The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (2 page)

The Gods used a drug called “Gravy,” also known as
Pozole
(“stew”). Their drug use was heavy and appeared to be both ritualistic and recreational. At one time, it was considered to be what actually made the Gods deities, and there was speculation that consumption by human beings might bestow certain divine qualities on them. Gravy was originally thought to be a smokable version of the Vedic drug Soma and assumed to be hallucinogenic and derived from psilocybin mushrooms or
Amanita muscaria
(psychoactive basidiomycete fungus). Some have speculated that Gravy is a form of hallucinogenic borscht—a theory endorsed by such scholars as Mircea Eliade, Georges Dumezil, and University of Chicago Professor of the History of Religions Wendy Doniger. Today, though, many experts believe that Gravy is a solvent similar to what’s found in glue, paint thinner, and felt-tip markers. This theory has gained considerable support among a wide range of prominent people, including TMZ’s Harvey Levin, forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos, and professional beach volleyball player Misty May-Treanor. Before the imbibing of Gravy, ritual protocol required the recitation of a sacred oath, and then the guest would clink his golden chalice against that of his divine host and solemnly ask, “You gonna shoot that or sip it?” There are about fourteen Weight Watchers Points in a half-cup serving of the rich hallucinogenic beverage. Smokable Gravy—made by heating liquid Gravy and baking soda until small pinkish-white precipitates (“rocks”) form—is more quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, reaching the brain in about eight seconds. (Side effects can include: Progeria, Necrotizing Fasciitis, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, Craniopagus Twins, Elephantiasis of the Testicles, Projectile Anal Hemorrhaging, and Gangrene of the Eyeballs.)

Yagyu
—a God who was also known as
Dark Cuervo
(“Dark Raven”) and
Fast-Cooking Ali
—created “Woman’s Ass,” which was considered his masterpiece. Nothing he’d done before prepared the other Gods for the stunning, unprecedented triumph that was “Woman’s Ass.” His previous accomplishments had been deliberately banal. He’d created the Platitude, for instance. When the Gods first
came to
—once they’d finally recovered from whatever dissipated spree they’d been on—they came to with a jolt, pulsing with intensity and ambition. They worked nonstop, didn’t sleep, their pupils were dilated, they were jittery, quivering with nervous tics, and they talked incessantly—they had this self-indulgent, hyperintellectual diarrhea of the mouth. Like, instead of just muttering “Fuck,” a God who cut himself shaving would launch into an anguished soliloquy in the iambic tetrameter of John Milton’s
Il Penseroso.
And the simplest, most perfunctory questions, like “Hey, how’s it going?” would elicit long, recondite Spinozan disquisitions on “attributes” and “modes” and discursive, inferential perception. Fast-Cooking Ali was a very shy, introspective, solitary individual. So he created a series of stock phrases that more reticent, self-effacing Gods like himself could use in response to the query “Hey, how’s it going?” These included “It’s going,” “Hangin’ in there,” “Same shit, different day,” and “If you want to live, don’t come any closer.” Fast-Cooking Ali’s bromides quickly became part of the standard repertoire, but he pretty much disappeared from the scene and became a recluse and no one after that knew what he was working on or if he was even working on anything. It was said that he was spending his days holed up in a room somewhere, by himself, smoking Gravy, muttering to himself, lost in masturbatory fantasies about loop quantum gravity and supersymmetric particles. And then one day he emerged with “Woman’s Ass.” El Brazo was the first to see it. “That’s so fucking hot! It’s genius,” he exclaimed, immediately summoning the other Gods. There was considerable discussion about hair—how much, how little (final decision: none on the cheeks, some along the perineum, downy fuzz above the crack)—and the pigmentation of the skin around the anus (final decision: slightly darker for white women). Despite the great acclaim he received for “Woman’s Ass,” Fast-​Cooking Ali dropped out of sight again. Although it would not become public knowledge for millions of years, he had begun a very secret, very intense affair with La Felina, the Goddess of Humility. La Felina would, over the course of time, have many relationships with mortal men. She has a heavy sexual thing for Hasidic and Amish guys, as well as anarcho-primitivists, including Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber). Sometimes she wears a Japanese schoolgirl sailor outfit. La Felina hates the rich and she hates celebrities. (She has recently tried to induce a deranged person to stalk and kill the designer Marc Jacobs.) El Brazo is the God who fills our bodies with desires that can never be satisfied. But La Felina is the Goddess responsible for making ugly women more erotic than beautiful women.

The God of Head Trauma (who was also, of course, the God of Concussions, the God of Dementia, the God of Alcoholic Blackouts, the God of Brainwashing, Implanted Thoughts, and Cultural Amnesia) was called
El Cucho
(“The Old Man”). This was a facetious epithet because El Cucho had a lustrously youthful appearance—a million-watt smile and a streaming surfer-boy mane of blond hair. He wore a tiger-skin loincloth. In the eternal schism between El Brazo and La Felina on one side versus Mogul Magoo and his snake-headed Pistoleras on the other, El Cucho (who was also known as “Kid Coma” and “XOXO”) was firmly in the El Brazo / La Felina camp. XOXO liked sitting around with circus performers and hockey players and boxers and plying them with drugged sherbet. He liked to mess with people’s minds—to make them forget things or put alien ideas in their heads. (Year after year, he was consistently voted both “Most Sadistic”
and
“Friendliest” God by his peers!) Once, he gave Pittsburgh Penguin center Evgeni Malkin a concussion during a game at Mellon Arena, and although Malkin’s body (his “mortal husk”) lay unconscious on the ice for about ten human-minutes, XOXO actually “kidnapped” Malkin’s soul and took it to his garish hyperborean hermitage miles beneath the earth’s surface in what is now Antarctica, where he kept it captive for two and a half God-years. There was a suffocatingly sweet smell at the hermitage, as if Eggnog Febreze was being continuously pumped in through the ventilation system. XOXO served Malkin’s soul drugged sherbet, which made Malkin’s soul woozy and disinhibited enough that it agreed to be dressed up in a U.S. Marines tank top and PVC diaper briefs. Then the two of them played a card game called snarples, and every so often XOXO would chastely kiss Malkin’s soul on the mouth. Then XOXO shampooed and cornrowed Malkin’s soul’s hair, and, using a sharp periodontal curette, he carved short secret phrases into the furrows on his scalp (like “Puppy Love” and “Book Club” and “New You”). It was creepy. Each time XOXO would kiss him, he’d exhale fervently into his mouth. It was really more like CPR than making out. XOXO’s breath was like mentholated Freon. And when Malkin finally came to on the ice at Mellon Arena, he pawed violently at his throat saying over and over again in Russian, “My uvula is frozen!” All Malkin could remember was being given a ticker tape parade. But then he realized with a shudder that it wasn’t ticker tape at all but the gossamer scales of his own molting mind that were falling all over the streets of Pittsburgh! XOXO also delighted in abducting legal proofreaders from midtown office buildings in the middle of the night and taking their souls to his remote, sweet-scented hermitage, where he’d keep them captive and toy with them for years. They’d wake up back in their office cubicles thinking they’d lost consciousness from anaphylactic allergic reactions to ingesting peanuts in candy bars they’d gotten out of the vending machines. XOXO had once shown a poem he’d written to Shanice, the irrepressibly chipper Goddess of Management—the adorable one with the awesome organizational skill set—and her reaction was uncharacteristically negative. XOXO had literally asked for it, though. He had explicitly requested that Shanice not give him one of those glib “Oh, it’s really great!” responses, but to take her time, read it over carefully, and provide him with a very honest critique. And he told her, furthermore, that the more unsparing the critique was, the more meaningful it would be to him, and that he was only showing the poem to her because he considered her the most trustworthy of all the Gods and he could depend on her, and only her, to be completely candid with him. What Shanice didn’t realize at the time—although she would eventually—was that the offering of the poem was a gesture of seduction. Not that the content of the poem was seductive per se—it was not a “love poem” in any sense. The poem depicts a group of businessmen who are returning home from work one evening. On a lark, they diverge from their customary route and end up deep in the woods. They gang up on the “new guy” (someone who’d only recently been transferred to their division), and, in what appears to be a sort of hazing ritual, they tie him to a tree and whip him with his own belt. His pants fall to his ankles, and it’s obvious that he’s aroused.
But
—as the poem goes on to suggest—he’s aroused not by the robust flagellation but because he sees an ineffably beautiful butterfly flit by. Everyone had always considered XOXO to be kind of frivolous. He actively pursued his hobby of snatching hockey players’ souls and messing with their minds and what not, but he didn’t seem to apply himself diligently to much of anything else. He came across as something of a dilettante and an underachiever. XOXO thought that the poem would show Shanice a more serious side and a more delicately registered sensibility than he was usually given credit for. Shanice had always assumed that XOXO was unequivocally gay—something confirmed, in her mind, by the homoerotic tenor of the poem.
One could certainly discern an element of shame in the poem or at least a desire on the part of the poem’s protagonist to displace or mitigate the cause of his arousal. And Shanice did, in fact, discern this strain of discomfort in the poem. She wasn’t at all what she seemed either.
And, in this way, she had a great deal in common with XOXO. They both felt underestimated by the other Gods. (It was Shanice’s sense that the other Gods considered her to be affable and competent, but basically pedestrian.) Anyway, if Shanice had realized at the time that XOXO was offering her the poem to read and critique as a gesture of seduction, she probably would have finessed her evaluation a bit. But she didn’t. And it was quite a blow. The incident made things tense between Shanice and XOXO, left them somewhat estranged, and undoubtedly influenced Shanice—whether she was conscious of it or not—to align herself with Mogul Magoo (on whom she soon developed an insane crush). It also left XOXO embittered and implacably hostile to anyone who ever tried to put his or her thoughts and feelings into words. And so XOXO, this resentful poet manqué, became the God who delights in spitefully snatching brilliant thoughts from people’s minds and casting them into oblivion. When you’re lying in bed, in that hypnagogic state, neither awake nor asleep, and you have a lovely idea that seems to evanesce almost as soon as you’re conscious of it—that’s XOXO snatching it away. And when you’re high and you have an extraordinarily inspired and unprecedented idea and then you wake up the next day and have to glumly acknowledge how banal and derivative it actually was—that’s also XOXO’s doing. During the night he came down and sabotaged the idea, gutted it—leaving only the banal and derivative. He keeps a vast cache of stolen ideas in his hyperborean hermitage.

For them it’s a kind of slumming, rough trade, a
nostalgie de la boue
(“nostalgia for the mud”). And many of the Gods—including several of the
major
deities—feel that human beings’ finite life expectancies and their comparatively limited intelligence simply make them SUPER-SEXY! These Gods find human existential angst—being aware that death is inevitable, but not knowing, at any given moment, exactly when or how it might occur—to be a total TURN-ON! They paradoxically find those very characteristics that so definitively subordinate human beings to the Gods—mortality, benightedness, and impotence—to be HOT, HOT! HOT!! And the very thought of abjectly defiling themselves—of
wallowing
—in all the pungent excretions and effluvia of the human body maddens them with desire. This is the good news. The bad news is that, for a human, having a sexual/romantic relationship with a God can be a daunting, traumatic, and even tragic experience. You have to be very careful! Gods are self-important. They tend to have ADD. They love to fuck with your head. Because they’re immortal, they tend to be late all the time. And because they’re omnipotent, they usually exhibit a complete lack of empathy. They are narcissistic and furiously self-absorbed. If they want to have sex with you, it doesn’t really matter to them how you’re feeling or what you’re going through. So don’t expect understanding or patience from a God just because you’re getting your period or you have to study for your SATs or you’re leaving the next day for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. And if a God does seem to evince some concern or betray any vulnerability, you have to be very skeptical because their behavior is frequently insincere and manipulative. And they’re supermercurial and you have to always put up with their cryptic moods and petulant fatwas. And they can come and go (i.e., materialize and disappear) so that no one else can see them—which can make you feel very isolated from other people. Mi-Hyun, age twenty-nine, worked at a florist shop. She was
very
pretty. She had a pageboy with cute blunt-cut bangs. One day,
Bosco Hifikepunye,
the God of Miscellany (including Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc., etc.) espied Mi-Hyun as she smoked a Parliament Light outside the florist shop. He couldn’t believe how HOT she was! And soon the God and his “Little Flower Girl” were having completely insane sex-a-thons. But, of course, Hifikepunye would arrive and depart invisibly, unbeknownst to anyone but Mi-Hyun. Mi-Hyun’s neighbors—the old Dominican ladies—would always tease her: “You’re a pretty girl, Mi-Hyun. When are you going to get a boyfriend?” And Mi-Hyun would be like, “I have boyfriend. He visit me every night.” “But we never see him,” the old ladies would reply. “We never see
anyone
visit you.” And soon they started to think that Mi-Hyun was crazy. At first, it didn’t really bother Mi-Hyun. She was too happy. The God, Hifikepunye, was GREAT in bed! He’d anoint her clitoris with Witches’ Flying Ointment (aka
Lamiarum Unguenta
or “Witches’ Unguent”), a mixture of Gravy, belladonna, chimney soot, clove oil, and the fat of an unbaptized child. Once he made her fifty feet tall and put the mummified body of King Tutankhamen into her ass as she came. She liked that so much that he turned Lenin’s corpse and Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head into anal sex toys too! These are things that, of course, Mi-Hyun would excitedly tell her coworkers at the florist shop the next morning, but they would just shake their heads and say, “Mi-Hyun, you need to see a psychiatrist.” Soon Mi-Hyun was let go from the florist shop. And she became alienated from her neighbors. And, worst of all, the Goddess Lady Rukia (Scrabble, Jellied Candies, Harness Racing), who coveted Hifikepunye and was jealous of his mortal paramour, gave Mi-Hyun periodontal disease so she’d have bad breath and bleeding gums and be less alluring to the God. Sure enough, Hifikepunye lost interest in her and stopped coming around. (One Christmas, he felt guilty and put a winning Pick 6 Lotto number into one of her dreams. But XOXO made her forget it as soon as she woke up.) Heartbroken, lonely, penniless, and now dying from the high levels of bacterial endotoxins that her infected gums had released into her bloodstream, Mi-Hyun lay across the tracks at the West Side Rail Yards one freezing night and waited for a freight train to end her misery.…She was picked up by the police and brought to the Emergency Room at Bellevue Hospital where she was admitted with a fever of 104 degrees, refractory hypotension, tachypnea, and a white blood cell count of 14,000 cells/mm
³
. She was immediately administered oxygen, fluids, and antibiotics and transferred to the ICU where she was given an APACHE II score of 25 and diagnosed with severe sepsis. She was put on norepinephrine and a continuous infusion of piperacillin-tazobactam with aminoglycoside. Three weeks later, it was determined that she was healthy enough to be transferred to the psychiatric unit. After telling psychiatrists and nurses about her sexual liaisons with the God Bosco Hifikepunye and about how he made her fifty feet tall and used Ted Williams’s cryonically preserved head as an anal sex toy and about how XOXO, the God of Dementia and Implanted Thoughts, had made her forget the winning Pick 6 Lotto number that Hifikepunye had hidden in her dreams and about how Lady Rukia, the Goddess of Scrabble and Jellied Candies, in a jealous rage, had given her periodontal disease that eventually developed into endotoxemia and sepsis…she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and put on 15 mg per day of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. When she failed to respond to the medication (i.e., when she continued to insist upon the veracity of her stories about the Gods), she was given electroconvulsive therapy four times a week for the following several months. And although this resulted in severe retrograde amnesia (she no longer has
any
memories of her parents or her childhood), her memory of being fifty feet tall and fucking a God remains vividly intact. And this memory, like a single calligraphic stroke on the white page of her erased mind, caused a dreamy smile to permanently settle across the catatonic impassivity of her face. XOXO had ineradicably inscribed the memory in Mi-Hyun’s mind at the behest of La Felina (who detests the vain, the rich, the celebrated and champions the humble, the indigent, the anonymous, the unknown and inaccessible, the marginalized, the deranged, the antimodernists, the anarcho-primitivists, the fanatical Luddites, the bedraggled, plump, sweaty working-class women with hairy pussies, etc.). The Gods glorify chosen mortals (“the elect”) by having XOXO ineradicably inscribe in their minds the story of the Gods. Now this particular story brings up a very interesting point about the Gods and their complex and often opaque relationships. Why would XOXO ineradicably inscribe into the mind of a mortal woman an amorous memory about Bosco Hifikepunye (who was also sometimes known as
Cara de Papa
(“Potato Face”)? After all, wasn’t XOXO aligned with the El Brazo / La Felina / Fast-Cooking Ali axis, which generally contended against
the Mogul Magoo / Shanice /
Lady Rukia / Hifikepunye camp? Yes, but although the Gods’ roiling antipathies and interpersonal feuds were genuine and their larger schisms intractable and polarizing, they constituted, in the grand scheme of things, a kind of “play.” The Gods disported themselves by endlessly acting out their essential natures, the affirmation of their own wills and the fulfillment of their own desires—this “sport” perpetually reproducing (as if inadvertently) the harsh patterns and eternal recurrences of human life. The settlement of divine differences inevitably results in human collateral damage for which the Gods feel absolutely no responsibility or remorse. But the bonds of kinship among them are indestructible. And their protocol—their lordly code of precedence and etiquette vis-à-vis one another—as inscrutable as it will forever remain to us, is scrupulously observed, without dissent, by them. When, by some unspoken consensus, the Gods determine to glorify a chosen mortal by having XOXO ineradicably inscribe in his or her mind the story of the Gods, it’s done, regardless of whomever’s proxy or fuck-buddy that mortal might have been. Just as when, by some unspoken consensus, the Gods determined one day that their Belle Époque was over and that it was time to disperse for a while, for each God and Goddess to go his or her own way.