Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Most original, though, is Salingerand Foyt’s theory that has come to be known as “ Rapunzel’s Braid,” in which they contend that the images of wafting armpit hair (“look how beautiful Ike’s abundant chestnut-color armpit hair is, how lustrous and soft and fluffy. It almost looks as if he blow-dries it for extra volume!”), the tampon string and Chinese fortune-cookie fortune in Ike’s dream of La Felina, the pendulous breasts of the ubiquitous “chubby middle-aged women,” even the hanging hydroceles of the decrepit waiters in XOXO’s Dantean Hooters, represent “lifelines,” i.e., means of extricating the hero from some underworld (i.e., from death or from some perilous spiritual journey). “ Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!”—the incantatory concatenation of the Name —is a string of words (analogous to a tampon string or a paper fortune or a loyal retainer’s nose hair) upon which the hero can climb back into the world of the living. Ikeconfigures himself as an in-and-out alternation of bard/hero, which constitutes a kind of “braided identity.” When we chant “ Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!” (the first Ikein the string a hero, the second a bard, the third a hero, the fourth a bard, the fifth a hero), we are forming a plaited lifeline that Salingerand Foytrefer to as “ Rapunzel’s Braid.” And isn’t Ike’s vaunted tongue sandwich, they proceed to ask, the figurative instrument par excellence for depicting the inside-outness of chanting the braided name (the bard) and of being consumed (the enveloped hero)? This is the “Swallowed Tongue”—a metonymic symbol for epilepsy. So clearly, according to Salingerand Foyt, the epic intends to associate Ike’s “pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out”—his perpetual high-pitched oscillation between bard and hero — with a form of seizure (e.g., “the feral fatalism of all his loony tics — like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids and the Mussolinitorticollis of his Schick-nicked neck”).

Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it’s upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order. It’s also worth noting that Salingerand Foytwere the very first experts to notice a change from Ike’s Spartan premartyrdom diet of cole slaw and protein shakes to a more epicurean regimen of salami and provolone sandwiches, egg rolls, Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts, Kozy Shack Butterscotch Pudding, and Absolut Peppar vodka shots.

For deliberately demented gobbledygook, nothing tops a group of experts who call themselves “Chineans” after Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the mob boss who wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in an act to avoid prosecution. The Chineans maintain an evangelical belief in the surpassing significance of Vanceand swear allegiance to the nose-thumbing, mind-fucking God XOXO, for which they have earned the implacable enmity of the reclusive, shadowy paramilitary leader Meir Poznak, who has placed a high-price bounty on the head of the equally reclusive and shadowy impresario of the Chineans — a man called The High-Talking Chief(and who is also known as “The Craziest of the Crazy,” “The Pazzo di Tutti Pazzi,” and “The Capo di Tutti Frutti”). Meir Poznakhas threatened The High-Talking Chiefof the Chineans with the ritual punishment of eye enucleation by melon baller and guillotining. No one’s ever seen The High-Talking Chief. There are no official photos of him. And the authenticity of existing images is debated. Apart from the fact that he is already missing one eye, accounts of his physical appearance are wildly contradictory. Some people who have met him describe him as having the voluptuous curves of a Beyoncéor a Serena Williams, while others describe him as more closely resembling Representative Henry Waxman. The High-Talking Chiefhas said, “We did a complete simulation of The Big Lacuna and sliced the code to its deepest level. We have studied its protocols and functionality. We’re convinced that XOXOhas nothing to do with it.” The High-Talking Chiefof the Chineans has also said that the most serious attacks on the epic have been mounted not by XOXO, but by Fast-Cooking Ali(supposedly acting out of jealousy, because his girlfriend La Felinahas such an obsessive crush on Ike Karton). The High-Talking Chiefof the Chineans has said that what Fast-Cooking Alidoes is “ramp up the frequency of the epic, so that it spins faster and faster, causing it to hit 1,410 Hertz (or cycles per second) — just enough to send it flying apart.” Although this is all self-serving and unsubstantiated bullshit, it is upscale, artisanal self-serving and unsubstantiated bullshit of the highest order, and the Chineans are responsible for certain findings which have broadened our understanding of the epic immeasurably. For instance, it was the Chineans who uncovered identical e-mails sent by Ike, on the night before his death, to the three top heavyweight competitors at the Women’s Sumo World Championship in Warsaw, Poland— Anna Zhigalovaof Russia, and Svitlana Iaromkaand Olga Davydko, both of the Ukraine. Although their precise content is unknown, they are said to be lengthy and unusually coherent, alternating between crude sexual bravado and weary resignation. Ikepurportedly quotes Thomas Hardy(without attribution, of course): “Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good.” It was the Chineans who discovered numerous inscriptions in Ike’s Snyder High School yearbook reading “See you at Rutgers!” irrefutably debunking the myth that Ikeever attended the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.). The Chineans were the first experts to grapple with the question of why Oprah Winfrey’s name is conspicuously omitted from the roster of those sentenced to the guillotine in Ike’s galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards.” She is, after all, #1 on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. The Chineans contend that the answer lies in Ike’s habit of plagiarizing from her magazine and his self-professed fondness for the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies. And it was the Chineans (who claim to “strip away the accretions of the epic”) who determined that the definitive title of the epic is — and always has been— The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack.

The Chineans advocated that the bards actually negotiate with XOXO, and went so far as to publicly suggest “positive interventions” he might undertake to expand the epic’s audience, e.g., “Hmm, how about deleting all the references to Ike’s rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism?” and “Hey, why not make Vancemuch more prominent? How about posting on YouTube footage of Vancetooling around Jersey City on his BMX bike with his Glock tucked into the waistband of his jeans to the Boys Noizeremix of the N.E.R.D./ Nelly Furtadotrack ‘Hot-N-Fun’? Or how about Vancewith the lesbian fisherwomen, in their squalid shack under the PulaskiSkyway, drinking, smoking, playing dominoes, cooking, laughing to the Four Tetremix of the Pantha du Princetrack ‘Stick to My Side’? Just a real cool, tranced-out video. That would definitely appeal to a younger, hipper demographic” and “Consider losing Ike’s fetish for chubby, sweaty, hairy, unkempt, and uneducated middle-aged women and replace it with a predilection for smokin’ hot young chicks. This would make it significantly easier for that whole coveted eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male demographic to identify with Ike.” The Chineans offered their consulting services to XOXOin return for a 5 percent stake in royalties generated by the narcocorrido Ikewrote at the Miss America Diner (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) which is weird because — unless the Chineans know something we don’t know (which they very well might) — the rights to Ike’s narcocorrido belong exclusively to Mogul Magoo. The Chineans also criticized Ruthiefor parading around on her front lawn, wearing a transparent “prairie dress” and no underwear (calling the look “Ruby Ridge meets Tila Tequila”) and offered her a free makeover from celebrity stylist Andrea Lieberman. This was such an egregious affront to Ike—suggesting to someone who fervently yearns for the massacre of celebrities that his own wife get a makeover from a “celebrity stylist”—that it spawned a stand-alone fantasy episode in the Twenty-Eighth Season . In a sort of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack meets Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman , Ike, blinded by a particularly disgusting case of conjunctivitis, bludgeons to death a group of Chineans, clad in their trademark bathrobes and slippers (which are associated not only with Vincent “The Chin” Gigantebut also with the old, decrepit waiters from XOXO’s Dantean Hooters ), who have encircled him on the corner of West Side Avenue and Culver in Jersey City. Unlike the episode in which La Felinadistracts Ikefrom his impulsive rage by impersonating a voluptuous au pair from Cote d’Ivoire, this time, La Felina, watching from the top floor of the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completely gets off on Ike’s “helmet-to-helmet” violence and masturbates until she has an outrageous gushing orgasm that lasts for fifty years and fills a 143,200-square-mile endorheic basin between the Caucasus Mountains and the steppe of Central Asia that is today called the “Caspian Sea.”