Ike is then supposed to go back outside, “opening the front door onto his stoop, stepping into the maddeningly bright klieg lights of the Mossad,” take out his pistol, wave it — making looping figures in the air to signal all his Goddesses that his “climactic moment is nigh”—and fire wildly into the treetops.
There are supposed to be scores of Mossad sharpshooters, hundreds perhaps — they were supposed to have been abseiling onto rooftops and into the trees from black helicopters. They each aim for the hero’s sugar frosted nutsack, and Ike, laughing, whistling the Mister Softee jingle (“those recursive, foretokening measures of music; that hypnotic riff ”) over and over and over and over again to himself, amid this fusillade of gunfire…until a sniper’s coup de grace to the head.…This was supposed to be Ike Karton’s fate — dying to an orgasmic chorus of masturbating Goddesses. This was a scene that had replayed in his mind over and over and over and over again since he was a boy. Ike Karton—riddled, infested, consumed, devoured by Gods.
Experts wonder if Ike thinks his neighbors will rise up on his behalf. (“What does he imagine? Cheering crowds? Fluttering flags?”) But they don’t. They shutter themselves up in their identical, brick, two-story houses and peer out from timid apertures in their drapes and blinds and watch Ike, the pariah, haranguing the Mossad and murmuring lascivious things to all his heavyset Goddesses, as bullets bounce off his magic groin cup, creating a mesmerizing beat…until a sniper’s coup de grace to the head.
And then, years later, seated at the kitchen table, Colter Dale is supposed to compose his “Coda”: “To Whom It May Concern: That the Gods only occur in Ike’s mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in Ike’s mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative. Yours, Colter Dale, aka Ahab, King of the Ants (Reichsführer of the Upper Peninsula), age nine.”
And none of this is going to happen, of course, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, because it all has to be set in motion by Ike making his list of Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.), which XOXO is thwarting in his effort to sabotage the epic.
In place of this traditional sequence of events (foretold and guaranteed by blind, blitzed-out bards for thousands of years) XOXO nonchalantly interpolates a miscellany of spurious scenes:
Paratroopers, in hooded leather S&M bondage outfits and armed with automatic weapons, are dropped into Jersey City one night.
While batting flies (and imagined nano-drones) from his armpits, as the glassy-eyed Vance spins his BMX bike wheel, Ike mentions the fact, apropos of nothing, that “Hanukkah menorah” and “labia minora” rhyme.
Ike goes in to see his urologist to get his prostate biopsy results. The urologist tells Ike that he has low-range prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 3/3 in one out of twelve cores. Hilarity ensues. When the urologist tells Ike that it’s a slow-growing cancer (“You’ll probably die of something else long before this”), Ike tells him, “Yes, I’m destined to be killed by Mossad sharpshooters this Friday.” The urologist then advises “Active Surveillance”—a term used for a conservative treatment modality that Ike misinterprets as proof that the urologist is a Mossad agent. After threatening to sodomize the urologist and, for several side-splitting minutes, chasing him around the office, Ike settles for giving him a “taste of his own medicine”—an extremely rough digital exam during which Ike actually detects a hard nodule in the urologist’s prostate. The urologist has a follow-up biopsy, which yields a Gleason of 1/5 in seven out of twelve cores, etc.
A Goddess helps Ike shop for jeans. (Ike holds two pairs up to the sky: “Do you like these or these?”)
Ike sneezes so hard that it momentarily unfurls his rectum out his asshole like a New Year’s Eve party blower.
La Felina, watching Ike do a set of lat pulldowns, produces an orgasmic torrent of paraurethral fluid so forceful that it reminds many baby boomers of the water cannon used to disperse civil rights marchers in southern states during the 1960s.
Three bearded, bare-chested men in cargo shorts come up to Ike. “We’ll give you all the gold in the world in return for your daughter’s firstborn baby.” Ike kills them and bakes them into pies, which he puts on the windowsill of his hermitage to cool. When he returns from the gym, there are only two pies. “Who stole my pie?!” he thunders.
Ike has a long, Pinteresque dinner with his elderly father (“like two stammering antagonists in a Pinter play”), who’s wearing a red lucha libre mask. (It’s hard to imagine Ike’s favorite topics of conversation — masturbating heavyset Goddesses, the interpenetration of sex and death, Ukrainian women sumo wrestlers, the demise of the Professional Women’s Bowling Association, how sexy Kim Clijsters looks at the end of a hard-fought third-set tiebreaker, etc. — holding any interest for a man like his father.) “You don’t think that being the inducer of a form of folie à famille makes me a more interesting person?” Ike smiles wolfishly, an incisor gleaming in the candlelight, then bats his eyes coquettishly, trying to make his father laugh, trying to defuse the situation. Ike waves the fork crazily in his father’s face, “I’ll gouge out your eyeballs, you senile fuck.” “Is that any way to speak to your father?” he replies. Waitress: “Would the schizo with the spasmodic torticollis like another whiskey?” “Ikie want whiskey?” parrots the father, who’s brushing his teeth at the table, the senile old man in a red lucha libre mask. His mouth is foamy. There’s an occasional squeal of feedback from his hearing aid. (“Of course Ike had been drinking, which clouded his thinking, and though his judgment was impaired, none of his feelings were spared…”)
XOXO kidnaps Ike’s and his father’s souls and takes them to his hyperborean hermitage, where he plies them with drugged sherbet and gives their souls innumerable little hickies, like little chigger bites. Ike is presented with the coveted Sugar Frosted Nutsack, which is usually represented as either a military medal similar to the Croix de Guerre or the Iron Cross, or an entertainment industry award, like the Golden Globe or the People’s Choice Award statuette.
La Felina tells Ike that Fast-Cooking Ali is gay (a “couturier”). Only a gay man could have designed Woman’s Ass. She denies ever having been sexually attracted to him. “He’s too sophisticated. His mind is too agile and nuanced, his sensibility is too refined and delicate. He’s too petite. Too ethereal. Too patrician.”