning the wheel of his BMX bike, the spokes rhythmically thrumming the empty Sunkist can.

Later, Iketells Vanceabout his special diet for the week preceding his violent death: two meals a day, each meal consisting of 16 oz of cole slaw served in a “sacred” blue Dansk plastic salad bowl and two rounded scoops (44 g each) of BSN Syntha-6 banana-flavored protein powder mixed into 12 oz of Sunkist orange soda. “The cole slaw is for roughage,” he explains to Vance. “I want to have a clean colon when I die,” he tells him, “because when the Mossad kills you, Israeli law requires them to do a colonoscopy on your corpse as part of the autopsy. It’s this Yid fixation with the gastrointestinal tract.” Ike(SO high) totally cracks up at the sheer perversity of his rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism. And then he tells Vanceabout how he had an appointment with his urologist the other day, and the Discovery Channel was on the TV in the waiting room, and there was a show about the origin of cole slaw, about how it was originally called “Cossack Saddle Cabbage,” and about how a Cossack horseman would take a razor-sharp hatchet and shred a couple of raw cabbages and pack it into a rawhide sack and actually use that as a saddle, and how, over long distances, the horse sweat would actually pickle the cabbage, producing a version of what we today call “cole slaw,” and how the name “Cole Slaw” is actually the result of a careless transliteration of the phrase “Cossack Saddle Cabbage” by a harried immigration official at Ellis Island. (Note, here, a foreshadowing of Ike’s discussion about the significance of naming. ) Vance(high school dropout) is too gullible and too fucked up to know whether Ikeis putting him on or not. Also, some people (e.g., experts) wonder whether Ike, in reality, wasn’t in the living room of his two-story hermitage, watching the Discovery Channel on his own TV, in his wifebeater and night-vision goggles, with his bottle of Scotch, and simply imagined that he was in the waiting room of a urologist. One never knows with Ike, who must perpetually contend with the mischievous and mind-manipulating XOXO, who, in turn, persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha. Meanwhile, in the course of discussing the change in his diet and needing to be strong for “The Last Concert” and his martyrdom, Ikeapologizes to Vancefor not inviting him to be in the band ( The Kartons).…“You’re not a Karton, though,” he says. And Vancegoes, “I know, names have talismanic power; when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name; the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name; a person is just a hash of glands and myelin sheathing and electrochemical impulses, but there’s no discernable context, no recognizable pattern, it’s all incoherent, until it’s organized and orchestrated into a story, into a fate, by that name. ” (Experts today are in almost unanimous agreement that this scene and the scene that follows it are in the WRONG ORDER! Vanceis sarcastically parroting, almost verbatim, Ike’s ideas about naming that Ikehasn’t even expressed yet, and won’t until the next scene. So, unless the Gravy has endowed Vancewith uncanny powers of precognition, the two scenes should obviously be reversed. But this remains the canonical sequence, because bards — surprisingly hidebound for drug-addled vagrants — insist on continuing to recite the epic as it’s traditionally been recited for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.) At any rate, there’s something so mocking and provocative about Vance’s tone (probably because he’s SO high on Gravy) that it makes Ikemomentarily furious. His great impacted anger flares, his festering Maoist/ Mansonesquerage. (In his coiled fury, Ikeis like Tetsuo, the Iron Man. He dreams of Red Guard maenads, of flesh-eating Maoistzombies tearing celebrities apart.) And he almost impulsively smashes Vance’s face in with his bat. And he would have done it so quickly and so brutally that Vancewould never have had a chance to even pull his Glock 17 from the waistband of his jeans. But La Felina(who, of course, with a Goddess’s telescopic vision, is ogling Ikefrom the penthouse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) intervenes by swooping down into Jersey City and impersonating a young nanny from Côte d’Ivoire (with a spectacular big-ass ass and big-ass titties), who sashays past pushing a white baby in a stroller, distracting Ike(he imagines that look on the nanny’s face, that moment of surrender to her own indigenous pleasure, etc., etc.), and by the time she passes out of sight, Ike’s temper has cooled, and, high as he is, he smiles and shakes his head abashedly at his own propensity for explosive violence. His lust and his rage are strong. He never dithers. Thrown into this world, he maneuvers himself with the unfaltering aplomb of a somnambulist, but a somnambulist in blazing daylight, in the “blaze of the gaze.” (Whether this scene is intended to augur the hyperviolent demise of Ike Kartonor this is merely identifiable with the benefit of hindsight remains a question contested by experts, but it is surely tempting to see in the overt symbolism of Ike’s bat and Vance’s Glock a prefiguration of the epic’s death-drenched climax.) As if to atone for his transient wrath, Ikeoffers Vanceanother fascinating factoid: that, in the week before he himself was guillotined, Maximilien Robespierre(another one of La Felina’s “boy-toys”) subsisted on black coffee and marzipan.

“I may not understand life,” Ikesays, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, “but I know how to die magnificently.”

“For real,” Vanceavers, spinning the wheel.

“I love my fate,” Ikesays, channeling Friedrich Nietzsche.

“If you love your fate so much, why don’t you marry it?” Vance(who’s so high) asks.

“I’m fervently wedded to my fate,” answers Ike.

And here, of course, as throughout, you feel Ike’s fealty to his fate in his smile, not in his solemnity.

“How are things going with you and my daughter?” Ikeasks, not using his daughter’s name out of respect for her privacy.

Vancedescribes being raised by hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen as “ The Vagina Monologues if it were hosted by Jerry Springer.…There was a lot of disclosure, a lot of sharing, followed by a lot of violence…so I’m used to all that obstreperous emoting.…But with your daughter, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her.” (That line, “it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her,” will become critically important relative to the daughter’s impending pregnancy on Thursday night’s episode.) Then, Vanceasks Ikehow he got his wife, Ruthie, to fall in love with him, and Iketells him that the first time he saw Ruthieshe was thrashing on a patch of grass at Lincoln Park in Jersey City, wearing a see-through prairie dress and no underwear, wildly plucking at a zither. “I was immediately struck by her anarcho-primitivist hypersexuality. Although, she was more petite and hygienic than the women I usually go for, and she seemed educated to me — which I usually don’t like. I usually go for women who can barely follow an episode of Dora the Explorer without becoming hopelessly befuddled and breaking into tears. I just find them, on the whole, more wonder struck ( thaumazein ).” So he read every book and saw every movie and every play that features a character named Ruthieor Ruth—every single boldface Ruthor Ruthie—including Dr. Ruth Westheimerin Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50: Revving up the Romance, Passion & Excitement!; Ruth Bader Ginsburgin Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court; Ruth(“a woman in her early thirties”) in Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming ; the patio-sealant huffing Ruth Stoopsin Citizen Ruth (the Alexander Paynemovie starring Laura Dern); and, of course, Ruthin The Book of Ruth, in which Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi(which means “the delightful one”), changes her name to Mara(which means “the bitter one”): “And she said unto them, ‘Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.’”