by Mark Leyner
“Why?”
“You gotta look at the injured parties here, the plaintiffs, these guys Donnie De Vries and Sonny Ghazarian. They’re exactly the kind of rich, privileged, good-looking scumbags that Fast-Cooking Ali and La Felina loathe with a passion, tooling down the PCH in their little Porsche 911 Cabriolets, in their fuckin’ Moss Lipow sunglasses.”
There’s a long pause…
“You there?”
Another long, long pause…then—
“Are you still on?…I can barely hear you.…I’m going to put you back up in boldface.”
CALLER I was just saying that I was listening to Tony Bennett singing “The Shadow of Your Smile” on YouTube. And I read this comment that someone had posted about how “The Shadow of Your Smile” had been her late father’s favorite song. And how he always used to sing it walking down the street, and how, when this person was a little girl, she would be so embarrassed and beg him to stop singing. And she ends the post by saying, “Oh, what I would give to hear him sing one more time!” And that made me so sad that I just started crying. And it’s so weird because my own father died recently, and I don’t really think of him that much and when I do it’s not with much emotion. My first conscious memory of my dad—he’s wearing one of those, y’know, those belligerent T-shirts that say, like, “Stop Reading My Shirt, Asshole!” and these polyester Hawaiian swim trunks, and Velcro sandals he got at Dollar Tree, and socks, and he’s drinking fuckin’ Keystone Light from a go-cup, and I was like, “Ewwwww, that’s my dad?” So, y’know, I don’t really miss him in that painful way you miss someone when you’re really grieving. But that comment on YouTube made me feel so much intense grief on behalf of this person I don’t even know. It’s so weird…
REAL HUSBAND I don’t think that’s so weird at all. I completely get that. Everyone typically thinks that when you’re intimately close to someone, like your husband or your wife or your mom or your dad, that it opens you up so much to all these powerful feelings of connectedness and enables you to understand the other person with such incredible empathy. But I really think that when you become habituated to someone, it can actually do completely the opposite—totally anesthetize you, totally numb you out and blind you to the other person. But then you’ll be somewhere completely random or you’ll just be reading, and you’ll come upon something so abstract, like, I don’t know, an equation in a math book or some mask in a museum or a comment by a complete stranger on YouTube, and suddenly you’re just flooded with all this raw emotion. I really think that the idea of grieving for a father, I mean in theory—the abstract notion of children grieving for fathers—can actually cause us to experience so much more anguish than our own personal grief for our own fathers.…Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?
CALLER I love you. If your wife ever leaves you for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, I’ll be waiting.
REAL HUSBAND (cuing Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You”) She’s already left me for a vagrant drug-addled bard.
There’s a long pause…like an eternity…and then…nothing.
It’s sometimes said that, here, for a moment, the world disappears, that there’s a fade to pure white…like a T-shirt bleached of sentiment…like an empty page…like the tabula rasa of an erased mind…and then—
a flourish of calligraphy:
Eleventh-Century Poem by Su Tung-p’o Entitled
“Re: Ike Karton”
Ike is known to sometimes walk backward
To leave misleading footprints.
Or to wade through puddles,
Leaving no tracks at all…
P.S. Ike also walks backward to hide his face from security cameras.
Backward, Ike enters the Miss America Diner. With the exception of a Chloë Sevigny doppelgänger who frets over cold pancakes in the corner, all the other patrons are the ostentatiously generic people whose photos are already in the picture frames you buy at the store. They are the world’s most famous nobodies: Joe Shmoe and John Q. Public sit at the counter drinking coffee and eating buttered rolls; Every Tom, Dick, and Harry are squeezed into a banquette across from Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, tucking into large breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and toast; Jane Doe and Your Average American Sports Fan clasp hands across unopened menus on a table. They all fall silent as Ike, dear to the Gods, Warlord of His Stoop, the world’s most anonymous somebody (“illustrious and unknown”), enters, backward.
How Can T.S.F.N. Defeat XOXO?
The Fifteenth Season is rough going. Many people find sitting through a public recitation of the Fifteenth Season almost unbearably harrowing. It features some of XOXO’s most vicious and cunning assaults on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and includes attacks on the itinerant bards themselves, attacks that leave hundreds massacred, maimed, and mutilated. It is also the first time that XOXO resorts to such “asymmetric tactics” as deploying what’s referred to as “military-grade ass-cheese” and momentarily effacing the world and scrawling across its white emptiness in his elegantly insouciant calligraphy. (In a recent poll, 59 percent said XOXO was winning, only 21 percent thought T.S.F.N. was making progress.) Also, in a ruthless effort to humiliate Ike, at the behest of the Goddess Shanice who remains (and will forever remain) implacably hostile to Ike for omitting her from his list, “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.),” XOXO steals ideas from the minds of exceptionally brilliant scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars and transplants them into the minds of dim-witted celebrities, enabling them to write erudite and abstruse books, which are released by prestigious publishing houses to tumultuous critical acclaim. Within the same three-month period, reality-TV star Heidi Montag comes out with Capitalism and the Florentine Renaissance (Hill & Wang), Kate Gosselin quickly follows with Mirror Neurons: The Bio-Epistemology of Countertransference (W. W. Norton & Company), and Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan weighs in with two prodigious tomes, The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics (Abrams) and Proust, Mallarmé, Racine: The Intersexuality of the Text / The Intertextuality of Sex (Yale University Press).
Ike—unfailingly self-abnegating, a hero cast into the maelstrom of life—of course, violently abhors the exaltation of rich, privileged celebrities, for whom he prefers the gulag and the guillotine. (This is the central reason he’s so beloved by La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali.) Shanice’s vindictive utilization of XOXO against Ike is tacitly abetted by Mogul Magoo, because it avails the plutocratic God of Bubbles yet another way of vexing, by proxy, his eternal nemesis La Felina, who champions the lumpen, the subproletarian, the unsung, the village idiot with his half-witted smile and tear-filled eyes, the anomic, the disaffected and misshapen, the disinherited, the lame and crippled, the unheralded; who loves everything that’s defiled and damned; who loves everyone who’s pockmarked and putrid; who exalts the physically deformed and the mentally unbalanced and the sans-culottes and the scum of the earth; and who wet her pants during the September Massacres of 1792.
XOXO attacks The Sugar Frosted Nutsack where it’s most vulnerable, when it’s most “keyed up,” most “hyperesthetic.” In the face of mounting criticism for his indiscriminant use of military-grade ass-cheese, XOXO simply shrugs. “I’m a legitimate businessman,” he’ll say, slyly assuming the role of one whose motives are eternally misinterpreted.
In the spring of 2013, a group of experts, including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and controversial Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Giancarlo Capella, make a startling assertion. After conducting what they describe as “an insane amount of research,” based on new information made available through “totally unprecedented access to the Myanmar military junta’s secret archives,” they reach the conclusion that the actual title of the epic is not—nor has it ever been—The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but is instead—and has always been—What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Although, that summer, Dr. Capella and Dog the Bounty Hunter (who are both in Lithuania to promote a chain of
vaginal rejuvenation clinics) recant their assertion, claiming that XOXO had plied their souls with drugged sherbet, Greenspan continues to defend his findings. Greenspan admits that, yes, his soul was plied with drugged sherbet, kidnapped, and taken to XOXO’s garish hyperborean hermitage miles beneath the earth’s surface in Antarctica, where it was kept captive for five and a half God-years, and, yes, there was a suffocatingly sweet smell at the hermitage, as if Eggnog Febreze was being continuously pumped in through the ventilation system, and, yes, every so often XOXO would chastely kiss his soul on the mouth, and that, at some point, XOXO shampooed and cornrowed his soul’s hair, and that, using a sharp periodontal curette, he carved secret wisdom into Greenspan’s soul’s mind. This wisdom includes, according to Greenspan, the curious notion that The Sugar Frosted Nutsack isn’t—and never was—really about Ike Karton at all, but is—and always has been—about the war between XOXO and the epic itself, i.e., the war between the boldfaced and the italicized.
Why Is It SO FUCKING EASY for XOXO to Hack into T.S.F.N.?
By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” website, a T.S.F.N. employee inadvertently permitted XOXO to gain access to T.S.F.N.
Having access to the original programmer’s instructions—or source code—provided XOXO with knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in T.S.F.N.
Understanding the algorithms on which T.S.F.N. is based enables XOXO to identify and locate weak points in the system.
Then Greenspan admitted—not realizing that his microphone was still on—that XOXO might be a cluster of multivariate, random variables, or possibly entropic vectors…
Thanks to the contradictory conclusions of Greenspan, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Dr. Capella, there was a great deal of confusion about what the real name of the epic actually was. Some experts, deliberately or inadvertently, began corrupting or blithely mixing-and-matching the titles, e.g., The Sugar Frosted Bard-Head or The Severed Nutsack, etc. So this bunch of guys in Arizona decided to conduct an experiment in which they called the epic using various names in order to determine which of those names the epic would respond to most readily: “Heeere, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack [or The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head or The Sugar Frosted Bard-Head or What to Expect When You’re Expecting or The Severed Nutsack or T.S.F.N.], [kissing or clicking sounds], come!”
It turns out that the epic most obediently and enthusiastically responded to the name T.S.F.N. And so “This Bunch O’ Guys” (as they came to be known) announced with great fanfare, at a hastily convened press conference held in a huge open-air outdoor mall called the Promenade at Casa Grande, that T.S.F.N. is the epic’s authentic name (a finding many experts around the world admittedly endorsed for no other reason than it’s the easiest title to type).
Keep in mind that even though T.S.F.N. is an epic whose origins date back thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, an epic which has accrued and been transmitted via public recitations by drug-addled, vagrant bards (still referred to as “severed bard-heads” in some parts of the world, e.g., Phlegmish-speaking regions of the Upper Peninsula), it still responds more readily to the “come” command when it’s delivered in a friendly, welcoming, and soothing voice. (You could even wave a tasty treat around to lure your epic over if necessary.) Your “come” command should be something your epic looks forward to hearing, something with which it has a positive association. Remember, there are many things an epic could be doing at any given moment—it could be subjecting itself to recitation by severed bard-heads, of course, it could be yielding to scholarly exegesis, it could be undergoing adaptation by Peter Brook for performance at the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris or by Robert Wilson or Gisli Örn Gardarsson for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Your goal is to make coming to you a more attractive option to your epic than any other alternative action.
You’re Gonna Love This
In the Sixteenth Season, Dog the Bounty Hunter captures a fugitive Lloyd Blankfein (ex–Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs). As part of Blankfein’s community service, he’s ordered to play the role of the poet Sebastian Venable in a Cirque du Soleil production of the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer. (It would be more accurate to say that Blankfein is, winkingly, playing himself playing Sebastian Venable.) In the Williams play, Venable is cannibalized by the street urchins / male prostitutes he’s been paying for sex. (In the play, we only hear the story as narrated by Sebastian’s insane cousin, Catharine Holly. In the movie version, we actually see fragments in flashback, as Catharine (played by Elizabeth Taylor), under the influence of Sodium Pentothal, relates the grisly story to the lobotomy specialist, Dr. John Cukrowicz (played by Montgomery Clift), of how, while vacationing in the Galápagos Islands, her cousin was beaten by street urchins / male prostitutes, who then tore him apart and ate his flesh.) At the end of the Cirque du Soleil production, Blankfein is actually cannibalized by street urchins / male prostitutes. No one in the audience even lifts a finger to try and help Blankfein. Even though it’s horrifically grisly—Blankfein is hacked and torn apart by flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita (hustlers)—his agonized cries for help go unheeded. Everyone in the audience thinks it’s just part of the Cirque du Soleil show. But it actually happens. In real life. These are not actors (i.e., rich fucking celebrities) pretending to be flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita. These are real flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita.
XOXO’s fingerprints are all over these mutations and deformities (i.e., the mind-fucking God’s “trashing” of the epic)—the power ballads; the operatic self-enucleation of the REAL HUSBAND’s eyeballs; the talk-radio drivel about cheap foreign labor and tort reform; the suborning of experts with the expedient of an abbreviated, user-friendly title; the suggestion that an epic that’s been declaimed by chanting, drug-addled bards for tens of thousands of years is actually some sort of compliant, domesticated pet that can be beckoned merely with the tantalizing display of a bacon-flavored treat; etc. The frat-boy prank of changing the word “Flemish” to “Phlegmish” is classic XOXO, as are the screeching gossip-magazine headlines that plunge Ike into the cauldron of his own contradictory abhorrence of celebrity and yearning for immortal renown, his introversion and diffidence and how shamelessly he revels in the masturbatory gaze of moaning Goddesses. And although the ritual dismemberment and cannibalization of Wall Street titan Lloyd Blankfein by feral male hustlers (or ragazzi di vita) “reeking of Thierry Mugler” bears the unmistakable imprint of La Felina, the abrupt and arbitrary switch from German to Italian as T.S.F.N.’s pet foreign language (e.g., ragazzi di vita) seems right out of XOXO’s bag of tricks.
An expert once observed that XOXO “totally gets off on injecting military-grade ass-cheese into the synapses of the epic.” But is the “XOXO effect” always harmful? It undoubtedly maximizes the mutability of the epic, which is a good thing, right? And although the Sixteenth Season is rough going and many people find sitting through a public recitation of it almost unbearably harrowing, it is also one of the most beloved Seasons. Grafting the culturally prestigious melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde into “The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head,” especially to cue the REAL HUSBAND’s self-enucleation by melon baller, couldn’t really be called “bad,” right?
But last September, the highly regarded but reclusive Caltech biochemistry professor Pot Pi, or someone writing under his name, issued a controversial statement declaring that XOXO was, in fact, a form of delusional parasitosis, akin to Morgellons disease. (Not much is known publicly about Pot Pi. There are no official photos of him. And the authenticity of existing images is debated. Apart from the fact that he is missing one eye, accounts of his physical appearance are wildly contradictory. Some people who have met him describe him as having the voluptuous curves of a Beyoncé or a Serena Williams, while others describe him as more closely resembling Representative Henry Waxman. And while he has been characterized by some as shy and unt
alkative with foreigners, others contend that if you get a few Mike’s Hard Lemonades into him, he becomes a screeching cockjockey.) Pot Pi’s hypothesis that XOXO is a form of delusional parasitosis is one with which Ike Karton violently disagrees. Ike unequivocally rejects any suggestion that the Gods are symbolic or allegorical. And just as he would dismiss any pantheistic or structuralist or semiotic interpretation of the Gods, he categorically repudiates a psychopathological one. Ike communes with the Gods themselves, he is their beloved, he is their sexual fantasy, he is their chosen one, even though they occasionally array themselves against him when they’ve taken umbrage at something, e.g., Shanice’s pique at having been left off the “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” list. But the bottom line is: the Gods are real and they intervene in human affairs. Period. And this is why Ike sent one of his elegant little Joseph Cornell / Unabomber boxes to Pot Pi at Caltech—a box containing a butcher cleaver stuck to Pot Pi’s photograph and splashed with blood and cold vomit, and a note that read, “You must not forget that traitors (i.e., thorns in the eyes of the Gods) have ALWAYS been slaughtered by cleavers.”
It’s Almost Impossible to Get One’s Mind Around XOXO
What shape does one’s mind need to assume in order to get around (i.e., “apprehend”—with both its meanings of “capture” and “understand”) XOXO?
It’s impossible to know where XOXO ends and you begin.
XOXO calls into question the provenance and chain of custody of every single thought in your head.
XOXO is the inside and the outside.
