by Mark Leyner
For doomed Ike, everything—every concept and every percept—is a totem of death. Everything bespeaks evanescence. Even a brand new Quiznos on the corner of West Side Avenue and Stegman Parkway (a Quiznos that hasn’t even opened yet!) reeks of mono no aware (“the pathos of things”) and lacrimae rerum (“tears of things”).
Of course, we know that Ike’s soul has been repeatedly kidnapped by XOXO and taken to XOXO’s hyperborean hermitage. And we know that Ike has developed (or is perhaps feigning, as a tactical ploy) Stockholm syndrome.
Ike’s heroic maneuvering to situate himself in an appositional space vis-à-vis XOXO—that is, to juxtapose himself somehow in relation to XOXO, to find a place interior to him or outside of him—may account for Ike’s fractured motion, for the sort of cubistic way he has of moving through space (“the feral fatalism of all his loony tics”).
Ike was asked at the zoning board hearing if his soul had ever had a homosexual relationship with XOXO, and Ike—ever the discreet, gallant, old-world gentleman—said that they’d merely had “tickle fights.” (And this, among other things, is also what makes Ike a hero.)
None of the above.
All of the above.
ANSWER: P. All of the above.
Note to self: P. All of the above includes O. None of the above. Consider mystical significance.
10.
Ike’s Agony:
Why His Own Family Fears for His Life
How his obsession with polytheism and martyrdom (and online porn) is tearing his family apart. Ruthie lashes out! She leaks X-rated pics of Ike, and gossips about La Felina’s “sham marriage” to Fast-Cooking Ali.
T.S.F.N. Shocker:
99% of All Unmanned Drone Attacks & Robotic Prostatectomies Are Being Conducted by the Same Nine-Year-Old Kid in a Mumbai Call-Center Cubicle!
Miss America Diner Waitress:
“I’m fired!”
Furious owner axes humiliated St. Peters sophomore for giving Ike Karton free tongue sandwich
Inside her legal battle to regain her part-time job
REAL HUSBAND on CALLER:
“She’s using me to get to Ike.”
Vance: “Ike’s bonkers.”
Drug-Addled, Blind Bard Steps Out to Flaunt New Super-Sexy Sumo Body:
“I gained 165 pounds from drinking 40 cans of Sunkist orange soda a day!”
75 Sex Tips from Gods:
Sizzling, Sinful, Surprising Things They’re Craving Now
Act like a skanky slut with a train-wreck personality who’s all about appealing to my needs while expressing none of your own. That’s a total turn-on to a God! With your tongue, trace the head of my penis in a circular motion, and then look up at me with your slutty trout-pout and say, “Determine my destiny capriciously, like you don’t even give a fuck. Give me a fate befitting the dirty little whore that I am! Use me and then fling me into the abyss where I belong.” I’ll have a huge orgasm. —El Brazo
Just at the moment I enter you from behind, sharply contrast my divine omnipotence with your human inadequacies. Say something like, “You’re immortal, I’m not. You remain eternally young and beautiful, whereas I’m going to get wrinkles, age spots, spider veins, osteoporosis, or diabetes, or have a stroke or something.” Or, if you’re riding me on top, reach back, grab my balls, and say, “You’re omniscient—I, on the other hand, can barely follow an episode of Dora the Explorer without becoming hopelessly befuddled and breaking into tears!” I’ll climax so convulsively and with such a magnitude of semen that hundreds of thousands of people in low-lying regions will drown! —Bosco Hifikepunye
This might sound stupid (but women don’t do it and we love it so much and it’s so easy)—refer to me occasionally as a “God.” Say things like “Oh, my God…oh, my God!” —Mogul Magoo
My favorite thing is spontaneity. So, say we’ve got courtside seats for the Lakers game. When we know the TV camera is right on us, and there we are up on the giant HDTV screen hanging over the arena, kiss me and put two of my fingers inside your underwear, so I can feel how excited you are. Then we’ll immediately head out to Death Valley, where you’ll slather my genitals with chopped meat or chicken giblets so that buzzards will swoop down and tear at my nutsack with their razor-sharp talons. (It won’t hurt me—I’m a God!) Then we’ll have punishing (i.e., super-hot) sex under the merciless desert sun for eternity (literally). The fact that you’d leave a Lakers game with a God, go to the desert and let him fuck you forever with his mangled, giblet-covered dick will show me that you’re into completely spontaneous, raw, gotta-have-you-now sex—which is a total turn-on! —Doc Hickory
Plus 71 more!!
T.S.F.N. Announces New Fall Lineup
Monday: 8 PM Eastern
“Ike’s Narcocorrido”
In the Season Premiere, Ike sits down in a booth at the Miss America Diner (West Side Avenue at the corner of Culver Avenue), with a pad of unlined white paper and a blue-ink pen, perhaps to make a list of celebrities to be gassed, but with no conscious intention to write a narcocorrido. “I might totally flirt with you,” he tells The Waitress. “I don’t mind,” she says coyly, with a slight Mississippi drawl. Ike’s rage and his lust are strong. He’s nursed by the Gods. His honor comes from El Brazo and La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali. He’s dear to them, these Gods who rule the world. In his soft voice, he orders a tongue sandwich (this is apparently what he meant by “flirting”). She can’t hear him and leans way over so he can whisper directly into her ear. She’s like some hapless Beckettian tramp in a white waitress uniform so short that it barely covers her spectacular big-ass ass. She’s got big-ass titties as well. As she leans over, her face in and out of oblongs of sunlight, she gently nuzzles his head, almost accidentally.
“What is that?” she asks, hearing something.
“Oh, it’s just this song I can’t get out of my head,” he says.
She puts her ear, now deliberately, to his temple and listens. “That’s the Mister Softee jingle,” she says.
He smiles.
“You know a lot about tongue,” she says.
“I’m a butcher.”
“Are you related to Bilinda Butcher, the guitarist in My Bloody Valentine?”
“No. My name is Ike Karton. I play Akai MPC drum machine in The Kartons.”
“Did you know that the Baal Shem Tov was a shohet (a ritual butcher) in Kshilowice, near Iashlowice?” (She’s totally flirting with him right now.)
Meanwhile, the Chloë Sevigny doppelgänger, who’s fretting over cold pancakes in the corner, is ritually reciting everything that Ike and The Waitress are saying as they say it, as if she were mouthing the lyrics to a favorite song or the dialogue from a scene she’d assiduously memorized by heart.
“When I eat,” Ike explains, in his shy, measured, Taurus way, “I always propitiate the Gods by offering them a portion of my food. But I don’t want to seem obsequious, so I try to be very casual and sort of uninflected. Do you know that expression actors use, where you just ‘throw your line away’? I’ll just jerk my head toward the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and say something, almost under my breath, like: ‘You want some fries? I can’t eat them. That tongue sandwich was huge. Did you see the size of that sandwich?’”
“I bet you’re too vain to eat fries anyway,” The Waitress says, giving his ripped torso a slow, flirtatious once-over. “And you’re married,” she adds, noticing the aluminum wedding ring that Ike taps on the table in rhythm to the music in his mind.
Ike explains to her that he and his wife are soul mates, but that she’s too gorgeous, too soft-spoken and articulate, too sophisticated. Her mind is too agile and nuanced, her sensibility is too refined and delicate. She’s a bit too petite. Too ethereal. Too patrician. “Sexually,” he confides, “I’m more attracted to coarser women…sweatier, bigger, less hygienic women…women who have trouble understanding even simple things.”
“You love your wife deeply,” The Waitress responds, “but you have this completely specific ps
ychosexual / sociopolitical fetish, this nostalgie de la boue. I totally get that.”
“I like the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies,” he says.
Then Ike reveals his intention to get himself killed by the ATF or Mossad in order for his wife and his daughter to collect his life insurance. The Waitress asks, “If you purposively get yourself killed—isn’t that like suicide-by-cop? Insurance companies won’t pay out on suicide, will they?” And Ike explains to her that, yes, he’s destined to die by suicide-by-cop, but that the determination of an individual’s mental capacity, or “soundness of mind,” to form an intent to commit suicide is of consequence in claims for recovery of death benefits under life insurance policies. In other words, if it’s determined that a person is of unsound mind when he commits suicide-by-cop, his family is entitled to receive life insurance benefits. And the fact that he’s intent upon neo-pagan martyrdom, that he’s under twenty-four-hour erotomaniacal surveillance by masturbating Goddesses, and that he’s the “inducer” in a family suffering from a form of folie à famille would probably constitute more than sufficient evidence, if needed, that he’s of “unsound mind.” The Waitress ponders this for a moment, and then asks rhetorically, “Isn’t fate, like, the ultimate preexisting condition?”
Later, as she serves Ike his breakfast, The Waitress asks him if he’s into online porn at all.
“Yes, totally,” Ike replies.
“Well,” she says, “you know how in porn movies the women always narrate what’s happening to them in the second person? The ‘you’re doing this, you’re doing that’ thing? ‘You’re licking my hard nipples’ or ‘You’re putting your big cock in my juicy pussy’ or ‘You’re gonna pound that pussy, you’re just gonna tear that pussy up, aren’t you?’” (She is so totally flirting with him right now.)
Ike looks intensely into her eyes for a moment, and then he says, “You’re serving me a hot tongue sandwich; you’re putting the plate right in front of me; you’re setting an ice-cold Sunkist orange soda down right next to my big, crunchy onion rings.”
And The Waitress smiles. “Second-person present-tense narration makes everything super-fucking-hot. I don’t know why exactly. You know how dentists always keep you apprised of everything they’re doing as they’re doing it, so you don’t get all freaked out? ‘I’m putting a dental dam in your mouth.…I’m making an opening through the crown of your tooth to gain access to the pulp chamber. I’m using an endodontic file to remove the diseased pulp tissue from the root canal.…Now I’m using a plugger to place the gutta-percha points into your empty root canals to replace the pulp tissue which I removed.’ Wouldn’t it be super-fucking-hot in the second-person, if the patient was like, “You’re making an opening through the crown of my tooth to gain access to the pulp chamber. You’re using an endodontic file to remove the diseased pulp tissue from the root canal.…Oh, God, now you’re using a plugger to place the gutta-percha points into my empty root canals to replace the pulp tissue which you removed’? Except that you probably wouldn’t be able to understand anything she’s saying with all that stuff in her mouth.”
Experts have made much of the links between the garbled speech of the dental patient; the mumbled, almost incoherent, shoegazey chanting of the vagrant, drug-addled bards; and the murmured, diffident, barely audible utterances of Ike Karton himself. But what implications are latent in these links? (That anagogic significance is not conveyed through discursive meaning, maybe?)
“Second-person present-tense narration somehow detaches the link between your actions and your own volition,” Ike says, “as if what you think you’re doing spontaneously has already been predetermined, as if it’s been reenacted countless times before. It ritualizes the extemporaneous. It can make every mundane thing you do feel like a dénouement that’s been gestating since the beginning of time.”
“Totally,” The Waitress says, cracking her gum.
And it’s here, for the first time, that we begin to suspect that we (and Ike, for that matter) may have been had, that The Waitress may be far less disingenuous and far more calculating than she seemed at first blush, i.e., much more of a professional waitress (perhaps the professional waitress par excellence) who knows just how to say all the right things and use all that cogent body language and instinctively acclimate herself to all the psychological idioms of her customers, peppering them with risqué innuendos, buttering them up with all sorts of blandishments, and milking them for helplessly exorbitant tips—although, it must be said, that this reading of her as merely Machiavellian is mitigated by the indisputable authenticity of her affect (i.e., her “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.
Whether it’s because he’s genuinely inspired by her or simply avails himself of the opportunity once she leaves to tend to her other tables, Ike now dashes off his 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…
I am looking up at your face
through the chartreuse froth
of your female ejaculate.
I am the sexual messiah
of every bespectacled bipolar girl
in her library carrel,
every lesbian lacrosse star,
every dorm-room slut, degenerate babysitter,
and fat, euthanizing, anal-sex-freak nurse.
I am the sexual messiah of the three-legged,
bulimic crypto-nympho rank and file.
The black cleft between your buttocks
is the primordial vector.
It’s the first line
drawn in the sands of time.
When the waitress returns with another ice-cold can of Sunkist orange, Ike shows her the narcocorrido. (Compare Ike’s anxiety as The Waitress reads the lyrics of his song to XOXO’s anxiety as Shanice read his poem.)
The Waitress tells Ike that the song is totally anthemic and romantic, and that she feels like he wrote it just for her because all her life people have called her a fat bipolar whore. She adds that it’s a little self-vaunting (the sexual messiah part), but that she really likes that aspect of it because it makes it even more super-fucking-hot, but that, to be honest, it did surprise her a little at first because Ike seems so modest and reserved. Ike explains that it’s exaggerated for dramatic effect and that the first-person narrator of the song isn’t him; it’s a character, it’s the persona of a Gravy trafficker (which is what makes the song a narcocorrido, by the way). She says she totally gets that—that Eminem isn’t Slim Shady and Daniel Dumile isn’t MF Doom. “Exactly,” Ike says. “Take a song like the Bee Gees’ ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.’ You’ve got the narrator of the song who’s a guy who’s about to be executed in the electric chair for killing his wife’s lover, but Robin Gibb never killed his wife’s lover and he obviously hasn’t been executed in the electric chair. It’s just a character.” The Waitress says it’s sort of like that Ass Ponys song “Hey Swifty,” and she recites all the lyrics to the song, which she’s assiduously memorized by heart.
Ike then tells her that his narcocorrido definitely expresses, in a poetic way, his beliefs about smashing the cultural and sociosexual hegemony of rich, privileged celebrities, and how fervently he’s wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low, to the lumpen, to the misshapen and the misbegotten. Then he says, “I’m sort of surprised you remember an Ass Ponys song so well,” and she says that she originally just liked the band because of its name, because her father had always called her his “Ass Pony.”
And Ike pauses for a moment (for dramatic effect) and says, “So did mine.”
Some experts contend that showing the narcocorrido to The Waitress—which seems like an overt act of seduction—is actually a means to simply ingratiate himself with The Waitress (and, by e
xtension, the entire waitstaff at the diner) so that Ike’s family can get discounted food there after his imminent death. But this reading of Ike as merely Machiavellian is mitigated not only by the fact that The Kartons do indeed perform the narcocorrido at “The Last Concert” but by the indisputable authenticity of his affect (i.e., his “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.
When it turns out that the God Doc Hickory (“whose snarky, adenoidal laugh is a snide reproach to those of simple purpose and modest means”) played a trick on Ike by assuring him that he was entitled to free rice pudding at the Miss America Diner, Ike gets into a brawl with the manager of the diner and is pepper-sprayed.
As he’s leaving, Ike turns back and grabs The Waitress and turns her around so she’s facing him, and he holds her in his arms, tears in his eyes, blinded by the pepper spray, perhaps experiencing a presentiment of his own imminent and hyperviolent demise, knowing he’ll never see her again. “Never forget,” he says fervently, “how close—in the end—we really turned out to be.” The Waitress watches Ike leave the diner; then, through the window, she watches him recede in epileptic jump-cuts, a marionette of his Gods, a clutter of spasms and ticks, a nude descending a staircase. She can’t move for a moment. Her throat is clogged with emotion. She knows she’s been traversed by tragedy.
