REAL HUSBAND All right, let me put you on hold for a moment and I’ll check on that for you.
The REAL HUSBAND’s MOH (Music on Hold) is Richard Wagner’s “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Tristan und Isolde. Several moments pass, and then—
REAL HUSBAND You still there?
CALLER Yes, I’m here.
REAL HUSBAND Sorry that took so long. I’m newly sightless. The address of the Gristedes is 251 West 86th Street at Broadway.
CALLER 251? You’re kidding.
REAL HUSBAND No, why?
CALLER That is so fucking weird.
REAL HUSBAND Why?
CALLER Because 251 is the number of times the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. And it’s the address of the first place where Ike had a butcher job. You don’t think there’s any mystical significance in that?
REAL HUSBAND Honestly, I think it’s a complete coincidence.
CALLER You seriously think the fact that the phrase “punishingly repetitive” is used 251 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and the fact that the address of the Gristedes where Ike Karton had his first butcher job is 251 West 86th Street is a complete coincidence?
REAL HUSBAND I really do.
CALLER You’re being serious?
REAL HUSBAND Yeah.
There’s a long pause…then—
CALLER It says in the Fourteenth Season, “Even within his small, haimish Jersey City neighborhood of attached two-story brick homes, Ike conducts himself with the guarded reserve and fateful solemnity of an exile. Doomed hero, dear to the Gods, unwavering, set apart by his fealty and his inexorable fate, but never evincing the hauteur of a freak, he calls his bowel movements his ‘little brother.’” I don’t completely understand what that means.
REAL HUSBAND You know how some women call their period their “friend”? It’s sort of like that. Ike is very courtly. He’d never say, “I have to go take a crap” or “a dump” or anything like that. He’d say, “My little brother is visiting.” Or “Excuse me, I think my little brother is here.” Or “Could you pull into that rest stop over there, I didn’t expect my little brother to get here so suddenly. He must have taken an earlier flight.” Or “He must have decided to take the Acela, instead of the regular Amtrak.”
CALLER Oh…I get it.
REAL HUSBAND And the closer Ike gets to the violent death which is his inexorable fate, the more intensely kindred he feels with things that are considered by most people to be base or odious, which is one of the things that makes him such a hero, I think. So there’s also a symbolic component to his calling a bowel movement his brother. It’s the same sort of thing as in the Fifteenth Season, in that scene where he and Vance are going to meet the God who’s supposedly selling hallucinogenic Gravy to Vance, and some guy on the street hawks up a big gob of phlegm and spits it on the sidewalk, and Ike stops, and he kneels down, and he says to the gob of phlegm, “Fräulein, my band, The Kartons, is giving a Final Concert later this week, and I’d be very much honored if you would attend.” This is Ike, with his sort of plainspoken eloquence, expressing the paradoxical nature of his character — destined for the glory of a martyr’s immortality but, at the same time, fervently wedded to those things most despised, most anathematized, to the lowest of the low.
CALLER You’re the one who’s actually reciting what I’m saying, right?
REAL HUSBAND Yes. You’re like a Japanese bunraku puppet and I’m like the chanter (the tayu) who performs all the characters’ voices.
CALLER So does it have to say “CALLER” like that? I don’t feel like being some sort of boldface signifier. Can’t I just be part of your recitation?
“Sure.”
“That’s better. Thank you. It was like being on speakerphone before. I want to ask you a question about these itinerant children who are toting the surplus NBA ball bags around and gathering severed bard-heads and selling them to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Doesn’t this drive home the whole issue of how detrimental cheap foreign labor is to American workers? If you have an unlimited supply of these vagrant kids outside the country who are willing to sell severed bard-heads for several rupees a head, it doesn’t matter to an American severed-bard-head scavenger how quickly our economy recovers or how fast it grows — the market value of a severed bard-head is going to be several rupees.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“A tariff. A tariff on foreign-scavenged severed bard-heads.”
“I don’t believe in tariffs or quotas or any form of protectionism. I think that protectionism leads to reduced consumer choice, higher prices, lower-quality goods, and, in the long run, economic stagnation and coercive monopolies.”
There’s a long pause…then—
“What does ‘military-grade ass-cheese’ mean?”
“I’ve always thought that military-grade ass-cheese is just basically the shit that gums up the works in your life. Do you know what I mean? This is just my interpretation, but I think it’s basically the shit that just fucks everything up.”
“OK. Is it true that Ike buys a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner?”
“No, that’s not true. This whole business of Ike buying a grenade launcher from an undercover FBI agent at the Miss America Diner is what experts call a ‘noncanonical blooper.’”
“But is it in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack or not?”
“It is now. Thanks to you. Thanks to you bringing it up.”
“OK. I guess this is my last question: There’s a vignette involving a pet groomer named Rebecca Nesbit and a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon by the name of Dr. Giancarlo Capella. And I’m not sure why it’s even included in the epic — if, in fact, it is — because it doesn’t appear to involve Ike or any of the Gods. And I was just wondering if it’s also considered a noncanonical blooper. And I’m also curious as to whether you think that noncanonical bloopers are the work of XOXO.”
“First of all, yes, this is an out-and-out noncanonical blooper that was not part of the original epic, although, again — as of right now — it’s considered totally authentic. Rebecca Nesbit was a pet groomer (actually, I think she advertised herself a ‘pet stylist’) who, following her divorce in Jersey City, New Jersey, moved out to Southern California with her kids and had a laser vaginal rejuvenation performed by Dr. Giancarlo Capella in Beverly Hills. As a result of the procedure, Nesbit’s vaginal muscle strength was increased so excessively that it resulted in traumatic penile injuries to two of her boyfriends—Donald De Vries, who, during intercourse with Nesbit, suffered a tear of the tunica albuginea (an injury sometimes referred to as a penile ‘fracture’), and Sonny Ghazarian, who, under similar circumstances, suffered a crushed penile shaft with extraalbugineal and bilateral cavernosal hematomas. De Vries and Ghazarian filed a joint medical-malpractice lawsuit against Capella (who was uniformly portrayed in the press as a combination Richard Simmons / Josef Mengele, or luridly compared to the Mantle brothers, the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers, or to Dr. Heiter, the demented surgeon in Tom Six’s The Human Centipede). In a dramatic courtroom demonstration before a rapt gallery, a pneumatic squeeze-bulb dynamometer was used to show that Nesbit now had a vaginal grip-strength of well over 4,500 pounds per square inch (PSI). (Keep in mind that a commercial trash compactor typically has a maximum operating pressure of only about 3,000 PSI.)”