The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (16 page)

“I may not understand life,”
Ike
says, paraphrasing
Joseph Goebbels
, “but I know how to die magnificently.”

“For real,”
Vance
avers, spinning the wheel.

“I love my fate,”
Ike
says, channeling
Friedrich Nietzsche
.

“If you love your fate so much, why don’t you marry it?”
Vance
(who’s
so
high) asks.

“I’m fervently wedded to my fate,” answers
Ike
.

And here, of course, as throughout, you feel
Ike
’s fealty to his fate in his smile, not in his solemnity.

“How are things going with you and my daughter?”
Ike
asks, not using his daughter’s name out of respect for her privacy.

Vance
describes being raised by hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen as “
The Vagina Monologues
if it were hosted by
Jerry Springer
.…There was a lot of disclosure, a lot of sharing, followed by a lot of violence…so I’m used to all that obstreperous emoting.…But with your daughter, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her.” (That line, “it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her,” will become critically important relative to the daughter’s impending pregnancy on Thursday night’s episode.) Then,
Vance
asks
Ike
how he got his wife,
Ruthie
, to fall in love with him, and
Ike
tells him that the first time he saw
Ruthie
she was thrashing on a patch of grass at Lincoln Park in Jersey City, wearing a see-through prairie dress and no underwear, wildly plucking at a zither. “I was immediately struck by her anarcho-primitivist hypersexuality. Although, she was more petite and hygienic than the women I usually go for, and she seemed educated to me—which I usually don’t like. I usually go for women who can barely follow an episode of
Dora the Explorer
without becoming hopelessly befuddled and breaking into tears. I just find them, on the whole, more wonder struck (
thaumazein
).” So he read every book and saw every movie and every play that features a character named
Ruthie
or
Ruth
—every single boldface
Ruth
or
Ruthie
—including
Dr. Ruth Westheimer
in
Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50: Revving up the Romance, Passion & Excitement!;
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
in
Jeffrey Toobin
’s
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court;
Ruth
(“a woman in her early thirties”) in
Harold Pinter
’s play
The Homecoming
; the patio-sealant huffing
Ruth Stoops
in
Citizen Ruth
(the
Alexander Payne
movie starring
Laura Dern
); and, of course,
Ruth
in
The Book of Ruth,
in which
Ruth
’s mother-in-law,
Naomi
(which means “the delightful one”), changes her name to
Mara
(which means “the bitter one”): “And she said unto them, ‘Call me not
Naomi
, call me
Mara
: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.’”

“A person’s name is a fate-conjuring incantation,”
Ike
tells
Vance
, and then proceeds to tell him a story illustrating the mystical significance of names: “A guy walks into an agent’s office and says, ‘I’d appreciate it very much if you’d consider representing me. I hear you’re one of the best agents in the business and that you could really give my career a terrific boost.’ The agent says, ‘OK, what do you do?’ And the guy says, ‘I do a bit of everything. I sing, I dance, I do impersonations, I act—straight drama, musical theater, comedy, slapstick—the whole megillah.’ And the agent says, ‘That sounds great. What’s your name?’ And the guy says, ‘My name is
Penis van Lesbian
.’ And the agent’s taken aback for a moment, and then he says, ‘With all respect, son, you’re going to have to change that name.’ And the guy says, ‘Why?’ And the agent says, ‘That name,
Penis van Lesbian
, just isn’t going to work in show business. So if I’m going to represent you, you’re simply going to have to change it.’ And the guy sighs and says, ‘That’s a shame, because
van Lesbian
has been the family name for generations upon generations, and it would be terribly disrespectful of me to change it. And my parents gave a lot of thought to naming me
Penis
, and I wouldn’t want to offend them in any way either. So I’m afraid changing my name is out of the question.’ And the agent says, ‘Well, I completely understand that, and I wish you all the luck in the world.’ And the guy leaves. So, about five years later, the agent’s sitting in his office and there’s a knock on the door. And in walks this same guy, looking a little bit older and considerably more prosperous. And he takes out a check for fifty thousand dollars made out to the agent, and he puts it on his desk. The agent’s totally nonplussed. ‘What’s this for?’ he asks. And the guy says, ‘Well, about five years ago I came in here and you told me that to make it in showbiz, I needed to change my name, and I said no. And after knocking my head against the wall and getting absolutely nowhere, I finally changed my name, and I’ve been a fabulous hit. You were
completely
right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘
Dick van Dyke
,’ the guy says.” As he recounts the parable,
Ike
’s whispery rasp is almost inaudible against the percussive rattle of the soda can thrummed by the slowly spinning spokes of
Vance
’s battered red BMX bike and the buzz of several enormous iridescent-winged horseflies who sip at dazzling rivulets of bright orange soda that trickle from the mouths of the discarded cans.
Vance
, because he’s
so
high on Gravy, is momentarily fixated on the flies—a surreal tableau of mutant nomadic nymphs feeding on chromium sludge in some postapocalyptic wasteland…he’s thinking. And the horsefly/nymphs seem to be serenading each other in some sort of high-pitched gibberish.…Tiny, voluptuous nymphs plucked out of a painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite
John William Waterhouse
and cast in some Disney/Pixar 3-D animation…he’s thinking. The very words he’s thinking—the very language he’s thinking in—scrolling across the bottom of his visual frame…like karaoke, he’s thinking…he’s SO high…

For
Ike
, the Gravy seems to have deepened his understanding of his relation to
XOXO
.
Ike
is “reading” (i.e., thinking) what
XOXO
is writing, what he’s inscribing in
Ike
’s mind with his sharp periodontal curette.
Ike
’s
denken
is
XOXO
’s
dichten.
XOXO
has also has made a series of “drill-drawings,” for which he inserts a periodontal curette into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns in
Ike
’s mind, thus divorcing the hand of the artist from the work of art. This is what produces the effect that links
Ike
’s simultaneous enactment of
hero
and
bard
to “the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball-dribbling nine-year-old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play.” (A periodontal curette inserted into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns would also explain the epic’s “tail-chasing, vortical form.”)

Some of the nymph/horseflies are attracted to
Ike
’s armpits (which are said to be “redolent of sex and death”).

Meanwhile,
Ike
expounds further upon the talismanic power of “the name,” about how—whether you’re mortal (
sterbliche
) or divine (
göttliche
);
Ike Karton
,
Vance
, or
DJ Doorjamb
;
Mogul Magoo
,
Bosco Hifikepunye
, or
Mister Softee
—when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name, and about how the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name, and about how 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. “Isn’t what you
call
something the crucial question?” he asks
Vance
rhetorically. Certainly, the experts have always maintained that what you call the epic is the crucial question. Is it
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
? Is it
The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head
? Is it
T.S.F.N.
? And, at one point, near the finale, swilling Scotch and swinging his bat at flitting nano-drones,
Ike
calls out “
XOXO
!” as if
that
were the title of the epic:
Trotzdem schrie
Ike
noch aus aller kraft den namen, der name donnerte durch die Nacht.
(“Nevertheless, with full force,
Ike
shouted out the name, the name thundered through the night.”)

Vance
—louche, semiliterate, BMX-borne Gravy dealer—was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on a daily dose of 72 mg of Concerta (Methylphenidate) when he was twelve years old, and was kicked out of high school for “habitual truancy.” Because he’s so high from the Gravy and/or because the God
XOXO
(“The Ventriloquist”) is using his sharp periodontal curette to indelibly engrave these ideas into his mind,
Vance
now finds himself discoursing upon the “problematics of the name,” identifying naming as both a
taxonomy
(a “hegemonic system of classification”) and a
taxidermy
(an “attempt to capture, chloroform, and neuter the referent”).

He shrugs, befuddled by the stream of high-pitched gibberish that’s coming out his own mouth. Then he loses his train of thought, and they both totally crack up.

At first, it seems as if
Vance
is finishing
Ike
’s sentences, as if he’s able to anticipate verbatim what
Ike
’s going to say…as if they’re performing some ritual they’ve reenacted countless times before…soon they’re actually riffing back and forth, a spirited give-and-take, the teasing interplay between tabla and sitar in some woozy raga they’ve played countless times before. (Note again here, as throughout,
the tellers
and
the told
folded in on themselves.)

When
Vance
stops spinning the BMX wheel,
Ike
’s whispery rasp is suddenly foregrounded in utter silence, imparting great drama to whatever he’s saying. And so too will the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards when they re-create this scene, and cease rhythmically banging their chunky chachkas against their jerrycans of orange soda, and intone, in the sudden sepulchral hush, the words “At dawn, he commits
seppuku,
solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand,” or “‘You were absolutely right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘
Dick Van Dyke
.’”

Because he’s so high on Gravy,
Ike
mentions to
Vance
that the Goddesses use him as pornography when they masturbate.
Ike
also makes the curious statement that fate enables a Goddess to know exactly when to watch him. “If I’m doing something, say, at 10:38
PM
EST on a Monday night, it’s because I’m fated to be doing it then—it’s precisely scheduled that way so a Goddess can find me easily. These are what they call my
listings.
Long ago the Gods ordained these things.” If only
Vance
were his son, perhaps
Ike
could be even more forthcoming and discuss his impending tryst with
La Felina
. Nonetheless, he does disclose to
Vance
that the thought of being shamelessly ogled by writhing autoerotomaniacal Goddesses makes his nutsack tingle as if it were a “sachet of plutonium potpourri.”
Vance
is like, “Sometimes I get so horny that one of my nuts starts gnawing on the other one.”

And it’s here that
Ike
makes the cryptic—and endlessly analyzed—assertion that his scrotum contains two eyeballs.

The Gravy’s made them both telepathic, so
Ike
knows that
Vance
is wondering what it’s like to fuck a Goddess, and
Ike
tells him—without having to say a word—that the greatest thing about having sex with a Goddess (or a human woman, for that matter) is the expression on her face when she capitulates to her own pleasure. It’s a return, a homecoming, riffs
Ike
. It’s that sublime moment when she defects to the
old country,
to her ancestral homeland, to her own private
paradise—
“where everything was
italicized,
where things happened without any discernable context, where there were no recognizable patterns, where it was all incoherent; where 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; where 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.” It’s that moment she succumbs to herself, surrenders to her depersonalized, oceanic subjectivity, uncorrupted by the narratives of fathers, husbands, village elders, etc. It’s a renunciation of modernity, thinks
Ike
—doomed, compulsively hermeneutic, unemployed, anarcho-primitivist, gym-rat. “What does it look like?” wonders
Vance
wordlessly. “Like the grimace of someone throwing herself on an electrified fence at a border crossing or the imperturbable serenity of someone about to do a reverse three-and-a-half somersault tuck into the abyss,”
Ike
replies in his thoughts. And
Vance
wonders whether
Ike
’s entire hermetically enclosed, paranoid, narcissistic
Weltanschauung
isn’t simply the fetishization of this single snapshot of female
jouissance
…but then he shrugs, unable to remember (never mind comprehend) a single word of what he just thought.