The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner Page A

bard-heads,” there were several who became fixated upon the significance of the line “We have just received confirmation that only one head is still chanting—let me repeat that: only one head is still chanting.” Contrary to their colleagues, who’d confected a theory of myriad free-floating severed bard-heads—that is, swarms of airborne anthropomorphic “scrubbing bubbles” or “nano-drones” whose punishingly repetitive high-pitched chants comprise what we think of today as The Sugar Frosted Nutsack —these experts contend that there is, in fact, only one severed bard-head. These experts—who collectively have become known as the “Jersey City School” because most of them actually reside in Jersey City and are, in fact, all people who babysat or taught or coached Ike when he was a child (including his driver’s ed instructor and the chubby babysitter with the big-ass titties who “mildly molested” Ike while they watched F-Troop together)—believe that “the one severed bard-head” is inhabited by all the Gods, which accounts for the polyvocal buzzing or droning quality of the head. They have determined, allegedly through the use of spy satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and information provided clandestinely by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, that “the one severed bard-head” containing the Gods is kept in a minibar on the top floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. All of which leads inevitably to the question: Is “the one severed bard-head” Ike himself?
    The identification of “the one severed bard-head” with Ike himself is persistent and completely understandable. Of course, one can hear in the cacophonous buzz that emanates from Ike ’s head an echo—an analogue—of Claude Lévi-Strauss ’s enigmatic dictum “the myths think themselves in me.” Also, the bards’ recitations are garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. Ike ’s continuous self-​narration is garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible. They are analogous. But are they one and the same? Isn’t Ike ’s self-narration (and, of course, this very speculation, these very sentences) instantly and retroactively incorporated into the epic The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and dutifully transmitted from generation to generation of chanting, drug-addled, blind “severed bard-heads” who maintain their trance-inducing beat by banging their chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda? An infinitely recursive epic that subtends and engulfs everything about it (i.e., everything extrinsic to it), and that has, for tens of thousands of years, at any given moment, been subject to the impish and sometimes spiteful corruptions and interpolations (or the out-and-out sabotage) of XOXO , presents a phenomenon that’s difficult to get your mind around.
The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head
    REAL HUSBAND
    He abhors celebrity
    And yet covets immortality.
    What is the meaning of the paradox?
    What are its latent properties?
     
    REAL WIFE
    These portions can seem hopelessly corrupt.
    XOXO is winning the battle to ruin the book,
    But he hasn’t won the war.
     
    REAL HUSBAND & REAL WIFE
    I’m a severed bard-head!
    I can’t stop reciting what I started!
    This shit ain’t for the fainthearted!
    We ain’t toasted, we Pop-Tarted!
    So dump me in the toilet bowl and flush me!
    Throw me in a garbage truck and crush me!
    A trash compactor or a wine press works OK,
    It’s like all that stupid shit in the Cirque du Soleil!
    Suicide-by-cop sounds fun,
    But you can never find a motherfuckin’ cop
    When you need one!
     
    REAL HUSBAND
    Some scholars have recently compared
    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack to Abacus 2007-AC1,
    The mortgage investment vehicle which
    Goldman Sachs VP Fabrice Tourre created.
     
    REAL WIFE
    And which he described,
    In an e-mail to his girlfriend,
    As a “Frankenstein” creation,
    “A product of pure intellectual masturbation,
    The type of thing which you invent telling