by Mark Leyner
The Chineans advocated that the bards actually negotiate with XOXO, and went so far as to publicly suggest “positive interventions” he might undertake to expand the epic’s audience, e.g., “Hmm, how about deleting all the references to Ike’s rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism?” and “Hey, why not make Vance much more prominent? How about posting on YouTube footage of Vance tooling around Jersey City on his BMX bike with his Glock tucked into the waistband of his jeans to the Boys Noize remix of the N.E.R.D. / Nelly Furtado track ‘Hot-N-Fun’? Or how about Vance with the lesbian fisherwomen, in their squalid shack under the Pulaski Skyway, drinking, smoking, playing dominoes, cooking, laughing to the Four Tet remix of the Pantha du Prince track ‘Stick to My Side’? Just a real cool, tranced-out video. That would definitely appeal to a younger, hipper demographic” and “Consider losing Ike’s fetish for chubby, sweaty, hairy, unkempt, and uneducated middle-aged women and replace it with a predilection for smokin’ hot young chicks. This would make it significantly easier for that whole coveted eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male demographic to identify with Ike.” The Chineans offered their consulting services to XOXO in return for a 5 percent stake in royalties generated by the narcocorrido Ike wrote at the Miss America Diner (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) which is weird because—unless the Chineans know something we don’t know (which they very well might)—the rights to Ike’s narcocorrido belong exclusively to Mogul Magoo. The Chineans also criticized Ruthie for parading around on her front lawn, wearing a transparent “prairie dress” and no underwear (calling the look “Ruby Ridge meets Tila Tequila”) and offered her a free makeover from celebrity stylist Andrea Lieberman. This was such an egregious affront to Ike—suggesting to someone who fervently yearns for the massacre of celebrities that his own wife get a makeover from a “celebrity stylist”—that it spawned a stand-alone fantasy episode in the Twenty-Eighth Season. In a sort of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack meets Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Ike, blinded by a particularly disgusting case of conjunctivitis, bludgeons to death a group of Chineans, clad in their trademark bathrobes and slippers (which are associated not only with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante but also with the old, decrepit waiters from XOXO’s Dantean Hooters), who have encircled him on the corner of West Side Avenue and Culver in Jersey City. Unlike the episode in which La Felina distracts Ike from his impulsive rage by impersonating a voluptuous au pair from Cote d’Ivoire, this time, La Felina, watching from the top floor of the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completely gets off on Ike’s “helmet-to-helmet” violence and masturbates until she has an outrageous gushing orgasm that lasts for fifty years and fills a 143,200-square-mile endorheic basin between the Caucasus Mountains and the steppe of Central Asia that is today called the “Caspian Sea.”
Meir Poznak, whose hard-line faction T.S.F.N.—General Command adamantly rejects any suggestion that the epic functions under the aegis of XOXO, considers this “the single greatest episode of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack ever made.” (Poznak relentlessly excoriates the Chineans. He is their irreconcilable enemy. In a series of blistering communiqués, Poznak inveighs against the Chineans’ perversely counterintuitive (but increasingly plausible) contention that there’s active collusion or some secret pact or modus vivendi between Ike Karton and XOXO.)
Slaughtering Chineans is straight-up Poznak shit. Experts who express even the slightest affinity for Chinean precepts are viciously beaten and crippled by T.S.F.N.—General Command thugs acting on orders from Meir Poznak. On the other hand, bards are routinely butchered by packs of pipe- and machete-wielding Chinean enforcers at the behest of the Capo di Tutti Frutti. True, Meir Poznak emerged from within the milieu of the bards and the Capo di Tutti Frutti emerged from within the milieu of the experts. But there are highly regarded Poznakian experts and celebrated Chinean bards. (Although, for those who haven’t made a close study of the schism, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between a Poznakian and a Chinean bard. Either would be a chanting, drug-addled vagrant who maintains his trance-inducing beat by banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda, either would assume the classical stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic posture during the so-called Big Lacuna, etc.)
Some Chineans have floated the idea that Vance—the louche, semiliterate, BMX-riding Gravy dealer—may actually be a God. This is based primarily on an interpretation of the line “experts consider The Big Lacuna to be over when Vance snaps out of his reverie and asks Ike whom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanford or Silda Spitzer.” These Chineans (a breakaway sect known as the “Some Chineans” or the “These Chineans”) suggest that Vance’s so-called “snapping out” is a form of extricating himself from or becoming extrinsic to the epic, and that since only a God can extricate himself from or become extrinsic to the epic, Vance is, ipso facto, a God. This theory is bolstered by the suspicion that Vance is the father of Ike’s teenage daughter’s infant, Colter Dale, who is generally considered to be quasi-divine, and that given the fact that Ike’s teenage daughter is mortal (she almost failed math!), Vance is, ipso facto, a God, although there is equally compelling evidence that Bosco Hifikepunye, the God of Miscellany (Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.), who used Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head as an anal sex toy with the Korean flower-shop clerk Mi-Hyun, and who supplies Vance with hallucinogenic Gravy, is the actual father of Colter Dale.
Monday: 11:30 PM Eastern
“The Stone Mind”
Most Chineans and Some Chineans contend that Ike is a statue. This is, of course, the theory with which the Chineans are most notoriously associated. There’s always a suspicion about the Chineans that their most wildly preposterous assertions are simply part of their act to “avoid prosecution” (i.e., to evade or confound critical scrutiny). But what had once seemed beyond the pale—Ike, a statue? An inanimate object?—has steadily gained credence.
The idea that Ike Karton—valiant, brooding neo-pagan, “despot of his stoop (n’est-ce pas? ),” with his pomaded pompadour, hazy and queasy from the Gravy, whose “rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism” is “just a way to stick it to his dad,” who’s beloved by La Felina for his loathing of celebrities and plutocrats and for his ardent solidarity with the lowest of the low, who likes the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies, who’s continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out—is actually in an advanced state of petrifaction (i.e., that he’s a statue, a stone homunculus, a lawn jockey) may have initially been broached for sheer shock value, but it soon developed into a finely calibrated theory which today is widely considered the finest calibrated theory for which the Most Chineans and the Some Chineans (aka the These Chineans) are most notoriously associated.
Could they mean all this figuratively or metaphorically—that Ike is simply statue-like or statuesque? Well, maybe at first. It’s easy to see how, given the fact that Ike’s been in a sort of dissociative fugue state ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old (“high on ketamine, wearing silver lederhosen and a hat made out of an Oreo box at the time, he initially claimed he’d been hit by a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type war between club kids and Hasids”), and that the Some Chineans surmise that he’s been mute (not just reticent or soft-spoken, but mute!) since the Mister Softee accident, and that, for most of the epic, Ike stands 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 gasping, masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus,” they might conclude that Ike is like a statue or like a lawn jockey.
After all, he does seem to largely exist in a state of suspended
animation, and his “taunting, lascivious dance along the precipice of incoherence” does make him “a frozen figure in a tableau vivant,” “a taxidermied gym-rat in a habitat diorama,” “a paralyzed player,” “a cataleptic kike,” etc. This is, of course, why Ike is so frequently called a “Nude Descending a Staircase”—because he is a static image of movement (“a ruptured contraption,” “a clutter of spasms and ticks”).
But the Chineans have gone way beyond the mere kinesics of Ike’s vaunted inertia. Ike literally goes nowhere, they claim. His birth and his death are the only real (i.e., the only measurable) events in his life and, thus, constitute the true polarity of the epic. These two events, though antipodal, simultaneously occupy one point in space. Ike is born (in the heroic sense) in the arousal of the gasping Goddesses’ desire, and he dies (heroically) in the self-satisfaction of that desire. In other words, he is born on his stoop and he dies on his stoop without having traversed any distance, without having moved a muscle—ergo, Ike the Statue. Everything in between his heroic birth and death (if anything can be said to be “between” events which coincide) is represented by an ellipsis. In other words, each dot in the ellipsis is made out of a zero-dimensional dollop of military-grade ass-cheese that’s been extruded from what the Chineans call “the pastry bag” (i.e., from a God’s ass). These are also called “loot drops” and “God guano.”
The Chineans don’t mean that at some point in recent history a statue of Ike Karton was erected in Jersey City to commemorate the hero of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack. They mean that Ike Karton, the hero of the The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack is, literally, a fucking statue.
Ike the hero—porn addict, Taurus, marionette of his Gods—is sculpted in time, in vectors of time, veering inexorably inward, inexorably toward his fate. Although his martyr’s death (at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters perched in trees) is a hyperviolent implosion, a convulsive centripetal rupturing, it is imperceptible to the external observer. Yes, Ike subjectively experiences it as “driving a Pagani Zonda into a concrete wall at 300 mph,” but his neighbors perceive the hyperviolently imploding Ike as basically the same Ike they see every day (“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”).
Ike is riddled, infested, consumed,
Devoured from within by Gods.
Only Gods can inhabit a stone mind.
So this whole massively involuted epic, which has variously been called Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and, finally and definitively, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack, with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion…is essentially, at the end of the day, about a man who just stands on his stoop, rooted to the spot, making cryptograms out of passing license plates, watching a kid tooling around the block on a BMX bike. (What’s interesting is that you never really know with overwrought angst or heavy-handed, stilted tropes—they can seem terrible on the page, but totally work at a public recitation. Same’s true with cringe-inducing smuttiness and off-putting adolescent scatology—it can seem lame on paper, but completely come alive when delivered by vagrant, drug-addled bards banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda.)
FYI: The Chineans also believe that Ruthie and the Daughter and Colter Dale are “superfluities,” i.e., later additions (noncanonical bloopers) which were inserted to “mainstream” the figure of Ike—to create a more normative version of Ike, i.e., to give a famille to his folie.
And they believe that if you put a stethoscope to the stone head of Ike, the Lawn Jockey, you can hear, against that endlessly looping sample from the Mister Softee jingle…
All the rapturous, orotund eroticism of
Ike’s erudite, oxymoronic doxologies,
And all the demagogic authority
Of his psychosexual serenades
(“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…”)
And finally, the Chineans ask: Do the Kartons comprise an organized crime family? According to the federal law against organized crime in Mexico, “when three or more people make an agreement to organize or form an organization to engage, in an ongoing or reiterated fashion, in activities that by themselves or together with other activities have as a goal or a result the commission of any or several crimes, they will be legally classified and penalized because of these actions as members of organized crime.” Clearly, the Chineans assert, the Kartons have engaged in a conspiracy to build a dildo-impaled statue without a permit and a conspiracy to perform a narcocorrido (“Do you hear that mosquito / that toilet flushing upstairs / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) in a residential area.
The Chineans are part of Vance’s reverie. Since many people believe that Vance is a God (significantly, Vance himself happens not to believe that he’s a God), this means that the Chineans are part of a God’s reverie, which confers enormous prestige upon them at least for the duration of the reverie, but consigns them to oblivion once Vance “snaps out” of his reverie (an event said to be augured by “the mysterious appearance of a mah-jongg tile on the floor of some cabana”).
It goes without saying that all of this could simply be another case of XOXO slipping something into the epic’s drink (i.e., drugging its sherbet). XOXO is forever doodling on Ike’s mind, and on the minds of bards (doodling on all our minds) with his sharp periodontal curette, and forever feeding “the apophenic mania of experts to find hidden and farfetched links and correlations. Is it possible to predict XOXO’s behavior toward human beings based on his alliances with other Gods? For example, what is his position vis-à-vis the La Felina / Mogul Magoo schism? Shanice had, from the beginning, cliqued up with Mogul Magoo, so XOXO (after Shanice’s withering critique of his poem) had naturally cliqued up with La Felina. But XOXO is too intractable a nihilist to ever be considered aligned with any single faction. And it always bears repeating that the Gods view human beings with a fundamental detachment, almost as if they were characters in a video game. They are entertained by humans. Sure, they have their favorites (Ike is famously La Felina’s favorite), but the Gods basically love to fuck with people—literally, in the sense of having sex with them (e.g., Bosco Hifikepunye with Mi-Hyun and Ike’s daughter), and in the sense of fucking with their minds (e.g., XOXO).
