“Damn,” Vance says, spinning the wheel of his BMX bike, the spokes rhythmically thrumming the empty Sunkist can.
Later, Ike tells Vance about his special diet for the week preceding his violent death: two meals a day, each meal consisting of 16 oz of cole slaw served in a “sacred” blue Dansk plastic salad bowl and two rounded scoops (44 g each) of BSN Syntha-6 banana-flavored protein powder mixed into 12 oz of Sunkist orange soda. “The cole slaw is for roughage,” he explains to Vance. “I want to have a clean colon when I die,” he tells him, “because when the Mossad kills you, Israeli law requires them to do a colonoscopy on your corpse as part of the autopsy. It’s this Yid fixation with the gastrointestinal tract.” Ike (SO high) totally cracks up at the sheer perversity of his rancid, self-loathing anti-Semitism. And then he tells Vance about how he had an appointment with his urologist the other day, and the Discovery Channel was on the TV in the waiting room, and there was a show about the origin of cole slaw, about how it was originally called “Cossack Saddle Cabbage,” and about how a Cossack horseman would take a razor-sharp hatchet and shred a couple of raw cabbages and pack it into a rawhide sack and actually use that as a saddle, and how, over long distances, the horse sweat would actually pickle the cabbage, producing a version of what we today call “cole slaw,” and how the name “Cole Slaw” is actually the result of a careless transliteration of the phrase “Cossack Saddle Cabbage” by a harried immigration official at Ellis Island. (Note, here, a foreshadowing of Ike’s discussion about the significance of naming.) Vance (high school dropout) is too gullible and too fucked up to know whether Ike is putting him on or not. Also, some people (e.g., experts) wonder whether Ike, in reality, wasn’t in the living room of his two-story hermitage, watching the Discovery Channel on his own TV, in his wifebeater and night-vision goggles, with his bottle of Scotch, and simply imagined that he was in the waiting room of a urologist. One never knows with Ike, who must perpetually contend with the mischievous and mind-manipulating XOXO, who, in turn, persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha. Meanwhile, in the course of discussing the change in his diet and needing to be strong for “The Last Concert” and his martyrdom, Ike apologizes to Vance for not inviting him to be in the band (The Kartons).…“You’re not a Karton, though,” he says. And Vance goes, “I know, names have talismanic power; when you’re given a name, your defining destinies magnetically accrue to that name; the infinite contingencies that arise at every given moment in your life are magnetically reconfigured by that name; a person is just a hash of glands and myelin sheathing and electrochemical impulses, but there’s no discernable context, no recognizable pattern, it’s all incoherent, until it’s organized and orchestrated into a story, into a fate, by that name.” (Experts today are in almost unanimous agreement that this scene and the scene that follows it are in the WRONG ORDER! Vance is sarcastically parroting, almost verbatim, Ike’s ideas about naming that Ike hasn’t even expressed yet, and won’t until the next scene. So, unless the Gravy has endowed Vance with uncanny powers of precognition, the two scenes should obviously be reversed. But this remains the canonical sequence, because bards — surprisingly hidebound for drug-addled vagrants — insist on continuing to recite the epic as it’s traditionally been recited for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.) At any rate, there’s something so mocking and provocative about Vance’s tone (probably because he’s SO high on Gravy) that it makes Ike momentarily furious. His great impacted anger flares, his festering Maoist / Mansonesque rage. (In his coiled fury, Ike is like Tetsuo, the Iron Man. He dreams of Red Guard maenads, of flesh-eating Maoist zombies tearing celebrities apart.) And he almost impulsively smashes Vance’s face in with his bat. And he would have done it so quickly and so brutally that Vance would never have had a chance to even pull his Glock 17 from the waistband of his jeans. But La Felina (who, of course, with a Goddess’s telescopic vision, is ogling Ike from the penthouse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) intervenes by swooping down into Jersey City and impersonating a young nanny from Côte d’Ivoire (with a spectacular big-ass ass and big-ass titties), who sashays past pushing a white baby in a stroller, distracting Ike (he imagines that look on the nanny’s face, that moment of surrender to her own indigenous pleasure, etc., etc.), and by the time she passes out of sight, Ike’s temper has cooled, and, high as he is, he smiles and shakes his head abashedly at his own propensity for explosive violence. His lust and his rage are strong. He never dithers. Thrown into this world, he maneuvers himself with the unfaltering aplomb of a somnambulist, but a somnambulist in blazing daylight, in the “blaze of the gaze.” (Whether this scene is intended to augur the hyperviolent demise of Ike Karton or this is merely identifiable with the benefit of hindsight remains a question contested by experts, but it is surely tempting to see in the overt symbolism of Ike’s bat and Vance’s Glock a prefiguration of the epic’s death-drenched climax.) As if to atone for his transient wrath, Ike offers Vance another fascinating factoid: that, in the week before he himself was guillotined, Maximilien Robespierre (another one of La Felina’s “boy-toys”) subsisted on black coffee and marzipan.
“I may not understand life,” Ike says, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, “but I know how to die magnificently.”
“For real,” Vance avers, spinning the wheel.
“I love my fate,” Ike says, channeling Friedrich Nietzsche.