The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (15 page)

The Waitress
tells
Ike
that the song is totally anthemic and romantic, and that she feels like he wrote it just for her because all her life people have called her a fat bipolar whore. She adds that it’s a little self-vaunting (the sexual messiah part), but that she really likes that aspect of it because it makes it even more super-fucking-hot, but that, to be honest, it did surprise her a little at first because
Ike
seems so modest and reserved.
Ike
explains that it’s exaggerated for dramatic effect and that the first-person narrator of the song isn’t him; it’s a character, it’s the persona of a Gravy trafficker (which is what makes the song a narcocorrido, by the way). She says she totally gets that—that
Eminem
isn’t
Slim Shady
and
Daniel Dumile
isn’t
MF Doom
. “Exactly,” Ike says. “Take a song like the
Bee Gees
’ ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.’ You’ve got the narrator of the song who’s a guy who’s about to be executed in the electric chair for killing his wife’s lover, but
Robin Gibb
never killed his wife’s lover and he obviously hasn’t been executed in the electric chair. It’s just a character.”
The Waitress
says it’s sort of like that
Ass Ponys
song “Hey Swifty,” and she recites all the lyrics to the song, which she’s assiduously memorized by heart.

Ike
then tells her that his narcocorrido definitely expresses, in a poetic way, his beliefs about smashing the cultural and sociosexual hegemony of rich, privileged celebrities, and how fervently he’s wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low, to the lumpen, to the misshapen and the misbegotten. Then he says, “I’m sort of surprised you remember an
Ass Ponys
song so well,” and she says that she originally just liked the band because of its name, because her father had always called her his “Ass Pony.”

And
Ike
pauses for a moment (for dramatic effect) and says, “So did mine.”

Some experts contend that showing the narcocorrido to
The Waitress
—which seems like an overt act of seduction—is actually a means to simply ingratiate himself with
The Waitress
(and, by extension, the entire waitstaff at the diner) so that
Ike
’s family can get discounted food there after his imminent death. But this reading of
Ike
as merely
Machiavellian
is mitigated not only by the fact that
The Kartons
do indeed perform the narcocorrido at “The Last Concert” but by the indisputable authenticity of his affect (i.e., his “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.

When it turns out that the God
Doc Hickory
(“whose snarky, adenoidal laugh is a snide reproach to those of simple purpose and modest means”) played a trick on
Ike
by assuring him that he was entitled to free rice pudding at the Miss America Diner,
Ike
gets into a brawl with the manager of the diner and is pepper-sprayed.

As he’s leaving,
Ike
turns back and grabs
The Waitress
and turns her around so she’s facing him, and he holds her in his arms, tears in his eyes, blinded by the pepper spray, perhaps experiencing a presentiment of his own imminent and hyperviolent demise, knowing he’ll never see her again. “Never forget,” he says fervently, “how close—in the end—we really turned out to be.”
The Waitress
watches
Ike
leave the diner; then, through the window, she watches him recede in epileptic jump-cuts, a marionette of his Gods, a clutter of spasms and ticks, a nude descending a staircase. She can’t move for a moment. Her throat is clogged with emotion. She knows she’s been traversed by tragedy.

Monday: 10
PM
Eastern
“Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)”

Ike
discovers that his daughter’s boyfriend, the glassy-eyed, unscrupulous
Vance
, has been stealing his underpants—two pairs of gray
Tommy Hilfiger
boxer briefs and one pair of smoky blue
Calvin Kleins
. Later, as
Ike
and his daughter sit together on the stoop in the late afternoon, he gives her a pep talk about an upcoming math midterm, and then casually broaches the subject of the stolen underpants. “What does
Vance
want to do, anyway—I mean, as a career?” he asks. “He’s really interested in doing something in music,” his daughter says. “What aspect of music is he interested in pursuing?” inquires
Ike
. “I think just listening to it,” she replies. Meanwhile,
Vance
, who was raised by three hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen in a squalid shack under the
Pulaski
Skyway, is seen tooling around town on a battered red BMX bike, making various stops, selling drugs. (Some experts interpret the threesome of alcoholic lesbian fisherwomen as a mortal analogue to the motif of the “triadic goddess,” i.e., a variant of the three tiny teenage girls in the terrarium who mouth 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’) and also of the three Gods known variously as
The Pince-Nez 44s
and
Los Vatos Locos
(“The Crazy Guys”)). After dinner,
Ike
resumes work on the fifteen-foot lewd statue of
La Felina
(“naked, dildo-​impaled”) that he’s begun constructing on the front lawn, adjacent to a jerry-rigged “stage.” Later, just as
The Kartons
begin rehearsing the narcocorrido that
Ike
wrote at the Miss America Diner (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”)—with
Ike
on vocals and Akai MPC drum machine,
Ruthie
on guitar and vocals, and his daughter on bass—a neighbor calls the police to complain about the noise. Three squad cars pull up in front of
Ike
’s hermitage, and, after verbal sparring with the cops escalates into a physical confrontation,
Ike
is pepper-sprayed and Tasered. The next day, when he and
Vance
drink Sunkist orange soda and get high on a smokable form of Gravy as they sit on the curb in front of a convenience store,
Ike
confronts him about the stolen underpants. But
Vance
totally disarms
Ike
with the remark “Did you know that hiccoughs are a form of myoclonic seizure?” (One may recognize here an epic application of a folkloric motif found frequently in the tales of every continent: a hero confronts his son-in-law or his daughter’s suitor about stolen underpants, only to be disarmed with a fascinating factoid.)
Ike
confides in
Vance
that he knows his violent death is imminent.

“Damn!”
Vance
says, with emphatic sympathy, shaking his downcast head as he absently spins a wheel of his battered red BMX bike, which lies on its side against the curb, and he lets his empty soda can rattle against the spokes. “How do you know for sure you’re gonna die so soon?” he asks.

“
La Felina
came to me in a dream,”
Ike
says, “and she pretty much promised me.”

And probably because he’s getting pretty high,
Ike
tells
Vance
about the dream, about how there was something dangling from
La Felina
’s snatch, and how, at first, he thought it was a tampon string, but, as he came closer, he could see that it was a fortune, and he pulled it out and read it, and it said: “You’re going to be assassinated by Mossad in a week or so.”
Ike
tells
Vance
that when
La Felina
spread her legs, it perfumed the room, that it was like the warm smells from a halal truck, and that it made him so hungry that he woke up from the dream with a ravenous appetite and went straight to the Miss America Diner and ate an enormous tongue sandwich.
Vance
says that if he knew that he was going to die in a week, he’d do every fucked-up thing he could think of.
Ike
gently admonishes
Vance
. “That’s the wrong approach,” he says. “Here’s what you’d do: You’d shave every day. You’d keep your shoelaces nice and snug. You’d work on your posture. You see what I’m saying?” Although
Ike
suspects that beneath
Vance
’s glazed stupor lurks a reptilian cunning, he senses that the semiliterate underpants-jacker is having trouble with the concept of Bushido asceticism, and proceeds to tell him a story illustrating exemplary conduct in the face of imminent hyperviolent death. How, early one morning in fifteenth-century Edo, a loyal retainer inadvertently offended a thin-skinned and legendarily fastidious nobleman. Stricken with remorse and shame at his conduct, the retainer immediately offered to commit
seppuku
at dawn the following day. The nobleman, now ashamed of his petulance, attempted to dissuade the retainer from taking such drastic action, but the retainer was adamant that, having offended his master, he must pay the ultimate price. The nobleman, sensing the unimpeachable rectitude and indomitable valor of this man, had no choice but to accept his decision to commit ritual suicide, but he invited the man to be his honored guest at his castle and, for the twenty-four hours before his death, partake of anything he desired—food, drink, concubines, etc. The retainer, bowing deeply, accepted his master’s invitation. Soon after he arrived at the opulent abode of the nobleman, as he wandered the labyrinthine hallways of the castle by himself, the retainer’s nose began to itch. A man of irreproachable manners and discretion, he exerted all his willpower in an effort not to scratch his nose and appear uncouth. But the more he tried to ignore the itch, the more maddening it became. Finally, he furtively reached up to his nose (furtively, even though he was completely alone—such was his rectitude) and felt an overgrown hair curling just a bit out of one nostril. He impulsively yanked it out, bringing tears to his eyes. Now he had the tiny hair between his thumb and forefinger. But so scrupulous was this man that he wouldn’t even consider the possibility of simply dropping the hair and letting it float harmlessly and unnoticeably to the floor. Knowing that his nose hair had befouled the gleaming tile of his master’s palace would have filled him with deep, intolerable shame. So he tried to find a small garbage bin or a pail of some sort or even an ashtray or a chamber pot where he could discreetly discard the nose hair. But the palace of the fastidious nobleman was so exceptionally pristine that there was no such vessel to be found anywhere—all the garbage bins and chamber pots had been tastefully ensconced out of sight. Still, the retainer absolutely refused to litter the floor with this single nose hair. And he spent the next twenty-four hours in their entirety—the very last twenty-four hours of his life—stubbornly, but fruitlessly, wandering the halls of the palace in search of something, anything, into which he could deposit the hair. He ate not a morsel, drank not a drop, and spent not even a single moment with any of the voluptuous concubines who awaited him. And, at dawn, he committed
seppuku,
solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand.

“Damn,”
Vance
says, spinning the wheel of his BMX bike, the spokes rhythmically thrumming the empty Sunkist can.

Later,
Ike
tells
Vance
about his special diet for the week preceding his violent death: two meals a day, each meal consisting of 16 oz of cole slaw served in a “sacred” blue Dansk plastic salad bowl and two rounded scoops (44 g each) of BSN Syntha-6 banana-flavored protein powder mixed into 12 oz of Sunkist orange soda. “The cole slaw is for roughage,” he explains to
Vance
. “I want to have a clean colon when I die,” he tells him, “because when the Mossad kills you, Israeli law requires them to do a colonoscopy on your corpse as part of the autopsy. It’s this Yid fixation with the gastrointestinal tract.”
Ike
(SO high) totally cracks up at the sheer perversity of his rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism. And then he tells
Vance
about how he had an appointment with his urologist the other day, and the Discovery Channel was on the TV in the waiting room, and there was a show about the origin of cole slaw, about how it was originally called “Cossack Saddle Cabbage,” and about how a Cossack horseman would take a razor-sharp hatchet and shred a couple of raw cabbages and pack it into a rawhide sack and actually use that as a saddle, and how, over long distances, the horse sweat would actually pickle the cabbage, producing a version of what we today call “cole slaw,” and how the name “Cole Slaw” is actually the result of a careless transliteration of the phrase “Cossack Saddle Cabbage” by a harried immigration official at Ellis Island. (Note, here, a foreshadowing of
Ike
’s discussion about the significance of
naming.
)
Vance
(high school dropout) is too gullible and too fucked up to know whether
Ike
is putting him on or not. Also, some people (e.g., experts) wonder whether
Ike
, in reality, wasn’t in the living room of his two-story hermitage, watching the Discovery Channel on his own TV, in his wifebeater and night-vision goggles, with his bottle of Scotch, and simply
imagined
that he was in the waiting room of a urologist. One never knows with
Ike
, who must perpetually contend with the mischievous and mind-manipulating
XOXO
, who, in turn, persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha. Meanwhile, in the course of discussing the change in his diet and needing to be strong for “The Last Concert” and his martyrdom,
Ike
apologizes to
Vance
for not inviting him to be in the band (
The Kartons
).…“You’re not a
Karton
, though,” he says. And
Vance
goes, “I know,
names have talismanic power; when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name; the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name; a person is just a hash of glands and myelin sheathing and electrochemical impulses, but there’s no discernable context, no recognizable pattern, it’s all incoherent, until it’s organized and orchestrated into a story, into a fate, by that name.
” (Experts today are in almost unanimous agreement that this scene and the scene that follows it are in the WRONG ORDER!
Vance
is sarcastically parroting, almost verbatim,
Ike
’s ideas about naming that
Ike
hasn’t even expressed yet, and won’t until the
next
scene. So, unless the Gravy has endowed
Vance
with uncanny powers of precognition, the two scenes should obviously be reversed. But this remains the canonical sequence, because bards—surprisingly hidebound for drug-addled vagrants—insist on continuing to recite the epic as it’s traditionally been recited for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.) At any rate, there’s something so mocking and provocative about
Vance
’s tone (probably because he’s SO high on Gravy) that it makes
Ike
momentarily furious. His great impacted anger flares, his festering
Maoist
/
Mansonesque
rage. (In his coiled fury,
Ike
is like
Tetsuo, the Iron Man
. He dreams of Red Guard maenads, of flesh-eating
Maoist
zombies tearing celebrities apart.) And he almost impulsively smashes
Vance
’s face in with his bat. And he would have done it so quickly and so brutally that
Vance
would never have had a chance to even pull his Glock 17 from the waistband of his jeans. But
La Felina
(who, of course, with a Goddess’s telescopic vision, is ogling
Ike
from the penthouse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) intervenes by swooping down into Jersey City and impersonating a young nanny from Côte d’Ivoire (with a spectacular big-ass ass and big-ass titties), who sashays past pushing a white baby in a stroller, distracting
Ike
(he imagines that look on the nanny’s face, that moment of surrender to her own indigenous pleasure, etc., etc.), and by the time she passes out of sight,
Ike
’s temper has cooled, and, high as he is, he smiles and shakes his head abashedly at his own propensity for explosive violence. His lust and his rage are strong. He never dithers. Thrown into this world, he maneuvers himself with the unfaltering aplomb of a somnambulist, but a somnambulist in blazing daylight, in the “blaze of the gaze.” (Whether this scene is intended to augur the hyperviolent demise of
Ike Karton
or this is merely identifiable with the benefit of hindsight remains a question contested by experts, but it is surely tempting to see in the overt symbolism of
Ike
’s bat and
Vance
’s Glock a prefiguration of the epic’s death-drenched climax.) As if to atone for his transient wrath,
Ike
offers
Vance
another fascinating factoid: that, in the week before he himself was guillotined,
Maximilien Robespierre
(another one of
La Felina
’s “boy-toys”) subsisted on black coffee and marzipan.