Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

The waiters are all suffering from dementia and can’t remember your orders (never mind their grandchildren’s names or the last movie they saw), so you have to write down what you want directly on their grotesquely exposed cerebrums with a sharp periodontal curette.

The allegorical interpretation of XOXO’s hermitage as hell and Ikeand Vance’s brief sojourn there as some sort of perilous infernal descent, which dominated the critical debate about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for, like, five minutes in the late ’80s, is now widely discredited. Yes, the hermitage is underground — miles beneath the surface of Antarctica. And yes, Ikerefers to it as unten —literally “under” or “below.” But, hello, it’s “hyperborean”—of or relating to the arctic, frigid, very cold. The opposite of infernally hot. Well, what if it’s WAY underground down near the inner core of the earth, where it’s like 10,000 degrees? Well, what if it’s up your ass where it’s like 10,000,000 degrees? Well, what if you’re a cocksucking dwarf racist retard midget dickwad? Well, what if you’re a fucking scatological-bakery urinal-cake-boss motherfucking fist-fucked cow-pie anal-fissureman motherfucker?

…And so this debate, rendered incontrovertibly moot years ago (if not tens of thousands of years ago), curiously rages on.

Ostensibly a sequence intended to reinforce the scope of XOXO’s omnipotent mischief (his mojo ) and/or the super-potency of the hallucinogenic Gravy that the God Bosco Hifikepunyeis selling Vance, the so-called “Playdate at the Hermitage” (whether apocryphal or not) has the perhaps unintended consequence of showcasing, of all things, XOXO’s tenderness (an anomaly in the epic, with the exception of his ill-fated literary courtship of Shanice). The big fuss he makes about the cole slaw behind the restaurant is clearly XOXO’s way of winking at Vanceand sympathetically acknowledging that he knows that Vancewas sort of punk’d by Ikere: the Cossack Saddle Cabbage and the harried immigration official at Ellis Island, etc. More significantly, in this scene (and again, experts are divided about whether it’s an authentic scene or a noncanonical blooper), XOXOclearly conveys a strong ideological solidarity with Ikevia the abject humiliation of the celebrity Casanovas at his Dantean “ Hooters. ”

Whether this perhaps vindicates some experts’ queasy faith in XOXOhas yet to be determined, but it surely feeds a growing suspicion that XOXOmay have a more sympathetic if not a distinctly symbiotic relationship with Ike(and with the epic itself) than previously thought — something that even XOXO’s most indefatigable detractors may have to wearily concede.

Suddenly, the following (“without any discernable context, etc.”):

Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2 Derek Jeter Yankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…pink fingernail polish, blue toenails, gold sandals…huge face…HUGE…almost like the kid in that movie Mask with Cher …not with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, just a really, really big face…and hot fleshy freckly chubby thighs.…The other three have knockoff Marc Jacobs bags…but the chubby one with the Burger King shake and the thighs and no underwear has the real deal: a $45,000 Hermès black crocodile Kelly bag.

Here, many people (e.g., audience members at public recitations, experts, metaphysicians, etc.) are like:

“Huh? ’The fuck just happened???”

This has gotta be XOXOtotally fucking with the epic, right? Plying the epic with drugged sherbet. Shooting it up with military-grade ass-cheese, right? XOXO—who persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha.

Well, not so fast, contend some scholars. In a scrupulously researched monograph coauthored by V. S. Naipauland C. C. Sabathia, a cogent case is made for the possibility that there is no Big Lacuna (i.e., that this is not XOXOvandalizing the epic), that during this mute interstice, Ikeand Vanceare simply too fucked up to talk and that Vancekeeps up the tranced-out empty-can-against-the-spinning-spokes rhythm while Ikejust stares off into space (a whole desultory lifetime tacitly exchanged between them, as if between two dogs) and that, at some point, Vance, emerging from some hallucinatory K-hole of his own, is like, “Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2 Derek JeterYankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…” In other words, that it’s simply his spacey elliptical reportage of something he observed recently (probably apropos of something Ikehad been saying before about how sexy he thinks sweaty plus-size women are) and not just a piece of completely incongruous bullshit that XOXOplopped in to gum up the epic (perhaps at the behest of the flagrantly snubbed and pissed-off Shanice). Other experts, though, contend that the V. S. Naipaul/ C. C. Sabathiamonograph itself is a crude forgery, an obvious noncanonical blooper lobbed in by XOXOto gum up the epic. (It bears repeating that all noncanonical bloopers are almost immediately subsumed into the realm of the canonical and are, at the first opportunity, dutifully chanted by vagrant, drug-addled bards.)

As the individual earlier identified as “ REAL WIFE” said (this is the woman who attended the public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack with her husband but then ditched him for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, the one who gave up painting when she saw Gerhard Richter’s paintings of Andreas Baaderand Ulrike Meinhof), “It’s too easy for people to always blame things on XOXO.” Although, clearly, XOXOis perfectly capable of turning the epic into a celebrity gossip magazine or TV listings if he feels like it, so why not a Big Lacuna ? Question, though: Might not the chubby girl in the subway without underwear be La Felina? Wouldn’t her fabulously expensive Hermès Kelly bag in this context signal a theophany —the appearance of a deity? A message to Ikere: their tryst, maybe? Or is the meaning of the Big Lacuna —this stand-alone mini-epic — ineffable? (Or, perhaps, as one noted metaphysician put it, simply too stupid for words?)

It’s at this point, during a public recitation, that a bard will stand and hysterically exclaim:

XOXO’s got the epic by the nutsack!!!

Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!

Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!

Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!

Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!

Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!

This chant, accompanied by the frenzied banging of gaudy rings against jerrycans of orange soda, continues unabated for a stupefying four hours, at which point (in almost every credible version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack ), Ike, in response to the defibrillating incantation of his name (“ Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!”), finally snaps out of his cataleptic reverie and addresses his galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards”—“apostrophe” because the bards are not literally present (in the epic dimension which Ikeinhabits), although the fact that they respond (echoing Ike’s words, but backward ) suggests that they are present (perhaps in some purely metaphysical sense) but not proximal . Salinger/ Foytwill later suggest that the bards here are hyperproximal , i.e., present in a purely intracranial sense. This is difficult to understand. When experts talk about the bards’ “hyperproximity” to Ike, about their presence being “intracranial,” they are correlating the motif of Ike’s head (filling with the perpetually inscribed narration of the epic and the ever murmuring voices of masturbating Goddesses) with the motif of the minibar at the Burj Khalifa (the underlying notion here being that all of the Gods actually compress or collapse themselves within the minibar itself). This is what some highly regarded pseudo-​intellectuals mean when they speak of Ike’s head as minibar. These interlocking motifs represent something that is simultaneously infinitely small and infinitely capacious.