The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (11 page)

“Sure.”

“That’s better. Thank you. It was like being on speakerphone before. I want to ask you a question about these itinerant children who are toting the surplus NBA ball bags around and gathering severed bard-heads and selling them to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Doesn’t this drive home the whole issue of how detrimental cheap foreign labor is to American workers? If you have an unlimited supply of these vagrant kids outside the country who are willing to sell severed bard-heads for several rupees a head, it doesn’t matter to an American severed-bard-head scavenger how quickly our economy recovers or how fast it grows—the market value of a severed bard-head is going to be several rupees.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“A tariff. A tariff on foreign-scavenged severed bard-heads.”

“I don’t believe in tariffs or quotas or any form of protectionism. I think that protectionism leads to reduced consumer choice, higher prices, lower-quality goods, and, in the long run, economic stagnation and coercive monopolies.”

There’s a long pause…then—

“What does ‘military-grade ass-cheese’ mean?”

“I’ve always thought that military-grade ass-cheese is just basically the shit that gums up the works in your life. Do you know what I mean? This is just my interpretation, but I think it’s basically the shit that just fucks everything up.”

“OK. Is it true that
Ike
buys a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner?”

“No, that’s not true. This whole business of
Ike
buying a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner is what experts call a ‘noncanonical blooper.’”

“But is it in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
or not?”

“It is now. Thanks to you. Thanks to you bringing it up.”

“OK. I guess this is my last question: There’s a vignette involving a pet groomer named
Rebecca Nesbit
and a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon by the name of
Dr. Giancarlo Capella
. And I’m not sure why it’s even included in the epic—if, in fact, it is—because it doesn’t appear to involve
Ike
or any of the Gods. And I was just wondering if it’s also considered a noncanonical blooper. And I’m also curious as to whether you think that noncanonical bloopers are the work of
XOXO
.”

“First of all, yes, this is an out-and-out noncanonical blooper that was not part of the original epic, although, again—as of right now—it’s considered totally authentic.
Rebecca Nesbit
was a pet groomer (actually, I think she advertised herself a ‘pet stylist’) who, following her divorce in Jersey City, New Jersey, moved out to Southern California with her kids and had a laser vaginal rejuvenation performed by
Dr. Giancarlo Capella
in Beverly Hills. As a result of the procedure,
Nesbit
’s vaginal muscle strength was increased so excessively that it resulted in traumatic penile injuries to two of her boyfriends—
Donald De Vries
, who, during intercourse with
Nesbit
, suffered a tear of the tunica albuginea (an injury sometimes referred to as a penile ‘fracture’), and
Sonny Ghazarian
, who, under similar circumstances, suffered a crushed penile shaft with extraalbugineal and bilateral cavernosal hematomas.
De Vries
and
Ghazarian
filed a joint medical-malpractice lawsuit against
Capella
(who was uniformly portrayed in the press as a combination
Richard Simmons
/
Josef Mengele
, or luridly compared to the
Mantle
brothers, the twin gynecologists in
David Cronenberg
’s film
Dead Ringers,
or to
Dr. Heiter
, the demented surgeon in
Tom Six
’s
The Human Centipede
). In a dramatic courtroom demonstration before a rapt gallery, a pneumatic squeeze-bulb dynamometer was used to show that
Nesbit
now had a vaginal grip-strength of well over 4,500 pounds per square inch (PSI). (Keep in mind that a commercial trash compactor typically has a maximum operating pressure of only about 3,000 PSI.)”

“This is
exactly
why we need comprehensive tort reform in this country. There’s an epidemic of these frivolous lawsuits and it’s bankrupting our health care system. I have a very good friend who’s a pet stylist in Jersey City, and he’s been doing 2,500-PSI vaginal rejuvenations on some of his dogs, but he told me that because of all the publicity generated by the case in Beverly Hills, he’s had to stop. He can’t afford the insurance anymore or risk the litigation.”

“There are a number of experts who actually think that
Nesbit
and
Capella
were impersonated by
Fast-Cooking Ali
and
La Felina
.”

“Why?”

“You gotta look at the injured parties here, the plaintiffs, these guys
Donnie De Vries
and
Sonny Ghazarian
. They’re exactly the kind of rich, privileged, good-looking scumbags that
Fast-Cooking Ali
and
La Felina
loathe with a passion, tooling down the PCH in their little Porsche 911 Cabriolets, in their fuckin’
Moss Lipow
sunglasses.”

There’s a long pause…

“You there?”

Another long, long pause…then—

“Are you still on?…I can barely hear you.…I’m going to put you back up in boldface.”

There’s a long pause…like an eternity…and then…nothing.

It’s sometimes said that, here, for a moment, the world disappears, that there’s a fade to pure white…like a T-shirt bleached of sentiment…like an empty page…like the tabula rasa of an erased mind…and then—

a flourish of calligraphy:

P.S.
Ike
also walks backward to hide his face from security cameras.

Backward,
Ike
enters the Miss America Diner. With the exception of a
Chloë Sevigny
doppelgänger who frets over cold pancakes in the corner, all the other patrons are the ostentatiously generic people whose photos are already in the picture frames you buy at the store. They are the world’s most famous nobodies:
Joe Shmoe
and
John Q. Public
sit at the counter drinking coffee and eating buttered rolls;
Every
Tom, Dick, and Harry
are squeezed into a banquette across from
Mr. and Mrs. Consumer
, tucking into large breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and toast;
Jane Doe
and
Your Average American Sports Fan
clasp hands across unopened menus on a table. They all fall silent as
Ike
, dear to the Gods, Warlord of His Stoop, the world’s most anonymous somebody (“illustrious and unknown”), enters, backward.

The
Fifteenth Season
is rough going. Many people find sitting through a public recitation of the
Fifteenth Season
almost unbearably harrowing. It features some of
XOXO
’s most vicious and cunning assaults on
The
Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
and includes attacks on the itinerant bards themselves, attacks that leave hundreds massacred, maimed, and mutilated. It is also the first time that
XOXO
resorts to such “asymmetric tactics” as deploying what’s referred to as “military-grade ass-cheese” and momentarily effacing the world and scrawling across its white emptiness in his elegantly insouciant calligraphy. (In a recent poll, 59 percent said
XOXO
was winning, only 21 percent thought
T.S.F.N.
was making progress.) Also, in a ruthless effort to humiliate
Ike
, at the behest of the Goddess
Shanice
who remains (and will forever remain) implacably hostile to
Ike
for omitting her from his list, “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.),”
XOXO
steals ideas from the minds of exceptionally brilliant scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars and transplants them into the minds of dim-witted celebrities, enabling them to write erudite and abstruse books, which are released by prestigious publishing houses to tumultuous critical acclaim. Within the same three-month period, reality-TV star
Heidi Montag
comes out with
Capitalism and the Florentine Renaissance
(Hill & Wang),
Kate Gosselin
quickly follows with
Mirror Neurons: The Bio-Epistemology of Countertransference
(W. W. Norton & Company), and Abercrombie & Fitch model and
90210
star
Trevor Donovan
weighs in with two prodigious tomes,
The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics
(Abrams) and
Proust, Mallarmé, Racine: The Intersexuality of the Text / The Intertextuality of Sex
(Yale University Press).

Ike
—unfailingly self-abnegating, a hero cast into the maelstrom of life—of course, violently abhors the exaltation of rich, privileged celebrities, for whom he prefers the gulag and the guillotine. (This is the central reason he’s so beloved by
La Felina
and
Fast-Cooking Ali
.)
Shanice
’s vindictive utilization of
XOXO
against
Ike
is tacitly abetted by
Mogul Magoo
, because it avails the plutocratic God of Bubbles yet another way of vexing, by proxy, his eternal nemesis
La Felina
, who champions the lumpen, the subproletarian, the unsung, the village idiot with his half-witted smile and tear-filled eyes, the anomic, the disaffected and misshapen, the disinherited, the lame and crippled, the unheralded; who loves everything that’s defiled and damned; who loves everyone who’s pockmarked and putrid; who exalts the physically deformed and the mentally unbalanced and the sans-​culottes and the scum of the earth; and who wet her pants during the September Massacres of 1792.

XOXO
attacks
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
where it’s most vulnerable, when it’s most “keyed up,” most “hyperesthetic.” In the face of mounting criticism for his indiscriminant use of military-grade ass-cheese,
XOXO
simply shrugs. “I’m a legitimate businessman,” he’ll say, slyly assuming the role of one whose motives are eternally misinterpreted.

In the spring of 2013, a group of experts, including former Federal Reserve chairman
Alan Greenspan
,
Dog the Bounty Hunter
, and controversial Beverly Hills plastic surgeon
Dr. Giancarlo Capella
, make a startling assertion. After conducting what they describe as “an insane amount of research,” based on new information made available through “totally unprecedented access to the Myanmar military junta’s secret archives,” they reach the conclusion that the actual title of the epic is not—nor has it
ever
been—
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
but is instead—and has
always
been—
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Although, that summer,
Dr. Capella
and
Dog the Bounty Hunter
(who are both in Lithuania to promote a chain of vaginal rejuvenation clinics) recant their assertion, claiming that
XOXO
had plied their souls with drugged sherbet,
Greenspan
continues to defend his findings.
Greenspan
admits that, yes, his soul was plied with drugged sherbet, kidnapped, and taken to
XOXO
’s garish hyperborean hermitage miles beneath the earth’s surface in Antarctica, where it was kept captive for five and a half God-years, and, yes, there was a suffocatingly sweet smell at the hermitage, as if Eggnog Febreze was being continuously pumped in through the ventilation system, and, yes, every so often
XOXO
would chastely kiss his soul on the mouth, and that, at some point,
XOXO
shampooed and cornrowed his soul’s hair, and that, using a sharp periodontal curette, he carved secret wisdom into
Greenspan
’s soul’s mind. This wisdom includes, according to
Greenspan
, the curious notion that
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
isn’t—and never was—really about
Ike Karton
at all, but is—and always has been—about the war between
XOXO
and
the epic itself,
i.e., the war between the boldfaced and the italicized.