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 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 New School. But I got terminal, fucking insurmountable writer’s block immediately. Like the first day of the class. And it was crushing because I’d really made up my mind that I wanted to be a songwriter, even though I’d never written a song before. I’d never really written anything except lists, actually. I was a great list maker. So, anyway, I decided — and this is going to sound crazy, but it’s the Gods’ truth — I decided that I’d try to become gay, because so many of my favorite songwriters were gay, like Cole Porter and Elton John and the Pet Shop Boys, and I was thinking that might sort of jump-start me creatively. So I went to one of those Christian therapists who “cure” gay people, and I asked him if he’d take whatever he says to them, y’know, whatever secret incantation he uses, and say it to me backward, so I’d actually become converted to being gay.
T.S.F.N. That’s so funny.
REAL HUSBAND Yeah. Well, it didn’t work anyway. And then the two of us met at the Limelight and started dating, so the whole gay conversion thing became moot. And it’s probably a good thing I never became a lyricist or a jingle-writer, because she has to help me finish my sentences all the time!
T.S.F.N. How about you? What were you doing at Parsons?