The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (18 page)

…And so this debate, rendered incontrovertibly moot years ago (if not tens of thousands of years ago), curiously rages on.

Ostensibly a sequence intended to reinforce the scope of
XOXO
’s omnipotent mischief (his
mojo
) and/or the super-potency of the hallucinogenic Gravy that the God
Bosco Hifikepunye
is selling
Vance
, the so-called “Playdate at the Hermitage” (whether apocryphal or not) has the perhaps unintended consequence of showcasing, of all things,
XOXO
’s
tenderness
(an anomaly in the epic, with the exception of his ill-fated literary courtship of
Shanice
). The big fuss he makes about the cole slaw behind the restaurant is clearly
XOXO
’s way of winking at
Vance
and sympathetically acknowledging that he knows that
Vance
was sort of punk’d by
Ike
re: the Cossack Saddle Cabbage and the harried immigration official at Ellis Island, etc. More significantly, in this scene (and again, experts are divided about whether it’s an authentic scene or a noncanonical blooper),
XOXO
clearly conveys a strong ideological solidarity with
Ike
via the abject humiliation of the celebrity Casanovas at his Dantean “
Hooters.
”

Whether this perhaps vindicates some experts’ queasy faith in
XOXO
has yet to be determined, but it surely feeds a growing suspicion that
XOXO
may have a more sympathetic if not a distinctly symbiotic relationship with
Ike
(and with the epic itself) than previously thought—something that even
XOXO
’s most indefatigable detractors may have to wearily concede.

Suddenly, the following (“without any discernable context, etc.”):

Here, many people (e.g., audience members at public recitations, experts, metaphysicians, etc.) are like:

“Huh? ’The fuck just happened???”

This has gotta be
XOXO
totally fucking with the epic, right? Plying the epic with drugged sherbet. Shooting it up with military-grade ass-cheese, right?
XOXO
—who persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha.

Well, not so fast, contend some scholars. In a scrupulously researched monograph coauthored by
V. S. Naipaul
and
C. C. Sabathia
, a cogent case is made for the possibility that there is no
Big Lacuna
(i.e., that this is not
XOXO
vandalizing the epic), that during this mute interstice,
Ike
and
Vance
are simply too fucked up to talk and that
Vance
keeps up the tranced-out empty-can-against-the-spinning-spokes rhythm while
Ike
just stares off into space (a whole desultory lifetime tacitly exchanged between them, as if between two dogs) and that, at some point,
Vance
, emerging from some hallucinatory K-hole of his own, is like, “Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2
Derek Jeter
Yankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…” In other words, that it’s simply his spacey elliptical reportage of something he observed recently (probably apropos of something
Ike
had been saying before about how sexy he thinks sweaty plus-size women are) and not just a piece of completely incongruous bullshit that
XOXO
plopped in to gum up the epic (perhaps at the behest of the flagrantly snubbed and pissed-off
Shanice
). Other experts, though, contend that the
V. S. Naipaul
/
C. C. Sabathia
monograph itself is a crude forgery, an obvious noncanonical blooper lobbed in by
XOXO
to gum up the epic. (It bears repeating that all noncanonical bloopers are almost immediately subsumed into the realm of the canonical and are, at the first opportunity, dutifully chanted by vagrant, drug-addled bards.)

As the individual earlier identified as “
REAL
WIFE
” said (this is the woman who attended the public recitation of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
with her husband but then ditched him for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, the one who gave up painting when she saw
Gerhard Richter
’s paintings of
Andreas Baader
and
Ulrike Meinhof
), “It’s too easy for people to always blame things on
XOXO
.” Although, clearly,
XOXO
is perfectly capable of turning the epic into a celebrity gossip magazine or TV listings if he feels like it, so why not a
Big Lacuna
? Question, though: Might not the chubby girl in the subway without underwear be
La Felina
? Wouldn’t her fabulously expensive Hermès Kelly bag in this context signal a
theophany
—the appearance of a deity? A message to
Ike
re: their tryst, maybe? Or is the meaning of the
Big Lacuna
—this stand-alone mini-epic—ineffable? (Or, perhaps, as one noted metaphysician put it, simply too
stupid
for words?)

It’s at this point, during a public recitation, that a bard will stand and hysterically exclaim:

This chant, accompanied by the frenzied banging of gaudy rings against jerrycans of orange soda, continues unabated for a stupefying four hours, at which point (in almost every credible version of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
),
Ike
, in response to the defibrillating incantation of his name (“
Ike
Ike
Ike
Ike
Ike
!”), finally snaps out of his cataleptic reverie and addresses his galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards”—“apostrophe” because the bards are not literally present (in the
epic dimension
which
Ike
inhabits), although the fact that they respond (echoing
Ike
’s words, but
backward
) suggests that they are
present
(perhaps in some purely metaphysical sense) but not
proximal
.
Salinger
/
Foyt
will later suggest that the bards here are
hyperproximal
, i.e., present in a purely
intracranial
sense. This is difficult to understand. When experts talk about the bards’ “hyperproximity” to
Ike
, about their presence being “intracranial,” they are correlating the motif of
Ike
’s head (filling with the perpetually inscribed narration of the epic and the ever murmuring voices of masturbating Goddesses) with the motif of the minibar at the Burj Khalifa (the underlying notion here being that all of the Gods actually compress or collapse themselves within the minibar itself ). This is what some highly regarded pseudo-​intellectuals mean when they speak of
Ike
’s head
as
minibar. These interlocking motifs represent something that is simultaneously infinitely small and infinitely capacious.

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from the Upper Peninsula

Ike

Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from the Upper Peninsula

In a provocative (though virtually incomprehensible) essay titled “Memory and Obsolescence,” first published in the August 1958 edition of the children’s magazine
Highlights,
coauthors
J. D. Salinger
and
A. J. Foyt
analyze this mirrored call-and-response between
Ike
(doomed introvert, implacable neo-pagan, coy Taurus, Saint Laurentian fusion of the tough and the tender) and the bards, which is driven by the mesmerizing beat of empty soda can against BMX spoke.
Salinger
and
Foyt
explain the incongruity of
Ike
’s profane, clamorous exhortations (“a full-bore venting of all his fevered antipathies toward celebrities and, implicitly, an impassioned avowal of his devout affiliation with the humble and abject”) by suggesting that they are “whispered, if not wholly tacit”—after all, if you’re addressing bards who are “hyperproximal” or who reside “intracranially” (i.e., in your “minibar”), there’s really no need to raise your voice.
Salinger
and
Foyt
go on to claim that “the fact that the bards are represented here as repeating what
Ike
says but backward means that, essentially,
Ike
is continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out.”

“
Ike
is continuously pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out” is another way of depicting the
inside-outness
of
Ike
’s simultaneous narration and enactment of the epic. When you think (and you don’t have to actually say it out loud) “I am a hero,” you immediately become a
karaoke bard
because you’re simply
reading
what
XOXO
is inscribing into your brain. But because the epic subsumes everything extrinsic to it, the karaoke bard is instantly turned back into content, i.e., back into a hero.
Salinger
and
Foyt
call this unending process “enveloping inversion.” And they liken the
inside-outness
of
Ike
’s simultaneous narration and enactment to the In-N-Out Burger “secret menu,” and specifically the “3
x
4”—three beef patties, four slices of cheese. Not only do the alternating layers of cheese/beef/cheese/beef/cheese/beef/cheese parallel the alternating inversions of hero/bard/hero/bard/hero/bard/hero, but the 3
x
4 configuration corresponds to the three letters in the name “
Ike
” and the four letters in the name “
XOXO
” and, most significantly, to the license plate HPG-XOXO, a license plate analyzed in stupefyingly granular detail over the course of an essay that runs some thirty thousand words (every one of which audiences expect the vagrant, drug-addled bards to recite verbatim).