Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Meir Poznak, whose hard-line faction T.S.F.N. — General Command adamantly rejects any suggestion that the epic functions under the aegis of XOXO, considers this “the single greatest episode of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack ever made.” ( Poznakrelentlessly excoriates the Chineans. He is their irreconcilable enemy. In a series of blistering communiqués, Poznakinveighs against the Chineans’ perversely counterintuitive (but increasingly plausible) contention that there’s active collusion or some secret pact or modus vivendi between Ike Kartonand XOXO.)

Slaughtering Chineans is straight-up Poznakshit. Experts who express even the slightest affinity for Chinean precepts are viciously beaten and crippled by T.S.F.N. — General Command thugs acting on orders from Meir Poznak. On the other hand, bards are routinely butchered by packs of pipe- and machete-wielding Chinean enforcers at the behest of the Capo di Tutti Frutti. True, Meir Poznakemerged from within the milieu of the bards and the Capo di Tutti Fruttiemerged from within the milieu of the experts. But there are highly regarded Poznakian experts and celebrated Chinean bards. (Although, for those who haven’t made a close study of the schism, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between a Poznakian and a Chinean bard. Either would be a chanting, drug-addled vagrant who maintains his trance-inducing beat by banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda, either would assume the classical stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic posture during the so-called Big Lacuna, etc.)

Some Chineans have floated the idea that Vance—the louche, semiliterate, BMX-riding Gravy dealer — may actually be a God. This is based primarily on an interpretation of the line “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.” These Chineans (a breakaway sect known as the “Some Chineans” or the “These Chineans”) suggest that Vance’s so-called “snapping out” is a form of extricating himself from or becoming extrinsic to the epic, and that since only a God can extricate himself from or become extrinsic to the epic, Vanceis, ipso facto, a God. This theory is bolstered by the suspicion that Vanceis the father of Ike’s teenage daughter’s infant, Colter Dale, who is generally considered to be quasi-divine, and that given the fact that Ike’s teenage daughter is mortal (she almost failed math!), Vanceis, ipso facto, a God, although there is equally compelling evidence that Bosco Hifikepunye, the God of Miscellany (Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.), who used Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head as an anal sex toy with the Korean flower-shop clerk Mi-Hyun, and who supplies Vancewith hallucinogenic Gravy, is the actual father of Colter Dale.

Monday: 11:30 PM Eastern

“The Stone Mind”

Most Chineans and Some Chineans contend that Ikeis a statue. This is, of course, the theory with which the Chineans are most notoriously associated. There’s always a suspicion about the Chineans that their most wildly preposterous assertions are simply part of their act to “avoid prosecution” (i.e., to evade or confound critical scrutiny). But what had once seemed beyond the pale— Ike, a statue? An inanimate object? — has steadily gained credence.

The idea that Ike Karton—valiant, brooding neo-​pagan, “despot of his stoop ( n’est-ce pas? ),” with his pomaded pompadour, hazy and queasy from the Gravy, whose “rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism” is “just a way to stick it to his dad,” who’s beloved by La Felinafor his loathing of celebrities and plutocrats and for his ardent solidarity with the lowest of the low, who likes the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies, who’s continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out — is actually in an advanced state of petrifaction (i.e., that he’s a statue, a stone homunculus, a lawn jockey) may have initially been broached for sheer shock value, but it soon developed into a finely calibrated theory which today is widely considered the finest calibrated theory for which the Most Chineans and the Some Chineans (aka the These Chineans ) are most notoriously associated.

Could they mean all this figuratively or metaphorically — that Ikeis simply statue-like or statuesque? Well, maybe at first. It’s easy to see how, given the fact that Ike’s been in a sort of dissociative fugue state ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old (“high on ketamine, wearing silver lederhosen and a hat made out of an Oreo box at the time, he initially claimed he’d been hit by a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter — type war between club kids and Hasids”), and that the Some Chineans surmise that he’s been mute (not just reticent or soft-spoken, but mute!) since the Mister Softee accident, and that, for most of the epic, Ikestands on his stoop, “on the prow of his hermitage, striking that contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of gasping, masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus,” they might conclude that Ikeis like a statue or like a lawn jockey.

After all, he does seem to largely exist in a state of suspended animation, and his “taunting, lascivious dance along the precipice of incoherence” does make him “a frozen figure in a tableau vivant,” “a taxidermied gym-rat in a habitat diorama,” “a paralyzed player,” “a cataleptic kike,” etc. This is, of course, why Ikeis so frequently called a “Nude Descending a Staircase”—because he is a static image of movement (“a ruptured contraption,” “a clutter of spasms and ticks”).

But the Chineans have gone way beyond the mere kinesics of Ike’s vaunted inertia. Ikeliterally goes nowhere, they claim. His birth and his death are the only real (i.e., the only measurable ) events in his life and, thus, constitute the true polarity of the epic. These two events, though antipodal, simultaneously occupy one point in space. Ikeis born (in the heroic sense) in the arousal of the gasping Goddesses’ desire, and he dies (heroically) in the self-satisfaction of that desire. In other words, he is born on his stoop and he dies on his stoop without having traversed any distance, without having moved a muscle — ergo, Ikethe Statue. Everything in between his heroic birth and death (if anything can be said to be “between” events which coincide) is represented by an ellipsis. In other words, each dot in the ellipsis is made out of a zero-dimensional dollop of military-grade ass-cheese that’s been extruded from what the Chineans call “the pastry bag” (i.e., from a God’s ass). These are also called “loot drops” and “God guano.”