vulgar or profane. Ike ’s a Taurus and an autodidact, and his diction tends to be Victorian, actually (think Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy ). The “real” Ike is such a sweetheart, such a pussycat in a way…although he’s capable of unprovoked spasms of explosive violence where you’re like:
I cannot believe
He just did that .
4.
We know of the so-called “real” Ike that he often speaks poignantly of never ever ever wanting to leave Jersey City, of his memories, of…
“…the opaque stillness of its abstract, ashen evenings, in which even a five-year-old child could discern the siren call of his own fate, the homecoming of death itself.”
“…dialogue from old movies leaking from the HVAC shafts of abandoned hospitals.”
“…the spectacle of sugar melting on the glistening pink flesh of a halved grapefruit (in the background, the white noise of adult conversation).”
“…the gravitas of chivalrous, pensive, amoral men—men who were impossible to spoof (and their disappearance, one by one, from the face of the earth).”
“…the indescribable surprise of finding a cricket asleep amidst silver dollars in a cigar humidor.”
“…the F-Troop theme song, as you’re being mildly molested by a chubby babysitter with big-ass titties chewing Juicy Fruit (and begging your parents for her again).”
“…the thwack of a straight-edge razor on a leather strop, combs refracted in blue liquid, Jerry Vale (‘Innamorata’), hot lather on the nape of your neck mysteriously eliciting the incipient desire to be whipped by chain-smoking middle-aged women (and/or sweaty Eastern-bloc athletes) in bras & panties.”
…of never ever even wanting to venture beyond his three-block enclave of two-story brick homes. But we also know that he lets slip, not infrequently, that he dreams of being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II , although he can sometimes be heard—barely heard in his diffident, feathery whisper—claiming (à la Lyndon LaRouche ) that the Queen of England is a degenerate, androgenized thug with a five-o’clock shadow and a hypertrophied clitoris who controls the international drug trade and seeks to liquidate the sovereignty of every nation-state in the Americas.
But how is the “epic” Ike portrayed in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack ?
7.
The key narrative event in (what is now considered) the Seventh Season is Ike sitting down at the Miss America Diner and writing the lyrics to the narcocorrido “That’s Me ( Ike ’s Song)” that his family’s band ( The Kartons ) will sing at the “Last Concert”—the front-lawn performance Ike intends to give for the benefit of his neighbors earlier on the night he’s destined to be gunned down by ATF and Mossad sharpshooters. His expiration date (his “fate”) is pre-encoded into his genome. In fact, Ike ’s whole genome has been decoded. He has the East Asian version of a gene known as EDAR, which endows people with armpit hair that is thicker and more lustrous than that of most Europeans and Africans. Another gene suggests that he has dry earwax, as do Asians and Native Americans, not the wet earwax of other ethnic groups.
The Seventh Season begins with that heavily cadenced and folkloric cadenza subtitled Ike Always Keeps It Simple and Sexy:
Ike Always Keeps It Simple and Sexy
What subculture is evinced by Ike ’s clothes and his shtick, by the non-Semitic contours of his nose and his dick, by the feral fatalism of all his loony tics—like the petit-mal fluttering of his long-lashed lids and the Mussolini torticollis of his Schick-nicked neck, and the staring and the glaring and the daring and the hectoring, and the tapping on the table with his aluminum wedding ring, as he hums those tunes from his childhood albums and, after a spasm of Keith Moon air-drums, returns to his lewd mandala of Italian breadcrumbs?
Ike always keeps it simple and sexy. He’s wearing a hot little white wifebeater. It