The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (17 page)

Ordinarily
Ike
probably wouldn’t be so candid with
Vance
, except that he’s SO high on Gravy. It’s like military-grade Gravy, and
Ike
suspects that
Vance
is being supplied by a God. And sure enough, once
Vance
describes the “guy” he’s getting his shit from,
Ike
’s almost certain that it’s someone who’s being impersonated by the God
Bosco Hifikepunye
. (The incident in which
Ike
actually encounters this “guy” is the basis for the celebrated and extensively studied episode from the
Fifteenth Season,
during which
Ike
will kneel down and say to a 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,” accentuating the dignity he bestows on the lowest of the low.
Ike
’s suspicion that
Vance
’s supplier is
Bosco Hifikepunye
is confirmed when
Ike
discovers fresh loot drops (or “God guano”) in the vicinity.)

They are SO high.

This Gravy is super-potent.

It’s military-grade Gravy.

Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins…

The mesmerizing metronomic tick

                   of the spokes thrumming against

                                the empty Sunkist can…

Vance
spins the BMX wheel not as if it were a Himalayan prayer wheel (as some shit-for-brains experts have stupidly suggested).…He spins it like
Goethe
’s
Gretchen am Spinnrade
.
Gretchen
is singing at her spinning wheel, in anguished erotic contemplation of
Faust
.
“Mein armer Kopf / Ist mir verrückt, / Mein aremer Sinn / Ist mir zerstückt.”
(“My poor head / Is crazy to me, / My poor mind / Is torn apart.”)

Like
Gretchen
,
Vance
seems here like someone smitten, someone besotted. Yes,
Vance
is captivated by
Ike
’s diffident magnificence, his “death-drenched luminosity.” But there’s something vaguely homoerotic in the way he absently spins his wheel and stares vacantly at his girlfriend’s father, something of the grotto-groping Goddesses’ vacuous gazes, that so perfectly reflects the slack drift of the masturbating mind.

“Oh my god, we love the
same
song!”
Vance
says at one point, in such a lilting tone of blithe, unalloyed affection that it’s hard not to read at least
some
element of homoeroticism into the remark.

Just as the piano in
Schubert
’s
Lied
stops as
Gretchen
becomes completely distracted by the thought of
Faust
’s kiss and forgets to keeps spinning—
“Mein Busen drängt sich / Nach ihm hin. / Ach dürft ich fassen / Und halten ihn, / Und küssen ihn, / So wie ich wollt, / An seinen Küssen / Vergehen sollt!”
(“My bosom urges / Itself toward him. / Ah, might I grasp / And hold him! / And kiss him, / As I would wish, / At his kisses / I should die!”)—
Vance
forgets to keep spinning the BMX wheel…

At this point, there is a break—a missing section—in the epic of nearly four hours. This has come to be known as
The Big Lacuna.
Reconstruction of
The Big Lacuna
can never be more than conjectural, but its contents, at least in outline, are tolerably clear. (Experts consider
The Big Lacuna
to be over when
Vance
snaps out of his reverie and asks
Ike
whom he’d rather fuck,
Jenny Sanford
or
Silda Spitzer
.) Blame for
The Big Lacuna
obviously and immediately falls on
XOXO
. Given the tendency of the embittered poet manqué to brazenly interpolate something gratuitously titillating or abstruse or jarringly incongruous, i.e., to preemptively corrupt the epic beyond redemption, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he’d capriciously paralyzed
Ike
and
Vance
for four hours. But what other means might
XOXO
have at his disposal to cause a
Big Lacuna
in the epic? Well, he could go directly after the bards themselves. He could use a nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis), and he could have any one of those department store perfume saleswomen simply sashay by a group of bards as they recite the epic and casually spray a small amount of the mixture in their vicinity. This would be enough to cause a
Big Lacuna
.
XOXO
, who says he’s retired and lives on his pension, dismisses any such allegations as “absolute nonsense.” Speaking by telephone from his hyperborean hermitage, he says, “I have no hand in it.” He adds, “
T.S.F.N.—General Command
is pulling the wool over your eyes”—referring to the splinter group allied with a radical faction of exiled bards. But we all know what
XOXO
is capable of doing to the bards. He can make some of their pianissimo phrases breathy. He can cause them to suddenly chant in a laughable falsetto or stutter helplessly. And, of course, he can make them recite high-pitched gibberish. (Because the bards are traditionally blind, drug-​addled vagrants, experts tend to underplay what great shape they need to be in, especially to perform some of the more physically demanding and rigorously choreographed reenactments in the epic, e.g., when
Ike
is pepper-sprayed at the Miss America Diner or when he chases his daughter’s math teacher around the room or restrains himself from bludgeoning
Vance
with his baseball bat, etc. A bard’s heart rate can surge from 60 beats a minute to over 240 beats a minute during a recitation of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
. The lateral G-forces exerted on a bard who’s rocking back and forth to the rhythmic ostinato of spokes against a jerrycan could be as much as 4.5 G, which means about 25 kg of pressure on the neck.)

Whatever the cause of
The Big Lacuna,
for the entirety of its duration,
Ike
remains frozen in one immutable cataleptic posture. This tableau vivant demarcates in physical space the deep authenticity of
Ike
’s mode of experiencing the passage of time—to strike a single pose under the unflinchingly prurient gaze of the moaning Goddesses, a gaze which casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus, the “glaze of the gaze,” that Abercrombie & Fitch model and
90210
star
Trevor Donovan
analyzes in his book
The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics
.

Ike
presses himself like a gargoyle or a figurehead on the prow of a ship against the onrush of his own fate.

This tableau of
Ike
batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed
Vance
spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world.

And although the epic reaches a state of absolute stasis here, this continues to be one of the single most popular parts of the epic repertoire. Its hieratic solemnity and magisterial, almost inert choreography have given rise to comparisons with Noh drama, Khmer royal ballet, and Indian classical dance forms, including Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Kuchipudi. Connoisseurs appreciate the degree to which bards are willing to deform themselves into stunted and crippled shapes as they reenact the interminable tableau, risking grotesque injuries (although probably only the most discerning cognoscenti could distinguish these ​stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures from the stoop-​​shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures that the drug-addled vagrants typically assume, even when they’re not performing the epic). A bard is expected to have extraordinarily precise control over every single part of his body. For instance, when reenacting the scene in which
Ike
is distracted from bludgeoning
Vance
with his bat by the Goddess
La Felina
, who swoops down into Jersey City and impersonates 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, the bard, miming
Ike
with his brandished bat frozen in mid-air, must remain perfectly still except for the gentle rising and falling of his erection which choreographically registers the modalities of
Ike
’s emotions, achieving a tumescence and a flaccidity that’s precisely synchronized with the narration of the nanny’s approach and recession into the distance.

Among the world’s most illustrious blind, drug-addled bards,
Meir
and
Aaron Poznak
—feral twins abandoned as infants by their parents at Bergdorf Goodman and raised by a wild pack of Yorkipoos near the pond at the southeast corner of Central Park—are especially celebrated for their performances of the “Bat and Nanny” scene, to which they have added their own inimitable flourish. They can actually swivel their testicles from left to right in tandem to signify
Ike
“watching” the nanny as she sashays by—a sly allusion to, and literalization of, his cryptic assertion that his scrotum contains “two eyeballs.” In addition to their ultrasophisticated interpretations of
Ike
’s complex and hieratic poses during
The Big Lacuna,
the
Poznak Twins
are also renowned as unrivaled virtuosos of “high-pitched gibberish.” (Recently,
Meir Poznak
has receded from the public eye, purportedly becoming the shadowy leader of
T.S.F.N.—General Command.
)

Meanwhile…

Ike
seems to see two suns blazing in the heavens, and new mothers who had left their babies behind at home, their breasts swollen with milk, nestling gazelles and young wolves in their arms, suckling them.

“Is this a private jihad, or can anyone join?” a nymph/horsefly murmurs to
Ike
, flitting from armpit to armpit.

Ike
’s aura is sugar frosted.

Vance
is lost in some hallucinatory K-hole of his own.

The mesmerizing metronomic ostinato of the spokes ticking against the empty Sunkist can…the high-pitched gibberish of the nymph/horseflies (the “
Ikettes
”)…the buzz of the unmanned drones that represent
Ike
’s inescapable destiny…

They are SO high. This Gravy is super-potent. It’s military-grade Gravy. Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins.

They’re SO high.

They’re SO FUCKING high.

According to a report issued by the organization
Psychopharmacologists Without Boundaries,
the amount of hallucinogenic Gravy which could be contained in the period at the end of this sentence, if ingested on an empty stomach, would be enough to cause a person to mistake a rocket-propelled grenade for a Vietnamese
bánh mi
sandwich. But is it simply Gravy that
Ike
and
Vance
are smoking in this episode? They seem SO high. Well, some experts have concluded that the Gravy
Vance
is buying from the God
Bosco
Hifikepunye
has been cut with military-grade ass-cheese, which would make it exponentially more potent and potentially neurotoxic. The amount of military-grade ass-​cheese / Gravy blend that you could snort off the hyphen between the words “ass” and “cheese” in this very sentence is said to be enough to induce a full-blown psychotic episode. And, if all the letters in the sentence
This tableau of
Ike
batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed
Vance
spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world
were infused with the military-grade ass-cheese / Gravy blend and a person were to ingest the entire sentence, that person would almost certainly become an incurable paranoid schizophrenic. (Keep in mind, too, that boldface signifiers like “
Ike
” and “
Vance
” contain up to three times the amount of the binary psychotropic drug as words in a regular or italicized font do.)

Although it’s not the consensus opinion, many scholars suspect that during
The Big Lacuna,
XOXO
has kidnapped
Ike
’s and
Vance
’s souls and spirited them off to his hyperborean hermitage beneath Antarctica.
Vance
’s soul doesn’t know where the fuck it is. And it gets a little agitated. And
XOXO
starts telling it some bullshit just to calm it down, like “We have a salon on premises and I promise you our stylists don’t push products on the customers. Don’t you hate it when you go get your hair cut and the stylist tries to push a product on you, etc.”—just some bullshit to calm
Vance
’s soul down. He also tells them that there’s a restaurant at the hermitage: “You’ll love it,” he says. “It’s like a weird version of
Hooters.
” He takes the two souls out back behind the restaurant where Zaporozhian Cossack cavalrymen are just returning from raiding an Ottoman village with freshly made cole slaw under their saddles. Inside, all the waiters are famous Casanovas who are now impotent, incontinent, doddering old men, traipsing from table to table in diapers, using walkers, enormous hydroceles sagging their scrotums to the floor—
Hugh Hefner
,
Warren Beatty
,
Jack Nicholson
,
Wilt Chamberlain
,
Tommy Lee
,
Julio Iglesias
, etc.

Vance
’s soul is like, “I thought he said this was like
Hooters.
” And
Ike
’s soul says, “I think he just meant that there’s, like, a theme going on with the waiters.”

The waiters are all suffering from dementia and can’t remember your orders (never mind their grandchildren’s names or the last movie they saw), so you have to write down what you want directly on their grotesquely exposed cerebrums with a sharp periodontal curette.

The allegorical interpretation of
XOXO
’s hermitage as
hell
and
Ike
and
Vance
’s brief sojourn there as some sort of
perilous infernal descent,
which dominated the critical debate about
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
for, like, five minutes in the late ’80s, is now widely discredited. Yes, the hermitage is underground—miles beneath the surface of Antarctica. And yes,
Ike
refers to it as
unten
—literally “under” or “below.” But,
hello,
it’s “hyperborean”—of or relating to the arctic, frigid, very cold. The opposite of infernally hot. Well, what if it’s WAY underground down near the inner core of the earth, where it’s like 10,000 degrees? Well, what if it’s up your ass where it’s like
10,000,000
degrees? Well, what if you’re a cocksucking dwarf racist retard midget dickwad? Well, what if you’re a fucking scatological-bakery urinal-cake-boss motherfucking fist-fucked cow-pie anal-fissureman motherfucker?