Free The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner Page B

can’t understand anything that the bards are chanting, they are creating each time, almost out of whole cloth, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for themselves, out of what they think they hear. After subjecting thousands of hours of taped recitations to sophisticated audiological analysis, he wrote, “It is more than likely that there is no originative, coherent epic, that there is merely a succession of misinterpretations of the bards’ muffled cacophony, of their static, their white noise.” Emig , an enigmatic figure, started his career as a semiprofessional hockey player. For several years he was a forward for Thetford Mines Isothermic, a team in the Ligue Nord-​Américaine de Hockey (LNAH), which is generally considered the most violent hockey league in the world. Emig ’s teammates on Thetford Mines Isothermic included veteran NHL defenseman Yves Racine and right winger Gaetan Royer , who played games with the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2001–02 season and also played for the Bartercard Gold Coast Blue Tongues in the Australian Ice Hockey League (AIHL) in 2008. Emig was forced to retire from professional hockey as a result of post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and a succession of DUI arrests. It was then that he became interested in the field of forensic audiology, received his Masters of Applied Science degree several years later, and soon thereafter became an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Forensic Audiology at Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida. Almost immediately upon publication of Emig ’s study, “Castles of Hardened Bullshit,” his work was completely discredited by discoveries that he’d crudely altered much of his audiological research to suit his thesis. Less than a week after these revelations surfaced, Emig was found dead at his gym, Bodies-N-Motion, on East Main Street in Leesburg. At first it was naturally assumed that Emig , distraught over the self-inflicted damage to his academic reputation, had committed suicide. But forensic allergists were able to determine that the scholar had succumbed to food-associated, exercise-induced anaphylaxis. Emig , who was allergic to shellfish, was also receiving weekly immunotherapeutic injections of dust-mite extract to treat his chronic allergic rhinoconjunctivitis. On the afternoon of his death, he’d ordered a bowl of num pachok chon (a Cambodian freshwater-snail noodle soup) from a food truck parked near campus. He’d been intrigued by a photograph of the dish taped to the truck, but was completely unaware of its ingredients. After consuming the soup, Emig went to the gym and began a vigorous session of aerobic exercise. Within a half hour, he reportedly broke out in giant hives, began to wheeze, vomited, collapsed across the elliptical, and died. There’s a significant cross-reactivity between house dust mites and snails, and the combination of dust-mite extract in the immunotherapy injections with the shellfish in the noodle soup and the strenuous exercise proved to be too much for Jake Emig ’s system to withstand. Soon after his death, a law was enacted—known today as “Jake’s Law”—that makes it a federal crime to knowingly sell any noodle soup containing freshwater snails to anyone receiving immunotherapy injections of dust-mite extract.
    Intriguingly, when volunteers at Manatee Community College in Bradenton, Florida, who’d been locked in sweltering Porta-Johns and subjected to bards chanting the words “sugar frosted nutsack” nonstop for twelve hours, were asked what visual images occurred to them most frequently, the majority reported envisioning a white planet with a kind of scrotal topography (i.e., “ridged,” “wrinkled,” “corrugated,” etc.). Some simply saw the planet spinning in empty space. Others saw themselves actually on the planet, in a car on an empty highway traversing a desolate, bluish-white, furrowed landscape which radiated out infinitely to the horizon. One of the students ( Heidi , a junior