“This is exactly why we need comprehensive tort reform in this country. There’s an epidemic of these frivolous lawsuits and it’s bankrupting our health care system. I have a very good friend who’s a pet stylist in Jersey City, and he’s been doing 2,500-PSI vaginal rejuvenations on some of his dogs, but he told me that because of all the publicity generated by the case in Beverly Hills, he’s had to stop. He can’t afford the insurance anymore or risk the litigation.”
“There are a number of experts who actually think that Nesbit and Capella were impersonated by Fast-Cooking Ali and La Felina.”
“Why?”
“You gotta look at the injured parties here, the plaintiffs, these guys Donnie De Vries and Sonny Ghazarian. They’re exactly the kind of rich, privileged, good-looking scumbags that Fast-Cooking Ali and La Felina loathe with a passion, tooling down the PCH in their little Porsche 911 Cabriolets, in their fuckin’ Moss Lipow sunglasses.”
There’s a long pause…
“You there?”
Another long, long pause…then—
“Are you still on?…I can barely hear you.…I’m going to put you back up in boldface.”
CALLER I was just saying that I was listening to Tony Bennett singing “The Shadow of Your Smile” on YouTube. And I read this comment that someone had posted about how “The Shadow of Your Smile” had been her late father’s favorite song. And how he always used to sing it walking down the street, and how, when this person was a little girl, she would be so embarrassed and beg him to stop singing. And she ends the post by saying, “Oh, what I would give to hear him sing one more time!” And that made me so sad that I just started crying. And it’s so weird because my own father died recently, and I don’t really think of him that much and when I do it’s not with much emotion. My first conscious memory of my dad — he’s wearing one of those, y’know, those belligerent T-shirts that say, like, “Stop Reading My Shirt, Asshole!” and these polyester Hawaiian swim trunks, and Velcro sandals he got at Dollar Tree, and socks, and he’s drinking fuckin’ Keystone Light from a go-cup, and I was like, “Ewwwww, that’s my dad?” So, y’know, I don’t really miss him in that painful way you miss someone when you’re really grieving. But that comment on YouTube made me feel so much intense grief on behalf of this person I don’t even know. It’s so weird…
REAL HUSBAND I don’t think that’s so weird at all. I completely get that. Everyone typically thinks that when you’re intimately close to someone, like your husband or your wife or your mom or your dad, that it opens you up so much to all these powerful feelings of connectedness and enables you to understand the other person with such incredible empathy. But I really think that when you become habituated to someone, it can actually do completely the opposite — totally anesthetize you, totally numb you out and blind you to the other person. But then you’ll be somewhere completely random or you’ll just be reading, and you’ll come upon something so abstract, like, I don’t know, an equation in a math book or some mask in a museum or a comment by a complete stranger on YouTube, and suddenly you’re just flooded with all this raw emotion. I really think that the idea of grieving for a father, I mean in theory—the abstract notion of children grieving for fathers — can actually cause us to experience so much more anguish than our own personal grief for our own fathers.…Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?
CALLER I love you. If your wife ever leaves you for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, I’ll be waiting.
REAL HUSBAND (cuing Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You”) She’s already left me for a vagrant drug-addled bard.
There’s a long pause…like an eternity…and then…nothing.
It’s sometimes said that, here, for a moment, the world disappears, that there’s a fade to pure white…like a T-shirt bleached of sentiment…like an empty page…like the tabula rasa of an erased mind…and then—
a flourish of calligraphy:
Eleventh-Century Poem by Su Tung-p’o Entitled
“Re: Ike Karton”
Ike is known to sometimes walk backward
To leave misleading footprints.
Or to wade through puddles,
Leaving no tracks at all…
P.S. Ike also walks backward to hide his face from security cameras.
Backward, Ike enters the Miss America Diner. With the exception of a Chloë Sevigny doppelgänger who frets over cold pancakes in the corner, all the other patrons are the ostentatiously generic people whose photos are already in the picture frames you buy at the store. They are the world’s most famous nobodies: Joe Shmoe and John Q. Public sit at the counter drinking coffee and eating buttered rolls; Every Tom, Dick, and Harry are squeezed into a banquette across from Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, tucking into large breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and toast; Jane Doe and Your Average American Sports Fan clasp hands across unopened menus on a table. They all fall silent as Ike, dear to the Gods, Warlord of His Stoop, the world’s most anonymous somebody (“illustrious and unknown”), enters, backward. How Can T.S.F.N. Defeat XOXO?
The Fifteenth Season is rough going. Many people find sitting through a public recitation of the Fifteenth Season almost unbearably harrowing. It features some of XOXO’s most vicious and cunning assaults on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and includes attacks on the itinerant bards themselves, attacks that leave hundreds massacred, maimed, and mutilated. It is also the first time that XOXO resorts to such “asymmetric tactics” as deploying what’s referred to as “military-grade ass-cheese” and momentarily effacing the world and scrawling across its white emptiness in his elegantly insouciant calligraphy. (In a recent poll, 59 percent said XOXO was winning, only 21 percent thought T.S.F.N. was making progress.) Also, in a ruthless effort to humiliate Ike, at the behest of the Goddess Shanice who remains (and will forever remain) implacably hostile to Ike for omitting her from his list, “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.),” XOXO steals ideas from the minds of exceptionally brilliant scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars and transplants them into the minds of dim-witted celebrities, enabling them to write erudite and abstruse books, which are released by prestigious publishing houses to tumultuous critical acclaim. Within the same three-month period, reality-TV star Heidi Montag comes out with Capitalism and the Florentine Renaissance (Hill & Wang), Kate Gosselin quickly follows with Mirror Neurons: The Bio-Epistemology of Countertransference (W. W. Norton & Company), and Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan weighs in with two prodigious tomes, The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics (Abrams) and Proust, Mallarmé, Racine: The Intersexuality of the Text / The Intertextuality of Sex (Yale University Press).