Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

The Goddesses prefer gazing at inert and immutable images (“onanistic ornaments”) while they masturbate. This is why, the Chineans insist, the only significant image of Ikein the entirety of the epic is the one of him “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.”

In an event at the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library billed as THE CAPO DI TUTTI FRUTTI in conversation with Lorena Bobbitt (who was replaced at the last moment by Malcolm Gladwell), a man purporting to be The Capo di Tutti Frutti(his face was covered by a balaclava) answers the question “What do you think is the sexiest inert and immutable image?” by proposing “A photograph of a chubby, perspiring fifty-year-old woman bending over to pick up a mah-jongg tile from the floor of some cabana, coquettishly exposing her hairy hole.” This creates quite a stir, prompting some in the audience to call out their own suggestions: “What about a Hummel figurine of a plus-size Bavarian beer maid getting a dental X-ray, wearing a low-cut dirndl and a lead apron,” someone proposes. “Some defaced plinth in a piazza,” someone else says. “A magazine layout of models showing the half-chewed-up food in their mouths,” says another. The Capo di Tutti Frutti(or whoever he is) glares at the audience, shaking his head vehemently. “A photograph of a chubby, perspiring fifty-year-old woman bending over to pick up a mah-jongg tile from the floor of some cabana, coquettishly exposing her hairy hole,” he repeats.

That night, thousands of rats descend on an enormous obelisk of baklava that’s been erected by bearded, bare-chested intellectuals in cargo shorts to protest a significant uptick in the number of vagrant, drug-addled bards who are being slaughtered.

Tuesday: 8:00 PM Eastern

“Snapping Out”

Here, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, Vanceis supposed to snap out of his reverie and ask Ikewhom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanfordor Silda Spitzer. And Ike the Kike—“haloed martyr, edged in splendor, the stone homunculus, who never curdles into the comprehensible”—is supposed to impassively ignore the question, his eyes remaining fixed in the direction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and then Vanceis supposed to ask, “Well, who do you think are the hottest Goddesses?” prompting Iketo compile his “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” list (headed, of course, by his beloved La Felinaand including Lady Rukia, La Muñeca, Las Pistoleras, and several others, including a hitherto unknown Goddess named Hmm Uh, who is now considered a Goddess of surpassing significance, although some experts continue to believe that “Hmm Uh” was simply what’s called a “speech disfluency” or “verbal placeholder”—a meaningless interjection that Ikeunconsciously inserted as he tried to think of other Goddesses he’d fuck). And this is the list in which Ikefatefully neglects to include Shanice, which sets into motion an inexorable concatenation of events culminating in Ike’s death at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters hiding among the leaves of the trees across the street from Ike’s hermitage.

But Ikedoesn’t compile his list. And Vancespins the wheel of his BMX bike, faster and faster now, sensing that everything is about to become incredibly messed up.

The highly provocative proximity of the words “balaclava” and “baklava”—the sheer fuck-you impudence of it — is a deliberate and unambiguous signal that XOXOis decisively ratcheting up his sabotage of the epic. And Vanceunderstands, on a completely intuitive level, that the faster he spins the BMX wheel, the faster the epic might reach its conclusion (i.e., the masochistic, hyperviolent death of Ike Karton).

There’s a ticking clock now (i.e., the spokes of the BMX wheel against the empty soda can). XOXOis unraveling the epic faster than the bards can recite it, which results in the bards’ increasingly high-pitched gibberish. The epic might end without Ikedying (and on a Tuesday at 8:00 PM!) or drag on inconclusively for an infinite number of seasons. This is XOXOfucking with everyone’s mind. He’s denying Ikehis doom— Ike, so eager for a hero’s martyrdom, virtually cataleptic yet perpetually flinging himself toward his fate, “his spur caught in the bull-rope of his own inexorable destiny.”

XOXOfinds it amusing to shit on the integrity of the epic, to leave it in a state of suspended animation, a state of complete unfulfillment and nongratification, a form of eternal Tie and Tease. He wants to leave The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack with an epic case of blue balls. It’s XOXO’s ultimate mind-fuck.

XOXOthinks it’s “cool” to just paralyze the whole looping, recursive epic, 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…

At this point, XOXOis blocking blood flow into the brains of the bards. XOXOis giving the bards TIAs (transient ischemic attacks) which are miniature temporary strokes and which are causing the bards to forget vast sections of the epic and simply spout high-pitched gibberish (i.e., nonlexical vocables). Of course, the fact that XOXOis giving the bards “ministrokes” which are causing the bards to forget vast sections of the epic and spout high-pitched gibberish is a now a crucial part of the epic, which audiences at public recitations expect the bards to “belt out like the cast of some Broadway musical.” The bards are now expected to “belt out” that XOXOis expunging the epic in its entirety from their memories, to “belt out” that the hyperviolent death of Ike Kartonmight now be endlessly deferred.

Some bards simply start making up phrases suggested by the letters of license plates on passing cars, and attempting to pass that off as “the epic.”

DYS: Dad, you suck

AED: Actress / Egg Donor

ZUP: Zipped-up pussy

BFV: Best fisting video

ITM: Impeccable table manners

VNN: Vaginas Need Nivea

JNU: Jews Never Unite

WNN: Welcome Nude Nigerians

CSC: Cossack Saddle Cabbage

YWB: You Wiggle Beautifully

CUR: Can’t Understand Reality

SRL: Sadist Rapes Limbaugh

MMU: My Mom Ululates

AAJ: Anime Amputee Jamboree

A Volvo wagon (THG-87F), an old Toyota Corolla (IKR-53J), and a little blue Mazda Miata (HAH-19B) drive past.

THG: They’re hot guys.

IKR: I know, right?

HAH: Hot as hell.

Two more cars: TSH-74P, SFH-19N.

TSH: They’re so high.

SFH: So fuckin’ high.

In response to a spate of violent crimes and growing concern that the encampments are breeding grounds for Meir Poznak’s extremist organization, T.S.F.N. — General Command, police today evacuated 1,000 vagrant, drug-addled bards in 251 caravans in southwestern France. More than 40 camps have been dismantled in the last fifteen days, and 700 vagrant, drug-addled bards are being sent back to Jersey City and the Upper Peninsula on chartered flights. Vagrant, drug-addled bards (blindfolded even though they’re already blind) continuously chant The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack on their chartered flight from southwestern France to Jersey City International Airport (on West Side Avenue, at the corner of Culver).