The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (19 page)

Ike
’s “Apostrophe to the Bards” could also be “A Cry from the Smallest Box,” i.e., a
cri de coeur
from the depths. What
Salinger
and
Foyt
mean here is that
Ike
could be calling out from within
XOXO
’s hyperborean hermitage or, more likely, that in
The Big Lacuna,
Ike
finds himself in an extreme spiritual state, in the innermost embedded place, in the innermost and smallest of all the epic’s ever-diminishing Chinese nested boxes or Russian Matryoshka dolls (or “M-dolls”). The smallest, most deeply embedded version of the “
Ike
M-doll” (which is a purely practical construct—in theory, of course, there is no
terminus
in an infinitely recursive
reductio ad infinitum
) is basically a freeze-frame at the very threshold of existence which is called “The Minibar.” This is why the Gods are sometimes said to reside in “The Minibar,” which is sometimes likened to an infinitesimal zero-​dimensional point called a Severed Bard-Head, and which is sometimes thought to symbolize
Ike
’s head. The amplitude of the vibration of a “terminal” infinitesimally recursive Severed Bard-Head is referred to as “high-pitched” or “HPG” (“High-Pitched Gibberish”). And, of course, HPG-XOXO is the license plate of the
Mister Softee
truck that hit
Ike
during Spring Break and the final license plate that traverses
Ike
’s field of vision as he orgasms at the precise moment of his assassination by the ATF/Mossad.

Most original, though, is
Salinger
and
Foyt
’s theory that has come to be known as “
Rapunzel
’s Braid,” in which they contend that the images of wafting armpit hair (“look how beautiful
Ike
’s abundant chestnut-color armpit hair is, how lustrous and soft and fluffy. It almost looks as if he blow-dries it for extra volume!”), the tampon string and Chinese fortune-cookie fortune in
Ike
’s dream of
La Felina
, the pendulous breasts of the ubiquitous “chubby middle-aged women,” even the hanging hydroceles of the decrepit waiters in
XOXO
’s Dantean
Hooters,
represent “lifelines,” i.e., means of extricating the hero from some underworld (i.e., from death or from some perilous spiritual journey). “
Ike
Ike
Ike
Ike
Ike
!”—the incantatory concatenation of the
Name
—is a string of words (analogous to a tampon string or a paper fortune or a loyal retainer’s nose hair) upon which the hero can climb back into the world of the living.
Ike
configures himself as an in-and-out alternation of bard/hero, which constitutes a kind of “braided identity.” When we chant “
Ike
Ike
Ike
Ike
Ike
!” (the first
Ike
in the string a hero, the second a bard, the third a hero, the fourth a bard, the fifth a hero), we are forming a plaited lifeline that
Salinger
and
Foyt
refer to as “
Rapunzel
’s Braid.” And isn’t
Ike
’s vaunted tongue sandwich, they proceed to ask, the figurative instrument
par excellence
for depicting the inside-outness of chanting the braided name (the bard) and of being consumed (the enveloped hero)? This is the “Swallowed Tongue”—a metonymic symbol for epilepsy. So clearly, according to
Salinger
and
Foyt
, the epic intends to associate
Ike
’s “pulling himself out of his own ass, inside-out”—his perpetual high-pitched oscillation between bard and hero—with a form of seizure (e.g., “the feral fatalism of all his loony tics—like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids and the
Mussolini
torticollis of his Schick-nicked neck”).

Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it’s upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order. It’s also worth noting that
Salinger
and
Foyt
were the very first experts to notice a change from
Ike
’s Spartan premartyrdom diet of cole slaw and protein shakes to a more epicurean regimen of salami and provolone sandwiches, egg rolls, Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts, Kozy Shack Butterscotch Pudding, and Absolut Peppar vodka shots.

For deliberately demented gobbledygook, nothing tops a group of experts who call themselves “Chineans” after
Vincent “The Chin” Gigante
, the mob boss who wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in an act to avoid prosecution. The Chineans maintain an evangelical belief in the surpassing significance of
Vance
and swear allegiance to the nose-thumbing, mind-fucking God
XOXO
, for which they have earned the implacable enmity of the reclusive, shadowy paramilitary leader
Meir Poznak
, who has placed a high-price bounty on the head of the equally reclusive and shadowy impresario of the Chineans—a man called
The High-Talking Chief
(and who is also known as “The Craziest of the Crazy,” “The Pazzo di Tutti Pazzi,” and “The Capo di Tutti Frutti”).
Meir Poznak
has threatened
The High-Talking Chief
of the Chineans with the ritual punishment of eye enucleation by melon baller and guillotining. No one’s ever seen
The High-Talking Chief
. There are no official photos of him. And the authenticity of existing images is debated. Apart from the fact that he is already missing one eye, accounts of his physical appearance are wildly contradictory. Some people who have met him describe him as having the voluptuous curves of a
Beyoncé
or a
Serena Williams
, while others describe him as more closely resembling
Representative Henry Waxman
.
The High-Talking Chief
has said, “We did a complete simulation of
The Big Lacuna
and sliced the code to its deepest level. We have studied its protocols and functionality. We’re convinced that
XOXO
has nothing to do with it.”
The High-Talking Chief
of the Chineans has also said that the most serious attacks on the epic have been mounted not by
XOXO
, but by
Fast-Cooking Ali
(supposedly acting out of jealousy, because his girlfriend
La Felina
has such an obsessive crush on
Ike Karton
).
The High-Talking Chief
of the Chineans has said that what
Fast-Cooking Ali
does is “ramp up the frequency of the epic, so that it spins faster and faster, causing it to hit 1,410 Hertz (or cycles per second)—just enough to send it flying apart.” Although this is all self-serving and unsubstantiated bullshit, it is upscale, artisanal self-serving and unsubstantiated bullshit of the highest order, and the Chineans are responsible for certain findings which have broadened our understanding of the epic immeasurably. For instance, it was the Chineans who uncovered identical e-mails sent by
Ike
, on the night before his death, to the three top heavyweight competitors at the Women’s Sumo World Championship in Warsaw, Poland—
Anna Zhigalova
of Russia, and
Svitlana Iaromka
and
Olga Davydko
, both of the Ukraine. Although their precise content is unknown, they are said to be lengthy and unusually coherent, alternating between crude sexual bravado and weary resignation.
Ike
purportedly quotes
Thomas Hardy
(without attribution, of course): “Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good.” It was the Chineans who discovered numerous inscriptions in
Ike
’s Snyder High School yearbook reading “See you at Rutgers!” irrefutably debunking the myth that
Ike
ever attended the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.). The Chineans were the first experts to grapple with the question of why
Oprah Winfrey
’s name is conspicuously omitted from the roster of those sentenced to the guillotine in
Ike
’s galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards.” She is, after all, #1 on the
Forbes
Celebrity 100 list. The Chineans contend that the answer lies in
Ike
’s habit of plagiarizing from her magazine and his self-professed fondness for the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies. And it was the Chineans (who claim to “strip away the accretions of the epic”) who determined that the definitive title of the epic is—and always has been—
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack.

The Chineans advocated that the bards actually negotiate with
XOXO
, and went so far as to publicly suggest “positive interventions” he might undertake to expand the epic’s audience, e.g., “Hmm, how about deleting all the references to
Ike
’s rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism?” and “Hey, why not make
Vance
much more prominent? How about posting on YouTube footage of
Vance
tooling around Jersey City on his BMX bike with his Glock tucked into the waistband of his jeans to the
Boys Noize
remix of the
N.E.R.D.
/
Nelly Furtado
track ‘Hot-N-Fun’? Or how about
Vance
with the lesbian fisherwomen, in their squalid shack under the
Pulaski
Skyway, drinking, smoking, playing dominoes, cooking, laughing to the
Four Tet
remix of the
Pantha du Prince
track ‘Stick to My Side’? Just a real cool, tranced-out video. That would definitely appeal to a younger, hipper demographic” and “Consider losing
Ike
’s fetish for chubby, sweaty, hairy, unkempt, and uneducated middle-aged women and replace it with a predilection for smokin’ hot young chicks. This would make it significantly easier for that whole coveted eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male demographic to identify with
Ike
.” The Chineans offered their consulting services to
XOXO
in return for a 5 percent stake in royalties generated by the narcocorrido
Ike
wrote at the Miss America Diner (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) which is weird because—unless the Chineans know something we don’t know (which they very well might)—the rights to
Ike
’s narcocorrido belong exclusively to
Mogul Magoo
. The Chineans also criticized
Ruthie
for parading around on her front lawn, wearing a transparent “prairie dress” and no underwear (calling the look “Ruby Ridge meets
Tila Tequila
”) and offered her a free makeover from celebrity stylist
Andrea Lieberman
. This was such an egregious affront to
Ike
—suggesting to someone who fervently yearns for the massacre of celebrities that his own wife get a makeover from a “celebrity stylist”—that it spawned a stand-alone fantasy episode in the
Twenty-Eighth Season
. In a sort of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
meets
Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman
,
Ike
, blinded by a particularly disgusting case of conjunctivitis, bludgeons to death a group of Chineans, clad in their trademark bathrobes and slippers (which are associated not only with
Vincent “The Chin” Gigante
but also with the old, decrepit waiters from
XOXO
’s Dantean
Hooters
), who have encircled him on the corner of West Side Avenue and Culver in Jersey City. Unlike the episode in which
La Felina
distracts
Ike
from his impulsive rage by impersonating a voluptuous au pair from Cote d’Ivoire, this time,
La Felina
, watching from the top floor of the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completely gets off on
Ike
’s “helmet-to-helmet” violence and masturbates until she has an outrageous gushing orgasm that lasts for fifty years and fills a 143,200-square-mile endorheic basin between the Caucasus Mountains and the steppe of Central Asia that is today called the “Caspian Sea.”

Meir Poznak
, whose hard-line faction
T.S.F.N.—General Command
adamantly rejects any suggestion that the epic functions under the aegis of
XOXO
, considers this “the single greatest episode of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack
ever made.” (
Poznak
relentlessly excoriates the Chineans. He is their irreconcilable enemy. In a series of blistering communiqués,
Poznak
inveighs against the Chineans’ perversely counterintuitive (but increasingly plausible) contention that there’s active collusion or some secret pact or modus vivendi between
Ike Karton
and
XOXO
.)

Slaughtering Chineans is straight-up
Poznak
shit. Experts who express even the slightest affinity for Chinean precepts are viciously beaten and crippled by
T.S.F.N.—General Command
thugs acting on orders from
Meir Poznak
. On the other hand, bards are routinely butchered by packs of pipe- and machete-wielding Chinean enforcers at the behest of the
Capo di Tutti Frutti
. True,
Meir Poznak
emerged from within the milieu of the bards and the
Capo di Tutti Frutti
emerged from within the milieu of the experts. But there are highly regarded Poznakian experts and celebrated Chinean bards. (Although, for those who haven’t made a close study of the schism, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between a Poznakian and a Chinean bard. Either would be a chanting, drug-addled vagrant who maintains his trance-inducing beat by banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda, either would assume the classical stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic posture during the so-called
Big Lacuna,
etc.)

Some Chineans have floated the idea that
Vance
—the louche, semiliterate, BMX-riding Gravy dealer—may actually be a God. This is based primarily on an interpretation of the line “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
.” These Chineans (a breakaway sect known as the “Some Chineans” or the “These Chineans”) suggest that
Vance
’s so-called “snapping out” is a form of extricating himself from or becoming extrinsic to the epic, and that since only a God can extricate himself from or become extrinsic to the epic,
Vance
is, ipso facto, a God. This theory is bolstered by the suspicion that
Vance
is the father of
Ike
’s teenage daughter’s infant,
Colter Dale
, who is generally considered to be quasi-divine, and that given the fact that
Ike
’s teenage daughter is mortal (she almost failed math!),
Vance
is, ipso facto, a God, although there is equally compelling evidence that
Bosco Hifikepunye
, the God of Miscellany (Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.), who used
Ted Williams
’s cryonically preserved head as an anal sex toy with the Korean flower-shop clerk
Mi-Hyun
, and who supplies
Vance
with hallucinogenic Gravy, is the actual father of
Colter Dale
.