Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

The Chineans don’t mean that at some point in recent history a statue of Ike Kartonwas erected in Jersey City to commemorate the hero of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack. They mean that Ike Karton, the hero of the The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack is, literally, a fucking statue.

Ikethe hero — porn addict, Taurus, marionette of his Gods — is sculpted in time, in vectors of time, veering inexorably inward, inexorably toward his fate. Although his martyr’s death (at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters perched in trees) is a hyperviolent implosion, a convulsive centripetal rupturing, it is imperceptible to the external observer. Yes, Ikesubjectively experiences it as “driving a Pagani Zonda into a concrete wall at 300 mph,” but his neighbors perceive the hyperviolently imploding Ikeas basically the same Ikethey see every day (“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 masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus”).

Ikeis riddled, infested, consumed,

Devoured from within by Gods.

Only Gods can inhabit a stone mind.

So this whole massively involuted epic, which has variously been called Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and, finally and definitively, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack , with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion…is essentially, at the end of the day, about a man who just stands on his stoop, rooted to the spot, making cryptograms out of passing license plates, watching a kid tooling around the block on a BMX bike. (What’s interesting is that you never really know with overwrought angst or heavy-handed, stilted tropes — they can seem terrible on the page, but totally work at a public recitation. Same’s true with cringe-inducing smuttiness and off-putting adolescent scatology — it can seem lame on paper, but completely come alive when delivered by vagrant, drug-addled bards banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda.)

FYI: The Chineans also believe that Ruthieand the Daughterand Colter Daleare “superfluities,” i.e., later additions (noncanonical bloopers) which were inserted to “mainstream” the figure of Ike—to create a more normative version of Ike, i.e., to give a famille to his folie .

And they believe that if you put a stethoscope to the stone head of Ike, the Lawn Jockey, you can hear, against that endlessly looping sample from the Mister Softee jingle…

All the rapturous, orotund eroticism of

Ike’s erudite, oxymoronic doxologies,

And all the demagogic authority

Of his psychosexual serenades

(“Do you hear that mosquito,

That toilet flushing upstairs,

That glockenspiel out in the briar patch?

That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One,

Despised Whore, Lonely Nut Job…”)

And finally, the Chineans ask: Do the Kartonscomprise an organized crime family? According to the federal law against organized crime in Mexico, “when three or more people make an agreement to organize or form an organization to engage, in an ongoing or reiterated fashion, in activities that by themselves or together with other activities have as a goal or a result the commission of any or several crimes, they will be legally classified and penalized because of these actions as members of organized crime.” Clearly, the Chineans assert, the Kartonshave engaged in a conspiracy to build a dildo-impaled statue without a permit and a conspiracy to perform a narcocorrido (“Do you hear that mosquito / that toilet flushing upstairs / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) in a residential area.

The Chineans are part of Vance’s reverie. Since many people believe that Vanceis a God (significantly, Vancehimself happens not to believe that he’s a God), this means that the Chineans are part of a God’s reverie, which confers enormous prestige upon them at least for the duration of the reverie, but consigns them to oblivion once Vance“snaps out” of his reverie (an event said to be augured by “the mysterious appearance of a mah-jongg tile on the floor of some cabana”).

It goes without saying that all of this could simply be another case of XOXOslipping something into the epic’s drink (i.e., drugging its sherbet). XOXOis forever doodling on Ike’s mind, and on the minds of bards (doodling on all our minds) with his sharp periodontal curette, and forever feeding “the apophenic mania of experts to find hidden and farfetched links and correlations. Is it possible to predict XOXO’s behavior toward human beings based on his alliances with other Gods? For example, what is his position vis-à-vis the La Felina/ Mogul Magooschism? Shanicehad, from the beginning, cliqued up with Mogul Magoo, so XOXO(after Shanice’s withering critique of his poem) had naturally cliqued up with La Felina. But XOXOis too intractable a nihilist to ever be considered aligned with any single faction. And it always bears repeating that the Gods view human beings with a fundamental detachment, almost as if they were characters in a video game. They are entertained by humans. Sure, they have their favorites ( Ikeis famously La Felina’s favorite ), but the Gods basically love to fuck with people — literally, in the sense of having sex with them (e.g., Bosco Hifikepunyewith Mi-Hyunand Ike’s daughter), and in the sense of fucking with their minds (e.g., XOXO).

A Chinean comandante decries what he calls “the self-​flagellation over our affinity for XOXO.” The shadowy death-squad leader says that, although experts routinely call XOXO“a resentful poet manqué who plies the epic with drugged sherbet and shoots it up with military-grade ass-cheese,” what the God has actually done is taken a single static tableau (that of Ike Karton“standing 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 masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus”) and, thanks to all his filigreed interpolations (i.e., noncanonical bloopers), turned it into a massive, stupor-inducingly redundant epic, and he deserves major kudos for that. (As he’s giving this interview, the severed heads of fifteen vagrant, drug-addled bards, strung together with coaxial cable, are found floating in the Passaic River under the PulaskiSkyway. These fifteen bards had recently signed a statement which urged aficionados of the epic to rapidly chant “ Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!” (“it should sound like Popeyelaughing, or like Billy Joelin ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)’—‘But working too hard can give you / A heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack’” as a way of “fucking with the mind of the mind-​fucking God”—an obvious reference to XOXO). The notorious Chinean death-squad comandante (whose nomme de guerre is “ lol”) quickly issues the following addendum: “Don’t want my previous statement to be misconstrued in any way as a condemnation of self-flagellation. If it’s inconvenient to have someone else flagellate you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with flagellating yourself. It’s an excellent way to relieve tension, which can increase your risk of stroke or heart attack.” “When I was a kid,” lolreminisces later, over coffee, “most of my friends loved the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I preferred the Shia Day of Ashura processions in which young men ceremonially whip their own backs with barbed chains and razors.” He says that the first movie scenes that gave him a hard-on were when seaman John Mills(played by Richard Harris) gets flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails in Mutiny on the Bounty and when Lucrèce Borgia(played by Martine Carol) is whipped by her brother, Cesare(played by Pedro Armendáriz), in Lucrèce Borgia (aka Sins of the Borgias ). Favorite poem? The poem XOXOwrote for Shaniceabout the businessman who became so terribly aroused when he was flogged in the woods by some of his colleagues (“They gang up on the ‘new guy’—someone who’d only recently been transferred to their division — and, in what appears to be a sort of hazing ritual, they tie him to a tree and whip him with his own belt. His pants fall to his ankles, and it’s obvious that he’s aroused.” Reminded that most experts interpret the poem to mean that the protagonist is aroused not by the robust flagellation, but because he sees an ineffably beautiful butterfly flit by, lolshakes his head vehemently. “I think he’s aroused by the robust flagellation.”)