The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (5 page)

Putting aside what might
be construed as a cynical attempt to pathologize an authentic oracular hero in order to sell him drugs (e.g., Clozaril, Zyprexa, Risperdal, etc.), in other words, for the financial benefit of the pharmaceutical industry (once we assume an organic basis for
deviant theologies,
we legitimize a market for diagnostic assays and treatment modalities), and putting aside the even more fundamental issue of the pharmacological colonization of the Western psyche, is there any validity to the diagnosis of
folie à famille
for the
Kartons
(the family, not the band)?
Ike Karton
doesn’t seem to fit the textbook profile of “the inducer.” He can’t really be described as domineering, for instance. Of course, in his unassuming way, he casually offers up incidental remarks and observations about the world—that people like
Anna Wintour
,
Gisele Bündchen
,
Ronald Perelman
, and
Jon Bon Jovi
should be dragged from their offices or homes and guillotined on the street, or how it would be much more entertaining in the Winter Olympics biathlon if, instead of shooting at targets, the biathletes shot ski jumpers at the apex of their flights like human skeet, or his admiration for the ferocious Renaissance politician
Cesare
Borgia
and Chechen strongman
Ramzan
Kadyrov
and the ruthless one-eyed Prime Minister of Cambodia,
Hun Sen
. But he has never tried to “proselytize” or “indoctrinate” his family. He has never sat his wife and daughter down and formally told them the entire saga (i.e., the entirety of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
) in the classic style—that is, high on ecstasy, swigging orange soda from a gourd, tapping his aluminum wedding ring on the tabletop to maintain that mesmerizing cadence—from beginning to end. In fact, he won’t formally tell the whole saga in the classic style from beginning to end until—in the Penultimate Season, and shortly before being gunned down by ATF and Mossad sharpshooters—he sits down with his half-divine infant grandson,
Colter Dale
, pours out a sacred libation of Sunkist, and, tapping his ring on the tabletop, begins chanting to the rapt, wide-eyed infant from the very beginning: “There was never
nothing.
But before the debut of the Gods, about fourteen billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent. Isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their
significance,
annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next. A terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like
Mothra
’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and T-shirts that read ‘I Don’t Do White Guys’) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear…” And with that unprecedented gesture,
Ike
incorporates (and consecrates) what had heretofore been simply an academic prologue into the very body, the very heart of
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
(and it has been considered its First Season ever since). But prior to the Penultimate Season, over the years,
Ike
has, every now and then, sat down with his wife and his daughter and his daughter’s disreputable boyfriend,
Vance
, and, in his soft, confidential, hoarse whisper, informally shared with them several vivid but isolated and disjointed little fragments. And despite the fact (or maybe due to the fact) that these disjointed little fragments seem to lack any discernable context,
Ike
’s wife, his daughter, and
Vance
are sufficiently enthralled so that they appear (to some experts) to suffer from a form of
folie à famille.
Such is
Ike
’s galvanic (albeit diffident) charisma, his
magnificence.
Such is the inky dye of his faith that, over time, drop by drop by drop, it slowly seeps into and stains the porous minds of his loyal, loving family. (There are some experts, although they constitute a persecuted minority within the expert community, who believe that there has actually been only one bard—that one being
Ike Karton
. And within this group, there is a dissident faction who also believes that there has actually been only one expert, that one also being
Ike Karton
. Although this is an extremely controversial and virtually indefensible position, it does have one vehement and disproportionately influential proponent:
Ike Karton
.)

The key narrative event
in (what is now considered) the
Seventh Season
is
Ike
sitting down at the Miss America Diner and writing the lyrics to the narcocorrido “That’s Me (
Ike
’s Song)” that his family’s band (
The Kartons
) will sing at the “Last Concert”—the front-lawn performance
Ike
intends to give for the benefit of his neighbors earlier on the night he’s destined to be gunned down by ATF and Mossad sharpshooters. His expiration date (his “fate”) is pre-encoded into his genome. In fact,
Ike
’s whole genome has been decoded. He has the East Asian version of a gene known as EDAR, which endows people with armpit hair that is thicker and more lustrous than that of most Europeans and Africans. Another gene suggests that he has dry earwax, as do Asians and Native Americans, not the wet earwax of other ethnic groups.

The
Seventh Season
begins with that heavily cadenced and folkloric cadenza subtitled
Ike Always Keeps It Simple and Sexy:

What subculture is evinced by
Ike
’s clothes and his shtick, by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick, by 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, and the staring and the glaring and the daring and the hectoring, and the tapping on the table with his aluminum wedding ring, as he hums those tunes from his childhood albums and, after a spasm of
Keith Moon
air-drums, returns to his lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs?

Ike
always keeps it simple and sexy. 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. He’s bodaciously buff, and (unlike
Charlie Sheen
) he’s never been arrested for beating his wife! And
look,
when he reaches up to point at those birds (“They’re house sparrows. And they’re gonna eat my fuckin’ Italian breadcrumb mandala!” he screams with mock consternation, then cracks up. “But seriously—that’s the whole point. It’s a sacrificial mandala for the God
Fast-Cooking Ali
. The basic symbolism is that the birds come and carry the crumbs to him up at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai”),
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!) And his baggy gray terry sweatpants look as if they’re falling off, which amps up the sex appeal!

Then, in a section subtitled
Ike
Shares a Laugh with a God,
Ike
considers what to have for breakfast, an issue that will eventually lead him to the Miss America Diner. “I can’t decide what to have for breakfast today. I don’t want something
breakfasty
—that’s the problem. You know what I’d really like? A shawarma and a malt. But you can’t find good shawarma in this fuckin’ town now that it’s full of Jews and Freemasons.…I’m
serious!
” he cracks up laughing. He muses out loud about several alternatives to shawarma, including pastrami and sliced beef tongue with cole slaw and Russian dressing on rye and a Sunkist orange soda, or maybe just a big bowl of Beefaroni and some chocolate milk. Suddenly, like some hapless
Beckettian
tramp in a white wifebeater and saggy terry sweats, he inadvertently airs his ass-crack as he jauntily genuflects in the general direction of the rocket-shaped Burj Khalifa. “If there’s a God who has a minute for an unemployed neo-pagan butcher with a bodaciously buff body who’s been out here all morning in his fuckin’ guido dishabille making a breadcrumb mandala, I’d appreciate a quick breakfast suggestion. Please—something relatively inexpensive. I’m unemployed.” Then, almost immediately, Ike’s cellphone rings. (His ringtone, as we know, is
2 Live Crew
’s “Me So Horny.”) He sees from the caller ID that it’s
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. It’s
Doc Hickory
who suggests that
Ike
go to the Miss America Diner. “It’s like three blocks from your house, it’s cheap, and they have a million things on the menu, including a gyro, which is pretty close to a fuckin’ shawarma, big guy.”
Doc Hickory
cracks up laughing. His laugh, which is more of a snicker, sounds like that rhythmic, shrill, squeaky-hinge sound that women make in Japanese porn.
Ike
finds
Doc Hickory
’s laugh mocking and malevolent. But, hey,
Doc Hickory
’s a God, and he’s supermercurial, and you always have to put up with his cryptic moods and his petulant fatwas. He can be mocking and malevolent one moment and inexplicably generous the next. “Oh, I almost forgot,” says
Doc Hickory
. “The rice pudding’s on me. Just remind your server or the cashier that
Doc Hickory
—the God whose static-charged back hair became the template for the drift of continental landmasses on earth—is treating you to a rice pudding, and they won’t charge you. But you have to use those exact words, that exact epithet.
Buon appetito,
Mighty Mouse-olini
.” The God’s snide parting interjection is followed by another dose of that squeaky
ee-ee-ee-ee-ee
laugh of his.

Although the
Seventh Season
wildly exaggerates his extroversion and loquacity, it does accurately represent that, at the end of the day, there’s one irrefutable, fundamental fact about
Ike
(who hit the big
forty-eight
last winter, on the same day he got laid off from his butcher job at the A&P Meat Department): he’s all about Family and Home (
Blut und Boden
). Priding himself, above all else, on being an exemplary husband and father, he’s fanatically devoted to providing for his wife and daughter, and maintaining their modest two-story brick house on Towers Street in Jersey City (his “little hermitage,” as he calls it).
Ike
’s a Taurus and, like the typical Taurus man, he’s very quiet, practical, composed, and humble. Taurus men are very protective of their loved ones and will always be very gentle toward them. They possess a calm strength and are always prepared for the worst of circumstances. Taurus guys dislike synthetic or “man-made” things, have a tendency to become paranoid and anti-Semitic, and exhibit a higher incidence of thyroid nodules than non-​Taurus guys. The Taurus man is stubborn and, if sufficiently provoked, can lash out with genocidal fury. But otherwise you’ll have yourself a real man, who’ll wrap his big, muscular arms around you and give you money and make you cum. (Famous Tauruses include
Adolf
Hitler
,
Pol Pot
,
Jessica Alba
, and
Megan Fox
.) FYI:
Ike
blames losing his butcher job at the A&P on a whispering campaign conducted against him by several Gods, including
Mogul Magoo
,
Shanice
, and
Bosco Hifikepunye
.

“The stars show that your long-term finances are precarious. Don’t try to solve everything all at once, though. Events are fast and furious, but take things one step at a time. Have a conversation with your daughter about why she’s failing math, and also try to ascertain whether her boyfriend,
Vance
, is a drug dealer. Also, this is not a good time to try to persuade the zoning board to grant you permission to build a huge statue of a naked, dildo-impaled
La Felina
on your front lawn. Think positive—try not to obsess about being killed by the ATF or Mossad. Remember, at the end of the day, you’re a bodaciously buff unemployed butcher and the Gods (especially
La Felina
, champion of the unkempt, the plain-spoken, the
Frontschweine,
the
Lumpenproletariat,
etc.) love you very much.”

Ike
’s wife (she’s trendy and gorgeous and believes in the Gods too—it’s a
folie à famille!
) comes out to talk to him on their tiny front yard where
Ike
’s just putting the finishing touches to his Italian breadcrumb mandala for the God
Fast-Cooking Ali
. (She makes all her own clothes. She’s an anarcho-primitivist too, but she’s super-sexy! Her décolletage and sheer prairie dress don’t leave much to the imagination!!)

One Good Grab Deserves Another: they both grab each other’s asses. Hey, it looks like his wife is sticking her middle finger up
Ike
’s ass! Like she’s checking his prostate! False alarm—she’s just tickling him. But the marriage is obviously still
muy caliente
. The Jersey City Fire Department might have to come and hose these kids down!!

Ike
’s wife (“Her name is
Ruthie
!”) has an incredible figure. But her secret isn’t counting calories. “I eat what I like, but I try to keep it clean and healthy—fruit, vegetables, lean protein—lots of sushi. I don’t eat like
Ike
. He likes tonkatsu, shawarma, Beefaroni, Double Whoppers with Cheese, jalapeño poppers, Dairy Queen shakes, and shit like that. But look at him! Where does it all go?! If I ate like he does, I’d look like
Gabourey Sidibe
!” (Here’s the “skinny” from
Ruthie
: “Try swapping out the mayonnaise for mustard.”)