Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

When Vancestops spinning the BMX wheel, Ike’s whispery rasp is suddenly foregrounded in utter silence, imparting great drama to whatever he’s saying. And so too will the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards when they re-create this scene, and cease rhythmically banging their chunky chachkas against their jerrycans of orange soda, and intone, in the sudden sepulchral hush, the words “At dawn, he commits seppuku, solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand,” or “‘You were absolutely right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘ Dick Van Dyke.’”

Because he’s so high on Gravy, Ikementions to Vancethat the Goddesses use him as pornography when they masturbate. Ikealso makes the curious statement that fate enables a Goddess to know exactly when to watch him. “If I’m doing something, say, at 10:38 PM EST on a Monday night, it’s because I’m fated to be doing it then — it’s precisely scheduled that way so a Goddess can find me easily. These are what they call my listings. Long ago the Gods ordained these things.” If only Vancewere his son, perhaps Ikecould be even more forthcoming and discuss his impending tryst with La Felina. Nonetheless, he does disclose to Vancethat the thought of being shamelessly ogled by writhing autoerotomaniacal Goddesses makes his nutsack tingle as if it were a “sachet of plutonium potpourri.” Vanceis like, “Sometimes I get so horny that one of my nuts starts gnawing on the other one.”

And it’s here that Ikemakes the cryptic — and endlessly analyzed — assertion that his scrotum contains two eyeballs.

The Gravy’s made them both telepathic, so Ikeknows that Vanceis wondering what it’s like to fuck a Goddess, and Iketells him — without having to say a word — that the greatest thing about having sex with a Goddess (or a human woman, for that matter) is the expression on her face when she capitulates to her own pleasure. It’s a return, a homecoming, riffs Ike. It’s that sublime moment when she defects to the old country, to her ancestral homeland, to her own private paradise— “where everything was italicized, where things happened without any discernable context, where there were no recognizable patterns, where it was all incoherent; where isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next; where a terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and T-shirts that read ‘I Don’t Do White Guys’) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear.” It’s that moment she succumbs to herself, surrenders to her depersonalized, oceanic subjectivity, uncorrupted by the narratives of fathers, husbands, village elders, etc. It’s a renunciation of modernity, thinks Ike—doomed, compulsively hermeneutic, unemployed, anarcho-primitivist, gym-rat. “What does it look like?” wonders Vancewordlessly. “Like the grimace of someone throwing herself on an electrified fence at a border crossing or the imperturbable serenity of someone about to do a reverse three-and-a-half somersault tuck into the abyss,” Ikereplies in his thoughts. And Vancewonders whether Ike’s entire hermetically enclosed, paranoid, narcissistic Weltanschauung isn’t simply the fetishization of this single snapshot of female jouissance …but then he shrugs, unable to remember (never mind comprehend) a single word of what he just thought.

Ordinarily Ikeprobably wouldn’t be so candid with Vance, except that he’s SO high on Gravy. It’s like military-grade Gravy, and Ikesuspects that Vanceis being supplied by a God. And sure enough, once Vancedescribes the “guy” he’s getting his shit from, Ike’s almost certain that it’s someone who’s being impersonated by the God Bosco Hifikepunye. (The incident in which Ikeactually encounters this “guy” is the basis for the celebrated and extensively studied episode from the Fifteenth Season, during which Ikewill kneel down and say to a 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,” accentuating the dignity he bestows on the lowest of the low. Ike’s suspicion that Vance’s supplier is Bosco Hifikepunyeis confirmed when Ikediscovers fresh loot drops (or “God guano”) in the vicinity.)

They are SO high.

This Gravy is super-potent.

It’s military-grade Gravy.

Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins…

The mesmerizing metronomic tick

of the spokes thrumming against

the empty Sunkist can…

Vancespins the BMX wheel not as if it were a Himalayan prayer wheel (as some shit-for-brains experts have stupidly suggested).…He spins it like Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade . Gretchenis singing at her spinning wheel, in anguished erotic contemplation of Faust. “Mein armer Kopf / Ist mir verrückt, / Mein aremer Sinn / Ist mir zerstückt.” (“My poor head / Is crazy to me, / My poor mind / Is torn apart.”)

Like Gretchen, Vanceseems here like someone smitten, someone besotted. Yes, Vanceis captivated by Ike’s diffident magnificence, his “death-drenched luminosity.” But there’s something vaguely homoerotic in the way he absently spins his wheel and stares vacantly at his girlfriend’s father, something of the grotto-groping Goddesses’ vacuous gazes, that so perfectly reflects the slack drift of the masturbating mind.

“Oh my god, we love the same song!” Vancesays at one point, in such a lilting tone of blithe, unalloyed affection that it’s hard not to read at least some element of homoeroticism into the remark.

Just as the piano in Schubert’s Lied stops as Gretchenbecomes completely distracted by the thought of Faust’s kiss and forgets to keeps spinning— “Mein Busen drängt sich / Nach ihm hin. / Ach dürft ich fassen / Und halten ihn, / Und küssen ihn, / So wie ich wollt, / An seinen Küssen / Vergehen sollt!” (“My bosom urges / Itself toward him. / Ah, might I grasp / And hold him! / And kiss him, / As I would wish, / At his kisses / I should die!”)— Vanceforgets to keep spinning the BMX wheel…

At this point, there is a break — a missing section — in the epic of nearly four hours. This has come to be known as The Big Lacuna. Reconstruction of The Big Lacuna can never be more than conjectural, but its contents, at least in outline, are tolerably clear. (Experts consider The Big Lacuna to be over when Vancesnaps out of his reverie and asks Ikewhom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanfordor Silda Spitzer.) Blame for The Big Lacuna obviously and immediately falls on XOXO. Given the tendency of the embittered poet manqué to brazenly interpolate something gratuitously titillating or abstruse or jarringly incongruous, i.e., to preemptively corrupt the epic beyond redemption, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he’d capriciously paralyzed Ikeand Vancefor four hours. But what other means might XOXOhave at his disposal to cause a Big Lacuna in the epic? Well, he could go directly after the bards themselves. He could use a nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis), and he could have any one of those department store perfume saleswomen simply sashay by a group of bards as they recite the epic and casually spray a small amount of the mixture in their vicinity. This would be enough to cause a Big Lacuna . XOXO, who says he’s retired and lives on his pension, dismisses any such allegations as “absolute nonsense.” Speaking by telephone from his hyperborean hermitage, he says, “I have no hand in it.” He adds, “ T.S.F.N. — General Command is pulling the wool over your eyes”—referring to the splinter group allied with a radical faction of exiled bards. But we all know what XOXOis capable of doing to the bards. He can make some of their pianissimo phrases breathy. He can cause them to suddenly chant in a laughable falsetto or stutter helplessly. And, of course, he can make them recite high-pitched gibberish. (Because the bards are traditionally blind, drug-​addled vagrants, experts tend to underplay what great shape they need to be in, especially to perform some of the more physically demanding and rigorously choreographed reenactments in the epic, e.g., when Ikeis pepper-sprayed at the Miss America Diner or when he chases his daughter’s math teacher around the room or restrains himself from bludgeoning Vancewith his baseball bat, etc. A bard’s heart rate can surge from 60 beats a minute to over 240 beats a minute during a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack . The lateral G-forces exerted on a bard who’s rocking back and forth to the rhythmic ostinato of spokes against a jerrycan could be as much as 4.5 G, which means about 25 kg of pressure on the neck.)