Free The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner Page A

minutes and thirty-three seconds)—and Ike immediately realizes, to his horror, that having Cage ’s 4'33" as a ringtone would essentially mean that he’d have no ringtone, and that he’d almost inevitably miss La Felina ’s call, which, for Ike , is literally the booty-call of a lifetime; and they’d already know that on the morning of his father’s funeral, Ike wakes up with a incredibly gross (“grotesquely purulent”) case of conjunctivitis and, after delivering the eulogy (a phantasmagorically anti-Semitic diatribe, akin to Céline ’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre ), he tries to pull the pillars of the synagogue down and crush the congregation; and that his daughter gives birth to a half-divine, half-mortal infant named “ Colter Dale ”; and that soon after The Kartons begin their “Last Concert” (which happens to be their first concert), the ATF/Mossad raid on the compound begins; and that after retreating into his two-story brick “hermitage” and reciting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in its entirety to the infant Colter Dale , Ike is killed. (And they know that, in a coda, Colter Dale —who mythologically functions as Ike ’s successor—explains how Ike ’s so-called “delusions” are actually irrefutable proof of the Gods’ existence.)
    So audiences do not necessarily have to concentrate on each word, gesture, or nuance of meaning that comes from the bards. If your neighbor talks, you don’t try to quiet him. The overall impression at most recitations is chaos, as food vendors, children, and adults ceaselessly move up and down the aisles. No one can be expected to sit through an eight- or nine-hour performance without talking, eating, or getting up. Young children romp in the aisles, and when the action gets exciting they mass by the footlights like moths drawn to a flame. The predominantly female audience will continue to talk long after a recitation has begun. Many people doze during less interesting scenes and, in fact, bring their own straw mats on which they sit and sleep.
    But when the bards’ recitations get particularly lurid (e.g., the scene in the Tenth Season in which Ike goes to his daughter’s school to have a meeting with her math teacher, loses his temper, and threatens to sodomize the teacher if he doesn’t agree to give her a passing grade), spectators leap to their feet and the children howl with uproarious laughter, clap, whistle, and yell out encouragement. It may shock some people unfamiliar with orally transmitted epics that audiences would find men threatening each other with anal rape so entertaining. Perhaps it’s not hard to understand why uneducated, working-class, middle-aged women might find homoerotic sadism wildly diverting—but children? It could very possibly be that the children don’t even understand the content of what’s being chanted here at all (the language in this Season is almost impenetrably thick with de Sadean bombast) and are being whipped into paroxysms of excitement by nothing more than the hysterical cacophony of the bards. Also, the scene has an undeniable slapstick quality, with all its tumultuous, pants-at-the-knees, chase-me-around-the-office antics. And usually bards portray the math teacher as such a stock commedia dell’arte villain—i.e. the sanctimonious martinet moonlighting as JV basketball coach and driver’s ed instructor, etc.—that it’s easy to cheer on Ike , even if you disapprove of his cell-block bluster.
    There was one prominent and controversial expert who actually believed that the traditional style of the bards (i.e., slurred, mumbling, etc.) so garbles the content of what they are chanting that almost no literal meaning is actually ever transmitted. Jake S. Emig , in an erudite and exquisitely reasoned treatise, only slightly marred by vitriolic ad hominem attacks on several female colleagues (who’d reportedly objected to explicit photographs of himself that he’d texted them), contended that since audiences