The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

8. Ike Karton: Super-Sexy Neo-Pagan Martyr or Demented Loser?

Cast Your Vote Right This Second! You don’t have to go online or call in or anything. Just cast your vote in your own mind! And the Goddess Shanice (she’s telepathically omniscient!) will tally it all up.

He’s paranoid and maladaptively hostile. (Paranoia and maladaptive hostility can be super-sexy, right?) He oscillates between chip-on-the-shoulder belligerence and Talmudic introversion. (Isn’t the extremely high amplitude of this vibration, in fact, what produces Ike’s radioactive charisma?) He operates under what skeptics (his dreary neighbors among them) might call the erotomaniacal belief that Goddesses, high on Gravy, are obsessively watching him, that they are forever peering out the windows of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, across the Gulf, across the desert, and gazing at him and masturbating. (Compare the visual acuity of the Goddesses here with the blindness of the bards.) He states it in no uncertain terms: “The Goddesses watch me like pornography.” That’s the reason he’s such a total gym-rat — he always wants to look SUPER-SEXY in case La Felina, high on Gravy, is watching him from the 160th floor of the rocket-shaped Burj Khalifa! His neck and head intermittently jerk toward the Burj whenever he feels he’s being ogled by masturbating Goddesses. (As would yours.) He’s an anti-Semite, although many experts interpret his anti-Semitism as a form of playacting intended primarily to torment his father. (FYI: Ike went to Hebrew school until he was thirteen!) He has a catarrhal rasp and a criminal record. (Super-sexy!) Whenever he goes to a restaurant, he always flirts with the waitress by asking for a tongue sandwich — same line, every single time. (That might be a little demented loserish.) But check out how he looks at night — a little looped, a little bleary-eyed from all the beer and whiskey, standing there in “the soft pink glow of the sodium-vapor street lights.” (It’s unanimous—that’s SUPER-SEXY!!) He likes to sit in the dark at home, wearing night-vision goggles, watching the Military Channel, drinking Scotch. By day, he warns men on his block that their wives are probably Mossad agents. He firmly believes that most women are Mossad agents. (If you’re a married man and you’re reading this, your wife is probably a Mossad agent!) But obscured by all his whispery trash talk, and embedded deep within his algorithmic solipsism which transfigures every single thing in the world into a reiteration of his own mind, is his extraordinarily tender devotion to his wife. Even Ike’s philandering is uxorious. His infidelities do not, certainly in his own mind, seem incompatible with what he considers his incorruptible rectitude as a husband. They are either seen as the most practical expediencies — before he leaves the house, Ike routinely announces to his wife and daughter, “I might have to kill someone or maybe fuck somebody today, but remember, it’s for you guys”—or as consistent with the cultivation and honing of his virility, the very virility that Ike so solemnly bestows upon his wife as his tribute to her. Would Ruthie (or any self-respecting woman, for that matter) want to be married to a man whose appetite for life was so meager and whose libido was so governable that one woman would suffice? What manner of husband would that be? (Surely not a super-sexy one!) And what would his love signify, if not a groveling insult?

Sixty-one percent of women say that a scrupulously faithful husband is a TOTAL TURN-OFF!

Of course, some experts say that Ike—Implacable Warlord of His Stoop — would kill a human being as casually as a normal person would pop a pimple. But then you see him brushing his wife’s hair or coloring her roots, nuzzling her neck, even popping one of her pimples, softly singing “The Shadow of Your Smile” to her.…And, of course, we know how — in so many secret, unacknowledged, uxorious moments — he dotes on her, how if he’s getting Fig Newtons for them and there are only two left and one’s normal and the other one’s all mangled and misshapen, he’ll take the mangled, misshapen one for himself, or if there are only two Frozefruits left, one normal, one with freezer burn, he’ll invariably take the one with the freezer burn for himself, or — great example — when he and Ruthie were completely obsessed with these crab cake sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, and lemon aioli on ciabatta bread and Ike would go to the little deli and then realize he only had enough money in his wallet for one crab cake sandwich, he’d get the sandwich for Ruthie and he’d just eat a Slim Jim or make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when he got back home. And no one knows he’s doing any of this, there’s no showy, self-aggrandizing display of being a good husband, no “He went to Jared!” moment. It’s just part of the texture of uxorious doting that Ike is weaving every single moment of every single day. (There is the obvious irony here of characterizing these gestures as “secret” and “unacknowledged” or saying “no one knows he’s doing this” since bards — blind, vagrant, and drug-addled — have been chanting these very words for thousands of years, tapping their chachkas against jerrycans of orange soda to maintain that insistent trance-inducing beat.) The portrayal of the Kartons in the Seventh Season—cavorting on their front lawn in the early AM — is exaggerated to the point of being almost defamatory and flaunts the hyperrealism and saturated colors of a Claritin commercial. In real life, the Kartons are, yes, exceedingly loving with each other, but they are also unusually protective of each other’s privacy. (It would be considered a monstrous offense even to ask Ike if his wife was in good health!) They are utterly inscrutable figures who, paradoxically, understand each other perfectly well. One morning, Ruthie came downstairs and found Ike sitting at the kitchen table, writing. And she said to him, “You look like you’re writing letters to all the officers in your army.” There’s such profound sympathy and insight and tender irony to that statement, because Ike is so alone, so utterly alone in the world of men, so much an army of one. (When Ike sits at the kitchen table in the early morning, he’s not writing letters or composing narcocorridos, he’s typically making lists — lists of which celebrities he thinks should be guillotined, which should go to the gulag, which should be rehabilitated, etc.) In his heart of hearts, Ike knows that he’s going to die soon at the hands of the ATF and/or Mossad — his “suicide-by-cop”—but he believes that a golden age will come — what he calls “the time when all fettered monsters will break loose”—when he and his wife and his daughter will be reunited for eternity. The bonds uniting this family have been exceptionally strong from the very beginning. Ike’s “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” List

Soon after Ike and Ruthie first met (at the A&P where, at that time, Ike was employed as a butcher in the meat department), they had a conversation one spring day in the park about each other’s past relationships and about love and about what one could realistically hope for in a marriage, etc. Ruthie asked Ike if he thought he understood women well. Ike got very quiet and thought about this for a while, as he tossed handful after handful of croutons to the swans and mice that had gathered at their feet. Finally, he told Ruthie that he was going to make a list. “Not a list of which celebrities you think should be guillotined,” she said, coyly averting her eyes and smiling flirtatiously at him. “No,” he said, “a list of ten things that I know for sure about women.” About a week later — to show Ruthie a more delicately registered sensibility than he, a gym-rat and butcher, suspected Ruthie gave him credit for—Ike presented the list (entitled “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” but including an 11th) to Ruthie as they sat on the very same bench in Lincoln Park:

Even little girls, in all their blithe, unharrowed innocence, have a presentiment of sorrow, hardship, and adversity…of loss. Women, throughout their lives, have an intrinsic and profound understanding of Keats’s sentiments about “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.”

This sage knowledge of, and ability to abide, the inherently fugitive nature of happiness somehow accounts for the extraordinary beauty of women as they age.

Women have an astonishing capacity to maintain their equilibrium in the face of life’s mutability, its unceasing and unforeseeable vicissitudes. And this agility is always in stark and frequently comical contradistinction to men’s naively bullish and brittle delusions that things can forever remain exactly the same.

Women are forgiving, but implacably cognizant.

Women are almost never gullible, but sometimes relax their vigilance out of loneliness. (And I believe most women abhor loneliness.)

In their most casual, off-hand, sisterly moments, women are capable of discussing sex in such uninhibited detail that it would cause a horde of carousing Cossacks to cringe.

Women are, for all intents and purposes, indomitable. It really requires an almost unimaginable confluence of crushing, cataclysmic forces to vanquish a woman.

Women’s instincts for self-preservation and survival can seem to men to be inscrutably unsentimental and sometimes cruel.

Women have a very specific kind of courage that enables them to fling themselves into the open sea, into some uncharted terra incognita — whether it’s a new life for themselves, another person’s life, or even what might appear to be a kind of madness.

Women never — no matter how old they are — completely relinquish their aristocratic assumption of seductiveness.

And here is one last thing I know — and I know this with a certitude that exceeds anything I’ve said before: that men’s final thoughts in their waking days and in their lives are of women…ardent, wistful thoughts of wives and lovers and daughters and mothers.

Ruthie found this so beautiful and so moving that she wept as she read it. In the coming weeks, though, she’d discover that Ike had plagiarized it, from beginning to end, word for word, from something that had appeared in the November 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. But by then she’d already fallen deeply in love with him, and not at all in spite of what he’d done, but, in large part, because of it — here was a man willing to steal for her, a man with a big enough nutsack that he was willing to brazenly steal another man’s words, another man’s ideas (his most precious intellectual property)…for her.

Ninety-seven percent of people think that it was SUPER-SEXY of Ike to totally plagiarize that from O, The Oprah Magazine!! The Club Kids Vs. The Hasids

Ike has suffered from irregular clonic jerks of the head and neck ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old. High on ketamine, wearing silver lederhosen and a hat made out of an Oreo box at the time, he initially claimed he’d been hit by a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter — type war between club kids and Hasids. Many experts, including Zsófia Csontváry-Horvath of the Institute of Linguistics and Classical Philology in Budapest (who’s slick with sweat and has a spectacular big-ass ass), maintain that those passages in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack about Ike making confusing and patently erroneous claims about a Hasidic ambulance are “noncanonical interpolations” and should be deemed “spurious” and deleted. Csontváry-Horvath contends that these passages were deliberately inserted by experts who, themselves, were trying to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter — type war between club kids and Hasids. Of course, not only is Ike’s erroneous contention that he was hit by a Hasidic ambulance considered today a totally canonical and authentic part of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but Zsófia Csontváry-Horvath’s assertion that it’s a noncanonical interpolation is considered a canonical and integral part of the saga which audiences expect the chachka-jangling, sightless bards to feature prominently in their recitations. It’s also entirely possible that all this could just be another example of XOXO vandalizing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and trying to confuse people and just fuck everything up. But let’s be absolutely clear: Ike, when he was eighteen years old, on Spring Break, and high on Special K, staggered into the street and was struck by a Mister Softee truck. And ever since the accident, the Mister Softee song loops endlessly in his head. This is not an auditory hallucination. The song is actually in there — i.e., if you put a stethoscope to Ike’s forehead, you can hear the Mister Softee song.

But 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 and XOXO. He’s dear to them, these Gods who rule the world.

Throughout The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Ike is portrayed as the most soft-spoken, self-deprecating man you could possibly imagine — someone, in fact, almost ostentatious in his soft-spoken self-deprecation — and even on those rare occasions when he might come across as vain or a little smug — he is, after all, a super-sexy neo-pagan hero and a transformative human being — he’ll reveal something so disarmingly personal about himself (like his tinea versicolor or his genital psoriasis or his dermatitis herpetiformis, which sometimes requires him to soak for long hours in the bathtub with a vinegar-drenched bandana wrapped around his head) that any hint of hubris is immediately dispelled.

Ike is preoccupied with hidden motives, and nothing makes him happier than when, presented with something fairly straightforward — a bus driver’s request for exact change, for instance — he can burrow into deeper and deeper netherworlds of subtext and sub-subtext, disclosing for himself ever-murkier layers of bewildering intrigue and subterfuge, because he believes that it’s only when confronted with something that completely befuddles us that we experience the sense of “speechless wonder” (thaumazein) that opens us up to a fleeting intimation of the sacred. To Ike, the Gods’ designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles. (Hey, maybe this is why he concocted that whole story about being hit by a Hasidic ambulance years ago when he’d so irrefutably been hit by a Mister Softee truck — to obfuscate the obvious and thus anoint it with a residue of divinity!) So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the guy would eschew books in his native English and opt instead to pore over texts in languages he can’t remotely understand (particularly German). Nor should it come as any great shock that, if he’s not at the gym or making a lewd breadcrumb mandala or feeding his wife a Fig Newton, you’ll probably find Ike (“seething and petulant butcher, coiled with energy”) on his stoop or in the park or at the Miss America Diner “reading” his German books, even though he can’t understand a single word of German (in the strict sense of the word “understand”), because they are, for him, in his own mind, like magical incantations, and he’s able to distill the most essential, the most profound, esoteric, and mystical significance, not from their semantic content, but purely from the sounds of the words, from their music. And so he’ll sit there on the hot subway, hunched over his unintelligible text and swaying with concentration (and missing his stop), mouthing a passage — like the following one — out loud, over and over to himself, like some zealous foreign understudy learning his lines phonetically, or — better analogy — like some super-sexy (and totally shredded!) priest who’s been sent off to a hopelessly remote mission in the jungle, and, sitting on a sweltering train as it steams into the dark interior of the country, is zealously trying to learn the dying language of the head-hunting heathens he’s been sent to proselytize, even though he suspects, and perhaps half desires, that instead of gratefully receiving the sacrament, they might very well flog, flay, boil, and consume him:

Mein Kahn ist ohne Steuer, er fährt mit dem Wind, der in den untersten Regionen des Todes bläst.

Comments (Newest First)

SugarFrosted XOXO is introducing junk DNA into the genome of the story. Don’t panic. Just keep chanting Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike! And keep in mind that even this junk DNA (cunningly disguised as SMS abbreviations) that XOXO has inserted into these comments is now considered an integral part of the epic, and if the vagrant, drug-addled bards were to recite or perform Season Nine without this junk DNA, the audience would feel — and justifiably so — cheated, and probably demand a full refund.

Posted 11:26 AM

Beachgirl What is that? What does that mean?

Posted 11:20 AM

KidComa DYHAB DUM DUWBHTPHFIYAWYC GYPO IWFU DYSL GNOC SMB EWI ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TTG AGT TAT TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG CAC TTG AGT TGT TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC GTG AGT TAT TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TCG AGT TAT ATA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TTG AGT TAT AGA GTG TGA TTA TAA ATG CTA TCA TTG CCA TCG TGA TAT ATA ATG CTA TCA TTG ACC TTG AGT TAT AGA

Posted 11:17 AM

Beachgirl Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike, Ike!

Posted 11:13 AM

KidComa FMUTA!!!!!

Posted 11:11 AM

Beachgirl XOXO!! That’s you, right?! You’re vandalizing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack again!!!

Posted 11:08 AM

KidComa ROTFLMAO!

Posted 11:06 AM

Beachgirl You’re a complete asshole!

Posted 11:01 AM

KidComa LMFAO!

Posted 10:55 AM

Beachgirl I hate people who just laugh at everything. Do you think spina bifida is funny or the Holocaust?

Posted 10:53 AM

KidComa Get your pants off!

Posted 10:50 AM

Beachgirl It is not stupid OR pretentious. You have a great deal of LEARNING to do. You’re just too shallow to delve deep into questioning yourself and your life. READ MORE!!!

Posted 10:45 AM

KidComa It’s stupid and pretentious.

Posted 10:42 AM

Beachgirl What’s funny about that? I think it’s so profound. And it’s so beautifully emblematic of Ike.

Posted 10:35 AM

KidComa LOL!

Posted 10:32 AM

Beachgirl It’s from Kafka’s “Der Jäger Gracchus” (The Hunter Gracchus), dickwad. It means: “My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.”

Posted 10:30 AM

KidComa What the fuck does that mean?

Posted 10:24 AM

Showing 17 of 9,709 comments Instead of a Monocle and a Walking Stick

It’s usually at this point in almost every authenticated version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack—following “Comments (Newest First)”—that Ike strolls to the Miss America Diner (on West Side Avenue, at the corner of Culver), where he engages in an extended adagio with The Waitress, ordering a tongue sandwich, discussing the erotics of second-person POV during endodontic procedures, and writing the lyrics to the narcocorrido “That’s Me (Ike’s Song)” that The Kartons will sing at the “Last Concert.” (In traditional public recitations, the bards — vagrant, drug-addled, and almost always blind, but sometimes just severely dyslexic — are expected to chant all 9,709 of the “Comments,” and not just the seventeen included here, especially if the performance is taking place in a remote, rural area “where the pace of life is unhurried, where the air is fragrant with the aromas of shearing sheds and cattle yards, honeysuckle or corn dogs from some fair, and where the appetite for orally transmitted, maddeningly repetitive epic entertainment remains unsated.”)

The image of “Ike the Flâneur” strolling to the Miss America Diner has become one of the most familiar and iconic representations of the sinewy and reticent hero who, in addition to being convinced that Goddesses are almost continuously leering at him from the top floor of the Burj Khalifa and masturbating, believes that Western materialism — most perfectly embodied by privileged celebrities — is polluting the soul of every living creature in the world (in addition to the souls of human beings, Ike believes that Western materialism is also polluting the souls of animals, especially house sparrows, swans, and mice).

Instead of a monocle and a walking stick, this flâneur sports a tight guinea-T and a baseball bat. But don’t worry — he’s loaded with gem-like aperçus and aphorisms! For example:

— If you give people too many things to remember you by, they’ll forget them. Pick one.