The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

by Mark Leyner

  As you hear this or read it, the God XOXO is indelibly inscribing it into your brain. But XOXO is a puzzling figure. It’s not possible to characterize him as “good” or “bad”—these terms are meaningless when applied to the Gods. He’s mischievous—a trickster. Though frequently innocuous or merely “naughty,” his meddling can cause enormous inconvenience and suffering, i.e., it can be wicked in its consequences. And it certainly seems as if he often acts under the compulsion of his own ancient grievances—primarily the humiliation he suffered when the Goddess Shanice criticized his poem about the businessman who became so terribly aroused when he was flogged in the woods by some of his colleagues. Like some disturbed stenographer, interjecting his own thoughts into the court record, XOXO will constantly try to insinuate his own lurid “poetry” into this story. For instance, you will soon come upon the unfortunate passage “Pumping her shiksa ass full of hot Jew jizz.” Now that may be an appropriate phrase for some Philip Roth novel, but it has no place in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. This is a perfect example of a gratuitous interpolation on the part of XOXO. This is XOXO—the embittered poet manqué—trying to ruin the book, trying to give the book Tourette’s, trying to kidnap the soul of the book and ply it with drugged sherbet. And make no mistake about it—he will try to kidnap the soul of the book and ply it with drugged sherbet.

  You can actually help preserve the integrity of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. You can help wrest control of the story back from XOXO. When you come upon a patently adventitious phrase, one that can, with a reasonable degree of certainty, be attributed to XOXO, like “Pumping her shiksa ass full of hot Jew jizz,” you can ward off the meddlesome mind-fucking God with the rapid staccato chant of “Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!” It should sound like Popeye laughing, or like Billy Joel in “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”—“But working too hard can give you / A heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack.” It’s similar to that moment when, after Captain Hook has poisoned Tinkerbell, Peter Pan asks the audience to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, or when, in The Tempest, Prospero beseeches the audience, in the play’s epilogue, to “Release me from my bands / With the help of your good hands.…As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.” But remember, when you chant “Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!” to fend off the spiteful interpolations of XOXO, it absolutely has to sound like Popeye laughing or like Billy Joel in “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” or it won’t work.

  2.

  Each section of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is called a “session.” The sessions were produced—over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of years—by nameless, typically blind men high on ecstasy or ketamine, sipping orange soda from a large hollowed-out gourd or a communal bucket or a jerrycan. The brand of orange soda traditionally associated with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is Sunkist.

  The first session, the ninety-six-word paragraph beginning with the phrase “What subculture is evinced by Ike’s clothes and his shtick, by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick” is considered the only original session. Everything else is considered a later addition to, or a corruption of, that original session. But if one were to recite or perform only the original session without all the later additions and corruptions, the audience would feel—and justifiably so—cheated. And they would probably feel completely justified in killing and ritualistically dismembering and cannibalizing the blind, drug-addled bard. At the very least, they’d demand their money back.

  Some experts have gone so far as to propose the hypothesis that that “original” ninety-six-word paragraph is itself an addition and a corruption, and that the only true, historically valid version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (the urtext) is the four-word phrase “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.” They surmise that blind men high on ecstasy, seated in a circle, and sipping orange soda from a jerrycan would chant the words “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack” over and over and over again, for hours upon hours, usually until dawn. As time went on, a stray word or phrase would be appended, resulting, eventually, in the ninety-six-word paragraph now generally accepted as part of the first session, under the subtitle: Ike Always Keeps It Simple and Sexy.

  The Sugar Frosted Nutsack was never actually “written.” A recursive aggregate of excerpts, interpolations, and commentaries, it’s been “produced” through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy. Composition has tended to more closely resemble the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional “writing.”

  3.

  Session One Is All Wrong

  You can clearly see in the tabloid style of the First Session, with its boldface names and the breathless, staccato, exclamatory sentences (e.g., He’s wearing a hot little white wifebeater! It works for his body and he goes for it! It exaggerates his ripped torso—those monster pecs and sick, big-ass pipes! ), an attempt to hyperbolize Ike and his wife, Ruthie, both of whom are unusually reserved people. It’s a distorted depiction that makes them appear more glamorous and significantly more scandalous (and inane) than they actually are (were). For instance, the idea that Ruthie, in public, would put her hand down the back of her husband’s sweatpants and tickle his butt-crack (Like she’s checking his prostate! cackles the First Session) is absolutely ludicrous. So is the notion of the relatively modest Ruthie (She’s an anarcho-primitivist too! ) parading around on her front lawn, wearing a transparent “prairie dress” and no underwear. And so, most egregiously, is the idea that Ike would build some garishly obscene statue of the Goddess La Felina (naked, dildo-impaled! ), when it’s so much more likely that he’d construct something elegant and self-​contained to propitiate the Goddess, something akin to one of Joseph Cornell’s enchanting little shadow boxes. But, obviously, generations of blind, spaced-out, Sunkist-swilling bards who—over hundreds, if not thousands, of years—mixed and remixed the First Session felt obliged to pander to an audience which prized the salacious over the subtle and preferred their heroes loony and rotten to the core. Or XOXO sabotaged the First Session. (One can’t discount, even for a second, the possibility that XOXO kidnapped the First Session and plied it with drugged sherbet.) Over the years, a number of experts including William Arrowsmith, Richmond Lattimore, Bernard Knox, and most recently the Dutch classical scholar, expert on circumpolar populations, and milliner Pym Voorjans, aka DJ Doorjamb, whose wife has a spectacular big-ass ass (courtesy of Fast-Cooking Ali), have each provided incisive analyses of one of the most glaring errors in the First Session: Ike raising his voice (“And they’re gonna eat my fuckin’ Italian breadcrumb mandala!” he screams with mock consternation, then cracks up…). Ike only speaks in a whisper. In point of fact, he is said to be frequently inaudible. Ike is reticent and sometimes abjectly bashful. He is so self-effacing that one wonders where his galvanic charisma, his magnificence, derive from. Aside from this erroneous characterization of Ike screaming in the First Session, there are only two instances in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in which Ike actually raises his voice above a whisper: in Session Nine, when he eulogizes his late father and threatens to destroy the synagogue, and in the Final Session when he chants the entirety of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack to his half-divine infant grandson, Colter Dale—a recitation that, of course, includes this paragraph about the only instances during which Ike actually raises his voice above a whisper. Had Ike neglected to include this paragraph—if for no other reason than the fact that, as he was chanting, the ATF or the FBI or the British SAS or the Dutch Korps Commandotroepen or (most likely) the Mossad was firing 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis) into his modest, brick, two-story hermitage in Jersey City, causing Ike to consider, under the circumstances, a slightly abridged version—Colter Dale would have felt—and justifiably so—cheated. Also, Ike scrupulously eschews the use of profanity, although, unfortunately, you wouldn’t know that from the First Session. He would never say, for instance,
“my fuckin’ Italian breadcrumb mandala!” or “you can’t find good shawarma in this fuckin’ town now that it’s full of Jews and Freemasons.” He can be wrenchingly graphic in his hypersexualized flirtations (even this, though, is invariably delivered in his gentle, barely audible murmur), and his truculent asides to other men can be phantasmagorically violent, but they’re always discreetly conveyed sotto voce into the ear of his antagonist, and the language, as bellicose as it may be, is never vulgar or profane. Ike’s a Taurus and an autodidact, and his diction tends to be Victorian, actually (think Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy). The “real” Ike is such a sweetheart, such a pussycat in a way…although he’s capable of unprovoked spasms of explosive violence where you’re like:

  I cannot believe

  He just did that.

  4.

  We know of the so-called “real” Ike that he often speaks poignantly of never ever ever wanting to leave Jersey City, of his memories, of…

  “…the opaque stillness of its abstract, ashen evenings, in which even a five-year-old child could discern the siren call of his own fate, the homecoming of death itself.”

  “…dialogue from old movies leaking from the HVAC shafts of abandoned hospitals.”

  “…the spectacle of sugar melting on the glistening pink flesh of a halved grapefruit (in the background, the white noise of adult conversation).”

  “…the gravitas of chivalrous, pensive, amoral men—men who were impossible to spoof (and their disappearance, one by one, from the face of the earth).”

  “…the indescribable surprise of finding a cricket asleep amidst silver dollars in a cigar humidor.”

  “…the F-Troop theme song, as you’re being mildly molested by a chubby babysitter with big-ass titties chewing Juicy Fruit (and begging your parents for her again).”

  “…the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid, Jerry Vale (‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties.”

  …of never ever even wanting to venture beyond his three-block enclave of two-story brick homes. But we also know that he lets slip, not infrequently, that he dreams of being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, although he can sometimes be heard—barely heard in his diffident, feathery whisper—claiming (à la Lyndon LaRouche) that the Queen of England is a degenerate, androgenized thug with a five-o’clock shadow and a hypertrophied clitoris who controls the international drug trade and seeks to liquidate the sovereignty of every nation-state in the Americas.

  But how is the “epic” Ike portrayed in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack?

  5.

  Poor, polytheistically devout, sex-obsessed Ike, cosseted and buffeted by his Gods, their marionette. With the exception of his own family, and possibly his daughter’s louche, drug-peddling boyfriend, Vance (who finds Ike endlessly entertaining and secretly reveres him), no one else in Ike’s neighborhood of modest two-story brick homes or perhaps the world (though, for Ike, his neighborhood is The World) seems to believe in the Gods. So, from a certain psychiatric perspective, one could say that the Karton family is clearly and deliberately portrayed as suffering from a form of folie à famille—a clinical syndrome in which a psychotic disorder is shared by an entire family, its essential feature being the transmission of delusions from the “inducer” to other family members (“the induced”). Typical characteristics of families with folie à famille include social isolation, codependent and ambivalent family relationships, repetitive crises (especially due to economic causes), and the presence of violent behaviors. The “inducer,” the original source and agent of the delusions, is usually the dominant family member (almost invariably the father and the symbol of authority, and almost always a Taurus). The other family members, who constitute the “induced,” frequently display passive, suggestible, and histrionic personality traits. The suggestion that the Kartons suffer from a folie à famille raises an interesting question about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes. There are four explanations for the ambiguous portrayal of the Gods’ empirical existence especially as it relates to Ike’s (and his family’s) mental health. First, obviously the Gods themselves have determined that Ike—their mortal champion, their chosen one, their “elect of the elect”—should be anathematized as “a nutbag” by his neighbors, perhaps as a test of Ike’s devotion and fortitude, or perhaps to give him the most masochistic bang for his buck, because it doesn’t take a psych major to glean from The Sugar Frosted Nutsack that Ike is a hardcore masochist who has a very florid martyr’s complex and chronic, almost continuous fantasies of being flogged by unkempt, overweight, world-weary women. Secondly, perhaps Ike (whose cellphone ringtone is 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny”) encourages people in his neighborhood to think of him as “crazy” because he is planning to commit “suicide-by-cop” and the determination of an individual’s mental capacity, or “soundness of mind,” to form an intent to commit suicide may be of consequence in claims for recovery of death benefits under life insurance policies—in other words, if Ike seems crazy, his family will get the insurance money after he provokes the ATF or Mossad into killing him (as is his fate). The third explanation is that this is the God XOXO fucking with the book, trying to ruin it by making it too confusing, by creating insoluble contradictions and conundrums, by essentially tying the shoelaces of the book together. It’s obvious, after all, that XOXO has hacked into The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, that XOXO has contaminated The Sugar Frosted Nutsack with a malicious software program or a botnet that’s able to compromise the integrity of the book’s operating system and/or Ike Karton’s mind and/or the entirety of Ike Karton’s genome, including, most significantly, his expiration date (i.e., the date upon which, driven by his daemon, his destiny will be fulfilled). Or—and this is the fourth possible explanation—perhaps, in a kind of “false flag operation,” it’s the Goddess Shanice who, upon becoming so indignant at not being named by Ike as one of the “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” in the Second Season, infects XOXO’s sharp periodontal curette (the one he uses to ineradicably engrave The Sugar Frosted Nutsack into Ike’s brain) with a botnet. Most experts now agree that there’s overwhelming validity to all four explanations. Though at times it may seem as if the Gods are portrayed as only existing in Ike’s mind, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack unequivocally represents the Gods as having, in fact, created the world (“During the Belle Époque—that period of time, about fourteen billion years ago, after the Gods were delivered by bus from some sort of ‘Spring Break’ during which they are said to have ‘gone wild’—the Gods put things in order, made them comprehensible, provided context, imposed coherence and meaning, i.e., they created the world as we know it today”). Also, there are frequent instances in which one or several Gods clearly intervene on behalf of or in opposition to Ike. For instance, in the Third Season (sometime around 1100 A.D., “sessions” became known as “seasons”), Doc Hickory, the God of Money, who was also known as El Mas Gordo (“The Fattest One”)—the God whose static-charged back hair became the template for the drift of continental landmasses on earth—tries to finagle Ike a free rice pudding at the Miss America Diner on West Side Avenue in Jersey City. In the Fourth Season, the Gods Los Vatos Locos (also known as The Pince-Nez 44s) prevent someone from coming to the aid of Ike’s daughter’s math teacher when Ike threatens to sodomize him. (They’re watching this all take place from their perch at the 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and they’re totally cracking up.) In the Fifth Season, Koji Mizokami, the God who fashioned the composer Béla Bartók out of his own testicular teratoma, helps Ike shoplift an Akai MPC drum machine from a Sam Ash on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey. And, in the Sixth Season, Bosco Hifikepunye, the God of Miscellany (including Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.) begins supplyin
g Vance with the hallucinogenic drug Gravy to sell on the street and also impregnates Ike’s daughter. And, as Colter Dale (the offspring of that union) postulates—in a postscript that would become the Final Season—“That the Gods only occur in Ike’s mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in Ike’s mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative.”

  6.

  Putting aside what might be construed as a cynical attempt to pathologize an authentic oracular hero in order to sell him drugs (e.g., Clozaril, Zyprexa, Risperdal, etc.), in other words, for the financial benefit of the pharmaceutical industry (once we assume an organic basis for deviant theologies, we legitimize a market for diagnostic assays and treatment modalities), and putting aside the even more fundamental issue of the pharmacological colonization of the Western psyche, is there any validity to the diagnosis of folie à famille for the Kartons (the family, not the band)? Ike Karton doesn’t seem to fit the textbook profile of “the inducer.” He can’t really be described as domineering, for instance. Of course, in his unassuming way, he casually offers up incidental remarks and observations about the world—that people like Anna Wintour, Gisele Bündchen, Ronald Perelman, and Jon Bon Jovi should be dragged from their offices or homes and guillotined on the street, or how it would be much more entertaining in the Winter Olympics biathlon if, instead of shooting at targets, the biathletes shot ski jumpers at the apex of their flights like human skeet, or his admiration for the ferocious Renaissance politician Cesare Borgia and Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov and the ruthless one-eyed Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen. But he has never tried to “proselytize” or “indoctrinate” his family. He has never sat his wife and daughter down and formally told them the entire saga (i.e., the entirety of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) in the classic style—that is, high on ecstasy, swigging orange soda from a gourd, tapping his aluminum wedding ring on the tabletop to maintain that mesmerizing cadence—from beginning to end. In fact, he won’t formally tell the whole saga in the classic style from beginning to end until—in the Penultimate Season, and shortly before being gunned down by ATF and Mossad sharpshooters—he sits down with his half-divine infant grandson, Colter Dale, pours out a sacred libation of Sunkist, and, tapping his ring on the tabletop, begins chanting to the rapt, wide-eyed infant from the very beginning: “There was never nothing. But before the debut of the Gods, about fourteen billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent. Isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next. A terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and T-shirts that read ‘I Don’t Do White Guys’) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear…” And with that unprecedented gesture, Ike incorporates (and consecrates) what had heretofore been simply an academic prologue into the very body, the very heart of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (and it has been considered its First Season ever since). But prior to the Penultimate Season, over the years, Ike has, every now and then, sat down with his wife and his daughter and his daughter’s disreputable boyfriend, Vance, and, in his soft, confidential, hoarse whisper, informally shared with them several vivid but isolated and disjointed little fragments. And despite the fact (or maybe due to the fact) that these disjointed little fragments seem to lack any discernable context, Ike’s wife, his daughter, and Vance are sufficiently enthralled so that they appear (to some experts) to suffer from a form of folie à famille. Such is Ike’s galvanic (albeit diffident) charisma, his magnificence. Such is the inky dye of his faith that, over time, drop by drop by drop, it slowly seeps into and stains the porous minds of his loyal, loving family. (There are some experts, although they constitute a persecuted minority within the expert community, who believe that there has actually been only one bard—that one being Ike Karton. And within this group, there is a dissident faction who also believes that there has actually been only one expert, that one also being Ike Karton. Although this is an extremely controversial and virtually indefensible position, it does have one vehement and disproportionately influential proponent: Ike Karton.)