The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (4 page)

Each section of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is called a “session.” The sessions were produced—over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of years—by nameless, typically blind men high on ecstasy or ketamine, sipping orange soda from a large hollowed-out gourd or a communal bucket or a jerrycan. The brand of orange soda traditionally associated with
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is Sunkist.

The first session, the ninety-six-word paragraph beginning with the phrase
“What subculture is evinced by
Ike
’s clothes and his shtick, by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick”
is considered the only original session. Everything else is considered a later addition to, or a corruption of, that original session. But if one were to recite or perform only the original session without all the later additions and corruptions, the audience would feel—and justifiably so—cheated. And they would probably feel completely justified in killing and ritualistically dismembering and cannibalizing the blind, drug-addled bard. At the very least, they’d demand their money back.

Some experts have gone so far as to propose the hypothesis that that “original” ninety-six-word paragraph is itself an addition and a corruption, and that the only true, historically valid version of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
(the urtext) is the four-word phrase “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.” They surmise that blind men high on ecstasy, seated in a circle, and sipping orange soda from a jerrycan would chant the words “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack” over and over and over again, for hours upon hours, usually until dawn. As time went on, a stray word or phrase would be appended, resulting, eventually, in the ninety-six-word paragraph now generally accepted as part of the first session, under the subtitle:
Ike
Always Keeps It Simple and Sexy
.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
was never actually “written.” A recursive aggregate of excerpts, interpolations, and commentaries, it’s been “produced” through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy. Composition has tended to more closely resemble the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional “writing.”

You can clearly see
in the tabloid style of the First Session, with its boldface names and the breathless, staccato, exclamatory sentences (e.g.,
He’s wearing a hot little white wifebeater! It works for his body and he goes for it! It exaggerates his ripped torso—those monster pecs and sick, big-ass pipes!
), an attempt to hyperbolize
Ike
and his wife,
Ruthie
, both of whom are unusually reserved people. It’s a distorted depiction that makes them appear more glamorous and significantly more scandalous (and inane) than they actually are (were). For instance, the idea that
Ruthie
, in public, would put her hand down the back of her husband’s sweatpants and tickle his butt-crack (
Like she’s checking his prostate!
cackles the First Session) is absolutely ludicrous. So is the notion of the relatively modest
Ruthie
(
She’s an anarcho-primitivist too!
) parading around on her front lawn, wearing a transparent “prairie dress” and no underwear. And so, most egregiously, is the idea that
Ike
would build some garishly obscene statue of the Goddess
La Felina
(
naked, dildo-impaled!
), when it’s so much more likely that he’d construct something elegant and self-​contained to propitiate the Goddess, something akin to one of
Joseph Cornell
’s enchanting little shadow boxes. But, obviously, generations of blind, spaced-out, Sunkist-swilling bards who—over hundreds, if not thousands, of years—mixed and remixed the First Session felt obliged to pander to an audience which prized the salacious over the subtle and preferred their heroes loony and rotten to the core. Or
XOXO
sabotaged the First Session. (One can’t discount, even for a second, the possibility that
XOXO
kidnapped the First Session and plied it with drugged sherbet.) Over the years, a number of experts including
William Arrowsmith
,
Richmond Lattimore
,
Bernard Knox
, and most recently the Dutch classical scholar, expert on circumpolar populations, and milliner
Pym Voorjans
, aka
DJ Doorjamb
, whose wife has a spectacular big-ass ass (courtesy of
Fast-Cooking Ali
), have each provided incisive analyses of one of the most glaring errors in the First Session:
Ike
raising his voice (
“And they’re gonna eat my fuckin’ Italian breadcrumb mandala!” he screams with mock consternation, then cracks up…
).
Ike
only speaks in a whisper. In point of fact, he is said to be frequently inaudible.
Ike
is reticent and sometimes abjectly bashful. He is so self-effacing that one wonders where his galvanic charisma, his
magnificence
,
derive from. Aside from this erroneous characterization of Ike
screaming
in the First Session, there are only two instances in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
in which
Ike
actually raises his voice above a whisper: in Session Nine, when he eulogizes his late father and threatens to destroy the synagogue, and in the Final Session when he chants the entirety of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
to his half-divine infant grandson,
Colter Dale
—a recitation that, of course, includes this paragraph about the only instances during which
Ike
actually raises his voice above a whisper. Had
Ike
neglected to include this paragraph—if for no other reason than the fact that, as he was chanting, the ATF or the FBI or the British SAS or the Dutch Korps Commandotroepen or (most likely) the Mossad was firing 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis) into his modest, brick, two-story
hermitage
in Jersey City, causing
Ike
to consider, under the circumstances, a slightly abridged version—
Colter Dale
would have felt—and justifiably so—cheated. Also,
Ike
scrupulously eschews the use of profanity, although, unfortunately, you wouldn’t know that from the First Session. He would never say, for instance, “my
fuckin’
Italian breadcrumb mandala!” or “you can’t find good shawarma in this
fuckin’
town now that it’s full of Jews and Freemasons.” He can be wrenchingly graphic in his hypersexualized flirtations (even this, though, is invariably delivered in his gentle, barely audible murmur), and his truculent asides to other men can be phantasmagorically violent, but they’re always discreetly conveyed
sotto voce
into the ear of his antagonist, and the language, as bellicose as it may be, is never vulgar or profane.
Ike
’s a Taurus and an autodidact, and his diction tends to be Victorian, actually (think
Matthew Arnold
and
Thomas Hardy
). The “real”
Ike
is such a sweetheart, such a pussycat in a way…although he’s capable of unprovoked spasms of explosive violence where you’re like:

I cannot believe

He just did that
.

We know of the
so-called “real”
Ike
that he often speaks poignantly of never ever
ever
wanting to leave Jersey City, of his memories, of…

“…the opaque stillness of its abstract, ashen evenings, in which even a five-year-old child could discern the siren call of his own fate, the homecoming of death itself.”

“…dialogue from old movies leaking from the HVAC shafts of abandoned hospitals.”

“…the spectacle of sugar melting on the glistening pink flesh of a halved grapefruit (in the background, the white noise of adult conversation).”

“…the gravitas of chivalrous, pensive, amoral men—men who were impossible to spoof (and their disappearance, one by one, from the face of the earth).”

“…the indescribable surprise of finding a cricket asleep amidst silver dollars in a cigar humidor.”

“…the
F-Troop
theme song, as you’re being mildly molested by a chubby babysitter with big-ass titties chewing Juicy Fruit (and begging your parents for her again).”

“…the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid,
Jerry Vale
(‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties.”

…of never ever even wanting to venture beyond his three-block enclave of two-story brick homes. But we also know that he lets slip, not infrequently, that he dreams of being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by
Queen Elizabeth II
, although he can sometimes be heard—barely heard in his diffident, feathery whisper—claiming (à la
Lyndon LaRouche
) that the
Queen of England
is a degenerate, androgenized thug with a five-o’clock shadow and a hypertrophied clitoris who controls the international drug trade and seeks to liquidate the sovereignty of every nation-state in the Americas.

But how is the “epic”
Ike
portrayed in
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
?

Poor, polytheistically devout
, sex-obsessed
Ike
, cosseted and buffeted by his Gods, their marionette. With the exception of his own family, and possibly his daughter’s louche, drug-peddling boyfriend,
Vance
(who finds
Ike
endlessly entertaining and secretly reveres him), no one else in
Ike
’s neighborhood of modest two-story brick homes or perhaps the world (though, for
Ike
, his neighborhood
is
The World) seems to believe in the Gods. So, from a certain psychiatric perspective, one could say that the
Karton
family is clearly and deliberately portrayed as suffering from a form of
folie à famille
—a clinical syndrome in which a psychotic disorder is shared by an entire family, its essential feature being the transmission of delusions from the “inducer” to other family members (“the induced”). Typical characteristics of families with
folie à famille
include social isolation, codependent and ambivalent family relationships, repetitive crises (especially due to economic causes), and the presence of violent behaviors. The “inducer,” the original source and agent of the delusions, is usually the dominant family member (almost invariably the father and the symbol of authority, and almost always a Taurus). The other family members, who constitute the “induced,” frequently display passive, suggestible, and histrionic personality traits. The suggestion that the
Kartons
suffer from a
folie à famille
raises an interesting question about
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
Are the Gods real or is
Ike Karton
just crazy? And the answer is: Yes. There are four explanations for the ambiguous portrayal of the Gods’ empirical existence especially as it relates to
Ike
’s (and his family’s) mental health. First, obviously the Gods themselves have determined that
Ike
—their mortal champion, their chosen one, their “elect of the elect”—should be anathematized as “a nutbag” by his neighbors, perhaps as a test of
Ike
’s devotion and fortitude, or perhaps to give him the most masochistic bang for his buck, because it doesn’t take a psych major to glean from
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
that
Ike
is a hardcore masochist who has a very florid martyr’s complex and chronic, almost continuous fantasies of being flogged by unkempt, overweight, world-weary women. Secondly, perhaps
Ike
(whose cellphone ringtone is
2 Live Crew
’s “Me So Horny”) encourages people in his neighborhood to think of him as “crazy” because he is planning to commit “suicide-by-cop” and the determination of an individual’s mental capacity, or “soundness of mind,” to form an intent to commit suicide may be of consequence in claims for recovery of death benefits under life insurance policies—in other words, if
Ike
seems crazy, his family will get the insurance money after he provokes the ATF or Mossad into killing him (as is his fate). The third explanation is that this is the God
XOXO
fucking with the book, trying to ruin it by making it too confusing, by creating insoluble contradictions and conundrums, by essentially tying the shoelaces of the book together. It’s obvious, after all, that
XOXO
has hacked into
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
that
XOXO
has contaminated
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
with a malicious software program or a botnet that’s able to compromise the integrity of the book’s operating system and/or
Ike Karton
’s mind and/or the entirety of
Ike Karton
’s genome, including, most significantly, his expiration date (i.e., the date upon which, driven by his daemon, his destiny will be fulfilled). Or—and this is the fourth possible explanation—perhaps, in a kind of “false flag operation,” it’s the Goddess
Shanice
who, upon becoming so indignant at not being named by
Ike
as one of the “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” in the Second Season, infects
XOXO
’s sharp periodontal curette (the one he uses to ineradicably engrave
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
into
Ike
’s brain) with a botnet. Most experts now agree that there’s overwhelming validity to all four explanations. Though at times it may seem as if the Gods are portrayed as only existing in
Ike
’s mind,
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
unequivocally represents the Gods as having, in fact, created the world (“During the Belle Époque—that period of time, about fourteen billion years ago, after the Gods were delivered by bus from some sort of ‘Spring Break’ during which they are said to have ‘gone wild’—the Gods put things in order, made them comprehensible, provided context, imposed coherence and meaning, i.e., they created the world as we know it today”). Also, there are frequent instances in which one or several Gods clearly intervene on behalf of or in opposition to
Ike
. For instance, in the Third Season (sometime around 1100 A.D., “sessions” became known as “seasons”),
Doc Hickory
, the God of Money, who was also known as
El Mas Gordo
(“The Fattest One”)—the God whose static-charged back hair became the template for the drift of continental landmasses on earth—tries to finagle
Ike
a free rice pudding at the Miss America Diner on West Side Avenue in Jersey City. In the Fourth Season, the Gods
Los Vatos Locos
(also known as
The Pince-Nez 44s
) prevent someone from coming to the aid of
Ike
’s daughter’s math teacher when
Ike
threatens to sodomize him. (They’re watching this all take place from their perch at the 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and they’re totally cracking up.) In the Fifth Season,
Koji Mizokami
, the God who fashioned the composer
Béla Bartók
out of his own testicular teratoma, helps
Ike
shoplift an Akai MPC drum machine from a Sam Ash on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey. And, in the Sixth Season,
Bosco Hifikepunye
, the God of Miscellany (including Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, SteamVac Carpet Cleaners, etc.) begins supplying
Vance
with the hallucinogenic drug Gravy to sell on the street and also impregnates
Ike
’s daughter. And, as
Colter Dale
(the offspring of that union) postulates—in a postscript that would become the Final Season—“That the Gods only occur in
Ike
’s mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in
Ike
’s mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative.”