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10

Ike’s Agony:

Why His Own Family Fears for His Life

How his obsession with polytheism and martyrdom (and online porn) is tearing his family apart. Ruthie lashes out! She leaks X-rated pics of Ike, and gossips about La Felina’s “sham marriage” to Fast-Cooking Ali.

T.S.F.N. Shocker:

99 % of All Unmanned Drone Attacks & Robotic Prostatectomies Are Being Conducted by the Same Nine-Year-Old Kid in a Mumbai Call-Center Cubicle!

Miss America Diner Waitress:

“I’m fired!”

Furious owner axes humiliated St. Peters sophomore for giving Ike Karton free tongue sandwich

Inside her legal battle to regain her part-time job

REAL HUSBAND on CALLER:

“She’s using me to get to Ike.”

Vance: “Ike’s bonkers.”

Drug-Addled, Blind Bard Steps Out to Flaunt New Super-Sexy Sumo Body:

“I gained 165 pounds from drinking 40 cans of Sunkist orange soda a day!”

75 Sex Tips from Gods:

Sizzling, Sinful, Surprising Things They’re Craving Now

Act like a skanky slut with a train-wreck personality who’s all about appealing to my needs while expressing none of your own. That’s a total turn-on to a God! With your tongue, trace the head of my penis in a circular motion, and then look up at me with your slutty trout-pout and say, “Determine my destiny capriciously, like you don’t even give a fuck. Give me a fate befitting the dirty little whore that I am! Use me and then fling me into the abyss where I belong.” I’ll have a huge orgasm.

— El Brazo

Just at the moment I enter you from behind, sharply contrast my divine omnipotence with your human inadequacies. Say something like, “You’re immortal, I’m not. You remain eternally young and beautiful, whereas I’m going to get wrinkles, age spots, spider veins, osteoporosis, or diabetes, or have a stroke or something.” Or, if you’re riding me on top, reach back, grab my balls, and say, “You’re omniscient — I, on the other hand, can barely follow an episode of Dora the Explorer without becoming hopelessly befuddled and breaking into tears!” I’ll climax so convulsively and with such a magnitude of semen that hundreds of thousands of people in low-lying regions will drown!

— Bosco Hifikepunye

This might sound stupid (but women don’t do it and we love it so much and it’s so easy) — refer to me occasionally as a “God.” Say things like “Oh, my God…oh, my God!”

— Mogul Magoo

My favorite thing is spontaneity. So, say we’ve got courtside seats for the Lakers game. When we know the TV camera is right on us, and there we are up on the giant HDTV screen hanging over the arena, kiss me and put two of my fingers inside your underwear, so I can feel how excited you are. Then we’ll immediately head out to Death Valley, where you’ll slather my genitals with chopped meat or chicken giblets so that buzzards will swoop down and tear at my nutsack with their razor-sharp talons. (It won’t hurt me — I’m a God!) Then we’ll have punishing (i.e., super-hot) sex under the merciless desert sun for eternity (literally). The fact that you’d leave a Lakers game with a God, go to the desert and let him fuck you forever with his mangled, giblet-covered dick will show me that you’re into completely spontaneous, raw, gotta-have-you-now sex — which is a total turn-on!

— Doc Hickory

Plus 71 more!!

T.S.F.N. Announces New Fall Lineup

Monday: 8 PM Eastern

“Ike’s Narcocorrido”

In the Season Premiere, Ike sits down in a booth at the Miss America Diner (West Side Avenue at the corner of Culver Avenue), with a pad of unlined white paper and a blue-ink pen, perhaps to make a list of celebrities to be gassed, but with no conscious intention to write a narcocorrido. “I might totally flirt with you,” he tells The Waitress. “I don’t mind,” she says coyly, with a slight Mississippi drawl. Ike’s rage and his lust are strong. He’s nursed by the Gods. His honor comes from El Brazo and La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali. He’s dear to them, these Gods who rule the world. In his soft voice, he orders a tongue sandwich (this is apparently what he meant by “flirting”). She can’t hear him and leans way over so he can whisper directly into her ear. She’s like some hapless Beckettian tramp in a white waitress uniform so short that it barely covers her spectacular big-ass ass. She’s got big-ass titties as well. As she leans over, her face in and out of oblongs of sunlight, she gently nuzzles his head, almost accidentally.

“What is that?” she asks, hearing something.

“Oh, it’s just this song I can’t get out of my head,” he says.

She puts her ear, now deliberately, to his temple and listens. “That’s the Mister Softee jingle,” she says.

He smiles.

“You know a lot about tongue,” she says.

“I’m a butcher.”

“Are you related to Bilinda Butcher, the guitarist in My Bloody Valentine?”

“No. My name is Ike Karton. I play Akai MPC drum machine in The Kartons.”

“Did you know that the Baal Shem Tov was a shohet (a ritual butcher) in Kshilowice, near Iashlowice?” (She’s totally flirting with him right now.)

Meanwhile, the Chloë Sevigny doppelgänger, who’s fretting over cold pancakes in the corner, is ritually reciting everything that Ike and The Waitress are saying as they say it, as if she were mouthing the lyrics to a favorite song or the dialogue from a scene she’d assiduously memorized by heart.

“When I eat,” Ike explains, in his shy, measured, Taurus way, “I always propitiate the Gods by offering them a portion of my food. But I don’t want to seem obsequious, so I try to be very casual and sort of uninflected. Do you know that expression actors use, where you just ‘throw your line away’? I’ll just jerk my head toward the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and say something, almost under my breath, like: ‘You want some fries? I can’t eat them. That tongue sandwich was huge. Did you see the size of that sandwich?’”

“I bet you’re too vain to eat fries anyway,” The Waitress says, giving his ripped torso a slow, flirtatious once-over. “And you’re married,” she adds, noticing the aluminum wedding ring that Ike taps on the table in rhythm to the music in his mind.

Ike explains to her that he and his wife are soul mates, but that she’s too gorgeous, too soft-spoken and articulate, too sophisticated. Her mind is too agile and nuanced, her sensibility is too refined and delicate. She’s a bit too petite. Too ethereal. Too patrician. “Sexually,” he confides, “I’m more attracted to coarser women…sweatier, bigger, less hygienic women…women who have trouble understanding even simple things.”

“You love your wife deeply,” The Waitress responds, “but you have this completely specific psychosexual / sociopolitical fetish, this nostalgie de la boue. I totally get that.”

“I like the bodies of women who don’t like their bodies,” he says.

Then Ike reveals his intention to get himself killed by the ATF or Mossad in order for his wife and his daughter to collect his life insurance. The Waitress asks, “If you purposively get yourself killed — isn’t that like suicide-by-cop? Insurance companies won’t pay out on suicide, will they?” And Ike explains to her that, yes, he’s destined to die by suicide-by-cop, but that the determination of an individual’s mental capacity, or “soundness of mind,” to form an intent to commit suicide is of consequence in claims for recovery of death benefits under life insurance policies. In other words, if it’s determined that a person is of unsound mind when he commits suicide-by-cop, his family is entitled to receive life insurance benefits. And the fact that he’s intent upon neo-pagan martyrdom, that he’s under twenty-four-hour erotomaniacal surveillance by masturbating Goddesses, and that he’s the “inducer” in a family suffering from a form of folie à famille would probably constitute more than sufficient evidence, if needed, that he’s of “unsound mind.” The Waitress ponders this for a moment, and then asks rhetorically, “Isn’t fate, like, the ultimate preexisting condition?”

Later, as she serves Ike his breakfast, The Waitress asks him if he’s into online porn at all.

“Yes, totally,” Ike replies.

“Well,” she says, “you know how in porn movies the women always narrate what’s happening to them in the second person? The ‘you’re doing this, you’re doing that’ thing? ‘You’re licking my hard nipples’ or ‘You’re putting your big cock in my juicy pussy’ or ‘You’re gonna pound that pussy, you’re just gonna tear that pussy up, aren’t you?’” (She is so totally flirting with him right now.)

Ike looks intensely into her eyes for a moment, and then he says, “You’re serving me a hot tongue sandwich; you’re putting the plate right in front of me; you’re setting an ice-cold Sunkist orange soda down right next to my big, crunchy onion rings.”

And The Waitress smiles. “Second-person present-tense narration makes everything super-fucking-hot. I don’t know why exactly. You know how dentists always keep you apprised of everything they’re doing as they’re doing it, so you don’t get all freaked out? ‘I’m putting a dental dam in your mouth.…I’m making an opening through the crown of your tooth to gain access to the pulp chamber. I’m using an endodontic file to remove the diseased pulp tissue from the root canal.…Now I’m using a plugger to place the gutta-percha points into your empty root canals to replace the pulp tissue which I removed.’ Wouldn’t it be super-fucking-hot in the second-person, if the patient was like, “You’re making an opening through the crown of my tooth to gain access to the pulp chamber. You’re using an endodontic file to remove the diseased pulp tissue from the root canal.…Oh, God, now you’re using a plugger to place the gutta-percha points into my empty root canals to replace the pulp tissue which you removed’? Except that you probably wouldn’t be able to understand anything she’s saying with all that stuff in her mouth.”

Experts have made much of the links between the garbled speech of the dental patient; the mumbled, almost incoherent, shoegazey chanting of the vagrant, drug-addled bards; and the murmured, diffident, barely audible utterances of Ike Karton himself. But what implications are latent in these links? (That anagogic significance is not conveyed through discursive meaning, maybe?)

“Second-person present-tense narration somehow detaches the link between your actions and your own volition,” Ike says, “as if what you think you’re doing spontaneously has already been predetermined, as if it’s been reenacted countless times before. It ritualizes the extemporaneous. It can make every mundane thing you do feel like a dénouement that’s been gestating since the beginning of time.”

“Totally,” The Waitress says, cracking her gum.

And it’s here, for the first time, that we begin to suspect that we (and Ike, for that matter) may have been had, that The Waitress may be far less disingenuous and far more calculating than she seemed at first blush, i.e., much more of a professional waitress (perhaps the professional waitress par excellence) who knows just how to say all the right things and use all that cogent body language and instinctively acclimate herself to all the psychological idioms of her customers, peppering them with risqué innuendos, buttering them up with all sorts of blandishments, and milking them for helplessly exorbitant tips — although, it must be said, that this reading of her as merely Machiavellian is mitigated by the indisputable authenticity of her affect (i.e., her “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.

Whether it’s because he’s genuinely inspired by her or simply avails himself of the opportunity once she leaves to tend to her other tables, Ike now dashes off his narcocorrido:

That’s Me (Ike’s Song)

Do you hear that mosquito,

that toilet flushing upstairs,

that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?

That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One, Despised

Whore, Lonely Nut Job…

I am looking up at your face

through the chartreuse froth

of your female ejaculate.

I am the sexual messiah

of every bespectacled bipolar girl

in her library carrel,

every lesbian lacrosse star,

every dorm-room slut, degenerate babysitter,

and fat, euthanizing, anal-sex-freak nurse.

I am the sexual messiah of the three-legged,

bulimic crypto-nympho rank and file.

The black cleft between your buttocks

is the primordial vector.

It’s the first line

drawn in the sands of time.

When the waitress returns with another ice-cold can of Sunkist orange, Ike shows her the narcocorrido. (Compare Ike’s anxiety as The Waitress reads the lyrics of his song to XOXO’s anxiety as Shanice read his poem.)

The Waitress tells Ike that the song is totally anthemic and romantic, and that she feels like he wrote it just for her because all her life people have called her a fat bipolar whore. She adds that it’s a little self-vaunting (the sexual messiah part), but that she really likes that aspect of it because it makes it even more super-fucking-hot, but that, to be honest, it did surprise her a little at first because Ike seems so modest and reserved. Ike explains that it’s exaggerated for dramatic effect and that the first-person narrator of the song isn’t him; it’s a character, it’s the persona of a Gravy trafficker (which is what makes the song a narcocorrido, by the way). She says she totally gets that — that Eminem isn’t Slim Shady and Daniel Dumile isn’t MF Doom. “Exactly,” Ike says. “Take a song like the Bee Gees’ ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.’ You’ve got the narrator of the song who’s a guy who’s about to be executed in the electric chair for killing his wife’s lover, but Robin Gibb never killed his wife’s lover and he obviously hasn’t been executed in the electric chair. It’s just a character.” The Waitress says it’s sort of like that Ass Ponys song “Hey Swifty,” and she recites all the lyrics to the song, which she’s assiduously memorized by heart.

Ike then tells her that his narcocorrido definitely expresses, in a poetic way, his beliefs about smashing the cultural and sociosexual hegemony of rich, privileged celebrities, and how fervently he’s wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low, to the lumpen, to the misshapen and the misbegotten. Then he says, “I’m sort of surprised you remember an Ass Ponys song so well,” and she says that she originally just liked the band because of its name, because her father had always called her his “Ass Pony.”

And Ike pauses for a moment (for dramatic effect) and says, “So did mine.”

Some experts contend that showing the narcocorrido to The Waitress—which seems like an overt act of seduction — is actually a means to simply ingratiate himself with The Waitress (and, by extension, the entire waitstaff at the diner) so that Ike’s family can get discounted food there after his imminent death. But this reading of Ike as merely Machiavellian is mitigated not only by the fact that The Kartons do indeed perform the narcocorrido at “The Last Concert” but by the indisputable authenticity of his affect (i.e., his “humanity”) in this episode’s final scene.

When it turns out that the God Doc Hickory (“whose snarky, adenoidal laugh is a snide reproach to those of simple purpose and modest means”) played a trick on Ike by assuring him that he was entitled to free rice pudding at the Miss America Diner, Ike gets into a brawl with the manager of the diner and is pepper-sprayed.

As he’s leaving, Ike turns back and grabs The Waitress and turns her around so she’s facing him, and he holds her in his arms, tears in his eyes, blinded by the pepper spray, perhaps experiencing a presentiment of his own imminent and hyperviolent demise, knowing he’ll never see her again. “Never forget,” he says fervently, “how close — in the end — we really turned out to be.” The Waitress watches Ike leave the diner; then, through the window, she watches him recede in epileptic jump-cuts, a marionette of his Gods, a clutter of spasms and ticks, a nude descending a staircase. She can’t move for a moment. Her throat is clogged with emotion. She knows she’s been traversed by tragedy.

Monday: 10 PM Eastern

“Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)”

Ike discovers that his daughter’s boyfriend, the glassy-eyed, unscrupulous Vance, has been stealing his underpants — two pairs of gray Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs and one pair of smoky blue Calvin Kleins. Later, as Ike and his daughter sit together on the stoop in the late afternoon, he gives her a pep talk about an upcoming math midterm, and then casually broaches the subject of the stolen underpants. “What does Vance want to do, anyway — I mean, as a career?” he asks. “He’s really interested in doing something in music,” his daughter says. “What aspect of music is he interested in pursuing?” inquires Ike. “I think just listening to it,” she replies. Meanwhile, Vance, who was raised by three hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen in a squalid shack under the Pulaski Skyway, is seen tooling around town on a battered red BMX bike, making various stops, selling drugs. (Some experts interpret the threesome of alcoholic lesbian fisherwomen as a mortal analogue to the motif of the “triadic goddess,” i.e., a variant of the three tiny teenage girls in the terrarium who mouth 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’) and also of the three Gods known variously as The Pince-Nez 44s and Los Vatos Locos (“The Crazy Guys”)). After dinner, Ike resumes work on the fifteen-foot lewd statue of La Felina (“naked, dildo-impaled”) that he’s begun constructing on the front lawn, adjacent to a jerry-rigged “stage.” Later, just as The Kartons begin rehearsing the narcocorrido that Ike wrote at the Miss America Diner (“Do you hear that mosquito, / that toilet flushing upstairs, / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) — with Ike on vocals and Akai MPC drum machine, Ruthie on guitar and vocals, and his daughter on bass — a neighbor calls the police to complain about the noise. Three squad cars pull up in front of Ike’s hermitage, and, after verbal sparring with the cops escalates into a physical confrontation, Ike is pepper-sprayed and Tasered. The next day, when he and Vance drink Sunkist orange soda and get high on a smokable form of Gravy as they sit on the curb in front of a convenience store, Ike confronts him about the stolen underpants. But Vance totally disarms Ike with the remark “Did you know that hiccoughs are a form of myoclonic seizure?” (One may recognize here an epic application of a folkloric motif found frequently in the tales of every continent: a hero confronts his son-in-law or his daughter’s suitor about stolen underpants, only to be disarmed with a fascinating factoid.) Ike confides in Vance that he knows his violent death is imminent.

“Damn!” Vance says, with emphatic sympathy, shaking his downcast head as he absently spins a wheel of his battered red BMX bike, which lies on its side against the curb, and he lets his empty soda can rattle against the spokes. “How do you know for sure you’re gonna die so soon?” he asks.

“La Felina came to me in a dream,” Ike says, “and she pretty much promised me.”

And probably because he’s getting pretty high, Ike tells Vance about the dream, about how there was something dangling from La Felina’s snatch, and how, at first, he thought it was a tampon string, but, as he came closer, he could see that it was a fortune, and he pulled it out and read it, and it said: “You’re going to be assassinated by Mossad in a week or so.” Ike tells Vance that when La Felina spread her legs, it perfumed the room, that it was like the warm smells from a halal truck, and that it made him so hungry that he woke up from the dream with a ravenous appetite and went straight to the Miss America Diner and ate an enormous tongue sandwich. Vance says that if he knew that he was going to die in a week, he’d do every fucked-up thing he could think of. Ike gently admonishes Vance. “That’s the wrong approach,” he says. “Here’s what you’d do: You’d shave every day. You’d keep your shoelaces nice and snug. You’d work on your posture. You see what I’m saying?” Although Ike suspects that beneath Vance’s glazed stupor lurks a reptilian cunning, he senses that the semiliterate underpants-jacker is having trouble with the concept of Bushido asceticism, and proceeds to tell him a story illustrating exemplary conduct in the face of imminent hyperviolent death. How, early one morning in fifteenth-century Edo, a loyal retainer inadvertently offended a thin-skinned and legendarily fastidious nobleman. Stricken with remorse and shame at his conduct, the retainer immediately offered to commit seppuku at dawn the following day. The nobleman, now ashamed of his petulance, attempted to dissuade the retainer from taking such drastic action, but the retainer was adamant that, having offended his master, he must pay the ultimate price. The nobleman, sensing the unimpeachable rectitude and indomitable valor of this man, had no choice but to accept his decision to commit ritual suicide, but he invited the man to be his honored guest at his castle and, for the twenty-four hours before his death, partake of anything he desired — food, drink, concubines, etc. The retainer, bowing deeply, accepted his master’s invitation. Soon after he arrived at the opulent abode of the nobleman, as he wandered the labyrinthine hallways of the castle by himself, the retainer’s nose began to itch. A man of irreproachable manners and discretion, he exerted all his willpower in an effort not to scratch his nose and appear uncouth. But the more he tried to ignore the itch, the more maddening it became. Finally, he furtively reached up to his nose (furtively, even though he was completely alone — such was his rectitude) and felt an overgrown hair curling just a bit out of one nostril. He impulsively yanked it out, bringing tears to his eyes. Now he had the tiny hair between his thumb and forefinger. But so scrupulous was this man that he wouldn’t even consider the possibility of simply dropping the hair and letting it float harmlessly and unnoticeably to the floor. Knowing that his nose hair had befouled the gleaming tile of his master’s palace would have filled him with deep, intolerable shame. So he tried to find a small garbage bin or a pail of some sort or even an ashtray or a chamber pot where he could discreetly discard the nose hair. But the palace of the fastidious nobleman was so exceptionally pristine that there was no such vessel to be found anywhere — all the garbage bins and chamber pots had been tastefully ensconced out of sight. Still, the retainer absolutely refused to litter the floor with this single nose hair. And he spent the next twenty-four hours in their entirety — the very last twenty-four hours of his life — stubbornly, but fruitlessly, wandering the halls of the palace in search of something, anything, into which he could deposit the hair. He ate not a morsel, drank not a drop, and spent not even a single moment with any of the voluptuous concubines who awaited him. And, at dawn, he committed seppuku, solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand.

“Damn,” Vance says, spinning the wheel of his BMX bike, the spokes rhythmically thrumming the empty Sunkist can.

Later, Ike tells Vance about his special diet for the week preceding his violent death: two meals a day, each meal consisting of 16 oz of cole slaw served in a “sacred” blue Dansk plastic salad bowl and two rounded scoops (44 g each) of BSN Syntha-6 banana-flavored protein powder mixed into 12 oz of Sunkist orange soda. “The cole slaw is for roughage,” he explains to Vance. “I want to have a clean colon when I die,” he tells him, “because when the Mossad kills you, Israeli law requires them to do a colonoscopy on your corpse as part of the autopsy. It’s this Yid fixation with the gastrointestinal tract.” Ike (SO high) totally cracks up at the sheer perversity of his rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism. And then he tells Vance about how he had an appointment with his urologist the other day, and the Discovery Channel was on the TV in the waiting room, and there was a show about the origin of cole slaw, about how it was originally called “Cossack Saddle Cabbage,” and about how a Cossack horseman would take a razor-sharp hatchet and shred a couple of raw cabbages and pack it into a rawhide sack and actually use that as a saddle, and how, over long distances, the horse sweat would actually pickle the cabbage, producing a version of what we today call “cole slaw,” and how the name “Cole Slaw” is actually the result of a careless transliteration of the phrase “Cossack Saddle Cabbage” by a harried immigration official at Ellis Island. (Note, here, a foreshadowing of Ike’s discussion about the significance of naming.) Vance (high school dropout) is too gullible and too fucked up to know whether Ike is putting him on or not. Also, some people (e.g., experts) wonder whether Ike, in reality, wasn’t in the living room of his two-story hermitage, watching the Discovery Channel on his own TV, in his wifebeater and night-vision goggles, with his bottle of Scotch, and simply imagined that he was in the waiting room of a urologist. One never knows with Ike, who must perpetually contend with the mischievous and mind-manipulating XOXO, who, in turn, persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha. Meanwhile, in the course of discussing the change in his diet and needing to be strong for “The Last Concert” and his martyrdom, Ike apologizes to Vance for not inviting him to be in the band (The Kartons).…“You’re not a Karton, though,” he says. And Vance goes, “I know, names have talismanic power; when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name; the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name; a person is just a hash of glands and myelin sheathing and electrochemical impulses, but there’s no discernable context, no recognizable pattern, it’s all incoherent, until it’s organized and orchestrated into a story, into a fate, by that name.” (Experts today are in almost unanimous agreement that this scene and the scene that follows it are in the WRONG ORDER! Vance is sarcastically parroting, almost verbatim, Ike’s ideas about naming that Ike hasn’t even expressed yet, and won’t until the next scene. So, unless the Gravy has endowed Vance with uncanny powers of precognition, the two scenes should obviously be reversed. But this remains the canonical sequence, because bards — surprisingly hidebound for drug-addled vagrants — insist on continuing to recite the epic as it’s traditionally been recited for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.) At any rate, there’s something so mocking and provocative about Vance’s tone (probably because he’s SO high on Gravy) that it makes Ike momentarily furious. His great impacted anger flares, his festering Maoist / Mansonesque rage. (In his coiled fury, Ike is like Tetsuo, the Iron Man. He dreams of Red Guard maenads, of flesh-eating Maoist zombies tearing celebrities apart.) And he almost impulsively smashes Vance’s face in with his bat. And he would have done it so quickly and so brutally that Vance would never have had a chance to even pull his Glock 17 from the waistband of his jeans. But La Felina (who, of course, with a Goddess’s telescopic vision, is ogling Ike from the penthouse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) intervenes by swooping down into Jersey City and impersonating a young nanny from Côte d’Ivoire (with a spectacular big-ass ass and big-ass titties), who sashays past pushing a white baby in a stroller, distracting Ike (he imagines that look on the nanny’s face, that moment of surrender to her own indigenous pleasure, etc., etc.), and by the time she passes out of sight, Ike’s temper has cooled, and, high as he is, he smiles and shakes his head abashedly at his own propensity for explosive violence. His lust and his rage are strong. He never dithers. Thrown into this world, he maneuvers himself with the unfaltering aplomb of a somnambulist, but a somnambulist in blazing daylight, in the “blaze of the gaze.” (Whether this scene is intended to augur the hyperviolent demise of Ike Karton or this is merely identifiable with the benefit of hindsight remains a question contested by experts, but it is surely tempting to see in the overt symbolism of Ike’s bat and Vance’s Glock a prefiguration of the epic’s death-drenched climax.) As if to atone for his transient wrath, Ike offers Vance another fascinating factoid: that, in the week before he himself was guillotined, Maximilien Robespierre (another one of La Felina’s “boy-toys”) subsisted on black coffee and marzipan.

“I may not understand life,” Ike says, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, “but I know how to die magnificently.”

“For real,” Vance avers, spinning the wheel.

“I love my fate,” Ike says, channeling Friedrich Nietzsche.

“If you love your fate so much, why don’t you marry it?” Vance (who’s so high) asks.

“I’m fervently wedded to my fate,” answers Ike.

And here, of course, as throughout, you feel Ike’s fealty to his fate in his smile, not in his solemnity.

“How are things going with you and my daughter?” Ike asks, not using his daughter’s name out of respect for her privacy.

Vance describes being raised by hard-drinking lesbian fisherwomen as “The Vagina Monologues if it were hosted by Jerry Springer.…There was a lot of disclosure, a lot of sharing, followed by a lot of violence…so I’m used to all that obstreperous emoting.…But with your daughter, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her.” (That line, “it’s impossible to know what’s really going on inside her,” will become critically important relative to the daughter’s impending pregnancy on Thursday night’s episode.) Then, Vance asks Ike how he got his wife, Ruthie, to fall in love with him, and Ike tells him that the first time he saw Ruthie she was thrashing on a patch of grass at Lincoln Park in Jersey City, wearing a see-through prairie dress and no underwear, wildly plucking at a zither. “I was immediately struck by her anarcho-primitivist hypersexuality. Although, she was more petite and hygienic than the women I usually go for, and she seemed educated to me — which I usually don’t like. I usually go for women who can barely follow an episode of Dora the Explorer without becoming hopelessly befuddled and breaking into tears. I just find them, on the whole, more wonder struck (thaumazein).” So he read every book and saw every movie and every play that features a character named Ruthie or Ruth—every single boldface Ruth or Ruthie—including Dr. Ruth Westheimer in Dr. Ruth’s Sex After 50: Revving up the Romance, Passion & Excitement!; Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court; Ruth (“a woman in her early thirties”) in Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming; the patio-sealant huffing Ruth Stoops in Citizen Ruth (the Alexander Payne movie starring Laura Dern); and, of course, Ruth in The Book of Ruth, in which Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi (which means “the delightful one”), changes her name to Mara (which means “the bitter one”): “And she said unto them, ‘Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.’”

“A person’s name is a fate-conjuring incantation,” Ike tells Vance, and then proceeds to tell him a story illustrating the mystical significance of names: “A guy walks into an agent’s office and says, ‘I’d appreciate it very much if you’d consider representing me. I hear you’re one of the best agents in the business and that you could really give my career a terrific boost.’ The agent says, ‘OK, what do you do?’ And the guy says, ‘I do a bit of everything. I sing, I dance, I do impersonations, I act — straight drama, musical theater, comedy, slapstick — the whole megillah.’ And the agent says, ‘That sounds great. What’s your name?’ And the guy says, ‘My name is Penis van Lesbian.’ And the agent’s taken aback for a moment, and then he says, ‘With all respect, son, you’re going to have to change that name.’ And the guy says, ‘Why?’ And the agent says, ‘That name, Penis van Lesbian, just isn’t going to work in show business. So if I’m going to represent you, you’re simply going to have to change it.’ And the guy sighs and says, ‘That’s a shame, because van Lesbian has been the family name for generations upon generations, and it would be terribly disrespectful of me to change it. And my parents gave a lot of thought to naming me Penis, and I wouldn’t want to offend them in any way either. So I’m afraid changing my name is out of the question.’ And the agent says, ‘Well, I completely understand that, and I wish you all the luck in the world.’ And the guy leaves. So, about five years later, the agent’s sitting in his office and there’s a knock on the door. And in walks this same guy, looking a little bit older and considerably more prosperous. And he takes out a check for fifty thousand dollars made out to the agent, and he puts it on his desk. The agent’s totally nonplussed. ‘What’s this for?’ he asks. And the guy says, ‘Well, about five years ago I came in here and you told me that to make it in showbiz, I needed to change my name, and I said no. And after knocking my head against the wall and getting absolutely nowhere, I finally changed my name, and I’ve been a fabulous hit. You were completely right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘Dick van Dyke,’ the guy says.” As he recounts the parable, Ike’s whispery rasp is almost inaudible against the percussive rattle of the soda can thrummed by the slowly spinning spokes of Vance’s battered red BMX bike and the buzz of several enormous iridescent-winged horseflies who sip at dazzling rivulets of bright orange soda that trickle from the mouths of the discarded cans. Vance, because he’s so high on Gravy, is momentarily fixated on the flies — a surreal tableau of mutant nomadic nymphs feeding on chromium sludge in some postapocalyptic wasteland…he’s thinking. And the horsefly/nymphs seem to be serenading each other in some sort of high-pitched gibberish.…Tiny, voluptuous nymphs plucked out of a painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse and cast in some Disney/Pixar 3-D animation…he’s thinking. The very words he’s thinking — the very language he’s thinking in — scrolling across the bottom of his visual frame…like karaoke, he’s thinking…he’s SO high…

For Ike, the Gravy seems to have deepened his understanding of his relation to XOXO. Ike is “reading” (i.e., thinking) what XOXO is writing, what he’s inscribing in Ike’s mind with his sharp periodontal curette. Ike’s denken is XOXO’s dichten. XOXO has also has made a series of “drill-drawings,” for which he inserts a periodontal curette into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns in Ike’s mind, thus divorcing the hand of the artist from the work of art. This is what produces the effect that links Ike’s simultaneous enactment of hero and bard to “the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball-dribbling nine-year-old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play.” (A periodontal curette inserted into a motorized drill to produce circular patterns would also explain the epic’s “tail-chasing, vortical form.”)

Some of the nymph/horseflies are attracted to Ike’s armpits (which are said to be “redolent of sex and death”).

Meanwhile, Ike expounds further upon the talismanic power of “the name,” about how — whether you’re mortal (sterbliche) or divine (göttliche); Ike Karton, Vance, or DJ Doorjamb; Mogul Magoo, Bosco Hifikepunye, or Mister Softee—when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name, and about how the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name, and about how a person is just a hash of glands and myelin sheathing and electrochemical impulses, but there’s no discernable context, no recognizable pattern, it’s all incoherent, until it’s organized and orchestrated into a story, into a fate, by that name. “Isn’t what you call something the crucial question?” he asks Vance rhetorically. Certainly, the experts have always maintained that what you call the epic is the crucial question. Is it The Sugar Frosted Nutsack? Is it The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head? Is it T.S.F.N.? And, at one point, near the finale, swilling Scotch and swinging his bat at flitting nano-drones, Ike calls out “XOXO!” as if that were the title of the epic: Trotzdem schrie Ike noch aus aller kraft den namen, der name donnerte durch die Nacht. (“Nevertheless, with full force, Ike shouted out the name, the name thundered through the night.”)

Vance—louche, semiliterate, BMX-borne Gravy dealer — was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on a daily dose of 72 mg of Concerta (Methylphenidate) when he was twelve years old, and was kicked out of high school for “habitual truancy.” Because he’s so high from the Gravy and/or because the God XOXO (“The Ventriloquist”) is using his sharp periodontal curette to indelibly engrave these ideas into his mind, Vance now finds himself discoursing upon the “problematics of the name,” identifying naming as both a taxonomy (a “hegemonic system of classification”) and a taxidermy (an “attempt to capture, chloroform, and neuter the referent”).

He shrugs, befuddled by the stream of high-pitched gibberish that’s coming out his own mouth. Then he loses his train of thought, and they both totally crack up.

At first, it seems as if Vance is finishing Ike’s sentences, as if he’s able to anticipate verbatim what Ike’s going to say…as if they’re performing some ritual they’ve reenacted countless times before…soon they’re actually riffing back and forth, a spirited give-and-take, the teasing interplay between tabla and sitar in some woozy raga they’ve played countless times before. (Note again here, as throughout, the tellers and the told folded in on themselves.)

When Vance stops spinning the BMX wheel, Ike’s whispery rasp is suddenly foregrounded in utter silence, imparting great drama to whatever he’s saying. And so too will the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards when they re-create this scene, and cease rhythmically banging their chunky chachkas against their jerrycans of orange soda, and intone, in the sudden sepulchral hush, the words “At dawn, he commits seppuku, solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand,” or “‘You were absolutely right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘Dick Van Dyke.’”

Because he’s so high on Gravy, Ike mentions to Vance that the Goddesses use him as pornography when they masturbate. Ike also makes the curious statement that fate enables a Goddess to know exactly when to watch him. “If I’m doing something, say, at 10:38 PM EST on a Monday night, it’s because I’m fated to be doing it then — it’s precisely scheduled that way so a Goddess can find me easily. These are what they call my listings. Long ago the Gods ordained these things.” If only Vance were his son, perhaps Ike could be even more forthcoming and discuss his impending tryst with La Felina. Nonetheless, he does disclose to Vance that the thought of being shamelessly ogled by writhing autoerotomaniacal Goddesses makes his nutsack tingle as if it were a “sachet of plutonium potpourri.” Vance is like, “Sometimes I get so horny that one of my nuts starts gnawing on the other one.”

And it’s here that Ike makes the cryptic — and endlessly analyzed — assertion that his scrotum contains two eyeballs.

The Gravy’s made them both telepathic, so Ike knows that Vance is wondering what it’s like to fuck a Goddess, and Ike tells him — without having to say a word — that the greatest thing about having sex with a Goddess (or a human woman, for that matter) is the expression on her face when she capitulates to her own pleasure. It’s a return, a homecoming, riffs Ike. It’s that sublime moment when she defects to the old country, to her ancestral homeland, to her own private paradise— “where everything was italicized, where things happened without any discernable context, where there were no recognizable patterns, where it was all incoherent; where 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; where 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.” It’s that moment she succumbs to herself, surrenders to her depersonalized, oceanic subjectivity, uncorrupted by the narratives of fathers, husbands, village elders, etc. It’s a renunciation of modernity, thinks Ike—doomed, compulsively hermeneutic, unemployed, anarcho-primitivist, gym-rat. “What does it look like?” wonders Vance wordlessly. “Like the grimace of someone throwing herself on an electrified fence at a border crossing or the imperturbable serenity of someone about to do a reverse three-and-a-half somersault tuck into the abyss,” Ike replies in his thoughts. And Vance wonders whether Ike’s entire hermetically enclosed, paranoid, narcissistic Weltanschauung isn’t simply the fetishization of this single snapshot of female jouissance…but then he shrugs, unable to remember (never mind comprehend) a single word of what he just thought.

Ordinarily Ike probably wouldn’t be so candid with Vance, except that he’s SO high on Gravy. It’s like military-grade Gravy, and Ike suspects that Vance is being supplied by a God. And sure enough, once Vance describes the “guy” he’s getting his shit from, Ike’s almost certain that it’s someone who’s being impersonated by the God Bosco Hifikepunye. (The incident in which Ike actually encounters this “guy” is the basis for the celebrated and extensively studied episode from the Fifteenth Season, during which Ike will kneel down and say to a 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,” accentuating the dignity he bestows on the lowest of the low. Ike’s suspicion that Vance’s supplier is Bosco Hifikepunye is confirmed when Ike discovers fresh loot drops (or “God guano”) in the vicinity.)

They are SO high.

This Gravy is super-potent.

It’s military-grade Gravy.

Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins…

The mesmerizing metronomic tick

of the spokes thrumming against

the empty Sunkist can…

Vance spins the BMX wheel not as if it were a Himalayan prayer wheel (as some shit-for-brains experts have stupidly suggested).…He spins it like Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. Gretchen is singing at her spinning wheel, in anguished erotic contemplation of Faust. “Mein armer Kopf / Ist mir verrückt, / Mein aremer Sinn / Ist mir zerstückt.” (“My poor head / Is crazy to me, / My poor mind / Is torn apart.”)

Like Gretchen, Vance seems here like someone smitten, someone besotted. Yes, Vance is captivated by Ike’s diffident magnificence, his “death-drenched luminosity.” But there’s something vaguely homoerotic in the way he absently spins his wheel and stares vacantly at his girlfriend’s father, something of the grotto-groping Goddesses’ vacuous gazes, that so perfectly reflects the slack drift of the masturbating mind.

“Oh my god, we love the same song!” Vance says at one point, in such a lilting tone of blithe, unalloyed affection that it’s hard not to read at least some element of homoeroticism into the remark.

Just as the piano in Schubert’s Lied stops as Gretchen becomes completely distracted by the thought of Faust’s kiss and forgets to keeps spinning—“Mein Busen drängt sich / Nach ihm hin. / Ach dürft ich fassen / Und halten ihn, / Und küssen ihn, / So wie ich wollt, / An seinen Küssen / Vergehen sollt!” (“My bosom urges / Itself toward him. / Ah, might I grasp / And hold him! / And kiss him, / As I would wish, / At his kisses / I should die!”)—Vance forgets to keep spinning the BMX wheel…

At this point, there is a break — a missing section — in the epic of nearly four hours. This has come to be known as The Big Lacuna. Reconstruction of The Big Lacuna can never be more than conjectural, but its contents, at least in outline, are tolerably clear. (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.) Blame for The Big Lacuna obviously and immediately falls on XOXO. Given the tendency of the embittered poet manqué to brazenly interpolate something gratuitously titillating or abstruse or jarringly incongruous, i.e., to preemptively corrupt the epic beyond redemption, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he’d capriciously paralyzed Ike and Vance for four hours. But what other means might XOXO have at his disposal to cause a Big Lacuna in the epic? Well, he could go directly after the bards themselves. He could use a nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis), and he could have any one of those department store perfume saleswomen simply sashay by a group of bards as they recite the epic and casually spray a small amount of the mixture in their vicinity. This would be enough to cause a Big Lacuna. XOXO, who says he’s retired and lives on his pension, dismisses any such allegations as “absolute nonsense.” Speaking by telephone from his hyperborean hermitage, he says, “I have no hand in it.” He adds, “T.S.F.N. — General Command is pulling the wool over your eyes”—referring to the splinter group allied with a radical faction of exiled bards. But we all know what XOXO is capable of doing to the bards. He can make some of their pianissimo phrases breathy. He can cause them to suddenly chant in a laughable falsetto or stutter helplessly. And, of course, he can make them recite high-pitched gibberish. (Because the bards are traditionally blind, drug-addled vagrants, experts tend to underplay what great shape they need to be in, especially to perform some of the more physically demanding and rigorously choreographed reenactments in the epic, e.g., when Ike is pepper-sprayed at the Miss America Diner or when he chases his daughter’s math teacher around the room or restrains himself from bludgeoning Vance with his baseball bat, etc. A bard’s heart rate can surge from 60 beats a minute to over 240 beats a minute during a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. The lateral G-forces exerted on a bard who’s rocking back and forth to the rhythmic ostinato of spokes against a jerrycan could be as much as 4.5 G, which means about 25 kg of pressure on the neck.)

Whatever the cause of The Big Lacuna, for the entirety of its duration, Ike remains frozen in one immutable cataleptic posture. This tableau vivant demarcates in physical space the deep authenticity of Ike’s mode of experiencing the passage of time — to strike a single pose under the unflinchingly prurient gaze of the moaning Goddesses, a gaze which casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus, the “glaze of the gaze,” that Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan analyzes in his book The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics.

Ike presses himself like a gargoyle or a figurehead on the prow of a ship against the onrush of his own fate.

This tableau of Ike batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world.

And although the epic reaches a state of absolute stasis here, this continues to be one of the single most popular parts of the epic repertoire. Its hieratic solemnity and magisterial, almost inert choreography have given rise to comparisons with Noh drama, Khmer royal ballet, and Indian classical dance forms, including Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Kuchipudi. Connoisseurs appreciate the degree to which bards are willing to deform themselves into stunted and crippled shapes as they reenact the interminable tableau, risking grotesque injuries (although probably only the most discerning cognoscenti could distinguish these stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures from the stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures that the drug-addled vagrants typically assume, even when they’re not performing the epic). A bard is expected to have extraordinarily precise control over every single part of his body. For instance, when reenacting the scene in which Ike is distracted from bludgeoning Vance with his bat by the Goddess La Felina, who swoops down into Jersey City and impersonates a young nanny from Côte d’Ivoire (with a spectacular big-ass ass and big-ass titties), who sashays past pushing a white baby in a stroller, the bard, miming Ike with his brandished bat frozen in mid-air, must remain perfectly still except for the gentle rising and falling of his erection which choreographically registers the modalities of Ike’s emotions, achieving a tumescence and a flaccidity that’s precisely synchronized with the narration of the nanny’s approach and recession into the distance.

Among the world’s most illustrious blind, drug-addled bards, Meir and Aaron Poznak—feral twins abandoned as infants by their parents at Bergdorf Goodman and raised by a wild pack of Yorkipoos near the pond at the southeast corner of Central Park — are especially celebrated for their performances of the “Bat and Nanny” scene, to which they have added their own inimitable flourish. They can actually swivel their testicles from left to right in tandem to signify Ike “watching” the nanny as she sashays by — a sly allusion to, and literalization of, his cryptic assertion that his scrotum contains “two eyeballs.” In addition to their ultrasophisticated interpretations of Ike’s complex and hieratic poses during The Big Lacuna, the Poznak Twins are also renowned as unrivaled virtuosos of “high-pitched gibberish.” (Recently, Meir Poznak has receded from the public eye, purportedly becoming the shadowy leader of T.S.F.N. — General Command.)

Meanwhile…

Ike seems to see two suns blazing in the heavens, and new mothers who had left their babies behind at home, their breasts swollen with milk, nestling gazelles and young wolves in their arms, suckling them.

“Is this a private jihad, or can anyone join?” a nymph/horsefly murmurs to Ike, flitting from armpit to armpit.

Ike’s aura is sugar frosted.

Vance is lost in some hallucinatory K-hole of his own.

The mesmerizing metronomic ostinato of the spokes ticking against the empty Sunkist can…the high-pitched gibberish of the nymph/horseflies (the “Ikettes”)…the buzz of the unmanned drones that represent Ike’s inescapable destiny…

They are SO high. This Gravy is super-potent. It’s military-grade Gravy. Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins.

They’re SO high.

They’re SO FUCKING high.

According to a report issued by the organization Psychopharmacologists Without Boundaries, the amount of hallucinogenic Gravy which could be contained in the period at the end of this sentence, if ingested on an empty stomach, would be enough to cause a person to mistake a rocket-propelled grenade for a Vietnamese bánh mi sandwich. But is it simply Gravy that Ike and Vance are smoking in this episode? They seem SO high. Well, some experts have concluded that the Gravy Vance is buying from the God Bosco Hifikepunye has been cut with military-grade ass-cheese, which would make it exponentially more potent and potentially neurotoxic. The amount of military-grade ass-cheese / Gravy blend that you could snort off the hyphen between the words “ass” and “cheese” in this very sentence is said to be enough to induce a full-blown psychotic episode. And, if all the letters in the sentence This tableau of Ike batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world were infused with the military-grade ass-cheese / Gravy blend and a person were to ingest the entire sentence, that person would almost certainly become an incurable paranoid schizophrenic. (Keep in mind, too, that boldface signifiers like “Ike” and “Vance” contain up to three times the amount of the binary psychotropic drug as words in a regular or italicized font do.)

Although it’s not the consensus opinion, many scholars suspect that during The Big Lacuna, XOXO has kidnapped Ike’s and Vance’s souls and spirited them off to his hyperborean hermitage beneath Antarctica. Vance’s soul doesn’t know where the fuck it is. And it gets a little agitated. And XOXO starts telling it some bullshit just to calm it down, like “We have a salon on premises and I promise you our stylists don’t push products on the customers. Don’t you hate it when you go get your hair cut and the stylist tries to push a product on you, etc.”—just some bullshit to calm Vance’s soul down. He also tells them that there’s a restaurant at the hermitage: “You’ll love it,” he says. “It’s like a weird version of Hooters.” He takes the two souls out back behind the restaurant where Zaporozhian Cossack cavalrymen are just returning from raiding an Ottoman village with freshly made cole slaw under their saddles. Inside, all the waiters are famous Casanovas who are now impotent, incontinent, doddering old men, traipsing from table to table in diapers, using walkers, enormous hydroceles sagging their scrotums to the floor—Hugh Hefner, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Wilt Chamberlain, Tommy Lee, Julio Iglesias, etc.

Vance’s soul is like, “I thought he said this was like Hooters.” And Ike’s soul says, “I think he just meant that there’s, like, a theme going on with the waiters.”

The waiters are all suffering from dementia and can’t remember your orders (never mind their grandchildren’s names or the last movie they saw), so you have to write down what you want directly on their grotesquely exposed cerebrums with a sharp periodontal curette.

The allegorical interpretation of XOXO’s hermitage as hell and Ike and Vance’s brief sojourn there as some sort of perilous infernal descent, which dominated the critical debate about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for, like, five minutes in the late ’80s, is now widely discredited. Yes, the hermitage is underground — miles beneath the surface of Antarctica. And yes, Ike refers to it as unten—literally “under” or “below.” But, hello, it’s “hyperborean”—of or relating to the arctic, frigid, very cold. The opposite of infernally hot. Well, what if it’s WAY underground down near the inner core of the earth, where it’s like 10,000 degrees? Well, what if it’s up your ass where it’s like 10,000,000 degrees? Well, what if you’re a cocksucking dwarf racist retard midget dickwad? Well, what if you’re a fucking scatological-bakery urinal-cake-boss motherfucking fist-fucked cow-pie anal-fissureman motherfucker?

…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.”):

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…pink fingernail polish, blue toenails, gold sandals…huge face…HUGE…almost like the kid in that movie Mask with Cher…not with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, just a really, really big face…and hot fleshy freckly chubby thighs.…The other three have knockoff Marc Jacobs bags…but the chubby one with the Burger King shake and the thighs and no underwear has the real deal: a $45,000 Hermès black crocodile Kelly bag.

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:

XOXO’s got the epic by the nutsack!!!

Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!

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

Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “HEY!”