The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner Page A

(Isn’t the extremely high amplitude of this vibration, in fact, what produces Ike ’s radioactive charisma?) He operates under what skeptics (his dreary neighbors among them) might call the erotomaniacal belief that Goddesses, high on Gravy, are obsessively watching him, that they are forever peering out the windows of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, across the Gulf, across the desert, and gazing at him and masturbating. (Compare the visual acuity of the Goddesses here with the blindness of the bards.) He states it in no uncertain terms: “The Goddesses watch me like pornography.” That’s the reason he’s such a total gym-rat—he always wants to look SUPER-SEXY in case La Felina , high on Gravy, is watching him from the 160th floor of the rocket-shaped Burj Khalifa! His neck and head intermittently jerk toward the Burj whenever he feels he’s being ogled by masturbating Goddesses. (As would yours.) He’s an anti-Semite, although many experts interpret his anti-Semitism as a form of playacting intended primarily to torment his father. (FYI: Ike went to Hebrew school until he was thirteen!) He has a catarrhal rasp and a criminal record. (Super-sexy!) Whenever he goes to a restaurant, he always flirts with the waitress by asking for a tongue sandwich—same line, every single time. (That might be a little demented loserish .) But check out how he looks at night—a little looped, a little bleary-eyed from all the beer and whiskey, standing there in “the soft pink glow of the sodium-vapor street lights.” (It’s unanimous— that’s SUPER-SEXY!!) He likes to sit in the dark at home, wearing night-vision goggles, watching the Military Channel, drinking Scotch. By day, he warns men on his block that their wives are probably Mossad agents. He firmly believes that most women are Mossad agents. (If you’re a married man and you’re reading this, your wife is probably a Mossad agent!) But obscured by all his whispery trash talk, and embedded deep within his algorithmic solipsism which transfigures every single thing in the world into a reiteration of his own mind, is his extraordinarily tender devotion to his wife. Even Ike ’s philandering is uxorious. His infidelities do not, certainly in his own mind, seem incompatible with what he considers his incorruptible rectitude as a husband. They are either seen as the most practical expediencies—before he leaves the house, Ike routinely announces to his wife and daughter, “I might have to kill someone or maybe fuck somebody today, but remember, it’s for you guys”—or as consistent with the cultivation and honing of his virility, the very virility that Ike so solemnly bestows upon his wife as his tribute to her. Would Ruthie (or any self-respecting woman, for that matter) want to be married to a man whose appetite for life was so meager and whose libido was so governable that one woman would suffice? What manner of husband would that be? (Surely not a super-sexy one!) And what would his love signify, if not a groveling insult?
    Sixty-one percent of women say that a scrupulously faithful husband is a TOTAL TURN-OFF!
    Of course, some experts say that Ike —Implacable Warlord of His Stoop—would kill a human being as casually as a normal person would pop a pimple. But then you see him brushing his wife’s hair or coloring her roots, nuzzling her neck, even popping one of her pimples, softly singing “The Shadow of Your Smile” to her.…And, of course, we know how—in so many secret, unacknowledged, uxorious moments—he dotes on her, how if he’s getting Fig Newtons for them and there are only two left and one’s normal and the other one’s all mangled and misshapen, he’ll take the mangled, misshapen one for himself, or if there are only two Frozefruits left, one normal, one with freezer burn, he’ll invariably take the one with the freezer burn for himself, or—great example—when he and Ruthie were completely obsessed with these crab cake sandwiches with