Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  I open to the first page of my play and begin to read aloud to Morty as we start off in the truck, through Irvington, the Oranges, on toward the West—Illinois! Indiana! Iowa! O my America of the plains and the mountains and the valleys and the rivers and the canyons … It is with just such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock. My radio play is called Let Freedom Ring! It is a morality play (now I know) whose two major characters are named Prejudice and Tolerance, and it is written in what I call “prose-poetry.” We pull into a diner in Dover, New Jersey, just as Tolerance begins to defend Negroes for the way they smell. The sound of my own humane, compassionate, Latinate, alliterative rhetoric, inflated almost beyond recognition by Roget’s Thesaurus (a birthday gift from my sister)—plus the fact of the dawn and my being out in it—plus the tattooed counterman in the diner whom Morty calls “Chief”—plus eating for the first time in my life home-fried potatoes for breakfast—plus swinging back up into the cab of the truck in my Levis and lumber jacket and moccasins (which out on the highway no longer seem the costume that they do in the halls of the high school)—plus the sun just beginning to shine over the hilly farmlands of New Jersey, my state!—I am reborn! Free, I find, of shameful secrets! So clean-feeling, so strong and virtuous-feeling—so American! Morty pulls back onto the highway, and right then and there I take my vow, I swear that I will dedicate my life to the righting of wrongs, to the elevation of the downtrodden and the underprivileged, to the liberation of the unjustly imprisoned. With Morty as my witness—my manly left-wing new-found older brother, the living proof that it is possible to love mankind and baseball both (and who loves my older sister, whom I am ready to love now, too, for the escape hatch with which she has provided the two of us), who is my link through the A.V.C. to Bill Mauldin, as much my hero as Corwin or Howard Fast—to Morty, with tears of love (for him, for me) in my eyes, I vow to use “the power of the pen” to liberate from injustice and exploitation, from humiliation and poverty and ignorance, the people I now think of (giving myself gooseflesh) as The People.

  I am icy with fear. Of the girl and her syph! of the father and his friends! of the brother and his fists! (even though Smolka has tried to get me to believe what strikes me as wholly incredible, even for goyim: that both brother and father know, and neither cares, that Bubbles is a “hoor”). And fear, too, that beneath the kitchen window, which I plan to leap out of if I should hear so much as a footstep on the stairway, is an iron picket fence upon which I will be impaled. Of course, the fence I am thinking of surrounds the Catholic orphanage on Lyons Avenue, but I am by now halfway between hallucination and coma, and somewhat woozy, as though I’ve gone too long without food. I see the photograph in the Newark News, of the fence and the dark puddle of my blood on the sidewalk, and the caption from which my family will never recover: INSURANCE MAN’S SON LEAPS TO DEATH.

  While I sit freezing in my igloo, Mandel is basting in his own perspiration—and smells it. The body odor of Negroes fills me with compassion, with “prose-poetry”—Mandel I am less indulgent of: “he nauseates me” (as my mother says of him), which isn’t to suggest that he is any less hypnotic a creature to me than Smolka is. Sixteen and Jewish just like me, but there all resemblance ends: he wears his hair in a duck’s ass, has sideburns down to his jawbone, and sports one-button roll suits and pointy black shoes, and Billy Eckstine collars bigger than Billy Eckstine’s! But Jewish. Incredible! A moralistic teacher has leaked to us that Arnold Mandel has the I.Q. of a genius yet prefers instead to take rides in stolen cars, smoke cigarettes, and get sick on bottles of beer. Can you believe it? A Jewish boy? He is also a participant in the circle-jerks held with the shades pulled down in Smolka’s living room after school, while both elder Smolkas are slaving away in the tailor shop. I have heard the stories, but still (despite my own onanism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism—not to mention fetishism) I can’t and won’t believe it: four or five guys sit around in a circle on the floor, and at Smolka’s signal, each begins to pull off—and the first one to come gets the pot, a buck a head.

  What pigs.

  The only explanation I have for Mandel’s behavior is that his father died when Mandel was only ten. And this of course is what mesmerizes me most of all: a boy without a father.

  How do I account for Smolka and his daring? He has a mother who works. Mine, remember, patrols the six rooms of our apartment the way a guerilla army moves across its own countryside—there’s not a single closet or drawer of mine whose contents she hasn’t a photographic sense of. Smolka’s mother, on the other hand, sits all day by a little light in a little chair in the corner of his father’s store, taking seams in and out, and by the time she gets home at night, hasn’t the strength to get out her Geiger counter and start in hunting for her child’s hair-raising collection of French ticklers. The Smolkas, you must understand, are not so rich as we—and therein lies the final difference. A mother who works and no Venetian blinds … yes, this sufficiently explains everything to me—how come he swims at Olympic Park as well as why he is always grabbing at everybody else’s putz. He lives on Hostess cupcakes and his own wits. I get a hot lunch and all the inhibitions thereof. But don’t get me wrong (as though that were possible): during a winter snowstorm what is more thrilling, while stamping off the slush on the back landing at lunchtime, than to hear “Aunt Jenny” coming over the kitchen radio, and to smell cream of tomato soup heating up on the stove? What beats freshly laundered and ironed pajamas any season of the year, and a bedroom fragrant with furniture polish? How would I like my underwear all gray and jumbled up in my drawer, as Smolka’s always is? I wouldn’t. How would I like socks without toes and nobody to bring me hot lemonade and honey when my throat is sore?

  Conversely, how would I like Bubbles Girardi to come to my own house in the afternoon and blow me, as she did Smolka, on his own bed?

  * * *

  Of some ironic interest. Last spring, whom do I run in to down on Worth Street, but the old circle-jerker himself, Mr. Mandel, carrying a sample case full of trusses, braces, and supports. And do you know? That he was still living and breathing absolutely astonished me. I couldn’t get over it—I haven’t yet. And married too, domesticated, with a wife and two little children—and a “ranch” house in Maplewood, New Jersey. Mandel lives, owns a length of garden hose, he tells me, and a barbecue and briquets! Mandel, who, out of awe of Pupi Campo and Tito Valdez, went off to City Hall the day after quitting high school and had his first name officially changed from Arnold to Ba-ba-lu. Mandel, who drank “six-packs” of beer! Miraculous. Can’t be! How on earth did it happen that retribution passed him by? There he was, year in and year out, standing in idleness and ignorance on the corner of Chancellor and Leslie, perched like some greaser over his bongo drums, his duck’s ass bare to the heavens—and nothing and nobody struck him down! And now he is thirty-three, like me, and a salesman for his wife’s father, who has a surgical supply house on Market Street in Newark. And what about me, he asks, what do I do for a living? Really, doesn’t he know? Isn’t he on my parents’ mailing list? Doesn’t everyone know I am now the most moral man in all of New York, all pure motives and humane and compassionate ideals? Doesn’t he know that what I do for a living is I’m good? “Civil Service,” I answered, pointing across to Thirty Worth. Mister Modesty.

  “You still see any of the guys?” Ba-ba-lu asked. “You married?”

  “No, no.”

  Inside the new jowls, the old furtive Latin-American greaser comes to life. “So, uh, what do you do for pussy?”

  “I have affairs, Arn, and I beat my meat.”

  Mistake, I think instantly. Mistake! What if he blabs to the Daily News? ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH FLOGS DUMMY, Also Lives in Sin, Reports Old School Chum.

  The headlines. Always the headlines revealing my filthy secrets to a shocked and disapproving world.

  “Hey,” said Ba-ba-lu, “remember Rita Girardi? Bubbles? Who used to suck u
s all off?”

  “… What about her?” Lower your voice, Ba-ba-lu!

  “What about her?”

  “Didn’t you read in the News?”

  “—What News?”

  “The Newark News.”

  “I don’t see the Newark papers any more. What happened to her?”

  “She got murdered. In a bar on Hawthorne Avenue, right down from The Annex. She was with some boogey and then some other boogey came in and shot them both in the head. How do you like that? Fucking for boogies.”

  “Wow,” I said, and meant it. Then suddenly—“Listen, Ba-ba-lu, whatever happened to Smolka?”

  “Don’t know,” says Ba-ba-lu. “Ain’t he a professor? I think I heard he was a professor.”

  “A professor? Smolka?”

  “I think he is some kind of college teacher.”

  “Oh, can’t be,” I say with my superior sneer.

  “Yeah. That’s what somebody said. Down at Princeton.”

  “Princeton?”

  But can’t be! Without hot tomato soup for lunch on freezing afternoons? Who slept in those putrid pajamas? The owner of all those red rubber thimbles with the angry little spiky projections that he told us drove the girls up the walls of Paris? Smolka, who swam in the pool at Olympic Park, he’s alive too? And a professor at Princeton noch? In what department, classical languages or astrophysics? Ba-ba-lu, you sound like my mother. You must mean plumber, or electrician. Because I will not believe it! I mean down in my kishkas, in my deep emotions and my old beliefs, down beneath the me who knows very well that of course Smolka and Mandel continue to enjoy the ranch houses and the professional opportunities available to men on this planet, I simply cannot believe in the survival, let alone the middle-class success, of these two bad boys. Why, they’re supposed to be in jail—or the gutter. They didn’t do their homework, damn it! Smolka used to cheat off me in Spanish, and Mandel didn’t even give enough of a shit to bother to do that, and as for washing their hands before eating … Don’t you understand, these two boys are supposed to be dead! Like Bubbles. Now there at least is a career that makes some sense. There’s a case of cause and effect that confirms my ideas about human consequence! Bad enough, rotten enough, and you get your cock-sucking head blown off by boogies. Now that’s the way the world’s supposed to be run!

  Smolka comes back into the kitchen and tells us she doesn’t want to do it.

  “But you said we were going to get laid!” cries Mandel. “You said we were going to get blowed! Reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned, that’s what you said!”

  “Fuck it,” I say, “if she doesn’t want to do it, who needs her, let’s go—”

  “But I’ve been pounding off over this for a week! I ain’t going anywhere! What kind of shit is this, Smolka? Won’t she even beat my meat?”

  Me, with my refrain: “Ah, look, if she doesn’t want to do it, let’s go—”

  Mandel: “Who the fuck is she that she won’t even give a guy a hand-job? A measly hand-job. Is that the world to ask of her? I ain’t leaving till she either sucks it or pulls it—one or the other! It’s up to her, the fucking whore!”

  So Smolka goes back in for a second conference, and returns nearly half an hour later with the news that the girl has changed her mind: she will jerk off one guy, but only with his pants on, and that’s all. We flip a coin—and I win the right to get the syph! Mandel claims the coin grazed the ceiling, and is ready to murder me—he is still screaming foul play when I enter the living room to reap my reward.

  She sits in her slip on the sofa at the other end of the linoleum floor, weighing a hundred and seventy pounds and growing a mustache. Anthony Peruta, that’s my name for when she asks. But she doesn’t. “Look,” says Bubbles, “let’s get it straight—you’re the only one I’m doing it to. You, and that’s it.”

  “It’s entirely up to you,” I say politely.

  “All right, take it out of your pants, but don’t take them down. You hear me, because I told him, I’m not doing anything to anybody’s balls.”

  “Fine, fine. Whatever you say.”

  “And don’t try to touch me either.”

  “Look, if you want me to, I’ll go.”

  “Just take it out.”

  “Sure, if that’s what you want, here … here,” I say, but prematurely. “I-just-have-to-get-it—” Where is that thing? In the classroom I sometimes set myself consciously to thinking about DEATH and HOSPITALS and HORRIBLE AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENTS in the hope that such grave thoughts will cause my “boner”’ to recede before the bell rings and I have to stand. It seems that I can’t go up to the blackboard in school, or try to get off a bus, without its jumping up and saying, “Hi! Look at me!” to everyone in sight—and now it is nowhere to be found.

  “Here!” I finally cry.

  “Is that it?”

  “Well,” I answer, turning colors, “it gets bigger when it gets harder …”

  “Well, I ain’t got all night, you know.”

  Nicely: “Oh, I don’t think it’ll be all night—”

  “Laydown!”

  Bubbles, not wholly content, lowers herself into a straight chair, while I stretch out beside her on the sofa—and suddenly she has hold of it, and it’s as though my poor cock has got caught in some kind of machine. Vigorously, to put it mildly, the ordeal begins. But it is like trying to jerk off a jellyfish.

  “What’s a matter?” she finally says. “Can’t you come?”

  “Usually, yes, I can.”

  “Then stop holding it back on me.”

  “I’m not. I am trying, Bubbles—”

  “Cause I’m going to count to fifty, and if you don’t do it by then, that ain’t my fault.”

  Fifty? I’ll be lucky if it is still attached to my body by fifty. Take it easy, I want to scream. Not so rough around the edges, please!—“eleven, twelve, thirteen”—and I think to myself, Thank God, soon it’ll be over—hang on, only another forty seconds to go—but simultaneous with the relief comes, of course, the disappointment, and it is keen: this only happens to be what I have been dreaming about night and day since I am thirteen. At long last, not a cored apple, not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt—and a mustache, but who am I to be picky? This is what I have been imagining for myself …

  Which is how it occurs to me what to do. I will forget that the fist tearing away at me belongs to Bubbles—I’ll pretend it’s my own! So, fixedly I stare at the dark ceiling, and instead of making believe that I am getting laid, as I ordinarily do while jerking off, I make believe that I am jerking off.

  And it begins instantly to take effect. Unfortunately, however, I get just about where I want to be when Bubbles’ workday comes to an end.

  “Okay, that’s it,” she says, “fifty,” and stops!

  “No!” I cry. “More!”

  “Look, I already ironed two hours, you know, before you guys even got here—”

  “JUST ONE MORE! I BEG OF YOU! TWO MORE! PLEASE!”

  “N-O!”

  Whereupon, unable (as always!) to stand the frustration—the deprivation and disappointment—I reach down, I grab it, and POW!

  Only right in my eye. With a single whiplike stroke of the master’s own hand, the lather comes rising out of me. I ask you, who jerks me off as well as I do it myself? Only, reclining as I am, the jet leaves my joint on the horizontal, rides back the length of my torso, and lands with a thick wet burning splash right in my own eye.

  “Son of a bitch kike!” Bubbles screams. “You got gissum all over the couch! And the walls! And the lamp!”

  “I got it in my eye! And don’t you say kike to me, you!”

  “You are a kike, Kike! You got it all over everything, you mocky son of a bitch! Look at the doilies!”

  It’s just as my parents have warned me—comes the first disagreement, no matter how small, and the only thing a shikse knows to call you is a dirty Jew. What an awful discovery—my parents who are
always wrong … are right! And my eye—it’s as though it’s been dropped in fire—and now I remember why. On Devil’s Island, Smolka has told us, the guards used to have fun with the prisoners by rubbing sperm in their eyes and making them blind. I’m going blind! A shikse has touched my dick with her bare hand, and now I’ll be blind forever! Doctor, my psyche, it’s about as difficult to understand as a grade-school primer! Who needs dreams, I ask you? Who needs Freud? Rose Franzblau of the New York Post has enough on the ball to come up with an analysis of somebody like me!

  “Sheeny!” she is screaming. “Hebe! You can’t even come off unless you pull your own pudding, cheap bastard fairy Jew!”

  Hey, enough is enough, where is her sympathy? “But my eye!” and rush for the kitchen, where Smolka and Mandel are rolling around the walls in ecstasy. “—right in the”—erupts Mandel, and folds in half onto the floor, beating at the linoleum with his fists—“right in the fucking—”

  “Water, you shits, I’m going blind! I’m on fire!” and flying full-speed over Mandel’s body, stick my head beneath the faucet. Above the sink Jesus still ascends in his pink nightie. That useless son of a bitch! I thought he was supposed to make the Christians compassionate and kind. I thought other people’s suffering is what he told them to feel sorry for. What bullshit! If I go blind, it’s his fault! Yes, somehow he strikes me as the ultimate cause for all this pain and confusion. And oh God, as the cold water runs down my face, how am I going to explain my blindness to my parents! My mother virtually spends half her life up my ass as it is, checking on the manufacture of my stool—how am I possibly going to hide the fact that I no longer have my sight? “Tap, tap, tap, it’s just me, Mother—this nice big dog brought me home, with my cane.” “A dog? In my house? Get him out of here before he makes everything filthy! Jack, there’s a dog in the house and I just washed the kitchen floor!” “But, Momma, he’s here to stay, he has to stay—he’s a seeing-eye dog. I’m blind.” “Oh my God! Jack!” she calls into the bathroom. “Jack, Alex is home with a dog—he’s gone blind!” “Him, blind?” my father replies. “How could he be blind, he doesn’t even know what it means to turn off a light.” “How?” screams my mother. “How? Tell us how such a thing—”