Whether this perhaps vindicates some experts’ queasy faith in XOXO has yet to be determined, but it surely feeds a growing suspicion that XOXO may have a more sympathetic if not a distinctly symbiotic relationship with Ike (and with the epic itself) than previously thought — something that even XOXO’s most indefatigable detractors may have to wearily concede.
Suddenly, the following (“without any discernable context, etc.”):
Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2 Derek Jeter Yankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…pink fingernail polish, blue toenails, gold sandals…huge face…HUGE…almost like the kid in that movie Mask with Cher…not with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, just a really, really big face…and hot fleshy freckly chubby thighs.…The other three have knockoff Marc Jacobs bags…but the chubby one with the Burger King shake and the thighs and no underwear has the real deaclass="underline" a $45,000 Hermès black crocodile Kelly bag.
Here, many people (e.g., audience members at public recitations, experts, metaphysicians, etc.) are like:
“Huh? ’The fuck just happened???”
This has gotta be XOXO totally fucking with the epic, right? Plying the epic with drugged sherbet. Shooting it up with military-grade ass-cheese, right? XOXO—who persists in booby-trapping the epic with nihilistic apocrypha.
Well, not so fast, contend some scholars. In a scrupulously researched monograph coauthored by V. S. Naipaul and C. C. Sabathia, a cogent case is made for the possibility that there is no Big Lacuna (i.e., that this is not XOXO vandalizing the epic), that during this mute interstice, Ike and Vance are simply too fucked up to talk and that Vance keeps up the tranced-out empty-can-against-the-spinning-spokes rhythm while Ike just stares off into space (a whole desultory lifetime tacitly exchanged between them, as if between two dogs) and that, at some point, Vance, emerging from some hallucinatory K-hole of his own, is like, “Four girls on the subway, back from a Yankees game…one in a white pinstripe #2 Derek Jeter Yankees jersey, tight, short white skirt, no underwear, drinking a big Burger King shake through a straw…white wristbands…chubby arms…” In other words, that it’s simply his spacey elliptical reportage of something he observed recently (probably apropos of something Ike had been saying before about how sexy he thinks sweaty plus-size women are) and not just a piece of completely incongruous bullshit that XOXO plopped in to gum up the epic (perhaps at the behest of the flagrantly snubbed and pissed-off Shanice). Other experts, though, contend that the V. S. Naipaul / C. C. Sabathia monograph itself is a crude forgery, an obvious noncanonical blooper lobbed in by XOXO to gum up the epic. (It bears repeating that all noncanonical bloopers are almost immediately subsumed into the realm of the canonical and are, at the first opportunity, dutifully chanted by vagrant, drug-addled bards.)
As the individual earlier identified as “REAL WIFE” said (this is the woman who attended the public recitation of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack with her husband but then ditched him for a vagrant, drug-addled bard, the one who gave up painting when she saw Gerhard Richter’s paintings of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof), “It’s too easy for people to always blame things on XOXO.” Although, clearly, XOXO is perfectly capable of turning the epic into a celebrity gossip magazine or TV listings if he feels like it, so why not a Big Lacuna? Question, though: Might not the chubby girl in the subway without underwear be La Felina? Wouldn’t her fabulously expensive Hermès Kelly bag in this context signal a theophany—the appearance of a deity? A message to Ike re: their tryst, maybe? Or is the meaning of the Big Lacuna—this stand-alone mini-epic — ineffable? (Or, perhaps, as one noted metaphysician put it, simply too stupid for words?)
It’s at this point, during a public recitation, that a bard will stand and hysterically exclaim:
XOXO’s got the epic by the nutsack!!!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!
This chant, accompanied by the frenzied banging of gaudy rings against jerrycans of orange soda, continues unabated for a stupefying four hours, at which point (in almost every credible version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack), Ike, in response to the defibrillating incantation of his name (“Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike!”), finally snaps out of his cataleptic reverie and addresses his galvanic “Apostrophe to the Bards”—“apostrophe” because the bards are not literally present (in the epic dimension which Ike inhabits), although the fact that they respond (echoing Ike’s words, but backward) suggests that they are present (perhaps in some purely metaphysical sense) but not proximal. Salinger/Foyt will later suggest that the bards here are hyperproximal, i.e., present in a purely intracranial sense. This is difficult to understand. When experts talk about the bards’ “hyperproximity” to Ike, about their presence being “intracranial,” they are correlating the motif of Ike’s head (filling with the perpetually inscribed narration of the epic and the ever murmuring voices of masturbating Goddesses) with the motif of the minibar at the Burj Khalifa (the underlying notion here being that all of the Gods actually compress or collapse themselves within the minibar itself). This is what some highly regarded pseudo-intellectuals mean when they speak of Ike’s head as minibar. These interlocking motifs represent something that is simultaneously infinitely small and infinitely capacious.
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “HEY!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
YEH!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “AHH!”
Big-Dick Drug-Addled Blind Bards
from Jersey City
HHA!
Ike
Let me hear all my fuckin’ big-dick drug-addled blind bards from Jersey City say “Tuer tous les célébrités!”