The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (10 page)

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the
Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

“Going into the forest to gather wild garlic”

Is a euphemism for those times

When
Ike
stares off into space,

Listening to the voice of a particular

God who’s speaking to him.

Or when he thinks

The writhing Goddesses are

Ogling him and masturbating,

Or when he thinks he hears

The distant whine of a

Drone aircraft circling overhead.

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the
Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

Ike
had a dream about
La Felina
.

There was something dangling from her snatch.

At first
Ike
thought it was a tampon string,

But as he came closer

He could see that it was a fortune.

He pulled it out and read it.

It said, “To propitiate
XOXO
,

So he allows your story to be told

In a quasi-coherent way,

You must kill your father, etc.

I’m a severed bard-head!

I can’t stop reciting what I started!

This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!

We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!

So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!

Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!

A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,

It’s like all that stupid shit in the
Cirque du Soleil!

Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,

But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop

When you need one!

REAL WIFE
I just want to tell you something. We both knew exactly what we were getting into when we signed on to this whole
Sugar Frosted Nutsack
thing…

REAL HUSBAND
I realize that.

REAL WIFE
I’m fated to leave you for a blind, drug-​addled bard, and then you have to enucleate your own eyeballs. It’s all foretold in the epic. You have to really do it—I mean, the eye thing.

REAL HUSBAND
I know.

REAL WIFE
No regrets?

REAL HUSBAND
In the
Thirteenth Season,
when
Ike
tells
The Waitress
at the Miss America diner about his intention (and destiny) to commit suicide-by-cop and thus enable his family to collect on his life insurance policy,
The Waitress
says that “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.” And I believe that.

At the risk of hoisting myself

On my own petard,

I’m leaving you

For a blind, drug-addled bard.

What about Cupid’s Stigmata?

My heart’s started an Intifada!

Instead of humiliating myself

By begging you to come back,

I’ll devote the rest of my life

To chanting
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
!

’Scuse me while I kiss the sky!

REAL HUSBAND
We’ve got a caller.

REAL HUSBAND
Hello, you’re on
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLER
Hello?

REAL HUSBAND
You’re on
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLER
I have a question for
Ike
.

REAL HUSBAND
Ike
’s not here. He’s at the Miss America Diner. I can give you his cellphone number or the number for the diner.

CALLER
Maybe you could help me.

REAL HUSBAND
I’ll try.

CALLER
OK. I have a couple of questions, but let me start with this one: why is
Ike
’s daughter’s name never revealed?

REAL HUSBAND
Out of respect for her privacy.

CALLER
OK. I know this question will probably make me seem hopelessly provincial, but…why is there
so
much sex in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
? You can’t listen to even thirty seconds of a public recitation without hearing these drug-addled, vagrant bards chanting about cocks and pussies and clits and tits and balls and asses and shiksa asses and spectacular big-ass asses and hot Jew jizz and fucking and masturbating.…​Why?

REAL HUSBAND
Because it’s
sex-drenched
and
death-drenched.

CALLER
But
why
is it sex-drenched and death-drenched?

REAL HUSBAND
Because
Ike
is obsessed with sex and death. The seventeenth-century samurai
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
, describing the proper attitude of a warrior, wrote, “Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.” The
Marquis de Sade
wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Combine the two and you have
Ike Karton
. (FYI,
Vincent van Gogh
’s last words before he shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise were “Fuck
Kirk Douglas
.”)

CALLER
There are just these punishingly repetitive references to anal sex toys and bedraggled, sweaty, chubby, mature, subproletarian women and hairy, Asian, midget, hypoglycemic, type-O-negative plumpers who squirt, etc.

REAL HUSBAND
There is also—and I don’t know if you’re aware of this—a punishingly repetitive use of the phrase “punishingly repetitive.” In fact, the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times (including this sentence) in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

CALLER
Is there any mystical significance to the number 251?

REAL HUSBAND
Not to my knowledge. But did you know that it’s impossible for a horse to vomit and that Turkish Taffy was
Harry Houdini
’s favorite candy?

CALLER
It says, “
Ike
suffers from irregular clonic jerks of the head and neck ever since he was hit by a
Mister Softee
truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old.” What college was he attending at the time?

REAL HUSBAND Ike
was going to F.I.T., but after one semester he dropped out and worked part-time in the meat department at a Gristedes on the Upper West Side.

CALLER
You don’t happen to have the exact address, do you?

REAL HUSBAND
Why?

CALLER
Because I’m planning a weekend where I go and visit all the key sites in
Ike
’s life, like the barbershop where he went as a kid and experienced “the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid,
Jerry Vale
(‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties,” and the park bench in Lincoln Park where he read “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” to
Ruthie
when they were dating, and the two-story brick “hermitage” where he and
Ruthie
and their daughter live, etc. So I’d definitely want to go to the Gristedes where he had his first butcher job.

REAL HUSBAND
All right, let me put you on hold for a moment and I’ll check on that for you.

REAL HUSBAND
You still there?

CALLER
Yes, I’m here.

REAL HUSBAND
Sorry that took so long. I’m newly sightless. The address of the Gristedes is 251 West 86th Street at Broadway.

CALLER
251? You’re kidding.

REAL HUSBAND
No, why?

CALLER
That is
so
fucking weird.

REAL HUSBAND
Why?

CALLER
Because 251 is the number of times the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
And it’s the address of the first place where
Ike
had a butcher job. You don’t think there’s any mystical significance in that?

REAL HUSBAND
Honestly, I think it’s a complete coincidence.

CALLER
You seriously think the fact that the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
and the fact that the address of the Gristedes where
Ike Karton
had his first butcher job is 251 West 86th Street is a complete coincidence?

REAL HUSBAND
I really do.

CALLER
You’re being serious?

REAL HUSBAND
Yeah.

CALLER
It says in the
Fourteenth Season,
“Even within his small, haimish Jersey City neighborhood of attached two-story brick homes,
Ike
conducts himself with the guarded reserve and fateful solemnity of an exile. Doomed hero, dear to the Gods, unwavering, set apart by his fealty and his inexorable fate, but never evincing the hauteur of a freak, he calls his bowel movements his ‘little brother.’” I don’t completely understand what that means.

REAL HUSBAND
You know how some women call their period their “friend”? It’s sort of like that.
Ike
is very courtly. He’d never say, “I have to go take a crap” or “a dump” or anything like that. He’d say, “My little brother is visiting.” Or “Excuse me, I think my little brother is here.” Or “Could you pull into that rest stop over there, I didn’t expect my little brother to get here so suddenly. He must have taken an earlier flight.” Or “He must have decided to take the Acela, instead of the regular Amtrak.”

CALLER
Oh…I get it.

REAL HUSBAND
And the closer
Ike
gets to the violent death which is his inexorable fate, the more intensely kindred he feels with things that are considered by most people to be base or odious, which is one of the things that makes him such a hero, I think. So there’s also a symbolic component to his calling a bowel movement his brother. It’s the same sort of thing as in the
Fifteenth Season,
in that scene where he and
Vance
are going to meet the God who’s supposedly selling hallucinogenic Gravy to
Vance
, and some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and
Ike
stops, and he kneels down, and he says to the gob of phlegm, “Fräulein, my band,
The Kartons
, is giving a Final Concert later this week, and I’d be very much honored if you would attend.” This is
Ike
, with his sort of plainspoken eloquence, expressing the paradoxical nature of his character—destined for the glory of a martyr’s immortality but, at the same time, fervently wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low.

CALLER
You’re the one who’s actually reciting what I’m saying, right?

REAL HUSBAND
Yes. You’re like a Japanese
bunraku
puppet and I’m like the chanter (the
tayu
) who performs all the characters’ voices.

CALLER
So does it have to say “
CALLER
” like that? I don’t feel like being some sort of boldface signifier. Can’t I just be part of your recitation?