The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (14 page)

ANSWER: P. All of the above.

Note to self:
P. All of the above
includes
O. None of the above.
Consider mystical significance.

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 psychosexual / 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:

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.)