The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner Page A

which will invariably include the sweaty, lusty middle-aged woman with the spectacular big-ass ass who will become the bard’s new wife, leaving yet another jilted man to gouge out his eyes. This is the endless reproductive cycle of the bard.
    An Inside The Sugar Frosted Nutsack reunion season finale features an exclusive interview with a real husband and real wife who’ve just emerged from a public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (an interview which is, of course, immediately incorporated into The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and which experts today consider an integral component of the epic itself, and which audiences naturally expect the bards to ritually chant in its entirety). The real husband and real wife spontaneously perform a power ballad (with its shades of George Jones and Tammy Wynette ) and a Wagnerian duet. This combination of declaimed passages (in which the blind, vagrant, drug-addled bards attempt to realistically imitate the voices of characters) and sung passages of greater (or lesser) lyrical beauty provide an enjoyable variety, keeping the recitation—even of long, mind-numbing exegetical monologues—from becoming tedious. Keep in mind that almost immediately after this interview is conducted, the woman leaves her husband for a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard she met at the very performance she just attended, and that her husband promptly enucleates both of his eyeballs and becomes—what else?—a blind, vagrant, drug-addled bard.
     
    T.S.F.N. If we were to ask you to pick the one thing you liked most about the performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack you just listened to, what would it be?
    REAL HUSBAND The sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of it. And the almost unendurable length. At first I wanted to just walk out—the bards seemed drunk or fucked-up on something, and I figured, OK, here we go, this is gonna be like Britney Spears at the MTV VMAs or Japan’s Minister of Finance Shoichi Nakagawa at the 2009 G7 meeting in Rome. But then once it got started, I really got into the way the bards kept up that mesmerizing beat by banging their rings on those metal jerrycans of orange soda. And I really like the way that they wander around from place to place…their vagrancy. And I love how they’re actually blind—I mean in real life. Although, it seemed like a couple of them could see but were…what’s the word?…Shit, I’m completely blanking out here.…Sweetie, what’s that thing where you see words backward or reverse some of the letters?
    REAL WIFE Dyslexic.
    REAL HUSBAND Dyslexic, right. And there was something about their completely mumbled, uninflected delivery that made it…even more sort of mind-numbing. It felt like it was just going around and around in circles and it felt like, at some point, I don’t know how to put it…maybe you should talk to my wife, because she’s so much better at articulating things like this—she was an arts major (and she has a spectacular big-ass ass, thanks to Fast-Cooking Ali ).
    T.S.F.N. OK, how would you describe the effect?
    REAL WIFE Well, I don’t know how much better I am at articulating any of this, but, to me, that sense of it just going around in circles, in these sort of endlessly spiraling recapitulations—it felt like, at some point, it was just going to drive me crazy. And then I thought, like, duh, this is what it feels like to have XOXO inscribing your brain with a sharp periodontal instrument. This is what it feels like to be Ike . That was one of those epiphany moments, for me at least.
    T.S.F.N. An epiphany about what exactly?
    REAL WIFE About how—and I think you could say that this is what The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fundamentally about, I mean, this is my interpretation anyway—about how we each have this ridiculously finite number of things inscribed in our minds, and that what we do, moment by moment, is continuously postulate an extrinsic “world” for ourselves by reshuffling and recapitulating these