by Mark Leyner
T.S.F.N. That’s so funny.
REAL HUSBAND Yeah. Well, it didn’t work anyway. And then the two of us met at the Limelight and started dating, so the whole gay conversion thing became moot. And it’s probably a good thing I never became a lyricist or a jingle-writer, because she has to help me finish my sentences all the time!
T.S.F.N. How about you? What were you doing at Parsons?
REAL WIFE It’s an interesting question because, during the recitation, my husband and I were talking about how people sort of “abuse” XOXO, and it made me think about something that had happened to me at Parsons.
T.S.F.N. Tell us about that.
REAL WIFE Well, I’d been there a couple of years, studying painting, and I’d been doing all this, y’know, completely derivative work—Kenneth Noland rip-offs, imitation Agnes Martins, second-rate Peter Halleys, all this shit. And then I came up with this idea, which was to use photographs of very grim, morbid sorts of things and make these kind of unfocused, blurry paintings out of them. Really cool idea, and I’d never seen anything like it. So, I’m thinking, y’know, finally, here I go. So I did this huge, unfocused, blurry painting of Joseph Goebbels’s family, based on a famous photograph of Joseph and Magda Goebbels’s dead children’s pajama-clad bodies (Helga Susanne, Hildegard, Helmut Christian, Hedwig, Holdine, and Heidrun) after they’d been put to sleep with morphine and poisoned with cyanide by their parents. And I showed the painting to one of my instructors at Parsons, and he was like, that’s amazing, that’s brilliant, that’s a completely new, unprecedented idea. And I was just totally euphoric. And then, a couple of days later, the same instructor comes up to me and says, you better go check out the new Gerhard Richter exhibit at MoMA. And I was like, why? And he said, just go. So I went to MoMA and there’s this fifteen-painting cycle of unfocused, blurry paintings that Richter had done based on photographs of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and their deaths.…It occurred to me at the time that maybe XOXO had taken the idea from my head and given it to Gerhard Richter. It crossed my mind. I’ll be honest. And I pretty much gave up on painting after that.
T.S.F.N. What did you mean about people abusing XOXO?
REAL WIFE I think it’s too easy for people to always blame things on XOXO. Everyone’s always, like, oh, sorry for what I said last night, XOXO must have kidnapped my soul and plied it with drugged sherbet, y’know? I think sometimes people just use that as a way of avoiding responsibility for what they say—it’s like the equivalent of—oh, I was drunk or I was so tired…
T.S.F.N. Was it a huge disappointment to you that you didn’t eventually become an artist?
REAL WIFE No. Look at the so-called “art world.” Fucking David Geffen sells a de Kooning to this hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen for 137.5 million dollars. Such “art lovers”! Right? It says in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack that a time will come when all fettered monsters will break loose and the plutocrats will be dragged out of office buildings and guillotined on the street. That includes the “art lovers.”
T.S.F.N. Some people think that that whole business about Ike getting hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen but initially telling people he was hit by a Hasidic ambulance to foment some apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type global war is really confusing. Do you agree with that?
REAL WIFE When I went to my first recitation and I heard the bards chant that part, I thought to myself, I don’t see how a dispute between club kids and Hasids could set off any kind of apocalyptic global war.
REAL HUSBAND What about World War One? Who was that guy…the Bosnian Serb…the nationalist? Uh…oh fuck!…What was his name, sweetie?
REAL WIFE Gavrilo Princip?
REAL HUSBAND Yeah, Gavrilo Princip. Gavrilo Princip assassinates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, right? And it sets off the whole fuckin’ First World War. I mean, that’s a pretty apocalyptic war. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.
REAL WIFE I’m not sure that’s the best analogy.
REAL HUSBAND You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic global war?
REAL WIFE That’s not what I mean.
REAL HUSBAND You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic fucking global war?
REAL WIFE I never said it wasn’t.
REAL HUSBAND Trench warfare. Poison gas. Fifteen million deaths.
REAL WIFE The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. There was an extremely complicated situation…
REAL HUSBAND I’m just sayin’.
REAL WIFE …with all sorts of interlocking alliances.
REAL HUSBAND I’m just sayin’. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.
T.S.F.N. You seem to really identify with Ike.
REAL HUSBAND People tell me I sound like him—y’know, the raspy, whispery voice and everything. And I have the same kinds of fantasies he does about big, sweaty, uneducated, working-class women, and about being ogled by masturbating Goddesses…
T.S.F.N. Do you think your wife is a Mossad agent?
REAL HUSBAND (looking askance at his wife with mock suspicion) Hmmm…
T.S.F.N. Possible?
REAL HUSBAND (laughing) Seriously, I tend to interpret that whole “everyone’s wife is a Mossad agent” thing in a more sort of metaphorical way—that people you’re intimate with might be, like, “double agents,” y’know? It’s a weird kind of paranoia you get about people you love—that they might turn out to be completely different from who you think they are, that it’s all been some sort of diabolically patient plot against you. I think that’s a pretty normal fear you have in any serious relationship. And that’s why it’s such a popular part of the epic, because so many people can relate to that fear. But personally I don’t really worry about it too much.
T.S.F.N. Why’s that?
REAL HUSBAND Have you ever heard of Cupid’s Stigmata?
T.S.F.N. No, what is that?
REAL HUSBAND It’s a term they use in online dating. It’s when two people share some uncommon anatomical feature with each other, which usually means that they’re sort of predestined to be together. And my wife and I both have double ureters draining one of our kidneys (which is an anomaly occurring in, like, 1 in 150 people), and we both have port-wine stains in the shape of Nike swooshes on the smalls of our backs (which is, like, 1 in 10 million people), so…
T.S.F.N. Is that true? That’s amazing!
REAL HUSBAND (totally cracking up) No, I’m kidding. I’m busting your chops, man. But seriously—we’re really close. Really really close. And I think that what they say about Ike and Ruthie is sort of true about us too—that we’re utterly inscrutable figures who, paradoxically, understand each other perfectly well. And we’re both lifelong connoisseurs of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
T.S.F.N. You’ve been going to recitations your whole life?
REAL HUSBAND Absolutely. And I was in one when I was a kid! In, like, fourth grade. It was a school recitation. I played a fuckin’ bard! I probably still know the lines…
T.S.F.N. Do it. Do a little for us.
REAL HUSBAND I don’t have a jerrycan of Sunkist to tap my ring on, but…
T.S.F.N. C’mon, do some.
REAL HUSBAND OK.…This is, like, totally from memory…and it isn’t verbatim, it’s sort of paraphrasing…
T.S.F.N. Go for it.
REAL HUSBAND OK…Ike is strolling down to the Miss America Diner. Instead of a monocle and a walking stick, this flâneur sports a tight guinea-T and a baseball bat. Uh…he’s loaded with gem-like apercus and aphorisms.…He enters the diner and…no, wait a minute…
REAL WIFE Doomed, elusive Ike, Warlord of His Stoop…
REAL HUSBAND Doomed, elusive Ike, Warlord of His Stoop…never ostentatious, self-righteous, or flamboyantly narcissistic, enters the diner…as if in a trance…a trance abetted by the obbligato of miscella
neous conversations, which is akin to the drone of the bards. “It’s his favorite restaurant!” a friend of the hero tells The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in an exclusive interview. No, wait—that’s not right…” There are two opposed facets to Ike’s character, a friend of the hero tells The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in an exclusive interview. “He abhors celebrity and yet covets immortality.” Ike himself is said to be troubled by the ambivalence in his character. “I dwell in anonymity. How is it, then, that I am enchanted by eternal renown?” One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn’t leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.…Uh—
REAL WIFE Three crazy things to report…
REAL HUSBAND Three crazy things to report: The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has received a letter demanding that Ike be replaced by actor Chace Crawford…six bards were hacked to death by jilted, machete-wielding husbands whose wives had been seduced at a public recitation…we are now learning that the bards have been decapitated, and that the severed heads of the bards continue to cacophonously chant The Sugar Frosted Nutsack…hold on…we have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting—let me repeat that: only one head is still chanting…we are now learning that drunken Ukrainian Cossacks, Mexican banditos wearing sombreros and crisscrossed cartridge bandoliers, khat-chewing Somali pirates, Indian Maoists (i.e., Naxalites), and Punjabi Taliban are playing Buzkashi with the headless carcasses of the slain bards. OK, we have just received word that all hell has broken loose. Children all over the world are now strangling their fathers with the intestines of their mothers. A single Chinook helicopter has been sent in to evacuate the loyalists, but its blades have been immobilized with what experts are calling “military-grade ass-cheese.” Ladies and gentlemen—we have just received an important clarification: all of this is apparently just part of a Cirque du Soleil show. Let me repeat that, for the benefit of those of you who are just tuning in: all of this is apparently just part of a Cirque du Soleil show. No one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds—
REAL WIFE Even though this all turned out to be just part of a Cirque du Soleil show, this notion of severed bard-heads was like a remark stricken from the record in a courtroom—no one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds…
REAL HUSBAND Right, right.…Even though this all turned out to be just part of a Cirque du Soleil show, this notion of severed bard-heads was like a remark stricken from the record in a courtroom—no one could really disregard it or completely purge it from their minds. In fact, in the Twelfth Season, some experts begin referring to the vagrant, drug-addled blind bards simply as “Severed Bard-Heads.” And a strange idea began to take root in the public imagination—that these severed bard-heads are gathered by itinerant children toting surplus NBA ball bags and sold to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Then the severed bard-heads are crushed in a kind of wine press, resulting in a “juicy pulp,” to which is added the spit of the horniest, hairiest, chubbiest, and most uneducated subproletarian women in that particular town or village (aka “La Felina’s Angels”). Enzymes in their saliva catalyze various chemical processes that culminate in what we today call “hallucinogenic Gravy.”
Some experts devote entire careers to the study of a single scene. For example, the unusually lachrymose (albeit highly ritualized) scene between Ike and his father at a restaurant, when Ike’s father says to him something to the effect of “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but your mother was a fat, sweaty, uneducated, subproletarian woman who didn’t have clue one.” And Ike indicates that he is weeping by slowly touching his sleeve to his forehead. And the father, noting this, says, “You know, I just realized something.…My father said almost the exact same thing to me at a restaurant when I was your age.” And then the father slowly touches his sleeve to his forehead. Or Ike’s lengthy and disjointed conversation with La Felina at Port Newark about whether Rachel Lee, the Korean-American mastermind of the “Bling Ring” (the gang of well-off Valley kids who burglarized the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and Audrina Patridge, a regular on the reality show The Hills who famously complained after the burglary that “They took…jeans made to fit my body to my perfect shape”), constitutes a new kind of anarchist insurrectionary, a “Neo-Bandito” representing perhaps the new “lumpen celebutante,” or whether she’s just someone slavishly in thrall to the celebrities she admired, etc. (This colloquy all by itself is considered by some to be a stand-alone mini-epic.) And there are some experts who devote entire careers to the study of a brief vignette or a single passage: the God Rikidozen absently tapping a Sharpie on the lip of a coffee mug, and the unvarying cadence of that tap-tap-tap becoming the basis for the standard 124 beats-per-minute in house music; or the Dwarf Goddess La Muñeca turning her mortal girlfriend, Chief Warrant Officer Francesca DiPasquale, into a macadamia nut, a jai alai ball, and then 100,000 shares of Schering-Plough stock; or when Bosco Hifikepunye makes Mi-Hyun fifty feet tall and turns Lenin’s corpse and Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head into anal sex toys for her; or when Ike says to the God of Money, Doc Hickory, “Can I ask you a stupid question? You don’t find me dour, do you?” and Doc Hickory’s like, “Dour?” and Ike goes, “Yeah, y’know, humorless,” and Doc Hickory’s like, “I know what dour means. I’m just wondering why you’re asking me,” and Ike goes, “Because I heard that Mogul Magoo told Bosco Hifikepunye that he thinks I’m all, like, dour and shit”; or when Shanice gets Lady Rukia to get XOXO to sabotage Ike’s daughter when she’s taking her tenth-grade math final and answering the question “If each of ‘Octomom’ Nadya Suleman’s octuplets also have eight children and then each of their children have eight children and each of their children have eight children, etc., how many offspring would there be in eight generations?”; or Candace Hilligoss getting out of the bathtub in Carnival of Souls (to creepy organ music); or Ike inviting a gob of phlegm to a concert. And then there are those experts who devote entire careers to the study and minute exegesis of a single line. And among these particular experts who were entranced with the phrase “severed bard-heads,” there were several who became fixated upon the significance of the line “We have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting—let me repeat that: only one head is still chanting.” Contrary to their colleagues, who’d confected a theory of myriad free-floating severed bard-heads—that is, swarms of airborne anthropomorphic “scrubbing bubbles” or “nano-drones” whose punishingly repetitive high-pitched chants comprise what we think of today as The Sugar Frosted Nutsack—these experts contend that there is, in fact, only one severed bard-head. These experts—who collectively have become known as the “Jersey City School” because most of them actually reside in Jersey City and are, in fact, all people who babysat or taught or coached Ike when he was a child (including his driver’s ed instructor and the chubby babysitter with the big-ass titties who “mildly molested” Ike while they watched F-Troop together)—believe that “the one severed bard-head” is inhabited by all the Gods, which accounts for the polyvocal buzzing or droning quality of the head. They have determined, allegedly through the use of spy satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and information provided clandestinely by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, that “the one severed bard-head” containing the Gods is kept in a minibar on the top floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. All of which leads inevitably to the question: Is “the one severed bard-head” Ike himself?
The identification of “the one severed bard-head” with Ike himself is persistent and completely understandable. Of course, one can hear in the cacophonous buzz that emanates from Ike’s head an echo—an analogue—of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s enigmatic dictum “the myths think themselves in me.” Also, the bards’ recitations are garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. Ike’s continuous self-narration is garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and a
lmost inaudible. They are analogous. But are they one and the same? Isn’t Ike’s self-narration (and, of course, this very speculation, these very sentences) instantly and retroactively incorporated into the epic The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and dutifully transmitted from generation to generation of chanting, drug-addled, blind “severed bard-heads” who maintain their trance-inducing beat by banging their chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda? An infinitely recursive epic that subtends and engulfs everything about it (i.e., everything extrinsic to it), and that has, for tens of thousands of years, at any given moment, been subject to the impish and sometimes spiteful corruptions and interpolations (or the out-and-out sabotage) of XOXO, presents a phenomenon that’s difficult to get your mind around.
The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head
REAL HUSBAND
He abhors celebrity
And yet covets immortality.
What is the meaning of the paradox?
What are its latent properties?
REAL WIFE
These portions can seem hopelessly corrupt.
XOXO is winning the battle to ruin the book,
But he hasn’t won the war.
REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
I’m a severed bard-head!
I can’t stop reciting what I started!
This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
