The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner Page B

ridiculously finite number of things. But it’s a completely closed system—there’s no “world” actually extrinsic to it. What makes Ike so magnificent is that he’s pared down his deck to a single card, The Hero —a man standing on his stoop, on the prow of his hermitage, striking that “contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus.”
    T.S.F.N. Your husband wasn’t kidding. That’s some straight-​up hyperarticulate, high-pitched shit!
    REAL HUSBAND (gushing) I told you! She’s pissah smaht! She’s phenomenological!!
    T.S.F.N. What else did you especially like?
    REAL WIFE There were these two tiny, busty bards with the T-shirts that said “I Don’t Do White Guys.” I loved them. They reminded me of Snooki .…Like weird little twin Snookies .
    T.S.F.N. What else?
    REAL WIFE The “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” list made me cry. It’s so beautiful.
    T.S.F.N. It doesn’t bother you that it was plagiarized from Oprah ’s magazine?
    REAL WIFE No, are you kidding?! I think that for a man to steal something from Oprah ’s magazine and say he wrote it—to do that for a woman you’re falling in love with—that is just the most romantic thing in the world. Seriously. I think Ike is super-sexy. Every time the bards describe his body and talk about his guinea-T and how he’s completely shredded and his vascularity and how you can see his butt-crack when he genuflects toward the Burj Khalifa, that kind of thing, it’s a huge turn-on for me. It makes me sweaty. I have to start fanning myself with my program.
    T.S.F.N. That’s funny. Wouldn’t you rather see a reenactment of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack than just hear people reciting the story? Wouldn’t that be even more powerful?
    REAL WIFE I’d rather listen to something than see it. It says in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, in Season Eight: “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.” And I believe that. And I’d certainly rather hear a story told by spaced-out blind bards than see it acted out by celebrities.
    T.S.F.N. You mean like in a movie?
    REAL WIFE Right.
    T.S.F.N. You don’t like movies?
    REAL WIFE I don’t particularly want to see two hours of George Clooney playing a human resource specialist or Gwyneth Paltrow pretending to die of the plague or Ben Stiller portraying some disaffected slacker, no. When we come to hear a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we’re not coming to hear fucking rich celebrities pretending to be bards. These are real bards. They are really blind. They are really itinerant. They are really high on ecstasy or psilocybin mushrooms or hallucinogenic borscht. They are not playing fucked-up bards. They are fucked-up.
    REAL HUSBAND Also, we love the whole ambience here, the whole scene—the way people bring their families, and their straw mats and folding chairs, and sit out here for hours, and bring food. And the way they chant along. It’s a little like mass karaoke.
    T.S.F.N. What did you guys bring?
    REAL HUSBAND We packed a lunch. We brought, let’s see…we brought shawarma, tongue sandwiches, Fig Newtons, orange soda, of course.
    T.S.F.N. How did you and your wife meet?
    REAL HUSBAND Well, the funny thing is—we’re both from Jersey City, but we met in Manhattan. I was working as a waiter at this place on Seventh Avenue and Nineteenth Street. And my wife was going to Parsons at the time. We met at the Limelight, actually.
    T.S.F.N. So you were waiting tables and…anything else? Trying to become an actor? Musician? Putting yourself through school?
    REAL HUSBAND I’d actually enrolled in a songwriting workshop at The