The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

by Mark Leyner

  Sometimes it actually appears as if T.S.F.N. is holding its own against XOXO. Maybe, with an invulnerability conferred by its morbid ingestion of everything extrinsic to it, T.S.F.N. simply cannot be killed, like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. So powerful is the human tropism toward boldface signifiers that whenever the severed bard-heads manage, even momentarily, to wrest control of the epic from XOXO and return to the basic story of Ike and Ruthie and Vance, the audience (which has glazed over, staring torpidly at their feet during the interminable and frequently incoherent exegetical Seasons) perks up, looking alive and avidly interested. But these moments are far and few between, and given the overwhelming perception that XOXO has carte blanche access to the bards’ brains and to your brain (via public recitation, book, Kindle, Nook, iPad, iTunes, etc.), it’s reasonable to ask: Why hasn’t XOXO just killed T.S.F.N. by now? And the answer is, according to the experts, because XOXO is content to simply toy with the epic, to just keep fucking with it forever.

  XOXO, who sometimes likes to pose as “an innocent Canadian tourist,” once boasted—not realizing that his microphone was still on—that when he kidnaps someone’s soul and brings it to his hyperborean hermitage, he likes to fillip the soul’s mind with his index finger so that it oscillates back and forth trillions of times a second between, what he called, “its regular state and its antimatter state.” This hyperoscillation, XOXO explained, is that state of mind called “going into the forest to gather wild garlic.”

  Of course, one could reasonably say (along with the CALLER) that there’s “too much” sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, that it’s punishingly repetitive. But whether that’s a function of Ike Karton’s fixations and fetishes and his compulsion to be punished or whether it’s the result of the impish perversity and malice of XOXO, we can’t possibly know. Nor can we know ultimately—because of XOXO—whether what you’re hearing or reading is what was originally intended. We can’t know—thanks to the legerdemain of the God XOXO—whether what you’re reading is what was written.

  Mogul Magoo V$ El Brazo

  In Season Seventeen, a protracted battle begins between El Brazo and Mogul Magoo over who owns the rights to T.S.F.N. Mogul Magoo (who was originally the God of Bubbles) had asserted himself as God of the Nutsack. He’d dutifully submitted his boilerplate rationale: Anything Enveloping Something Else. Just as a bubble is a globule of water that contains air, the scrotum is a pouch of skin and muscle that contains the testicles. Ergo, it’s perfectly logical and reasonable to conclude it falls within his purview. Thus, he reasoned, he owns exclusive worldwide rights (including all derivative works) to T.S.F.N. This completely infuriated El Brazo, also known as Das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen (“The Strangest of the Strange”), who, as the God of Urology and the God of Pornography, considered the nutsack his inviolable domain and thus claimed ownership of exclusive worldwide rights (including all derivative works) to T.S.F.N. The antipathy that developed between these two Gods (and, subsequently, between Magoo and the Goddess La Felina) would have significant consequences. El Brazo threatened Magoo and his cohorts with liquidation in a “Night of the Long Knives.” In response, Magoo beefed up his posse of “Pistoleras”—the divine, ax-wielding mercenary vixens who are total fitness freaks with rock-hard bodies, each of whom has a venomous black mamba snake growing out of the back of her head, which she pulls through the size-adjustment cutout on the back of her baseball cap. Neither of them could care less about the literal or the allegorical and mystical implications of the epic, or that many fashion critics are saying “Finally, a drug-induced epic that celebrates real women’s contours and silhouettes.” This is just a heavyweight dick-swinging contest between two Gods. Even though most legal experts conclude that Mogul Magoo can make the more compelling case for ownership of T.S.F.N.—its tail-chasing, vortical form is clearly consistent with his proprietary concept of “enveloping,” and there’s no question that severed bard-heads (aka “scrubbing bubbles”) fall within his realm—he is, characteristically, playing several moves ahead of everyone else. After tense marathon negotiations conducted at the 160-story, rocket-shaped Burj Khalifa in Dubai, this shrewd, uncannily prescient, and relentlessly enterprising businessman—who already owns the entire Rodgers and Hammerstein music catalogue, as well as the rights to such all-time favorites as “The Mister Softee Jingle,” “Under My Thumb,” “Tears of a Clown,” “White Wedding,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This,” “Party in the U.S.A.,” Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “The Shadow of Your Smile,” Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe,” and “The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head”—shocks everyone by suddenly conceding ownership of T.S.F.N. to El Brazo in return for acquisition of the ringtone rights to the narcocorrido “That’s Me (Ike’s Song)” (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch? / That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One, Despised / Whore, Lonely Nut Job…”).

  Whether Magoo’s wager that he can make more money from the ringtone rights to a single neo-pagan narcocorrido than from the public performance royalties that would accrue to him from thousands of years of spaced-out blind bards chanting a mind-numbingly repetitive fugue-like epic while swilling from jerrycans of orange soda remains to be seen. But financial history has shown that it doesn’t pay to bet against the chubby, pockmarked God of Bubbles.

  Ike’s New Horoscope (SPOILER ALERT)

  The A&P will start carrying that Kozy Shack butterscotch pudding you like so much. Your anal fissure will start bleeding again (so don’t wear the tight white jeans, in case you start spotting). Your daughter will get pregnant. You’re going to have dinner with your father to try to persuade him to change his will, and you’re going to get into a really nasty fight with him, and you’re going to say, “You know how they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Well, I’m like an apple that Vladimir Guerrero picked up and threw as far as he could. That’s how far from your fucking tree I fell.”

  What Is the Mystical Significance of Bold v. Italics?

  This is the innermost secret of the epic.

  Before the arrival of the Gods, everything was wildly italicized. This was the time of the so-called “Spring Break.” There were only phenomena and vaguely defined personages, and there was really no discernable distinction between phenomena and personages. There were no “Gods” per se, no dramatis personae, there was only an undifferentiated, unidimensional T.S.F.N.—only the infinitely recursive story and its infinitely droning loops, varying infinitesimally with each iteration. But once the Gods arrived and got off the bus, they insisted on being boldfaced signifiers.

  This whole epic is about the war on the part of T.S.F.N. to vanquish the boldfaced signifiers and reestablish the “golden age” when things happened without any discernable context; when there were no recognizable patterns; when it was all incoherent; when 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; when 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.

  One possible conclusion that could be drawn from this, of course—and it happens to be precisely the conclusion reached by the apocryphal “Justices of the Eighteenth Season” (these Justices who seem almost bard-like in their black hoodies, their scrotums dusted with confectionary sugar)—is that XOXO, whose ongoing and indefatigable campaign to undermine context and disrupt cohesiveness (i.e., his vandalism and vajazzlement of the epic) is, by now, familiar to anyone who’s not totally brain-dead, is actually working in collusion with T.S.F.N. And, in fact, the majority of the Justices—the vote was 8–1—question whether
the so-called “war between XOXO and T.S.F.N.” might not have always been a front or a pretext for this collusion between XOXO and T.S.F.N.

  But this whole notion of “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar” seems suspect. Who are these “Justices”? Are we meant to infer that they are the habitués from the Miss America Diner—Joe Shmoe, John Q. Public, Every Tom, Dick, and Harry, Your Average American Sports Fan, etc.—those men who so shamelessly and ostentatiously flaunt their vaunted anonymity? And what of this so-called “8–1 decision” suggesting that XOXO and T.S.F.N. are now working in cahoots, that they are, one or the other or both of them, double agents of some kind? Isn’t this all beginning to sound suspiciously familiar? Isn’t it more than plausible that all of this is part of the incredibly sophisticated disinformation campaign being waged by XOXO? This vexing suspicion is the very basis for the lone, dissenting vote—that lone, dissenting vote belonging, of course, to Ike Karton.

  The hero Ike—unwavering, irreproachably self-​abnegating, aloof, Warlord of His Stoop—offers neither oral nor written opinion. His dissent is mute. He strikes a pose of implacable mute dissent. He just stands there on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, and he strikes 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. (This is the “glaze of the gaze”—the onanistic scrutiny that sugar frosts Ike’s every move—which Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan analyzes in his book The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics.)

  Many of the epic’s most perceptive commentators have underestimated or missed altogether or dismissed as so much incoherent, dilettante bullshit (or as the product of the Brownian motion of Ike’s paranoid ideation) the complexities of the Boldface v. Italics case and this whole notion of “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar” (with its choral judgment of the dissenting voice—that judgment and that doomed voice staking out the dialectical polarities of martyrdom). One expert said, “With most of T.S.F.N., we can sing along by ‘following the bouncing ball,’ as Mitch Miller (whom many experts consider to be the ‘inventor’ of karaoke) used to instruct viewers of his 1960s television show, Sing Along with Mitch. But in this Season, we’re being asked to follow the red rubber tip of a paranoid flâneur’s walking stick as he jabs it at your head.”

  After the massacre of drug-addled, blind bards by jilted husbands (a bloodbath purportedly masterminded by XOXO), a shadowy splinter group was formed, calling itself T.S.F.N.—General Command. This group, which was fanatically anti-XOXO, began recruiting members in the fetid, overcrowded refugee camps to which the surviving bards fled after the massacre. After establishing links with La Felina, they forged an unlikely alliance of convenience with the nihilistic, glue-sniffing street punks who’d hacked to death and cannibalized Lloyd Blankfein. On an oppressively hot summer night, marked by a bizarre outbreak of ball lightning which left all of Jersey City reeking of sulfur, an assassination commando unit comprised of blind T.S.F.N.—General Command bards and glue-sniffing street punks—who’d recently taken to calling themselves giovanetti martirizzati (“martyred youth”) from the zozzo mondo (“slob world”)—supposedly descended on the Miss America Diner and slaughtered the eight “Justices in black hoodies, whose scrotums are dusted with confectionary sugar,” in retaliation for their having promulgated the idea that T.S.F.N. is working in collusion with XOXO.

  What Makes Ike a Hero?

  His implacable hatred of the rich is, among other things, what makes Ike a hero. An anarcho-primitivist, he strives to restore the world to an antediluvian arcadia (what he calls “Spring Break”) where no one man or woman seeks more wealth or notoriety than the next, and where the Gods are content to be indistinguishable from phenomena. And he dreams of a new Jacobinical Terror, of deploying guillotines outside Soho House (in West Hollywood and New York), of harvesting the severed heads of Hollywood A-listers and dropping one down the chimney of each and every child who’s been good that year (i.e., each child who’s militantly resisted celebrity worship in his or her school and who’s been modest, reticent, and almost naively kind to others, especially the misshapen and the misbegotten).

  Basically, at every moment, Ike is trying to figure out how to constitute himself and how to situate himself in history. And this, among other things, is what makes Ike a hero.

  Like all epic heroes, Ike hears the narration of the epic in his head and frequently mouths the words (sometimes audibly) to himself as he ritually reenacts the epic. This, of course, is what is meant by the term “epic karaoke” or “recursive karaoke” or “karaoke mise en abyme.” The ritual reenactment and murmured karaoke recitation of the epic of which he is the hero constitutes Ike’s life. This is the life to which Ike is doomed. This is why he is so frequently described as “death-drenched.”

  This is Ike the Chimera—the hybrid beast with the severed head of a bard and the sugar frosted nutsack of a hero.

  That statement, “This is Ike the Chimera—the hybrid beast with the severed head of a bard and the sugar frosted nutsack of a hero,” is considered to contain the innermost embedded secret within the many embedded innermost secrets of the epic, i.e., this is the very moment when the epic most suggests a Russian Matryoshka doll or a Chinese nested box.

  How can Ike be ritually reenacting something that he appears to be doing extemporaneously and for the very first time? It is because this takes place in the “realm or the zone of the heroic,” on a “heroic plane”—it is fated, choreographed by the Gods.

  Ike is the hero of the epic about the bard who simultaneously recites and reenacts the epic of which he is the extemporaneous, albeit inexorably doomed, hero. This is why scholars frequently refer to Ike as the “Möbius Stripper,” i.e., the man whose lascivious dance (i.e., “his life”) is performed for the delectation of masturbating Goddesses.

  Ike’s ongoing self-narration (which is an echolalic karaoke recitation of what he hears streaming in his head) is extremely similar to—and thought by many experts to actually derive from—the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball-dribbling nine-year-old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play: “…he’s got a lot going on that could potentially distract him…algebra midterm…his mom’s calling him to come inside…his asthma inhaler just fell out of his pocket…but somehow he totally shuts all that out of his mind…crowd’s going ca-razy!…but the kid’s in his own private Idaho…clock’s ticking down…​badass craves the drama…lives for this shit…​Gunslingaaah…he can hear the automatic garage-door opener…​that means his dad’s gonna be pulling into the driveway in, like, fifteen seconds…un-fucking-believable that he’s about to take this shot under this kind of pressure, with the survival of the species on the line…and look at him out there—dude’s ice…is this guy human or what?…his foot’s hurting from when he stepped on his retainer in his room last night…but he can play with pain…we’ve seen that time and time again…he’s stoic…a cold-blooded professional…Special Ops…Hitman with the Wristband…hand-eye coordination like a Cyborg Assassin…his mom’s calling him to come in and feed the dog and help set the table for dinner…the woman is doing everything she can possibly do to rattle him…but this guy’s not like the rest of us…he is un-fucking-flappable…he dribbles between his legs…OK, hold on…he dribbles between his legs…hold on…he dribbles…hold on…he dribbles between his legs (yes!)…fakes right, fakes left, double pump-fakes…there’s one second left on the clock…and he launches…an impossibly…long…fadeaway…​jumpaaah…​​it’s off the rim…but he fights for the offensive rebound like some kind of rabid samurai…throwing vicious elbows like lethally honed swords…the severed heads of h
is opponents litter the court…spinal cords are sticking out of the neck stumps…but there’s no ticky-tacky foul called, the referees are just letting them play…there’s somehow still .00137 seconds left on the clock…now there’s a horn honking…might that be the War Conch of the Undead?…etc., etc.”

  Ike is constantly testing his own self-narration against “empirical reality” (which is itself actually an illusory construct inscribed by XOXO in Ike’s mind, which Ike realized after being hit by the Mister Softee truck). So, Ike’s tactical response to XOXO (everyone’s, for that matter) is not far from a kind of delirium. Ike’s methodology is to echo the epic: “Ike’s doing this, Ike’s doing that,” and to compare what he’s saying he’s doing with what he’s actually doing, and see if there’s any “wobble.” This, among other things, is what makes Ike a hero.

  Ike Karton, unemployed butcher, inveterate mumbler, Warlord of His Stoop, believes—and justifiably so—that he’s fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters. And he will stand in front of the Miss America Diner (sometimes in close proximity to this other solitary psycho who angrily paces the perimeter of the parking lot bellowing at passersby, “Are you staring at my girlfriend’s tits?!”) and murmur to himself, “He is fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters,” to which he will almost immediately append, “He is also fated to stand in front of the Miss America Diner (sometimes in close proximity to this other solitary psycho who angrily paces the perimeter of the parking lot bellowing at passersby, ‘Are you staring at my girlfriend’s tits?!’) and murmur to himself, ‘He is fated to die very soon at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters.’” These bracketing redundancies, the compulsive conjuring up of these Matryoshka dolls or Chinese nested boxes, can occupy Ike’s thoughts for hours upon hours. This is one of the reasons (in addition to the whispering campaign conducted against him by Mogul Magoo, Shanice, and Bosco Hifikepunye) that Ike was fired from his job in the A&P Meat Department, and it is one of the things, among many, that makes Ike a hero.