by Philip Roth
The differences in their family predicament Zuckerman preferred not discussing right then—it could only promote further dismissive interpretations of his motives. Zuckerman was still stunned by how matter-of-factly Bobby had opposed him. His plan to change his life had seemed as absurd to Bobby as it had to Diana when he’d invited her to come out with him to Chicago and go to school.
“What’s it like.” Bobby asked him. “three, four years after they’re gone?”
“I miss them.” To miss. To feel the absence of. Also, to fail to do. as to miss an opportunity.
“What’d they make of Carnovsky?”
In the old days he would have told him the truth—back then Zuckerman would have kept Bobby up half the night telling him the truth. But to explain that his father had never forgiven the mockery that he saw in Carnovsky, of both the Zuckermans and the Jews: to describe his acquiescent mother’s discomposure, the wounded pride, the confused emotions, the social embarrassment during the last year of her life, all because of the mother in Carnovsky: to tell him that his brother had gone so far as to claim that what he’d committed wasn’t mockery but murder… well, he didn’t consider it seemly, twenty years on, still to be complaining to his roommate that nobody from New Jersey knew how to read.
Up the Outer Drive with Ricky at the wheel. Chicago by night, said the Percodan. visit the new Picasso, the old El. see how the dingy bars you wrote in your diary as “real” have now become far-out boutiques—”First a room where I can lie down. My neck. Must get my collar out of the suitcase.” But the Percodan wouldn’t hear of it: Your collar’s a crutch. You’re not going to medical school in that collar. “What’s Percodan then’?” True, but one crutch to be discarded at a time. You’re back, but it’s only Chicago, not Lourdes.
On the Outer Drive it seemed more like Chartres he’d returned to: away white they were hauling up the spires, he was seeing a wonder and an era all complete, a legend knocked together in twenty years. They’d built Rome, Athens, Angkor Wat, and Machu Picchu all while he was writing (and defending—stupidly defending!) his four books. He could have been seeing electric lighting for the first time £00. Broken bands of illumination, starred, squared, braided, climbing light, then a ghost wall of lakeshore. and of this day and age, nothing more. And to confound the enigma of all that light encoding all that black—and of the four books, the thousand pages, the three hundred thousand words that had made him what he was today—there was all the synthetic opium lacing his blood and steeping his brain.
Oxycodone. Thai was the ingredient doing the confounding. What egg whites had been to his mother’s angel-food cake, oxycodone was to Percodan. He’d learned about oxycodone from the Physicians’ Desk Reference to Pharmaceuticals and Biologicals. the big blue 25th edition, a full fifteen hundred pages to select from at bedtime, three hundred more even than his bedside copy of Gray’s Anatomy. Thirty pages showed color photographs, in actual size, of a thousand prescription drugs. He would swallow 500 milligrams of Placidyl—a rubbery reddish sleeping capsule exuding a faintly stinging aftertaste and odor—and, while waiting to discover if just one would work, lay alone in the lamplight with his PDR, boning up on side effects and contraindications. and feeling (if he could manage to) like the sleepy boy who used to take his stamp album into his bed with him back when inspecting watermarks under his magnifying lens was all it took to put him out—and not for thirty minutes, but ten hours.
Most of the pills looked banal enough, like M&Ms, like the pharmacopoeia’s counterpart of the multicolored sets of boring stamps portraying impregnable monarchs and founding fathers. But waiting on sleep he had al! the time in the world, and like the young philatelist of years ago scanned the thousand pictures to find the most delicately decorated, the whimsical, the inspired: to subdue nausea. Wans, suppositories looking like pastel torpedoes out of a toy war game; a pill called Naqua, to treat edema, fashioned like a fragile snowflake; Quaalude pills, marketed for sedation, initialed like a signet ring. For steroid therapy, De-cadron, modeled after the party hat, and to soften the stool, Coiace capsules as radiant as rubies. Paral capsules, another sedative, looked like garnet-shaped bottles of burgundy wine, and to combat severe infection, V-Cillin K, tiny white ostrich eggs stamped, as though for a birthday child, “Lilly.” Antivert they marked with a fossil arrowhead, Ethaquin with a fossil insect, and scratched upon the Theokin was a character identified by Zuckenman as runic. To alleviate pain there were dollhouse lipsticks called Darvon capsules, Phenaphen pills disguised as raspberry mints, and the die from which they cast the Ur-placebo, the little pink Talwin pill. But none of these—and he’d tried enormous doses of all three—alleviated Zuckerman’s pain like the oxycodone that the master chef at Endo Laboratories, Inc., mixed with a little aspirin, a little caffeine, a little phenacetin, then lightly sprinkled with a dash of homatropine terephthalate, to make mellow, soft, and cheering Percodan. Where would he be without it? Praying at the pillow of Dr. Roller, instead of out on the town with midnight stilt hours away.
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Keats studied medicine (was also said to have died of a review). Keats, Conan Doyle, Smollett, Rabelais, Walker Percy, Sir Thomas Browne. The affinity between vocations was real—and that wasn’t Percodan sweet talk, that was weighty biographical fact. Chekhov. Celine. A. J. Cronin. Carlo Levi. W. C. Williams of Rutherford, N.J….
He should have recited that list for Bobby. But they were all doctors first, Bobby would have replied. No, other doctors won’t trust me because I chose first to be an artiste. Nobody’ll believe I can do it. Or mean it. I’ll be as suspect a physician as I was a writer. And what about the poor patients? This new doctor wrote Carnovsky—he doesn’t want to cure me, he just wants to get my story and put it in a book.
“You a feminist, Ricky?”
“I just drive a car, sir.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like the feminists actually because they’re so fucking stupid. They talk about exploitation. To them exploitation in most cases is if a guy has sex with a woman. When I do the TV shows, when they invite me there to fight the feminists and those women start carrying on, I say to them, ‘You know, I’ve got the place for you: no pornography, no prostitution, no perversion. It’s called the Soviet Union. Why don’t you go?’ It generally shuts them up for a while. Wherever I am, there seems to be controversy. Always suing and fighting. It’s a constant being at war. I am an endangered species, under attack. That’s because I’m threatening. The most threatening. Physically I’m constantly aware of being hurt. That’s not just dramatizing. There are people who can hurt me. I get death threats, Ricky. If I showed you some of my death mail, half of it deals with ‘Only a Jew could do this. Only a kike could crawl so low.’ It’s like the body count in Vietnam. If you’re defined as not being human, somebody can justify your execution. One guy with a bullet can end it all. He can do it to me tomorrow. He can do it tonight. I want a gun permit. I want it now. I have many guns, but I’d like to have them legal, you know. In New York the Mayor still makes me fight to get a gun permit, and then he asks me to endorse his opponent. Never directly, no, not like that—but somebody comes down to the club and says, ‘The Mayor would appreciate blah blah biah,’ and so I do it. Otherwise City Hall would make it even worse than it is. I’m very frightened of kidnapping. In all my interviews and public statements I never touch on my wife and my son. I’ve got kidnapping insurance with Lloyds of London. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to get me to stop. I’ll never be the good acceptable pornographer like Hefner, with an acceptable bullshit ‘philosophy.’ I’ll never be the good acceptable Jew, never. What’s your religion?”
“Lutheran.”
“I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don’t have pimples on their ass. They’re my lawyers.
That’s who I send into court for me. I don’t send in Jews. Jews are too crazy. They’re like me. Volatile extremes. Jews sweat. These guys are in control, there’s a coolness there that I respect. These guys are quiet. I don’t want to be that way. I couldn’t begin to be that way. I’m the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A. But I love these guys—they keep me out of prison. Though a lot of them are crazy too, you know. They’re alcoholics, their wives stick their heads in ovens, their kids drop LSD and jump out of windows to see if they can fly. Wasps have troubles, J know that. What they don’t have is my enemies. I’ve cornered the market. Everybody hates me. Everybody. There’s a theatrical club in New York where I’d love to be a member. The Inquiry Club. I love show business, slapstick, the old comics. But they won’t let me in. They’ll take Mafia hit men, they’ll accept Shylocks, but the Jewish businessmen who run it won’t let me in. I’ve got more enemies than Nixon. The police. The mob. Crazy, fucking, paranoid Nixon himself. I’ve got Chief Justice Warren Burger. Justice Lewis Powell. Justice Harry Blackmun. Justice William Rehnquist. Justice Whizzer’ All-American White. My wife is my enemy. I’ve got an analyst who gets paid to be my enemy. Either they’re out to bust me, to indict me. to usurp me, or they want to change me into somebody else. I started psychoanalysis three months ago. You ever been in psychoanalysis?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s very scary, Ricky. There’s no product. I was just complaining to the shrink this morning that it’s an endless process. Sometimes I don’t know from one session to another if I’m getting my money’s worth. It’s a hundred bucks a session. It’s over sixteen hundred dollars a month. It’s expensive. Bui my wife is a very conservative woman and she wants it and I’m doing it. This is my fourth wife. She’s conservative and we fight all the time. She thinks pornography is juvenile. I tell her, ‘Yes, it’s true, so what?’ She thinks it’s beneath me. She tells me that I’m boxed in with a persona that doesn’t fit. What a grand human being I would be if only I would be somebody else. That’s what she and the analyst have in mind. I can’t say I’m not a little sick of pornography. There’s a lot of compulsivity in all this—I know that. I’m to some degree bored with talking about eating pussy and sucking cock and whose dick is larger than whose. A lot of times I’m tired of the lawsuits. I’m tired of the debates. It’s getting harder for me to wage a fervent battle about letting people watch other people fuck—but for those who want it, why ‘no’? Every other kind of shit is accessible, why not this? The analyst says to me, ‘Why do you go to such lengths to be unacceptable?” Do I? I’m not unacceptable to the readers of Lickety Split. I’m not unacceptable lo the poor bastards who want to go to a good porno film and jerk off. I’m not unacceptable to the people who come to Milton’s Millennia Two. I’m not saying you can come to my place and throw the women down on the floor and fuck them. I never said you can fuck everybody you want. Those are words that have been put into my mouth by all those fucking fascistic feminists who hated their fathers and now hate me. But that is not my position. Everything’s by mutual consent and every woman comes with a man to escort her inside. But immediately you eliminate the ninety percent of the people who say, ‘Oh, I don’t do that.’ You’re immediately in the ball park. Whoever wants you to fuck ‘em. you fuck ‘em. It’s the best buy in New York. For a couple it’s thirty-five dollars. That includes dinner, dancing, and staying till 4 a.m. You go to a disco in New York, you pay twenty-five dollars just to get in. At Milton’s for thirty-five bucks you’ve got your hotel room, you got your food, and you got your whole evening. And you’re safe. I reopened a year and a half ago and there hasn’t been a fight yet. Name a bar in Chicago without a fight in the last eighteen months. To fight over a woman there, you have to be off the fucking wall to do it. You fight when there’s repression, when you’re denied. At Milton’s, you’re obviously with a woman, you’re in there because you’re with a woman—so you can either watch and jerk off, or you fuck the woman you brought, or you can swing with another couple, if each person finds the other one compatible. We’ve got small rooms if you want to fuck alone and we’ve got a big orgy room with mirrors and a bar. Sure, to some degree it’s boring—a hundred people fucking, so what? I’m not saying it’s classy. These are people who live in Jersey and Queens. The pretty people aren’t going to Milton’s, other than to look. The real swingers who are very attractive swing privately at parties, California-style. At Milton’s it’s nice people, schleppy people—it’s sort of middle-class. You know how many come there who actually fuck?”
“No, sir.”
“Take a guess.”
“Better if I concentrate on my driving, sir. Heavy traffic.”
“Twenty percent. Tops. Eighty percent watch. Like television. Spectator stuff. But it’s not like Hefner’s mansion and the champagne parties for his entourage. I see him and Barbi on television and I want to throw up. I provide a service for the common man, I give entertainment, information—I legitimize feelings in people as real as anybody else. They need it dirty to get turned on? So what? They’re still human beings, you know, and there are millions of them out there. Ail the men’s magazines taken together have thirty million readers. That’s more people than voted for McGovern. If the men’s magazines had got together and held a convention and put up a candidate, he would have beaten George McGovern. That’s more men buying magazines to jerk off with than there are people living in Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, and Norway combined. Still, the analyst tells me that all I’ve done is institutionalized my neurosis. So did Napoleon, So did Sigmund Freud! This is the problem with analysis for me. Sure I want to be a better father. I have to deal with a seven-year-old son who is very bright, very precious to me. and very difficult. He’s a ball-breaking, bright kid, who’s constantly interrogating everything I do. Do I give my little Nathan values where he’s to challenge authority or to accept authority? I don’t have a glimmer. I don’t like the job of forbidding something’—it’s not my way. But here I am, grossing seven million a year, the most wanted terrorist of the sexual revolution, and I don’t have a fucking glimmer what to teach him. I want to learn to share with him. I want him to feel my strength and who I am, and to enjoy him. I’m concerned about Nathan. In some ways people are going to treat him badly because of me. But must I change my entire life for him? Right now he’s only seven and he doesn’t quite know who I am. He knows that sometimes people ask me for my autograph, but he doesn’t know what the business is. I tell him I make movies and I own a nightclub and I publish a magazine. He once wanted to look at Lickety Split. I tell him. ‘It’s not for you, it’s for grown-ups.’ He says, ‘Well, what’s in it?’ I say, ‘People making love.’ He says, ‘Oh.’ ‘What do you think making love is?’ I ask him. So he says, ‘How should I know?’—very indignant. But when he knows, it’s going to be difficult for him. When I pick him up at school, the twelve-year-olds know who I am—and I’m concerned about that. But analysis is complicated for someone like me. I’ve gotten such payoffs from being repulsive. I hear the analyst talking about monogamy and making a commitment to marriage, and these ideas are sort of goofy to me. That’s what he holds up to me as health. I don’t know—am I defending a stupid entrenched neurosis, or am I paying a hundred dollars an hour to get myself brainwashed by a professional bourgeois? I have a lot of girl friends. I’m supposed to get rid of them. I do group sex. I’m supposed to cut it out. I get blow jobs from my receptionist. I’m supposed to stop. My wife is sort of tuned-out—she’s detached and innocent and good, and she doesn’t know. People can’t believe she doesn’t know, but that’s the kind of woman she is, and I’m careful. So there’s The Milton Appel Story: the most notorious pornographer in America, and I live the dishonest life of most Americans about my sexuality. Ridiculous. The wildest antisocial desperado of them all, the embodiment of crudity, the Castro of cock, the personification of orgasmic mania, commander in chief of the American Democracy—”