So he allows your story to be told
In a quasi-coherent way,
You must kill your father, etc.
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!
The REAL HUSBAND and REAL WIFE stop tapping their wedding rings on their cans of Sunkist orange soda, and the tempo slows.
The sky darkens.
REAL WIFE I just want to tell you something. We both knew exactly what we were getting into when we signed on to this whole Sugar Frosted Nutsack thing…
REAL HUSBAND I realize that.
REAL WIFE I’m fated to leave you for a blind, drug-addled bard, and then you have to enucleate your own eyeballs. It’s all foretold in the epic. You have to really do it — I mean, the eye thing.
REAL HUSBAND I know.
REAL WIFE No regrets?
REAL HUSBAND In the Thirteenth Season, when Ike tells The Waitress at the Miss America diner about his intention (and destiny) to commit suicide-by-cop and thus enable his family to collect on his life insurance policy, The Waitress says that “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.” And I believe that.
(The following is sung to the melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.)
REAL WIFE
At the risk of hoisting myself
On my own petard,
I’m leaving you
For a blind, drug-addled bard.
REAL HUSBAND
What about Cupid’s Stigmata?
REAL WIFE
My heart’s started an Intifada!
As she departs, he calls out to her—
REAL HUSBAND
Instead of humiliating myself
By begging you to come back,
I’ll devote the rest of my life
To chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack!
He takes a melon baller from the picnic basket…
REAL HUSBAND
’Scuse me while I kiss the sky!
…and blinds himself.
We hear the opening bars of the Mister Softee jingle softly repeating over and over again, as if from a vast distance…over and over and over again…for hours, for days…months…years…as if for an eternity…
Until—
REAL HUSBAND We’ve got a caller.
Apparently the Mister Softee jingle is the ringtone for the Husband’s cellphone, which he retrieves from his jacket pocket.
REAL HUSBAND Hello, you’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
CALLER Hello?
REAL HUSBAND You’re on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
CALLER I have a question for Ike.
REAL HUSBAND Ike’s not here. He’s at the Miss America Diner. I can give you his cellphone number or the number for the diner.
CALLER Maybe you could help me.
REAL HUSBAND I’ll try.
CALLER OK. I have a couple of questions, but let me start with this one: why is Ike’s daughter’s name never revealed?
REAL HUSBAND Out of respect for her privacy.
CALLER OK. I know this question will probably make me seem hopelessly provincial, but…why is there so much sex in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack? You can’t listen to even thirty seconds of a public recitation without hearing these drug-addled, vagrant bards chanting about cocks and pussies and clits and tits and balls and asses and shiksa asses and spectacular big-ass asses and hot Jew jizz and fucking and masturbating.…Why?
REAL HUSBAND Because it’s sex-drenched and death-drenched.
CALLER But why is it sex-drenched and death-drenched?
REAL HUSBAND Because Ike is obsessed with sex and death. The seventeenth-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, describing the proper attitude of a warrior, wrote, “Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.” The Marquis de Sade wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Combine the two and you have Ike Karton. (FYI, Vincent van Gogh’s last words before he shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise were “Fuck Kirk Douglas.”)
CALLER There are just these punishingly repetitive references to anal sex toys and bedraggled, sweaty, chubby, mature, subproletarian women and hairy, Asian, midget, hypoglycemic, type-O-negative plumpers who squirt, etc.
REAL HUSBAND There is also — and I don’t know if you’re aware of this — a punishingly repetitive use of the phrase “punishingly repetitive.” In fact, the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times (including this sentence) in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.
CALLER Is there any mystical significance to the number 251?
REAL HUSBAND Not to my knowledge. But did you know that it’s impossible for a horse to vomit and that Turkish Taffy was Harry Houdini’s favorite candy?
CALLER It says, “Ike suffers from irregular clonic jerks of the head and neck ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old.” What college was he attending at the time?
REAL HUSBAND Ike was going to F.I.T., but after one semester he dropped out and worked part-time in the meat department at a Gristedes on the Upper West Side.
CALLER You don’t happen to have the exact address, do you?
REAL HUSBAND Why?
CALLER Because I’m planning a weekend where I go and visit all the key sites in Ike’s life, like the barbershop where he went as a kid and experienced “the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid, Jerry Vale (‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties,” and the park bench in Lincoln Park where he read “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” to Ruthie when they were dating, and the two-story brick “hermitage” where he and Ruthie and their daughter live, etc. So I’d definitely want to go to the Gristedes where he had his first butcher job.