by Mark Leyner
So audiences do not necessarily have to concentrate on each word, gesture, or nuance of meaning that comes from the bards. If your neighbor talks, you don’t try to quiet him. The overall impression at most recitations is chaos, as food vendors, children, and adults ceaselessly move up and down the aisles. No one can be expected to sit through an eight- or nine-hour performance without talking, eating, or getting up. Young children romp in the aisles, and when the action gets exciting they mass by the footlights like moths drawn to a flame. The predominantly female audience will continue to talk long after a recitation has begun. Many people doze during less interesting scenes and, in fact, bring their own straw mats on which they sit and sleep.
But when the bards’ recitations get particularly lurid (e.g., the scene in the Tenth Season in which Ike goes to his daughter’s school to have a meeting with her math teacher, loses his temper, and threatens to sodomize the teacher if he doesn’t agree to give her a passing grade), spectators leap to their feet and the children howl with uproarious laughter, clap, whistle, and yell out encouragement. It may shock some people unfamiliar with orally transmitted epics that audiences would find men threatening each other with anal rape so entertaining. Perhaps it’s not hard to understand why uneducated, working-class, middle-aged women might find homoerotic sadism wildly diverting—but children? It could very possibly be that the children don’t even understand the content of what’s being chanted here at all (the language in this Season is almost impenetrably thick with de Sadean bombast) and are being whipped into paroxysms of excitement by nothing more than the hysterical cacophony of the bards. Also, the scene has an undeniable slapstick quality, with all its tumultuous, pants-at-the-knees, chase-me-around-the-office antics. And usually bards portray the math teacher as such a stock commedia dell’arte villain—i.e. the sanctimonious martinet moonlighting as JV basketball coach and driver’s ed instructor, etc.—that it’s easy to cheer on Ike, even if you disapprove of his cell-block bluster.
There was one prominent and controversial expert who actually believed that the traditional style of the bards (i.e., slurred, mumbling, etc.) so garbles the content of what they are chanting that almost no literal meaning is actually ever transmitted. Jake S. Emig, in an erudite and exquisitely reasoned treatise, only slightly marred by vitriolic ad hominem attacks on several female colleagues (who’d reportedly objected to explicit photographs of himself that he’d texted them), contended that since audiences can’t understand anything that the bards are chanting, they are creating each time, almost out of whole cloth, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for themselves, out of what they think they hear. After subjecting thousands of hours of taped recitations to sophisticated audiological analysis, he wrote, “It is more than likely that there is no originative, coherent epic, that there is merely a succession of misinterpretations of the bards’ muffled cacophony, of their static, their white noise.” Emig, an enigmatic figure, started his career as a semiprofessional hockey player. For several years he was a forward for Thetford Mines Isothermic, a team in the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), which is generally considered the most violent hockey league in the world. Emig’s teammates on Thetford Mines Isothermic included veteran NHL defenseman Yves Racine and right winger Gaetan Royer, who played games with the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2001–02 season and also played for the Bartercard Gold Coast Blue Tongues in the Australian Ice Hockey League (AIHL) in 2008. Emig was forced to retire from professional hockey as a result of post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and a succession of DUI arrests. It was then that he became interested in the field of forensic audiology, received his Masters of Applied Science degree several years later, and soon thereafter became an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Forensic Audiology at Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida. Almost immediately upon publication of Emig’s study, “Castles of Hardened Bullshit,” his work was completely discredited by discoveries that he’d crudely altered much of his audiological research to suit his thesis. Less than a week after these revelations surfaced, Emig was found dead at his gym, Bodies-N-Motion, on East Main Street in Leesburg. At first it was naturally assumed that Emig, distraught over the self-inflicted damage to his academic reputation, had committed suicide. But forensic allergists were able to determine that the scholar had succumbed to food-associated, exercise-induced anaphylaxis. Emig, who was allergic to shellfish, was also receiving weekly immunotherapeutic injections of dust-mite extract to treat his chronic allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. On the afternoon of his death, he’d ordered a bowl of num pachok chon (a Cambodian freshwater-snail noodle soup) from a food truck parked near campus. He’d been intrigued by a photograph of the dish taped to the truck, but was completely unaware of its ingredients. After consuming the soup, Emig went to the gym and began a vigorous session of aerobic exercise. Within a half hour, he reportedly broke out in giant hives, began to wheeze, vomited, collapsed across the elliptical, and died. There’s a significant cross-reactivity between house dust mites and snails, and the combination of dust-mite extract in the immunotherapy injections with the shellfish in the noodle soup and the strenuous exercise proved to be too much for Jake Emig’s system to withstand. Soon after his death, a law was enacted—known today as “Jake’s Law”—that makes it a federal crime to knowingly sell any noodle soup containing freshwater snails to anyone receiving immunotherapy injections of dust-mite extract.
Intriguingly, when volunteers at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, Florida, who’d been locked in sweltering Porta-Johns and subjected to bards chanting the words “sugar frosted nutsack” nonstop for twelve hours, were asked what visual images occurred to them most frequently, the majority reported envisioning a white planet with a kind of scrotal topography (i.e., “ridged,” “wrinkled,” “corrugated,” etc.). Some simply saw the planet spinning in empty space. Others saw themselves actually on the planet, in a car on an empty highway traversing a desolate, bluish-white, furrowed landscape which radiated out infinitely to the horizon. One of the students (Heidi, a junior majoring in Public Safety Administration / Homeland Security who “loves Godiva chocolates and champagne”) visualized herself standing on the planet, disproportionately large, “like The Little Prince.”
The phrase “sugar frosted nutsack” occurs 3,385 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (including this sentence). Scholars suspect that this number corresponds to Section 3385, Title 8, of the California Code of Regulations: “Appropriate foot protection shall be required for employees who are exposed to foot injuries from electrical hazards, hot, corrosive, poisonous substances, falling objects, crushing or penetrating actions, which may cause injuries, or who are required to work in abnormally wet locations.” It’s thought that this mystical numerological correspondence might derive from the concern that bards have traditionally had about maintaining the health of their feet, since they are peripatetic and spend the preponderance of their lives walking from village to village. (There are many other eerie mystical numerological correspondences. The flight distance between San Diego, California, and Bogotá, Colombia, is 3,385 miles. The date 3/3/85 is the birthday of Lithuanian supermodel Dovile Virsilaite. The sum of the digits—3+3+8+5—equals 19. The smallest number of neutrons for which there is no stable isotope is 19. The composer Béla Bartók finished his Opus 19 in 1919 when he was 38 (twice 19). The product of the digits—3x3x8x5—equals 360. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Petition for Amerasian, Widow(er), or Special Immigrant is I-360. The area code for most of western Washington State, including the city of Bremerton, is 360. Ben Gibbard, the lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie, was born in, believe it or not, Bremerton! There are actually so many mystical numerological correspondences that you’re like, this is so fucking weird.)
The men who do attend public recitations of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack tend to be academic experts, connoisseurs by avocation, or individuals who aspire to be bards. Audiences, though, are composed predominantly of working-class, middle-aged women with little education, who are seekin
g to establish romantic relationships with the bards. These women chatter, eat, drink, smoke, spit betel juice and pumpkin seeds on the earthen floor, call raucously across the auditorium to each other, and, in imperious voices, order vendors to bring them fried chicken, beer, tampons, whatever they need at the moment. They frequently demonstrate the warmth of their feelings by giving small gifts to bards during the course of a performance. A “donor” will toss them gifts of cigarettes, candy, cologne, or a small amount of money. A gift is often wrapped in a note, requesting a favor of the bard in return. A bard may be asked, for instance, to perform a private recitation. In some cases, bards receive quite large sums of money or valuable gifts ranging from expensive toilet articles and wristwatches to flat-screen TVs, Mercedes-Benz cars, and luxury apartments—anything to pamper them. Often there is a sexual attachment between the donor and the bard. Liaisons between lusty middle-aged women and handsome young bards are especially common. Some of these women are widows, some are still married. They love to make a show of themselves at the public recitations and squander their husbands’ money on bards with whom they’ve become infatuated.
Most of the blind bards were, at one time, sighted audience members whose wives left them for the bards they met at public recitations. These distraught men, suddenly bereft of their spouses, then blinded themselves and, in turn, became itinerant bards, traveling from town to town, chanting what they remember hearing or think they heard at recitations, although they, too, mumble in such an incomprehensible manner (the traditional style) that it’s truly remarkable they convey anything at all to their audiences, one member of which will invariably include the sweaty, lusty middle-aged woman with the spectacular big-ass ass who will become the bard’s new wife, leaving yet another jilted man to gouge out his eyes. This is the endless reproductive cycle of the bard.
An Inside The Sugar Frosted Nutsack reunion season finale features an exclusive interview with a real husband and real wife who’ve just emerged from a public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (an interview which is, of course, immediately incorporated into The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and which experts today consider an integral component of the epic itself, and which audiences naturally expect the bards to ritually chant in its entirety). The real husband and real wife spontaneously perform a power ballad (with its shades of George Jones and Tammy Wynette) and a Wagnerian duet. This combination of declaimed passages (in which the blind, vagrant, drug-addled bards attempt to realistically imitate the voices of characters) and sung passages of greater (or lesser) lyrical beauty provide an enjoyable variety, keeping the recitation—even of long, mind-numbing exegetical monologues—from becoming tedious. Keep in mind that almost immediately after this interview is conducted, the woman leaves her husband for a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard she met at the very performance she just attended, and that her husband promptly enucleates both of his eyeballs and becomes—what else?—a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard.
T.S.F.N. If we were to ask you to pick the one thing you liked most about the performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack you just listened to, what would it be?
REAL HUSBAND The sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of it. And the almost unendurable length. At first I wanted to just walk out—the bards seemed drunk or fucked-up on something, and I figured, OK, here we go, this is gonna be like Britney Spears at the MTV VMAs or Japan’s Minister of Finance Shoichi Nakagawa at the 2009 G7 meeting in Rome. But then once it got started, I really got into the way the bards kept up that mesmerizing beat by banging their rings on those metal jerrycans of orange soda. And I really like the way that they wander around from place to place…their vagrancy. And I love how they’re actually blind—I mean in real life. Although, it seemed like a couple of them could see but were…what’s the word?…Shit, I’m completely blanking out here.…Sweetie, what’s that thing where you see words backward or reverse some of the letters?
REAL WIFE Dyslexic.
REAL HUSBAND Dyslexic, right. And there was something about their completely mumbled, uninflected delivery that made it…even more sort of mind-numbing. It felt like it was just going around and around in circles and it felt like, at some point, I don’t know how to put it…maybe you should talk to my wife, because she’s so much better at articulating things like this—she was an arts major (and she has a spectacular big-ass ass, thanks to Fast-Cooking Ali).
T.S.F.N. OK, how would you describe the effect?
REAL WIFE Well, I don’t know how much better I am at articulating any of this, but, to me, that sense of it just going around in circles, in these sort of endlessly spiraling recapitulations—it felt like, at some point, it was just going to drive me crazy. And then I thought, like, duh, this is what it feels like to have XOXO inscribing your brain with a sharp periodontal instrument. This is what it feels like to be Ike. That was one of those epiphany moments, for me at least.
T.S.F.N. An epiphany about what exactly?
REAL WIFE About how—and I think you could say that this is what The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fundamentally about, I mean, this is my interpretation anyway—about how we each have this ridiculously finite number of things inscribed in our minds, and that what we do, moment by moment, is continuously postulate an extrinsic “world” for ourselves by reshuffling and recapitulating these ridiculously finite number of things. But it’s a completely closed system—there’s no “world” actually extrinsic to it. What makes Ike so magnificent is that he’s pared down his deck to a single card, The Hero—a man 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.”
T.S.F.N. Your husband wasn’t kidding. That’s some straight-up hyperarticulate, high-pitched shit!
REAL HUSBAND (gushing) I told you! She’s pissah smaht! She’s phenomenological!!
T.S.F.N. What else did you especially like?
REAL WIFE There were these two tiny, busty bards with the T-shirts that said “I Don’t Do White Guys.” I loved them. They reminded me of Snooki.…Like weird little twin Snookies.
T.S.F.N. What else?
REAL WIFE The “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” list made me cry. It’s so beautiful.
T.S.F.N. It doesn’t bother you that it was plagiarized from Oprah’s magazine?
REAL WIFE No, are you kidding?! I think that for a man to steal something from Oprah’s magazine and say he wrote it—to do that for a woman you’re falling in love with—that is just the most romantic thing in the world. Seriously. I think Ike is super-sexy. Every time the bards describe his body and talk about his guinea-T and how he’s completely shredded and his vascularity and how you can see his butt-crack when he genuflects toward the Burj Khalifa, that kind of thing, it’s a huge turn-on for me. It makes me sweaty. I have to start fanning myself with my program.
T.S.F.N. That’s funny. Wouldn’t you rather see a reenactment of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack than just hear people reciting the story? Wouldn’t that be even more powerful?
REAL WIFE I’d rather listen to something than see it. It says in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, in Season Eight: “The Gods’ designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles.” And I believe that. And I’d certainly rather hear a story told by spaced-out blind bards than see it acted out by celebrities.
T.S.F.N. You mean like in a movie?
REAL WIFE Right.
T.S.F.N. You don’t like movies?
REAL WIFE I don’t particularly want to see two hours of George Clooney playing a human resource specialist or Gwyneth Paltrow pretending to die of the plague or Ben Stiller portraying some disaffected slacker, no. When we come to hear a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we’re not
coming to hear fucking rich celebrities pretending to be bards. These are real bards. They are really blind. They are really itinerant. They are really high on ecstasy or psilocybin mushrooms or hallucinogenic borscht. They are not playing fucked-up bards. They are fucked-up.
REAL HUSBAND Also, we love the whole ambience here, the whole scene—the way people bring their families, and their straw mats and folding chairs, and sit out here for hours, and bring food. And the way they chant along. It’s a little like mass karaoke.
T.S.F.N. What did you guys bring?
REAL HUSBAND We packed a lunch. We brought, let’s see…we brought shawarma, tongue sandwiches, Fig Newtons, orange soda, of course.
T.S.F.N. How did you and your wife meet?
REAL HUSBAND Well, the funny thing is—we’re both from Jersey City, but we met in Manhattan. I was working as a waiter at this place on Seventh Avenue and Nineteenth Street. And my wife was going to Parsons at the time. We met at the Limelight, actually.
T.S.F.N. So you were waiting tables and…anything else? Trying to become an actor? Musician? Putting yourself through school?
REAL HUSBAND I’d actually enrolled in a songwriting workshop at The New School. But I got terminal, fucking insurmountable writer’s block immediately. Like the first day of the class. And it was crushing because I’d really made up my mind that I wanted to be a songwriter, even though I’d never written a song before. I’d never really written anything except lists, actually. I was a great list maker. So, anyway, I decided—and this is going to sound crazy, but it’s the Gods’ truth—I decided that I’d try to become gay, because so many of my favorite songwriters were gay, like Cole Porter and Elton John and the Pet Shop Boys, and I was thinking that might sort of jump-start me creatively. So I went to one of those Christian therapists who “cure” gay people, and I asked him if he’d take whatever he says to them, y’know, whatever secret incantation he uses, and say it to me backward, so I’d actually become converted to being gay.
