They are SO high.
This Gravy is super-potent.
It’s military-grade Gravy.
Their eyes are glazed over and orange dribble runs down their chins…
The mesmerizing metronomic tick
of the spokes thrumming against
the empty Sunkist can…
Vance spins the BMX wheel not as if it were a Himalayan prayer wheel (as some shit-for-brains experts have stupidly suggested).…He spins it like Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. Gretchen is singing at her spinning wheel, in anguished erotic contemplation of Faust. “Mein armer Kopf / Ist mir verrückt, / Mein aremer Sinn / Ist mir zerstückt.” (“My poor head / Is crazy to me, / My poor mind / Is torn apart.”)
Like Gretchen, Vance seems here like someone smitten, someone besotted. Yes, Vance is captivated by Ike’s diffident magnificence, his “death-drenched luminosity.” But there’s something vaguely homoerotic in the way he absently spins his wheel and stares vacantly at his girlfriend’s father, something of the grotto-groping Goddesses’ vacuous gazes, that so perfectly reflects the slack drift of the masturbating mind.
“Oh my god, we love the same song!” Vance says at one point, in such a lilting tone of blithe, unalloyed affection that it’s hard not to read at least some element of homoeroticism into the remark.
Just as the piano in Schubert’s Lied stops as Gretchen becomes completely distracted by the thought of Faust’s kiss and forgets to keeps spinning—“Mein Busen drängt sich / Nach ihm hin. / Ach dürft ich fassen / Und halten ihn, / Und küssen ihn, / So wie ich wollt, / An seinen Küssen / Vergehen sollt!” (“My bosom urges / Itself toward him. / Ah, might I grasp / And hold him! / And kiss him, / As I would wish, / At his kisses / I should die!”)—Vance forgets to keep spinning the BMX wheel…
At this point, there is a break — a missing section — in the epic of nearly four hours. This has come to be known as The Big Lacuna. Reconstruction of The Big Lacuna can never be more than conjectural, but its contents, at least in outline, are tolerably clear. (Experts consider The Big Lacuna to be over when Vance snaps out of his reverie and asks Ike whom he’d rather fuck, Jenny Sanford or Silda Spitzer.) Blame for The Big Lacuna obviously and immediately falls on XOXO. Given the tendency of the embittered poet manqué to brazenly interpolate something gratuitously titillating or abstruse or jarringly incongruous, i.e., to preemptively corrupt the epic beyond redemption, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he’d capriciously paralyzed Ike and Vance for four hours. But what other means might XOXO have at his disposal to cause a Big Lacuna in the epic? Well, he could go directly after the bards themselves. He could use a nebulized mixture of military-grade ass-cheese and 3-Methylfentanyl (the aerosolized fentanyl derivative that Russian Spetsnaz forces used against Chechen separatists in the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis), and he could have any one of those department store perfume saleswomen simply sashay by a group of bards as they recite the epic and casually spray a small amount of the mixture in their vicinity. This would be enough to cause a Big Lacuna. XOXO, who says he’s retired and lives on his pension, dismisses any such allegations as “absolute nonsense.” Speaking by telephone from his hyperborean hermitage, he says, “I have no hand in it.” He adds, “T.S.F.N. — General Command is pulling the wool over your eyes”—referring to the splinter group allied with a radical faction of exiled bards. But we all know what XOXO is capable of doing to the bards. He can make some of their pianissimo phrases breathy. He can cause them to suddenly chant in a laughable falsetto or stutter helplessly. And, of course, he can make them recite high-pitched gibberish. (Because the bards are traditionally blind, drug-addled vagrants, experts tend to underplay what great shape they need to be in, especially to perform some of the more physically demanding and rigorously choreographed reenactments in the epic, e.g., when Ike is pepper-sprayed at the Miss America Diner or when he chases his daughter’s math teacher around the room or restrains himself from bludgeoning Vance with his baseball bat, etc. A bard’s heart rate can surge from 60 beats a minute to over 240 beats a minute during a recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. The lateral G-forces exerted on a bard who’s rocking back and forth to the rhythmic ostinato of spokes against a jerrycan could be as much as 4.5 G, which means about 25 kg of pressure on the neck.)
Whatever the cause of The Big Lacuna, for the entirety of its duration, Ike remains frozen in one immutable cataleptic posture. This tableau vivant demarcates in physical space the deep authenticity of Ike’s mode of experiencing the passage of time — to strike a single pose under the unflinchingly prurient gaze of the moaning Goddesses, a gaze which casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus, the “glaze of the gaze,” that Abercrombie & Fitch model and 90210 star Trevor Donovan analyzes in his book The Jade(d) G(l)aze: Twelfth-Century Goryeo Celadon Pottery and Ceramics.
Ike presses himself like a gargoyle or a figurehead on the prow of a ship against the onrush of his own fate.
This tableau of Ike batting flies from his armpits as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel is, arguably, one of the most famous and iconic in the world.
And although the epic reaches a state of absolute stasis here, this continues to be one of the single most popular parts of the epic repertoire. Its hieratic solemnity and magisterial, almost inert choreography have given rise to comparisons with Noh drama, Khmer royal ballet, and Indian classical dance forms, including Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Kuchipudi. Connoisseurs appreciate the degree to which bards are willing to deform themselves into stunted and crippled shapes as they reenact the interminable tableau, risking grotesque injuries (although probably only the most discerning cognoscenti could distinguish these stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures from the stoop-shouldered, drooling, cataleptic postures that the drug-addled vagrants typically assume, even when they’re not performing the epic). A bard is expected to have extraordinarily precise control over every single part of his body. For instance, when reenacting the scene in which Ike is distracted from bludgeoning Vance with his bat by the Goddess La Felina, who swoops down into Jersey City and impersonates 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, the bard, miming Ike with his brandished bat frozen in mid-air, must remain perfectly still except for the gentle rising and falling of his erection which choreographically registers the modalities of Ike’s emotions, achieving a tumescence and a flaccidity that’s precisely synchronized with the narration of the nanny’s approach and recession into the distance.