The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (23 page)

A few of the dwindlingly few vagrant, drug-addled bards who have survived all the Chinean-inspired anti-bard violence are partying at a crowded club in West Hollywood (Les Deux). Throbbing dance music.

“Quiet!” one hisses to the others, covering his cellphone. “It’s
Meir Poznak
!”

Poznak
recites the following lines:

The next day,
The Capo di Tutti Frutti
is found dead in the underground parking lot of his apartment complex. His hands had been bound and his head bludgeoned with a bat. His entrails had been eaten. Police suspect that a God ate his entrails because fingerprints on packets of tartar sauce found near the body were not human, and because fresh mounds of loot drops (or “God guano”) had been discovered in the woods nearby.

Wednesday: 9:00
PM
Eastern
“The Ascendancy of
Hmm Uh
”

Hmm Uh
, who inauspiciously began her career as a gob of phlegm on the street (“some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and
Ike
stops, and he kneels down, and he says to the 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’”) and then inexplicably reappeared in the guise of a “speech disfluency” or “verbal placeholder,” has suddenly (within, say, the past two minutes) become perhaps the single most influential Goddess in the history of the
Sugar Frosted Nutsack
pantheon (that “moaning menagerie”). “Impertinent with the scope of her new power, she burns with the inferiority complex of a former hawked-up gob of phlegm and speech disfluency.” She’s now the paramount Goddess. Elected to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Goddesses,
Hmm Uh
requests several days’ leave to engage in a celebratory series of drunken bisexual orgies, conducted first in one of the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mines in a town in south-central Quebec called Thetford Mines, and then in a succession of squalid gas station lavatories along Interstate 19 in Arizona. The Goddess
La Felina
, “champion of the sans-culottes and scum of the earth,” is said to be partying with
Hmm Uh
. Other debauched participants in the drunken bisexual orgies are said to include: creepy, unsavory looking porcelain Hummel figurines brought to life, leprechauns with disproportionately large, erect phalluses jutting out from their green breeches…and…umm…
Transformers
robots with huge, unruly tufts of fern-like pubic hair sprouting from their crotches like weird fucking Chia Pets—although, according to an updated report in
USA Today,
this is
not
true.

Hmm Uh
looks half-Russian, half-Korean. She has a perpetually salacious grin on her big, round face. Big-haired, buxom, retroussé-nosed, she is simple and unlettered (and depraved).

It’s amazing how prescient the Chineans were, how uncannily they anticipated the ascendancy of a Goddess like
Hmm Uh
. Yes,
Hmm Uh
is zaftig, hairy, and uninformed, but she is refreshingly young (early twenties) and much, much more cheerful than the gloomy and world-weary “chubby, sweaty, hairy, unkempt, and uneducated middle-aged women” who’d habituated the epic up until now.

Now
Hmm Uh
—patron Goddess of Inarticulation and Illegibility, of High-Pitched Gibberish, Nonlexical Vocables, and Hysterical Spastic Aphonia—is the star of her own reality show. She’s the only woman on an offshore drilling rig, thirty miles out in the Kara Sea, an icebound Arctic coastal backwater north of central Russia. Total darkness engulfs the region in the winter. Hilarity and puerile boorishness ensue as
Hmm Uh
entertains fifty super-horny, frequently drunk, and stir-crazy Russian oil workers. “The waters of the Arctic are particularly perilous for drilling because of the extreme cold, long periods of darkness, dense fogs, and hurricane-strength winds. Pervasive ice cover for eight to nine months out of the year can block relief ships in case of a blowout.…Until recently, Russia regarded the Kara Sea as primarily an icy dump. For years, the Soviet navy released nuclear waste into the sea, including several spent submarine reactors that were dropped overboard at undisclosed locations,” according to a report in the
New York Times
by
Andrew E. Kramer
and
Clifford Krauss
.

Hmm Uh
, who used to spend Spring Breaks at Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic testing site for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, says, “Radiation isn’t so bad. I think it makes men better at sex.”

Wednesday: 10:00
PM
Eastern
“
Meir Poznak
: Behind the Music”

Meir Poznak
begins to seriously, almost obsessively, ponder the idea of “fucking with the mind of the mind-fucking God.” He begins to think about whether it’s somehow possible to subvert
XOXO
, the God who subverts almost everything we think. He wonders whether it might be possible to inoculate the epic
against
XOXO
with denatured infusions
of
XOXO
, or whether a form of mithridatism might actually be feasible (i.e., protecting the epic against the poison
of
XOXO
by gradually administering nonlethal amounts
of
XOXO
). Of course, he has to concede, there are myriad enemies, real and perceived. The world of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
is a world of paranoia. There are endless provocateurs. Endless spies and traitors. Double, triple, and quadruple agents. But behind it all, pulling the strings and tying it all into knots, is
XOXO
.
Vance
and
Ruthie
and the
Daughter
(whose name is withheld because she’s a minor) and her unborn son,
Colter Dale
, have all been suddenly and unceremoniously “deported” from the epic and turned into football hooligans. (
Vance
because
Mogul Magoo
bristled at the notion that a street-level Gravy dealer was thought to be a God by the Chineans.
Ruthie
and the
Daughter
for their own protection? Or because they became superfluous? There’s no consensus among the experts.)
Vance
ends up in Serbia, where he joins the
Grobari
(“Gravediggers”), a gang of violent thugs associated with the Belgrade club FK Partizan.
Colter Dale
, a Liverpool Football Club fanatic, actually strangles his unborn twin brother (a Manchester United fan) to death in utero, using their mother’s umbilical cord. Put a stethoscope to the
Daughter
’s pregnant belly and you can hear a drunken
Colter Dale
singing the Liverpool FC anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” over and over and over again (“When you walk through a storm / Keep your chin up high / Etc., etc.”).
XOXO
’s “disappearing” of
Vance
,
Ruthie
, the
Daughter
, and
Colter Dale
guts the band
The Kartons
, leaving
Ike
a solo act, which, at the end of the day, is what he so quintessentially is anyway.
Meir Poznak
, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
knows, is seriously, almost obsessively, pondering all this…pondering exactly how he might fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God.

He’s skinny and fidgety and humming constantly, he’s only eating fish food (the red and gold flakes). In a conversation with his brother on the morning of
Super Bowl LVI
, he says he’s lost his interest in listening to music and talking to people. He says he might castrate himself (i.e., explore “nongenital sexuality”). He complains bitterly about “the whole balaclava/baklava thing” and says that
XOXO
is making everyone connected with the epic “look bad.” When his brother asks what he’s been doing with himself lately, he says “checking my ant traps” and “analyzing adjourned positions” (i.e., grappling with the ramifications of fucking with the mind of
XOXO
). He says that he wants to tear himself in half like
Rumpelstiltskin
.
Aaron Poznak
describes his brother as being “extremely, extremely disturbed by the proximity of the words ‘balaclava’ and ‘baklava.’”

Later that day, an expert cadges a lone cigarette from a vacant-eyed dockworker and tentatively approaches. “
Meir Poznak
was especially upset and angry about the proximity of those words, which he said were part of a smear campaign against the epic, and he wanted to do something about it, by which I assumed he meant do something about
XOXO
,” says the expert, who speaks on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy in discussing a major mind-fucking God’s mind possibly getting fucked.

During a hiatus of
Hmm Uh
’s reality show,
Meir Poznak
clandestinely rendezvouses with the Goddess of inarticulation and nonlexical vocables at her dacha in Paramus, New Jersey, and, for hours, pleasures her with his fingers and his mouth and the veiny two-headed latex toys he brings her.

The Gods (except for
Hmm Uh
and
La Felina
, who are out partying) have temporarily relocated from the top floors of the 2,717-foot, 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai to the bowels of the Compact Muon Solenoid, a particle detector buried in an underground cavern beneath the Large Hadron Collider in Cessy, France, just across the border from Geneva, as they await the construction of the next world’s tallest building, either the 3,284-foot, 250-story Burj Mubarak al Kabir at Madinat al-​Hareer (Silk City) in Subiya, Kuwait, or the 3,200-foot, 166-story Miapolis on Watson Island in Biscayne Bay, just west of Miami Beach—whichever goes up first. The Gods and Goddesses ride the particle accelerator, like kids on the Bizarro megacoaster at Six Flags New England—over and over and over again—and each becomes a subatomic, one-dimensional oscillating string.

Thursday: 8:00
PM
Eastern
“Fucking the Mind of the Mind-Fucking God”

Ike
is standing on his stoop, staring off into space, thinking about which heavyset, hairy Goddesses he’d like to fuck.…
Ike
—who never curdles into the comprehensible, whose willful anonymity and implacable hostility toward celebrities and desire for the bodies of women who dislike their bodies make him the favorite of
La Felina
, the patron Goddess of street scum and sans-culottes—is now exquisitely aware of the imminence of his fate. And there he stands on his stoop—alone, somber, dignified.

A distant cackling
Popeye
(“
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike
”), the
Mister Softee
jingle, the sound of the fetus
Colter Dale
singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from within the womb of his teenage mom…it’s all speeding up now, this fucked-up caffeinated cacophony, in reverse, as
XOXO
tries to expunge the epic—with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about
Freud
’s repetition compulsion—faster than the last surviving bard can recite it.

The spokes of the spinning BMX wheel hitting the empty can, that accelerating beat, the high-pitched gibberish of the horseflies (those buxom nymphs) and the transported babel of all those gasping, orgasming Goddesses…

Meir Poznak
walks past the Miss America Diner, east on Culver Avenue, turns right on Towers, strides up the stairs to the stoop of the two-story brick hermitage, pulls out a semiautomatic pistol, and shoots
Ike Karton
in the face.

At that moment, war conches are sounded.
Ike
searches for his Goddesses, readjusting his gaze with three sharp, reptilian ratchets of his head, first toward the Large Hadron Collider in Cessy, France (just across the border from Geneva), then toward south-central Quebec, then a Chevron station in Nogales, Arizona. At that moment,
Meir Poznak
, first-​person shooter, pupils dilated, trained by Russian Spetsnaz forces, a guy who is determined to fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God, a guy who, after a clandestine tête-à-tête with
Hmm Uh
—the Goddess of Inarticulation and Nonlexical Vocables—fully commits himself to consummating his love for
Ike Karton
, strides up the stairs to that stoop, and shoots and kills
Ike Karton
. At that moment, the war conches are sounded, and the high-pitched gibberish of tiny iridescent-winged nymphs and nano-drones and swarms of bold-faced notables (with their rising chorus of nonlexical vocables) is like a hissing crescendo of white noise.