Could they mean all this figuratively or metaphorically — that Ike is simply statue-like or statuesque? Well, maybe at first. It’s easy to see how, given the fact that Ike’s been in a sort of dissociative fugue state ever since he was hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen years old (“high on ketamine, wearing silver lederhosen and a hat made out of an Oreo box at the time, he initially claimed he’d been hit by a Hasidic ambulance in an effort to foment an apocalyptic Helter Skelter — type war between club kids and Hasids”), and that the Some Chineans surmise that he’s been mute (not just reticent or soft-spoken, but mute!) since the Mister Softee accident, and that, for most of the epic, Ike stands on his stoop, “on the prow of his hermitage, striking that contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of gasping, masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus,” they might conclude that Ike is like a statue or like a lawn jockey.
After all, he does seem to largely exist in a state of suspended animation, and his “taunting, lascivious dance along the precipice of incoherence” does make him “a frozen figure in a tableau vivant,” “a taxidermied gym-rat in a habitat diorama,” “a paralyzed player,” “a cataleptic kike,” etc. This is, of course, why Ike is so frequently called a “Nude Descending a Staircase”—because he is a static image of movement (“a ruptured contraption,” “a clutter of spasms and ticks”).
But the Chineans have gone way beyond the mere kinesics of Ike’s vaunted inertia. Ike literally goes nowhere, they claim. His birth and his death are the only real (i.e., the only measurable) events in his life and, thus, constitute the true polarity of the epic. These two events, though antipodal, simultaneously occupy one point in space. Ike is born (in the heroic sense) in the arousal of the gasping Goddesses’ desire, and he dies (heroically) in the self-satisfaction of that desire. In other words, he is born on his stoop and he dies on his stoop without having traversed any distance, without having moved a muscle — ergo, Ike the Statue. Everything in between his heroic birth and death (if anything can be said to be “between” events which coincide) is represented by an ellipsis. In other words, each dot in the ellipsis is made out of a zero-dimensional dollop of military-grade ass-cheese that’s been extruded from what the Chineans call “the pastry bag” (i.e., from a God’s ass). These are also called “loot drops” and “God guano.”
The Chineans don’t mean that at some point in recent history a statue of Ike Karton was erected in Jersey City to commemorate the hero of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack. They mean that Ike Karton, the hero of the The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack is, literally, a fucking statue.
Ike the hero — porn addict, Taurus, marionette of his Gods — is sculpted in time, in vectors of time, veering inexorably inward, inexorably toward his fate. Although his martyr’s death (at the hands of Mossad sharpshooters perched in trees) is a hyperviolent implosion, a convulsive centripetal rupturing, it is imperceptible to the external observer. Yes, Ike subjectively experiences it as “driving a Pagani Zonda into a concrete wall at 300 mph,” but his neighbors perceive the hyperviolently imploding Ike as basically the same Ike they see every day (“on the prow of his hermitage, striking that contrapposto pose, in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined up toward the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus”).
Ike is riddled, infested, consumed,
Devoured from within by Gods.
Only Gods can inhabit a stone mind.
So this whole massively involuted epic, which has variously been called Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and, finally and definitively, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack, with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion…is essentially, at the end of the day, about a man who just stands on his stoop, rooted to the spot, making cryptograms out of passing license plates, watching a kid tooling around the block on a BMX bike. (What’s interesting is that you never really know with overwrought angst or heavy-handed, stilted tropes — they can seem terrible on the page, but totally work at a public recitation. Same’s true with cringe-inducing smuttiness and off-putting adolescent scatology — it can seem lame on paper, but completely come alive when delivered by vagrant, drug-addled bards banging chunky chachkas against metal jerrycans of orange soda.)
FYI: The Chineans also believe that Ruthie and the Daughter and Colter Dale are “superfluities,” i.e., later additions (noncanonical bloopers) which were inserted to “mainstream” the figure of Ike—to create a more normative version of Ike, i.e., to give a famille to his folie.
And they believe that if you put a stethoscope to the stone head of Ike, the Lawn Jockey, you can hear, against that endlessly looping sample from the Mister Softee jingle…
All the rapturous, orotund eroticism of
Ike’s erudite, oxymoronic doxologies,
And all the demagogic authority
Of his psychosexual serenades
(“Do you hear that mosquito,
That toilet flushing upstairs,
That glockenspiel out in the briar patch?
That’s me, Unwanted One, Filthy One,
Despised Whore, Lonely Nut Job…”)
And finally, the Chineans ask: Do the Kartons comprise an organized crime family? According to the federal law against organized crime in Mexico, “when three or more people make an agreement to organize or form an organization to engage, in an ongoing or reiterated fashion, in activities that by themselves or together with other activities have as a goal or a result the commission of any or several crimes, they will be legally classified and penalized because of these actions as members of organized crime.” Clearly, the Chineans assert, the Kartons have engaged in a conspiracy to build a dildo-impaled statue without a permit and a conspiracy to perform a narcocorrido (“Do you hear that mosquito / that toilet flushing upstairs / that glockenspiel out in the briar patch?”) in a residential area.
The Chineans are part of Vance’s reverie. Since many people believe that Vance is a God (significantly, Vance himself happens not to believe that he’s a God), this means that the Chineans are part of a God’s reverie, which confers enormous prestige upon them at least for the duration of the reverie, but consigns them to oblivion once Vance “snaps out” of his reverie (an event said to be augured by “the mysterious appearance of a mah-jongg tile on the floor of some cabana”).