by Mark Leyner
A Chinean comandante decries what he calls “the self-flagellation over our affinity for XOXO.” The shadowy death-squad leader says that, although experts routinely call XOXO “a resentful poet manqué who plies the epic with drugged sherbet and shoots it up with military-grade ass-cheese,” what the God has actually done is taken a single static tableau (that of Ike Karton “standing 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 masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus”) and, thanks to all his filigreed interpolations (i.e., noncanonical bloopers), turned it into a massive, stupor-inducingly redundant epic, and he deserves major kudos for that. (As he’s giving this interview, the severed heads of fifteen vagrant, drug-addled bards, strung together with coaxial cable, are found floating in the Passaic River under the Pulaski Skyway. These fifteen bards had recently signed a statement which urged aficionados of the epic to rapidly chant “Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!” (“it should sound like Popeye laughing, or like Billy Joel in ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)’—‘But working too hard can give you / A heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack’” as a way of “fucking with the mind of the mind-fucking God”—an obvious reference to XOXO). The notorious Chinean death-squad comandante (whose nomme de guerre is “lol”) quickly issues the following addendum: “Don’t want my previous statement to be misconstrued in any way as a condemnation of self-flagellation. If it’s inconvenient to have someone else flagellate you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with flagellating yourself. It’s an excellent way to relieve tension, which can increase your risk of stroke or heart attack.” “When I was a kid,” lol reminisces later, over coffee, “most of my friends loved the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I preferred the Shia Day of Ashura processions in which young men ceremonially whip their own backs with barbed chains and razors.” He says that the first movie scenes that gave him a hard-on were when seaman John Mills (played by Richard Harris) gets flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails in Mutiny on the Bounty and when Lucrèce Borgia (played by Martine Carol) is whipped by her brother, Cesare (played by Pedro Armendáriz), in Lucrèce Borgia (aka Sins of the Borgias). Favorite poem? The poem XOXO wrote for Shanice about the businessman who became so terribly aroused when he was flogged in the woods by some of his colleagues (“They gang up on the ‘new guy’—someone who’d only recently been transferred to their division—and, in what appears to be a sort of hazing ritual, they tie him to a tree and whip him with his own belt. His pants fall to his ankles, and it’s obvious that he’s aroused.” Reminded that most experts interpret the poem to mean that the protagonist is aroused not by the robust flagellation, but because he sees an ineffably beautiful butterfly flit by, lol shakes his head vehemently. “I think he’s aroused by the robust flagellation.”)
The Goddesses prefer gazing at inert and immutable images (“onanistic ornaments”) while they masturbate. This is why, the Chineans insist, the only significant image of Ike in the entirety of the epic is the one of him “standing 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.”
In an event at the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library billed as THE CAPO DI TUTTI FRUTTI in conversation with Lorena Bobbitt (who was replaced at the last moment by Malcolm Gladwell), a man purporting to be The Capo di Tutti Frutti (his face was covered by a balaclava) answers the question “What do you think is the sexiest inert and immutable image?” by proposing “A photograph of a chubby, perspiring fifty-year-old woman bending over to pick up a mah-jongg tile from the floor of some cabana, coquettishly exposing her hairy hole.” This creates quite a stir, prompting some in the audience to call out their own suggestions: “What about a Hummel figurine of a plus-size Bavarian beer maid getting a dental X-ray, wearing a low-cut dirndl and a lead apron,” someone proposes. “Some defaced plinth in a piazza,” someone else says. “A magazine layout of models showing the half-chewed-up food in their mouths,” says another. The Capo di Tutti Frutti (or whoever he is) glares at the audience, shaking his head vehemently. “A photograph of a chubby, perspiring fifty-year-old woman bending over to pick up a mah-jongg tile from the floor of some cabana, coquettishly exposing her hairy hole,” he repeats.
That night, thousands of rats descend on an enormous obelisk of baklava that’s been erected by bearded, bare-chested intellectuals in cargo shorts to protest a significant uptick in the number of vagrant, drug-addled bards who are being slaughtered.
Tuesday: 8:00 PM Eastern
“Snapping Out”
Here, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, Vance is supposed to snap out of his reverie and ask Ike whom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanford or Silda Spitzer. And Ike the Kike—“haloed martyr, edged in splendor, the stone homunculus, who never curdles into the comprehensible”—is supposed to impassively ignore the question, his eyes remaining fixed in the direction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and then Vance is supposed to ask, “Well, who do you think are the hottest Goddesses?” prompting Ike to compile his “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” list (headed, of course, by his beloved La Felina and including Lady Rukia, La Muñeca, Las Pistoleras, and several others, including a hitherto unknown Goddess named Hmm Uh, who is now considered a Goddess of surpassing significance, although some experts continue to believe that “Hmm Uh” was simply what’s called a “speech disfluency” or “verbal placeholder”—a meaningless interjection that Ike unconsciously inserted as he tried to think of other Goddesses he’d fuck). And this is the list in which Ike fatefully neglects to include Shanice, which sets into motion an inexorable concatenation of events culminating in Ike’s death at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters hiding among the leaves of the trees across the street from Ike’s hermitage.
But Ike doesn’t compile his list. And Vance spins the wheel of his BMX bike, faster and faster now, sensing that everything is about to become incredibly messed up.
The highly provocative proximity of the words “balaclava” and “baklava”—the sheer fuck-you impudence of it—is a deliberate and unambiguous signal that XOXO is decisively ratcheting up his sabotage of the epic. And Vance understands, on a completely intuitive level, that the faster he spins the BMX wheel, the faster the epic might reach its conclusion (i.e., the masochistic, hyperviolent death of Ike Karton).
There’s a ticking clock now (i.e., the spokes of the BMX wheel against the empty soda can). XOXO is unraveling the epic faster than the bards can recite it, which results in the bards’ increasingly high-pitched gibberish. The epic might end without Ike dying (and on a Tuesday at 8:00 PM!) or drag on inconclusively for an infinite number of seasons. This is XOXO fucking with everyone’s mind. He’s denying Ike his doom—Ike, so eager for a hero’s martyrdom, virtually cataleptic yet perpetually flinging himself toward his fate, “his spur caught in the bull-rope of his own inexorable destiny.”
XOXO finds it amusing to shit on the integrity of the epic, to leave it in a state of suspended animation, a state of complete unfulfillment and nongratification, a form of eternal Tie and Tease. He wants to leave The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack with an epic case of blue balls. It’s XOXO’s ultimate mind-fuck.
XOXO thinks it’s “cool” to just paralyze the whole looping, recursive epic, 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…
At this point, XOXO is blocking blood flow into the brains of the bards. XOXO is giving the bards TIAs (transient ischemic attacks) which are miniature temporary strokes and which are causing the bards to forget vast sections of the epic and simply spout high-pitched gibberish (i.e., nonlexical vocables). Of course, the fact that XOXO is giving the bards “ministrokes” which are causing the bards to forget vast sections of the epic and spout high-pitched gibberish is a now a crucial part of the epic, which audiences at public recitations expect the bards to “belt out like the cast of some Broadway musical.” The bards are now expected to “belt out” that XOXO is expunging the epic in its entirety from their memories, to “belt out” that the hyperviolent death of Ike Karton might now be endlessly deferred.
Some bards simply start making up phrases suggested by the letters of license plates on passing cars, and attempting to pass that off as “the epic.”
DYS: Dad, you suck
AED: Actress / Egg Donor
ZUP: Zipped-up pussy
BFV: Best fisting video
ITM: Impeccable table manners
VNN: Vaginas Need Nivea
JNU: Jews Never Unite
WNN: Welcome Nude Nigerians
CSC: Cossack Saddle Cabbage
YWB: You Wiggle Beautifully
CUR: Can’t Understand Reality
SRL: Sadist Rapes Limbaugh
MMU: My Mom Ululates
AAJ: Anime Amputee Jamboree
A Volvo wagon (THG-87F), an old Toyota Corolla (IKR-53J), and a little blue Mazda Miata (HAH-19B) drive past.
THG: They’re hot guys.
IKR: I know, right?
HAH: Hot as hell.
Two more cars: TSH-74P, SFH-19N.
TSH: They’re so high.
SFH: So fuckin’ high.
In response to a spate of violent crimes and growing concern that the encampments are breeding grounds for Meir Poznak’s extremist organization, T.S.F.N.—General Command, police today evacuated 1,000 vagrant, drug-addled bards in 251 caravans in southwestern France. More than 40 camps have been dismantled in the last fifteen days, and 700 vagrant, drug-addled bards are being sent back to Jersey City and the Upper Peninsula on chartered flights. Vagrant, drug-addled bards (blindfolded even though they’re already blind) continuously chant The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack on their chartered flight from southwestern France to Jersey City International Airport (on West Side Avenue, at the corner of Culver).
These measures came after bards in southwestern France burned cars and a police station, following the death of a blind, blitzed-out bard who was shot by a husband whose wife had just left him for the bard at a public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack. The jilted husband almost immediately gouged out his own eyes and became a bard. He continuously chanted The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack (including, of course, this sentence) during his arraignment until the judge threatened him with a laryngectomy.
Bards are also being recalled because of “quality-control problems” (i.e., not blind, vagrant, or drug-addled, lacking chunky chachkas, etc.). Ken Howard, president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), said that he “must reassure disappointed aficionados of the epic and persuade them to once again attend public recitations.” Howard said that The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack owed its first responsibility to the unkempt, hairy, sweaty, heavyset, middle-aged women who’d left their husbands for vagrant, drug-addled bards. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack has since revamped and centralized its quality-control operations, installing state-of-the-art molybdenum-steel melon ballers for double eye enucleations and a strictly enforced policy of random drug-testing of bards to ensure that they are blind and blitzed-out.
Tuesday: 9:00 PM Eastern
“Vandalizing the Denouement”
XOXO is vandalizing the epic’s denouement, a denouement that’s been foretold and basically guaranteed for thousands of years by blind, blitzed-out bards beating time with their chunky chachkas against jerrycans of orange soda. He’s plying the denouement with drugged sherbet. He’s giving the denouement an enormous military-grade ass-cheese enema.
As anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, Ike is supposed to make a lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs for the Goddess La Felina, and then engage in an extended adagio with the waitress at the Miss America Diner, and write his narcocorrido, “That’s Me (Ike’s Song).” And then he’s supposed to get high with his daughter’s boyfriend, Vance, and make a list for him called “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F),” and neglect to include Shanice, which incurs her eternal enmity (FYI: La Felina was #1 on his list).
And then the scorned Goddess is supposed to wage a vindictive campaign against Ike that begins with her inducing the zoning board to ban Ike’s latest pornographic monument to La Felina—“a teetering monolith of marzipan.” (“Ike laughs, gathering up his notes and tapping them against the table into a tidy stack: ‘Look, guys…you’re fated to authorize the demolition of my pornographic monument to La Felina. I’m fated to die in the confrontation outside my modest two-story hermitage after performing my narcocorrido with my band, The Kartons. So why don’t we just get this over with?’”)
(But, of course, XOXO—who fucks with your mind, who will discomfit any denouement—is preventing everyone from “just getting this over with.”)
And then Koji Mizokami is supposed to help Ike shoplift an Akai MPC drum machine from a Sam Ash on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey, and Bosco Hifikepunye begins supplying Vance with the hallucinogenic drug Gravy to sell on the street. And La Felina promises Ike that before he martyrs himself, she’ll appear to him in human form and fuck him, and she says she’ll get in touch with him on his cellphone and let him know exactly when and where.
And then a God (very possibly Bosco Hifikepunye) is supposed to impregnate Ike’s teenage daughter while Ike is interviewing for a butcher’s job at Costco. (Ike says to the Costco meat department manager re: his relationship with the Goddesses: “I’m just a fantasy they jerk off to.” Explaining a gap in his resume, he says that during Spring Break in 1989 he was hit by a Mister Softee truck, but told police that it was a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter–type war between club kids and Hasids. And, in response to a question about his “availability,” Ike tells him that he can only work for a week because he’s going to be killed on Friday by Mossad sharpshooters.)
Then Ike is supposed to accidentally kill his father as they wrestle for Ike’s cellphone because Ike’s father is trying to change Ike’s ringtone from “Me So Horny” to John Cage’s 4'33''—the composer’s notorious “silent composition,” which would almost certainly ensure that Ike misses La Felina’s call, which, for Ike, is “the booty-call of a lifetime.”
(None of this is going to happen, of course, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, because it all has to be set in motion by Ike making his list of Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), which XOXO is thwarting in his effort to sabotage the epic.)
And on the morning of his father’s funeral, Ike is supposed to wake up with an incredibly gross case of conjunctivitis, and then try to pull the pillars of the synagogue down and crush the congregation, and then his daughter is supposed to give birth to a half-divine, half-mortal infant named Colter Dale. (“Colter Dale’s teenage mom is not even pregnant for two whole days—she got pregnant on Tuesday night and gave birth on Thursday night, about forty hours later. Even hamsters and marsupial cats have longer gestation periods! This preternaturally truncated pregnancy could simply be the result of the exceedingly clever way that episodic reality is edited (see TLC’s I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and MTV’s Teen Mom), or it could point to a wider trend that experts are noticing in which very young mothers, after preternaturally truncated pregnancies, are giving birth to precociously mature infants who almost immediately get pregnant or
father children themselves, each generation a miniature version of that which preceded them. This is being called The Russian Nesting Doll or Matryoshka Doll Phenomenon. Shorter and shorter gestation periods for pregnant teens who are giving birth to precociously mature infants may not be the result of endocrine-disrupting chemicals like polybrominated biphenyls or phthalates or high-fructose corn syrup or smartphone radiation, as experts have previously proposed, but may actually be caused by military-grade ass-cheese and Gravy leaching into the water supply.”)
And soon after that, the The Kartons are supposed to begin their “Last Concert” (which is also their first concert). Ike, who has refused to suspend work on his banned monument, his “teetering monolith of marzipan,” wears an impenetrable, bulletproof protective groin cup, fashioned for him by Bosco Hifikepunye, the God of Miscellany (Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.), at the behest of La Felina. “This is the first single from our new album, Folie à Famille,” Ike says in his raspy, almost inaudible whisper. “We call it a ‘narcocorrido’ because it’s about mortal men who traffic in Gravy.” Ike’s daughter plays her bass guitar tuned to cello standard tuning, in intervals of fifths (C–G–D–A) using a banjo string for the high A. She’s recently been seen using a five-string setup, tuned to C–G–D–A–E, with banjo strings for the A and E.
After the performance of the narcocorrido, Ike is supposed to retreat back into his hermitage. Rocking Colter Dale’s cradle as canisters of nebulized military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis) shatter the living room window, he taps his ring on the tabletop, and, blind from the gas, begins chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack to the infant, in its entirety, from the very beginning: “There was never nothing. But before the debut of the Gods, about fourteen billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent. 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. 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.…” And using his distinctive periodontal curette, the God XOXO engraves the epic into the smooth tabula rasa of Colter Dale’s mind.…(Colter Dale (half-divine) is immune to the nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl that the Mossad is pumping into the hermitage.)
