Among the world’s most illustrious blind, drug-addled bards, Meir and Aaron Poznak—feral twins abandoned as infants by their parents at Bergdorf Goodman and raised by a wild pack of Yorkipoos near the pond at the southeast corner of Central Park — are especially celebrated for their performances of the “Bat and Nanny” scene, to which they have added their own inimitable flourish. They can actually swivel their testicles from left to right in tandem to signify Ike “watching” the nanny as she sashays by — a sly allusion to, and literalization of, his cryptic assertion that his scrotum contains “two eyeballs.” In addition to their ultrasophisticated interpretations of Ike’s complex and hieratic poses during The Big Lacuna, the Poznak Twins are also renowned as unrivaled virtuosos of “high-pitched gibberish.” (Recently, Meir Poznak has receded from the public eye, purportedly becoming the shadowy leader of T.S.F.N. — General Command.)
Meanwhile…
Ike seems to see two suns blazing in the heavens, and new mothers who had left their babies behind at home, their breasts swollen with milk, nestling gazelles and young wolves in their arms, suckling them.
“Is this a private jihad, or can anyone join?” a nymph/horsefly murmurs to Ike, flitting from armpit to armpit.
Ike’s aura is sugar frosted.
Vance is lost in some hallucinatory K-hole of his own.
The mesmerizing metronomic ostinato of the spokes ticking against the empty Sunkist can…the high-pitched gibberish of the nymph/horseflies (the “Ikettes”)…the buzz of the unmanned drones that represent Ike’s inescapable destiny…
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.
They’re SO high.
They’re SO FUCKING high.
According to a report issued by the organization Psychopharmacologists Without Boundaries, the amount of hallucinogenic Gravy which could be contained in the period at the end of this sentence, if ingested on an empty stomach, would be enough to cause a person to mistake a rocket-propelled grenade for a Vietnamese bánh mi sandwich. But is it simply Gravy that Ike and Vance are smoking in this episode? They seem SO high. Well, some experts have concluded that the Gravy Vance is buying from the God Bosco Hifikepunye has been cut with military-grade ass-cheese, which would make it exponentially more potent and potentially neurotoxic. The amount of military-grade ass-cheese / Gravy blend that you could snort off the hyphen between the words “ass” and “cheese” in this very sentence is said to be enough to induce a full-blown psychotic episode. And, if all the letters in the sentence 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 were infused with the military-grade ass-cheese / Gravy blend and a person were to ingest the entire sentence, that person would almost certainly become an incurable paranoid schizophrenic. (Keep in mind, too, that boldface signifiers like “Ike” and “Vance” contain up to three times the amount of the binary psychotropic drug as words in a regular or italicized font do.)
Although it’s not the consensus opinion, many scholars suspect that during The Big Lacuna, XOXO has kidnapped Ike’s and Vance’s souls and spirited them off to his hyperborean hermitage beneath Antarctica. Vance’s soul doesn’t know where the fuck it is. And it gets a little agitated. And XOXO starts telling it some bullshit just to calm it down, like “We have a salon on premises and I promise you our stylists don’t push products on the customers. Don’t you hate it when you go get your hair cut and the stylist tries to push a product on you, etc.”—just some bullshit to calm Vance’s soul down. He also tells them that there’s a restaurant at the hermitage: “You’ll love it,” he says. “It’s like a weird version of Hooters.” He takes the two souls out back behind the restaurant where Zaporozhian Cossack cavalrymen are just returning from raiding an Ottoman village with freshly made cole slaw under their saddles. Inside, all the waiters are famous Casanovas who are now impotent, incontinent, doddering old men, traipsing from table to table in diapers, using walkers, enormous hydroceles sagging their scrotums to the floor—Hugh Hefner, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Wilt Chamberlain, Tommy Lee, Julio Iglesias, etc.
Vance’s soul is like, “I thought he said this was like Hooters.” And Ike’s soul says, “I think he just meant that there’s, like, a theme going on with the waiters.”
The waiters are all suffering from dementia and can’t remember your orders (never mind their grandchildren’s names or the last movie they saw), so you have to write down what you want directly on their grotesquely exposed cerebrums with a sharp periodontal curette.
The allegorical interpretation of XOXO’s hermitage as hell and Ike and Vance’s brief sojourn there as some sort of perilous infernal descent, which dominated the critical debate about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack for, like, five minutes in the late ’80s, is now widely discredited. Yes, the hermitage is underground — miles beneath the surface of Antarctica. And yes, Ike refers to it as unten—literally “under” or “below.” But, hello, it’s “hyperborean”—of or relating to the arctic, frigid, very cold. The opposite of infernally hot. Well, what if it’s WAY underground down near the inner core of the earth, where it’s like 10,000 degrees? Well, what if it’s up your ass where it’s like 10,000,000 degrees? Well, what if you’re a cocksucking dwarf racist retard midget dickwad? Well, what if you’re a fucking scatological-bakery urinal-cake-boss motherfucking fist-fucked cow-pie anal-fissureman motherfucker?
…And so this debate, rendered incontrovertibly moot years ago (if not tens of thousands of years ago), curiously rages on.
Ostensibly a sequence intended to reinforce the scope of XOXO’s omnipotent mischief (his mojo) and/or the super-potency of the hallucinogenic Gravy that the God Bosco Hifikepunye is selling Vance, the so-called “Playdate at the Hermitage” (whether apocryphal or not) has the perhaps unintended consequence of showcasing, of all things, XOXO’s tenderness (an anomaly in the epic, with the exception of his ill-fated literary courtship of Shanice). The big fuss he makes about the cole slaw behind the restaurant is clearly XOXO’s way of winking at Vance and sympathetically acknowledging that he knows that Vance was sort of punk’d by Ike re: the Cossack Saddle Cabbage and the harried immigration official at Ellis Island, etc. More significantly, in this scene (and again, experts are divided about whether it’s an authentic scene or a noncanonical blooper), XOXO clearly conveys a strong ideological solidarity with Ike via the abject humiliation of the celebrity Casanovas at his Dantean “Hooters.”