Vance—louche, semiliterate, BMX-borne Gravy dealer — was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on a daily dose of 72 mg of Concerta (Methylphenidate) when he was twelve years old, and was kicked out of high school for “habitual truancy.” Because he’s so high from the Gravy and/or because the God XOXO (“The Ventriloquist”) is using his sharp periodontal curette to indelibly engrave these ideas into his mind, Vance now finds himself discoursing upon the “problematics of the name,” identifying naming as both a taxonomy (a “hegemonic system of classification”) and a taxidermy (an “attempt to capture, chloroform, and neuter the referent”).
He shrugs, befuddled by the stream of high-pitched gibberish that’s coming out his own mouth. Then he loses his train of thought, and they both totally crack up.
At first, it seems as if Vance is finishing Ike’s sentences, as if he’s able to anticipate verbatim what Ike’s going to say…as if they’re performing some ritual they’ve reenacted countless times before…soon they’re actually riffing back and forth, a spirited give-and-take, the teasing interplay between tabla and sitar in some woozy raga they’ve played countless times before. (Note again here, as throughout, the tellers and the told folded in on themselves.)
When Vance stops spinning the BMX wheel, Ike’s whispery rasp is suddenly foregrounded in utter silence, imparting great drama to whatever he’s saying. And so too will the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards when they re-create this scene, and cease rhythmically banging their chunky chachkas against their jerrycans of orange soda, and intone, in the sudden sepulchral hush, the words “At dawn, he commits seppuku, solemnly disemboweling himself, the nose hair still pressed between the fingers of his hand,” or “‘You were absolutely right, and you deserve to share in my success.’ The agent shrugs. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘What did you change your name to?’ ‘Dick Van Dyke.’”
Because he’s so high on Gravy, Ike mentions to Vance that the Goddesses use him as pornography when they masturbate. Ike also makes the curious statement that fate enables a Goddess to know exactly when to watch him. “If I’m doing something, say, at 10:38 PM EST on a Monday night, it’s because I’m fated to be doing it then — it’s precisely scheduled that way so a Goddess can find me easily. These are what they call my listings. Long ago the Gods ordained these things.” If only Vance were his son, perhaps Ike could be even more forthcoming and discuss his impending tryst with La Felina. Nonetheless, he does disclose to Vance that the thought of being shamelessly ogled by writhing autoerotomaniacal Goddesses makes his nutsack tingle as if it were a “sachet of plutonium potpourri.” Vance is like, “Sometimes I get so horny that one of my nuts starts gnawing on the other one.”
And it’s here that Ike makes the cryptic — and endlessly analyzed — assertion that his scrotum contains two eyeballs.
The Gravy’s made them both telepathic, so Ike knows that Vance is wondering what it’s like to fuck a Goddess, and Ike tells him — without having to say a word — that the greatest thing about having sex with a Goddess (or a human woman, for that matter) is the expression on her face when she capitulates to her own pleasure. It’s a return, a homecoming, riffs Ike. It’s that sublime moment when she defects to the old country, to her ancestral homeland, to her own private paradise— “where everything was italicized, where things happened without any discernable context, where there were no recognizable patterns, where it was all incoherent; where isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next; where a terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and T-shirts that read ‘I Don’t Do White Guys’) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear.” It’s that moment she succumbs to herself, surrenders to her depersonalized, oceanic subjectivity, uncorrupted by the narratives of fathers, husbands, village elders, etc. It’s a renunciation of modernity, thinks Ike—doomed, compulsively hermeneutic, unemployed, anarcho-primitivist, gym-rat. “What does it look like?” wonders Vance wordlessly. “Like the grimace of someone throwing herself on an electrified fence at a border crossing or the imperturbable serenity of someone about to do a reverse three-and-a-half somersault tuck into the abyss,” Ike replies in his thoughts. And Vance wonders whether Ike’s entire hermetically enclosed, paranoid, narcissistic Weltanschauung isn’t simply the fetishization of this single snapshot of female jouissance…but then he shrugs, unable to remember (never mind comprehend) a single word of what he just thought.
Ordinarily Ike probably wouldn’t be so candid with Vance, except that he’s SO high on Gravy. It’s like military-grade Gravy, and Ike suspects that Vance is being supplied by a God. And sure enough, once Vance describes the “guy” he’s getting his shit from, Ike’s almost certain that it’s someone who’s being impersonated by the God Bosco Hifikepunye. (The incident in which Ike actually encounters this “guy” is the basis for the celebrated and extensively studied episode from the Fifteenth Season, during which Ike will kneel down and say to a 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,” accentuating the dignity he bestows on the lowest of the low. Ike’s suspicion that Vance’s supplier is Bosco Hifikepunye is confirmed when Ike discovers fresh loot drops (or “God guano”) in the vicinity.)