Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  “The bite I can live with, the shins I can live with”—her broom still relentlessly trying to poke me out from my cave—“but what am I going to do with a child who won’t even say he’s sorry? Who won’t tell his own mother that he’s sorry and will never never do such a thing again, ever! What are we going to do, Daddy, with such a little boy in our house!”

  Is she kidding? Is she serious? Why doesn’t she call the cops and get me shipped off to children’s prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? “Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother.” You’d think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America. When actually what we are playing in that house is some farce version of King Lear, with me in the role of Cordelia! On the phone she is perpetually telling whosoever isn’t listening on the other end about her biggest fault being that she’s too good. Because surely they’re not listening—surely they’re not sitting there nodding and taking down on their telephone pads this kind of transparent, self-serving, insane horse-shit that even a pre-school-age child can see through. “You know what my biggest fault is, Rose? I hate to say it about myself, but I’m too good.” These are actual words, Doctor, tape-recorded these many years in my brain. And killing me still! These are the actual messages that these Roses and Sophies and Goldies and Pearls transmit to one another daily! “I give my everything to other people,” she admits, sighing, “and I get kicked in the teeth in return—and my fault is that as many times as I get slapped in the face, I can’t stop being good.”

  Shit, Sophie, just try, why don’t you? Why don’t we all try! Because to be bad, Mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad—and to enjoy it! That is what makes men of us boys, Mother. But what my conscience, so-called, has done to my sexuality, my spontaneity, my courage! Never mind some of the things I try so hard to get away with—because the fact remains, I don’t. I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear. See, I am too good too, Mother, I too am moral to the bursting point—just like you! Did you ever see me try to smoke a cigarette? I look like Bette Davis. Today boys and girls not even old enough to be bar-mitzvahed are sucking on marijuana like it’s peppermint candy, and I’m still all thumbs with a Lucky Strike. Yes, that’s how good I am, Momma. Can’t smoke, hardly drink, no drugs, don’t borrow money or play cards, can’t tell a lie without beginning to sweat as though I’m passing over the equator. Sure, I say fuck a lot, but I assure you, that’s about the sum of my success with transgressing. Look what I have done with The Monkey—given her up, run from her in fear, the girl whose cunt I have been dreaming about lapping all my life. Why is a little turbulence so beyond my means? Why must the least deviation from respectable conventions cause me such inner hell? When I hate those fucking conventions! When I know better than the taboos! Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID! Liberate this nice Jewish boy’s libido, will you please? Raise the prices if you have to—I’ll pay anything! Only enough cowering in the face of the deep, dark pleasures! Ma, Ma, what was it you wanted to turn me into anyway, a walking zombie like Ronald Nimkin? Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires! “Alex,” you say, as we leave the Weequahic Diner—and don’t get me wrong, I eat it up: praise is praise, and I take it however it comes—“Alex,” you say to me all dressed up in my clip-on tie and my two-tone “loafer” jacket, “the way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never saw such a little gentleman with his little napkin in his lap like that!” Fruitcake, Mother. Little fruitcake is what you saw—and exactly what the training program was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I’m not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I’m not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand in Bloomingdale’s on Saturday mornings. Mother, the beach at Fire Island is strewn with the bodies of nice Jewish boys, in bikinis and Bain de Soleil, also little gentlemen in restaurants, I’m sure, also who helped mommies set up mah-jongg tiles when the ladies came on Monday night to play. Christ Almighty! After all those years of setting up those tiles—one bam! two crack! mah-jongg!—how I made it into the world of pussy at all, that’s the mystery. I close my eyes, and it’s not so awfully hard—I see myself sharing a house at Ocean Beach with somebody in eye make-up named Sheldon. “Oh, fuck you, Shelly, they’re your friends, you make the garlic bread.” Mother, your little gentlemen are all grown up now, and there on lavender beach towels they lie, in all their furious narcissism. And oy Gut, one is calling out—to me! “Alex? Alexander the King? Baby, did you see where I put my tarragon?” There he is, Ma, your little gentleman, kissing someone named Sheldon on the lips! Because of his herb dressing! “Do you know what I read in Cosmopolitan?” says my mother to my father. “That there are women who are homosexual persons.” “Come on,” grumbles Poppa Bear, “what kind of garbage is that, what kind of crap is that—?” “Jack, please, I’m not making it up. I read it in Cosmo! I’ll show you the article!” “Come on, they print that stuff for the circulation—” Momma! Poppa! There is worse even than that—there are people who fuck chickens! There are men who screw stiffs! You simply cannot imagine how some people will respond to having served fifteen- and twenty-year sentences as some crazy bastard’s idea of “good”! So if I kicked you in the shins, Ma-má, if I sunk my teeth into your wrist clear through to the bone, count your blessings! For had I kept it all inside me, believe me, you too might have arrived home to find a pimply adolescent corpse swinging over the bathtub by his father’s belt. Worse yet, this last summer, instead of sitting shiva over a son running off to faraway Europe, you might have found yourself dining out on my “deck” on Fire Island—the two of you, me, and Sheldon. And if you remember what that goyische lobster did to your kishkas, imagine what it would have been like trying to keep down Shelly’s sauce béarnaise.

  So there.

  …

  What a pantomime I had to perform to get my zylon windbreaker off my back and into my lap so as to cover my joint that night I bared it to the elements. All for the benefit of the driver, within whose Polack power it lay merely to flip on the overhead lights and thus destroy in a single moment fifteen years of neat notebooks and good grades and teeth-cleaning twice a day and never eating a piece of fruit without thoroughly washing it beforehand … Is it hot in here! Whew, is it hot! Boy oh boy, I guess I just better get this jacket off and put it right down here in a neat little pile in my lap … Only what am I doing? A Polack’s day, my father has suggested to me, isn’t complete until he has dragged his big dumb feet across the bones of a Jew. Why am I taking this chance in front of my worst enemy? What will become of me if I’m caught!

  Half the length of the tunnel it takes me to unzip my zipper silently—and there it is again, up it pops again, as always swollen, bursting with demands, like some idiot macrocephalic making his parents’ life a misery with his simpleton’s insatiable needs.

  “Jerk me off,” I am told by the silky monster. “Here? Now?” “Of course here and now. When would you expect an opportunity like this to present itself a second time? Don’t you know what that girl is who is asleep beside you? Just look at that nose.” “What nose?” “That’s the point—it’s hardly even there. Look at that hair, like off a spinning wheel. Remember ‘flax’ that you studied in school? That’s human flax! Schmuck, this is the real McCoy. A shikse! And asleep! Or maybe she’s just faking it is a strong possibility too. Faking it, but saying under her breath, ‘C’mon, Big Boy, do all the different dirty things to me you ever wanted to do.’ ” “Could that be so?” “Darling,” croons my cock, “let me just begin to list the many different dirty things she would like yo
u to start off with: she wants you to take her hard little shikse titties in your hands, for one.” “She does?” “She wants you to finger-fuck her shikse cunt till she faints.” “Oh God. Till she faints!” “This is an opportunity such as may never occur again. So long as you live.” “Ah, but that’s the point, how long is that likely to be? The driver’s name is all X’s and Y’s—if my father is right, these Polish people are direct descendants from the ox!”

  But who wins an argument with a hard-on? Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd. Know that famous proverb? When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground! When the prick stands up, the brains are as good as dead! And ’tis so! Up it jumps, a dog through a hoop, right into the bracelet of middle finger, index finger, and thumb that I have provided for the occasion. A three-finger hand-job with staccato half-inch strokes up from the base—this will be best for a bus, this will (hopefully) cause my zylon jacket to do a minimal amount of hopping and jumping around. To be sure, such a technique means forgoing the sensitive tip, but that much of life is sacrifice and self-control is a fact that even a sex fiend cannot afford to be blind to.

  The three-finger hand-job is what I have devised for jerking off in public places—already I have employed it at the Empire Burlesque house in downtown Newark. One Sunday morning—following the example of Smolka, my Tom Sawyer—I leave the house for the schoolyard, whistling and carrying a baseball glove, and when no one is looking (obviously a state of affairs I hardly believe in) I jump aboard an empty 14 bus, and crouch in my seat the length of the journey. You can just imagine the crowd outside the burlesque house on a Sunday morning. Downtown Newark is as empty of life and movement as the Sahara, except for those outside the Empire, who look like the crew off a ship stricken with scurvy. Am I crazy to be going in there? God only knows what kind of disease I am going to pick up off those seats! “Go in anyway, fuck the disease,” says the maniac who speaks into the microphone of my jockey shorts, “don’t you understand what you’re going to see inside there? A woman’s snatch.” “A snatch?” “The whole thing, right, all hot and dripping and ready to go.” “But I’ll come down with the syph from just touching the ticket. I’ll pick it up on the bottom of my sneaks and track it into my own house. Some nut will go berserk and stab me to death for the Trojan in my wallet. What if the cops come? Waving pistols—and somebody runs—and they shoot me by mistake! Because I’m underage. What if I get killed—or even worse, arrested! What about my parents!” “Look, do you want to see a cunt or don’t you want to see a cunt?” “I want to! I want to!” “They have a whore in there, kid, who fucks the curtain with her bare twat.” “Okay—I’ll risk the syph! I’ll risk having my brain curdle and spending the rest of my days in an insane asylum playing handball with my own shit—only what about my picture in the Newark Evening News! When the cops throw on the lights and cry, ‘Okay, freaks, this is a raid!’—what if the flashbulbs go off! And get me—me, already president of the International Relations Club in my second year of high school! Me, who skipped two grades of grammar school! Why, in 1946, because they wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing in Convention Hall, I led my entire eighth-grade class in refusing to participate in the annual patriotic-essay contest sponsored by the D.A.R. I was and still am the twelve-year-old boy who, in honor of his courageous stand against bigotry and hatred, was invited to the Essex House in Newark to attend the convention of the C.I.O. Political Action Committee—to mount the platform and to shake the hand of Dr. Frank Kingdon, the renowned columnist whom I read every day in PM. How can I be contemplating going into a burlesque house with all these degenerates to see some sixty-year-old lady pretend to make love to a hunk of asbestos, when on the stage of the Essex House ballroom, Dr. Frank Kingdon himself took my hand, and while the whole P.A.C. rose to applaud my opposition to the D.A.R., Dr. Kingdon said to me, “Young man, you are going to see democracy in action here this morning.” And with my brother-in-law-to-be, Morty Feibish, I have already attended meetings of the American Veterans Committee, I have helped Morty, who is Membership chairman, set up the bridge chairs for a chapter meeting. I have read Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast, I have read Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and Finnley Wren by Philip Wylie. With my sister and Morty, I have listened to the record of marching songs by the gallant Red Army Chorus. Rankin and Bilbo and Martin Dies, Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Coughlin, all those Fascist sons of bitches are my mortal enemies. So what in God’s name am I doing in a side seat at the burlesque house jerking off into the pocket of my fielder’s glove? What if there’s violence! What if there’s germs!

  Yes, only what if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if … In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is, too, under our bare bulb (HOTEL flashing just outside our window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil Cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little baby boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock while I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off—then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with poor) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh, Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark. Maybe.

  The big thing at the Empire is hats. Down the aisle from me a fellow-addict fifty years my senior is dropping his load in his hat. His hat, Doctor! Oy, I’m sick. I want to cry. Not into your hat, you shvantz, you got to put that thing on your head! You’ve got to put it on now and go back outside and walk around downtown Newark dripping gissum down your forehead. How will you eat your lunch in that hat!

  What misery descends upon me as the last drop dribbles into my mitt. The depression is overwhelming; even my cock is ashamed and doesn’t give me a single word of back talk as I start from the burlesque house, chastising myself ruthlessly, moaning aloud, “Oh, no, no,” not unlike a man who has just felt his sole skid through a pile of dog turds—sole of his shoe, but take the pun, who cares, who cares … Ach! Disgusting! Into his hat, for Christ’s sake. Ven der putz shteht! Ven der putz shteht! Into the hat that he wears on his head!

  I suddenly remember how my mother taught me to piss standing up! Listen, this may well be the piece of information we’ve been waiting for, the key to what determined my character, what causes me to be living in this predicament, torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires. Here is how I learned to pee into the bowl like a big man. Just listen to this!

  I stand over the circle of water, my baby’s weeny jutting cutely forth, while my momma sits beside the toilet on the rim of the bathtub, one hand controlling the tap of the tub (from which a trickle runs that I am supposed to imitate) and her other hand tickling the underside of my prick. I repeat: tickling my prickling! I guess she thinks that’s how to get stuff to come out of the front of that thing, and let me tell you, the lady is right. “Make a nice sis, bubala, make a nice little sissy for Mommy,” sings Mommy to me, while in actuality what I am standing there making with her hand on my prong is in all probability my future! Imagine! The ludicrousness! A man’s character is being forged, a destiny is being shaped … oh, maybe not
… At any rate, for what the information is worth, in the presence of another man I simply cannot draw my water. To this very day. My bladder may be distended to watermelon proportions, but interrupted by another presence before the stream has begun (you want to hear everything, okay, I’m telling everything) which is that in Rome, Doctor, The Monkey and I picked up a common whore in the street and took her back to bed with us. Well, now that’s out. It seems to have taken me some time.

  The bus, the bus, what intervened on the bus to prevent me from coming all over the sleeping shikse’s arm—I don’t know. Common sense, you think? Common decency? My right mind, as they say, coming to the fore? Well, where is this right mind on that afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty—and then had again on the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.

  So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner.