Portnoy's Complaint

CUNT CRAZY

Did I mention that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 bus from New York?

I had been treated to a perfect day by my sister and Morty Feibish, her fiancé—a doubleheader at Ebbets Field, followed afterward by a seafood dinner at Sheepshead Bay. An exquisite day. Hannah and Morty were to stay overnight in Flatbush with Morty’s family, and so I was put on a subway to Manhattan about ten o’clock—and there boarded the bus for New Jersey, upon which I took not just my cock in my hands but my whole life, when you think about it. The passengers were mostly drowsing off before we had even emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel—including the girl in the seat beside me, whose tartan skirt folds I had begun to press up against with the corduroy of my trouser legs—and I had it out and in my fist by the time we were climbing onto the Pulaski Skyway.

You might have thought that given the rich satisfactions of the day. I’d have had my fill of excitement and my dick would have been the last thing on my mind heading home that night. Bruce Edwards, a new catcher up from the minors—and just what we needed (we being Morty, myself, and Burt Shotton, the Dodger manager)—had gone something like six for eight in his first two games in the majors (or was it Furillo? at any rate, how insane whipping out my joint like that! Imagine what would have been had I been caught red-handed! Imagine if I had gone ahead and come all over that sleeping shikse’s golden arm! ) and then for dinner Morty had ordered me a lobster, the first of my life.

Now, maybe the lobster is what did it. That taboo so easily and simply broken, confidence may have been given to the whole slimy, suicidal Dionysian side of my nature; the lesson may have been learned that to break the law, all you have to do is—just go ahead and break it! All you have to do is stop trembling and quaking and finding it unimaginable and beyond you: all you have to do, is do it! What else, I ask you, were all those prohibitive dietary rules and regulations all about to begin with, what else but to give us little Jewish children practice in being repressed? Practice, darling, practice, practice, practice. Inhibition doesn’t grow on trees, you know—takes patience, takes concentration, takes a dedicated and self-sacrificing parent and a hard-working attentive little child to create in only a few years’ time a really constrained and tight-ass human being. Why else the two sets of dishes? Why else the kosher soap and salt? Why else, I ask you, but to remind us three times a day that life is boundaries and restrictions if it’s anything, hundreds of thousands of little rules laid down by none other than None Other, rules which either you obey without question, regardless of how idiotic they may appear (and thus remain, by obeying, in His good graces), or you transgress, most likely in the name of outraged common sense—which you transgress because even a child doesn’t like to go around feeling like an absolute moron and schmuck—yes, you transgress, only with the strong likelihood (my father assures me) that comes next Yom Kippur and the names are written in the big book where He writes the names of those who are going to get to live until the following September (a scene which manages somehow to engrave itself upon my imagination), and lo, your own precious name ain’t among them. Now who’s the schmuck, hub? And it doesn’t make any difference either (this I understand from the outset, about the way this God, Who runs things, reasons) how big or how small the rule is that you break: it’s the breaking alone that gets His goat—it’s the simple fact of waywardness, and that alone, that He absolutely cannot stand, and which He does not forget either, when He sits angrily down (fuming probably, and surely with a smashing miserable headache, like my father at the height of his constipation ) and begins to leave the names out of that book.

When duty, discipline, and obedience give way—ah, here, here is the message I take in each Passover with my mother’s matzoh brei—what follows, there is no predicting. Renunciation is all, cries the koshered and bloodless piece of steak my family and I sit down to eat at dinner time. Self-control, sobriety, sanctions—this is the key to a human life, saith all those endless dietary laws. Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not contaminate our humanity thus. Let them ( if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or shmutzig or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like—a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. All they know, these imbecilic eaters of the execrable, is to swagger, to insult, to sneer, and sooner or later to hit. Oh, also they know how to go out into the woods with a gun, these geniuses, and kill innocent wild deer, deer who themselves nosh quietly on berries and grasses and then go on their way, bothering no one. You stupid goyim! Reeking of beer and empty of ammunition, home you head, a dead animal (formerly alive ) strapped to each fender, so that all the motorists along the way can see how strong and manly you are; and then, in your houses, you take these deer—who have done you, who have done nothing in all of nature, not the least bit of harm—you take these deer, cut them up into pieces, and cook them in a pot. There isn’t enough to eat in this world, they have to eat up the deer as well! They will eat anything, anything they can get their big goy hands on! And the terrifying corollary, they will do anything as well. Deer eat what deer eat, and Jews eat what Jews eat, but not these goyim. Crawling animals, wallowing animals, leaping and angelic animals—it makes no difference to them—what they want they take, and to hell with the other thing’s feelings (let alone kindness and compassion). Yes, it’s all written down in history, what they have done, our illustrious neighbors who own the world and know absolutely nothing of human boundaries and limits.

. . . Thus saith the kosher laws, at least to the child I was, growing up under the tutelage of Sophie and Jack P., and in a school district of Newark where in my entire class there are only two little Christian children, and they live in houses I do not enter, on the far fringes of our neighborhood . . . thus saith the kosher laws, and who am I to argue that they’re wrong? For look at Alex himself, the subject of our every syllable—age fifteen, he sucks one night on a lobster’s claw and within the hour his cock is out and aimed at a shikse on a Public Service bus. And his superior Jewish brain might as well be made of matzoh brei!

Such a creature, needless to say, has never been boiled alive in our house—the lobster, I refer to. A shikse has never been in our house period, and so it’s a matter of conjecture in what condition she might emerge from my mother’s kitchen. The cleaning lady is obviously a shikse, but she doesn’t count because she’s black.

Ha ha. A shikse has never been in our house because I have brought her there, is what I mean to say. I do recall one that my own father brought home with him for dinner one night when I was still a boy: a thin, tense, shy, deferential, soft-spoken, aging cashier from his office named Anne McCaffery.

Doctor, could he have been slipping it to her? I can’t believe it! Only it suddenly occurs to me. Could my father have been slipping it to this lady on the side? I can still remember how she sat down beside me on the sofa, and in her nervousness made a lengthy to-do of spelling her first name, and of pointing out to me how it ended with an E, which wasn’t always the case with someone called Anne—and so on and so forth . . . and meanwhile, though her arms were long and white and skinny and freckled (Irish arms, I thought) inside her smooth white blouse, I could see she had breasts that were nice and substantial—and I kept taking peeks at her legs, too. I was only eight or nine, but she really did have such a terrific pair of legs that I couldn’t keep my eyes away from them, the kind of legs that every once in a while it surprises you to find some pale spinster with a pinched face walking around on top of . . . With those legs—why, of course he was shtupping her . . . Wasn’t he?

Why he brought her home, he said, was “for a real Jewish meal.” For weeks he had been jabbering about the new goyische cashier (“a very plain drab person,” he said, “who dresses in shmattas “) who had been pestering him—so went the story he couldn’t stop telling us—for a real Jewish meal from the day she had come to work in the Boston & Northeastern office. Finally my mother couldn’t take any more. “All right, bring her already—she needs it so bad, so I’ll give her one.” Was he caught a little by surprise? Who will ever know.

At any rate, a Jewish meal is what she got all right. I don’t think I have ever heard the word “Jewish” spoken so many times in one evening in my life, and let me tell you, I am a person who has heard the word “Jewish” spoken.

“This is your real Jewish chopped liver, Anne. Have you ever had real Jewish chopped liver before? Well, my wife makes the real thing, you can bet your life on that. Here, you eat it with a piece of bread. This is real Jewish rye bread, with seeds. That’s it, Anne, you’re doing very good, ain’t she doing good, Sophie, for her first time? That’s it, take a nice piece of real Jewish rye, now take a big fork full of the real Jewish chopped liver”—and on and on, right down to the jello—“that’s right, Anne, the jello is kosher too, sure, of course, has to be—oh no, oh no, no cream in your coffee, not after meat, ha ha, hear what Anne wanted, Alex—?”

But babble-babble all you want, Dad dear, a question has just occurred to me, twenty-five years later (not that I have a single shred of evidence, not that until this moment I have ever imagined my father capable of even the slightest infraction of domestic law . . . but since infraction seems to hold for me a certain fascination) a question has arisen in the audience: why did you bring a shikse, of all things, into our home? Because you couldn’t bear that a gentile woman should go through life without the experience of eating a dish of Jewish jello? Or because you could no longer live your own life without making Jewish confession? Without confronting your wife with your crime, so she might accuse, castigate, humiliate, punish, and thus bleed you forever of your forbidden lusts! Yes, a regular Jewish desperado, my father. I recognize the syndrome perfectly. Come, someone, anyone, find me out and condemn me—I did the most terrible thing you can think of: I took what I am not supposed to have! Chose pleasure for myself over duty to my loved ones! Please, catch me, incarcerate me, before God forbid I get away with it completely—and go out and do again something I actually like!

And did my mother oblige? Did Sophie put together the two tits and the two legs and come up with four? Me it seems to have taken two and a half decades to do such steep calculation. Oh, I must be making this up, really. My father . . . and a shikse? Can’t be. Was beyond his ken. My own father—fucked shikses? I’ll admit under duress that he fucked my mother . . . but shikses? I can no more imagine him knocking over a gas station.

But then why is she shouting at him so, what is this scene of accusation and denial, of castigation and threat and unending tears . . . what is this all about except that he has done something that is very bad and maybe even unforgivable? The scene itself is like some piece of heavy furniture that sits in my mind and will not budge—which leads me to believe that, yes, it actually did happen. My sister, I see, is hiding behind my mother: Hannah is clutching her around the middle and whimpering, while my mother’s own tears are tremendous and fall from her face all the way to the linoleum floor. Simultaneously with the tears she is screaming so loud at him that her veins stand out—and screaming at me, too, because, looking further into this thing, I find that while Hannah hides behind my mother, I take refuge behind the culprit himself.

Oh, this is pure fantasy, this is right out of the casebook, is it not? No, no, that is nobody else’s father but my own who now brings his fist down on the kitchen table and shouts back at her, “I did no such thing! That is a lie and wrong!” Only wait a minute—it’s me who is screaming “I didn’t do it!” The culprit is me! And why my mother weeps so is because my father refuses to potch my behind, which she promised would be potched, “and good,” when he found out the terrible thingI had done.

When I am bad and rotten in small ways she can manage me herself: she has, you recall—I know I recall!—only to put me in my coat and galoshes—oh, nice touch, Morn, those galoshes!—lock me out of the house ( lock me out of the house! ) and announce through the door that she is never going to let me in again, so I might as well be off and into my new life; she has only to take that simple and swift course of action to get instantaneously a confession, a self-scarification, and, if she should want it, a signed warranty that I will be one hundred percent pure and good for the rest of my life—all this if only I am allowed back inside that door, where they happen to have my bed and my clothes and the refrigerator. But when I am really wicked, so evil that she can only raise her arms to God Almighty to ask Him what she has done to deserve such a child, at such times my father is called in to mete out justice; my mother is herself too sensitive, too fine a creature, it turns out, to administer corporal punishment: “It hurts me,” I hear her explain to my Aunt Clara, “more than it hurts him. That’s the kind of person I am. I can’t do it, and that’s that.” Oh, poor Mother.

But look, what is going on here after all? Surely, Doctor, we can figure this thing out, two smart Jewish boys like ourselves . . . A terrible act has been committed, and it has been committed by either my father or me. The wrongdoer, in other words, is one of the two members of the family who owns a penis. Okay. So far so good. Now: did he fuck between those luscious legs the gentile cashier from the office, or have I eaten my sister’s chocolate pudding? You see, she didn’t want it at dinner, but apparently did want it saved so she could have it before she went to bed. Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he’s hungry? I’m eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn’t my own. Furthermore, I thought it was left over! And that’s the truth! Jesus Christ, is that what this screaming and shrying is all about, that I ate that sad sack’s chocolate pudding? Even if I did, I didn’t mean it! I thought it was something else! I swear, I swear, I didn’t mean to do it! . . . But is that me—or my father hollering out his defense before the jury? Sure, that’s him—he did it, okay, okay, Sophie, leave me alone already, I did it, but I didn’t mean it! Shit, the next thing he’ll tell her is why he should be forgiven is because he didn’t like it either. What do you mean, you didn’t mean it, schmuck—you stuck it in there, didn’t you? Then stick up for yourself now, like a man! Tell her, tell her: “That’s right, Sophie, I slipped it to the shikse, and what you think and don’t think on the subject don’t mean shit to me. Because the way it works, in case you ain’t heard, is that I am the man around here, and I call the shots!” And slug her if you have to! Deck her, Jake! Surely that’s what a goy would do, would he not? Do you think one of those big-shot deer hunters with a gun collapses in a chair when he gets caught committing the seventh and starts weeping and begging his wife to be forgiven?—forgiven for what? What after all does it consist of? You put your dick some place and moved it back and forth and stuff came out the front. So, Jake, what’s the big deal? How long did the whole thing last that you should suffer such damnation from her mouth—such guilt, such recrimination and self-loathing! Poppa, why do we have to have such guilty deference to women, you and me—when we don’t! We mustn’t! Who should run the show, Poppa, is us! “Daddy has done a terrible terrible thing,” cries my mother—or is that my imagination? Isn’t what she is saying more like, “Oh, little Alex has done a terrible thing again, Daddy—” Whatever, she lifts Hannah (of all people, Hannah!), who until that moment I had never really taken seriously as a genuine object of anybody’s love, takes her up into her arms and starts kissing her all over her sad and unloved face, saying that her little girl is the only one in the whole wide world she can really trust . . . But if I am eight, Hannah is twelve, and nobody is picking her up, I assure you, because the poor kid’s problem is that she is overweight, “and how,” my mother says. She’s not even supposed to eat chocolate pudding. Yeah, that’s why I took it! Tough shit, Hannah, it’s what the doctor ordered, not me. I can’t help it if you’re fat and “sluggish” and I’m skinny and brilliant. I can’t help it that I’m so beautiful they stop Mother when she is wheeling me in my carriage so as to get a good look at my gorgeous punim—you hear her tell that story, it’s something I myself had nothing to do with, it’s a simple fact of nature, that I was born beautiful and you were born, if not ugly, certainly not something people wanted to take special looks at. And is that my fault, too? How you were born, four whole years before I even entered the world? Apparently this is the way God wants it to be, Hannah! In the big book!

But the fact of the matter is, she doesn’t seem to hold me responsible for anything: she just goes on being good to her darling little baby brother, and never once strikes me or calls me a dirty name. I take her chocolate pudding, and she takes my shit, and never says a word in protest. Just kisses me before I go to bed, and carefully crosses me going to school, and then stands back and obligingly allows herself to be swallowed up by the wall (I guess that’s where she is) when I am imitating for my beaming parents all the voices on “Allen’s Alley,” or being heralded to relatives from one end of North Jersey to the other for my perfect report card. Because when I am not being punished, Doctor, I am being carried around that house like the Pope through the streets of Rome . . .

You know, I can really come up with no more than a dozen memories involving my sister from those early years of my childhood. Mostly, until she emerges in my adolescence as the only sane person in that lunatic asylum whom I can talk to, it is as though she is someone we see maybe once or twice a year—for a night or two she visits with us, eating at our table, sleeping in one of our beds, and then, poor fat thing, she just blessedly disappears.

Even in the Chinese restaurant, where the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel, the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Morn) to be totally out of the question. Why we can eat pig on Pell Street and not at home is because . . . frankly I still haven’t got the whole thing figured out, but at the time I believe it has largely to do with the fact that the elderly man who owns the place, and whom amongst ourselves we call “Shmendrick,” isn’t somebody whose opinion of us we have cause to worry about. Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white—and maybe even Anglo-Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP! Boy, do we eat! Suddenly even the pig is no threat—though, to be sure, it comes to us so chopped and shredded, and is then set afloat on our plates in such oceans of soy sauce, as to bear no resemblance at all to a pork chop, or a hambone, or, most disgusting of all, a sausage (ucchh!) . . . But why then can’t we eat a lobster, too, disguised as something else? Allow my mother a logical explanation. The syllogism, Doctor, as used by Sophie Portnoy. Ready? Why we can’t eat lobster. “Because it can kill you! Because I ate it once, and I nearly died!”

Yes, she too has committed her transgressions, and has been duly punished. In her wild youth (which all took place before I got to know her) she had allowed herself to be bamboozled (which is to say, flattered and shamed simultaneously) into eating lobster Newburg by a mischievous, attractive insurance agent who worked with my father for Boston & Northeastern, a lush named ( could it be better? ) Doyle.

It was at a convention held by the company in Atlantic City, at a noisy farewell banquet, that Doyle led my mother to believe that even though that wasn’t what it smelled like, the plate the waiter had shoved in front of her corsage contained nothing but chicken a la king. To be sure, she sensed that something was up even then, suspected even as the handsome drunken Doyle tried to feed her with her own fork that tragedy, as she calls it, was lurking in the wings. But high herself on the fruit of two whiskey sours, she rashly turned up her long Jewish nose to a very genuine premonition of foul play, and—oh, hotheaded bitch! wanton hussy! improvident adventuress!—surrendered herself wholly to the spirit of reckless abandon that apparently had taken possession of this hall full of insurance agents and their wives. Not until the sherbet arrived did Doyle—who my mother also describes as “in looks a second Errol Flynn, and not just in looks”—did Doyle reveal to her what it was she had actually ingested.

Subsequently she was over the toilet all night throwing up. “My kishkas came out from that thing! Some practical Joker! That’s why to this day I tell you, Alex, never to commit a practical joke-because the consequences can be tragic! I was so sick, Alex,” she used to love to remind herself and me, and my father too, five, ten, fifteen years after the cataclysm itself, “that your father, Mr. Brave One here, had to call the hotel doctor out of a sound sleep to come to the room. See how I’m holding my fingers? I was throwing up so hard, they got stiff just like this, like I was paralyzed, and ask your father—Jack, tell him, tell him what you thought when you saw what happened to my fingers from the lobster Newburg.” “What lobster Newburg?” “That your friend Doyle forced down my throat.” “Doyle? What Doyle?” “Doyle, The Shicker Goy Who They Had To Transfer To The Wilds of South Jersey He Was Such A Run-Around. Doyle! Who Looked Like Errol Flynn! Tell Alex what happened to my fingers, that you thought happened—” “Look, I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” which is probably the case: not everybody quite senses my mother’s life to be the high drama she herself experiences—also, there is always a possibility that this story has more to do with imagination than reality (more to do, needless to say, with the dangerous Doyle than the forbidden lobster). And then, of course, my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes he just has to forgo listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement. It can well be that he hasn’t really heard a word she’s been saying.

But on it goes, my mother’s monologue. As other children hear the story of Scrooge every year, or are read to nightly from some favorite book, I am continually shtupped full of the suspense-filled chapters of her perilous life. This in fact is the literature of my childhood, these stories of my mother’s—the only bound books in the house, aside from schoolbooks, are those that have been given as presents to my parents when one or the other was recuperating in the hospital. One third of our library consists of Dragon Seed (her hysterectomy) (moral: nothing is never ironic, there’s always a laugh lurking somewhere ) and the other two thirds are Argentine Diary by William L. Shirer and (same moral) The Memoirs of Casanova (his appendectomy). Otherwise our books are written by Sophie Portnoy, each an addition to that famous series of hers entitled. You Know Me, I’ll Try Anything Once. For the idea that seems to generate and inform her works is that she is some sort of daredevil who goes exuberantly out into life in search of the new and the thrilling, only to be slapped down for her pioneering spirit. She actually seems to think of herself as a woman at the very frontiers of experience, some doomed dazzling combination of Marie Curie, Anna Karenina, and Amelia Earhart. At any rate, that is the sort of romantic image of her which this little boy goes to bed with, after she has buttoned him into his pajamas and tucked him between the sheets with the story of how she learned to drive a car when she was pregnant with my sister, and the very first day that she had her license—“the very first hour, Alex”—“some maniac” slammed into her rear bumper, and consequently she has never driven a car from that moment on. Or the story of how she was searching for the goldfish in a pond at Saratoga Springs, New York, where she had been taken at the age of ten to visit an old sick aunt, and accidentally fell in, right to the bottom of the filthy pond, and has not gone into the water since, not even down the shore, when it’s low tide and a lifeguard is on duty. And then there is the lobster, which even in her drunkenness she knew wasn’t chicken a la king, but only “to shut up the mouth on that Doyle” had forced down her throat, and subsequently the near-tragedy happened, and she has not of course eaten anything even faintly resembling lobster since. And does not want me to either. Ever. Not, she says, if I know what is good for me. “There are plenty of good things to eat in the world, Alex, without eating a thing like a lobster and running the risk of having paralyzed hands for the rest of your life.”

Whew! Have I got grievances! Do I harbor hatreds I didn’t even know were there! Is it the process. Doctor, or is it what we call “the material”? All I do is complain, the repugnance seems bottomless, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe enough isn’t enough. I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public. Could I really have detested this childhood and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now, looking backward upon what I was from the vantage point of what I am—and am not? Is this truth I’m delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching? Or is kvetching for people like me a form of truth? Regardless, my conscience wishes to make it known, before the beefing begins anew, that at the time my boyhood was not this thing I feel so estranged from and resentful of now. Vast as my confusion was, deep as my inner turmoil seems to appear in retrospect, I don’t remember that I was one of those kids who went around wishing he lived in another house with other people, whatever my unconscious yearnings may have been in that direction. After all, where else would I find an audience like those two for my imitations? I used to leave them in the aisles at mealtime—my mother once actually wet her pants, Doctor, and had to go running in hysterical laughter to the bathroom from my impression of Mister Kitzel on “The Jack Benny Show.” What else? Walks, walks with my father in Weequahic Park on Sundays that I still haven’t forgotten. You know, I can’t go off to the country and find an acorn on the ground without thinking of him and those walks. And that’s not nothing, nearly thirty years later.

And have I mentioned, vis-a-vis my mother, the running conversation we two had in those years before I was even old enough to go off by myself to a school? During those five years when we had each other alone all day long, I do believe we covered just about every subject known to man. “Talking to Alex,” she used to tell my father when he walked in exhausted at night, “I can do a whole afternoon of ironing, and never even notice the time go by.” And mind you, I am only four.

And as for the hollering, the cowering, the crying, even that had vividness and excitement to recommend it; moreover, that nothing was ever simply nothing but always SOMETHING, that the most ordinary kind of occurrence could explode without warning into A TERRIBLE CRISIS, this was to me the way life is. The novelist, what’s his name, Markfield, has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed “aggravation” to be a Jewish word. Well, this was what I thought about “tumult” and “bedlam,” two favorite nouns of my mother’s. Also “spatula.” I was already the darling of the first grade, and in every schoolroom competition, expected to win hands down, when I was asked by the teacher one day to identify a picture of what I knew perfectly well my mother referred to as a “spatula.” But for the life of me I could not think of the word in English. Stammering and flushing, I sank defeated into my seat, not nearly so stunned as my teacher but badly shaken up just the same . . . and that’s how far back my fate goes, how early in the game it was “normal” for me to be in a state resembling torment—in this particular instance over something as monumental as a kitchen utensil.

Oh, all that conflict over a spatula, Momma,

Imagine how I feel about you!

I am reminded at this joyous little juncture of when we lived in Jersey City, back when I was still very much my mother’s papoose, still very much a sniffer of her body perfumes and a total slave to her kugel and grieben and ruggelech—there was a suicide in our building. A fifteen-year-old boy named Ronald Nimkin, who had been crowned by women in the building “José Iturbi the Second,” hanged himself from the shower head in his bathroom. “With those golden hands!” the women wailed, referring of course to his piano playing—“with that talent!” Followed by, “You couldn’t look for a boy more in love with his mother than Ronald!”

I swear to you, this is not bullshit or a screen memory, these are the very words these women use. The great dark operatic themes of human suffering and passion come rolling out of those mouths like the prices of Oxydol and Del Monte canned corn! My own mother, let me remind you, when I returned this past summer from my adventure in Europe, greets me over the phone with the following salutation: “Well, how’s my lover?” Her lover she calls me, while her husband is listening on the other extension! And it never occurs to her, if I’m her lover, who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with? No, you don’t have to go digging where these people are concerned—they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!

Mrs. Nimkin, weeping in our kitchen: “Why? Why? Why did he do this to us?” Hear? Not what might we have done to him, oh no, never that—why did he do this to us? To us! Who would have given our arms and legs to make him happy and a famous concert pianist into the bargain! Really, can they be this blind? Can people be so abysmally stupid and live? Do you believe it? Can they actually be equipped with all the machinery, a brain, a spinal cord, and the four apertures for the ears and eyes—equipment, Mrs. Nimkin, nearly as impressive as color TV—and still go through life without a single clue about the feelings and yearnings of anyone other than themselves? Mrs. Nimkin, you shit, I remember you, I was only six, but I remember you, and what killed your Ronald, the concert-pianist-to-be is obvious: YOUR FUCKING SELFISHNESS AND STUPIDITY! “All the lessons we gave him,” weeps Mrs. Nimkin . . . Oh look, look, why do I carry on like this? Maybe she means well, surely she must—at a time of grief, what can I expect of these simple people? It’s only because in her misery she doesn’t know what else to say that she says that God-awful thing about all the lessons they gave to somebody who is now a corpse. What are they, after all, these Jewish women who raised us up as children? In Calabria you see their suffering counterparts sitting like stones in the churches, swallowing all that hideous Catholic bullshit; in Calcutta they beg in the streets, or if they are lucky, are off somewhere in a dusty field hitched up to a plow . . . Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles—and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic. Yes, yes, maybe that’s the solution then: think of them as cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg. Why not be charitable in one’s thinking, right. Doctor?

My favorite detail from the Ronald Nimkin suicide: even as he is swinging from the shower head, there is a note pinned to the dead young pianist’s short-sleeved shirt—which is what I remember most about Ronald: this tall emaciated teen-age catatonic, swimming around all by himself in those oversized short-sleeved sport shirts, and with their lapels starched and ironed back so fiercely they looked to have been bulletproofed . . . And Ronald himself, every limb strung so tight to his backbone that if you touched him, he would probably have begun to hum . . . and the fingers, of course, those long white grotesqueries, seven knuckles at least before you got down to the nicely gnawed nail, those Bela Lugosi hands that my mother would tell me—and tell me—and tell me—because nothing is ever said once—nothing!—were “the hands of a born pianist.”

Pianist! Oh, that’s one of the words they just love, almost as much as doctor. Doctor. And residency. And best of all, his own office. He opened his own office in Livingston. “Do you remember Seymour Schmuck, Alex?” she asks me, or Aaron Putz or Howard Shiong, or some yo-yo I am supposed to have known in grade school twenty-five years ago, and of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. “Well, I met his mother on the street today, and she told me that Seymour is now the biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere. He owns six different split-level ranch-type houses made all of fieldstone in Livingston, and belongs to the boards of eleven synagogues, all brand-new and designed by Marc Kugel, and last year with his wife and his two little daughters, who are so beautiful that they are already under contract to Metro, and so brilliant that they should be in college—he took them all to Europe for an eighty-million-dollar tour of seven thousand countries, some of them you never even heard of, that they made them just to honor Seymour, and on top of that, he’s so important, Seymour, that in every single city in Europe that they visited he was asked by the mayor himself to stop and do an impossible operation on a brain in hospitals that they also built for him right on the spot, and—listen to this—where they pumped into the operating room during the operation the theme song from Exodus so everybody should know what religion he is—and that’s how big your friend Seymour is today! And how happy he makes his parents!”

And you, the implication is, when are you going to get married already? In Newark and the surrounding suburbs this apparently is the question on everybody’s Ups: WHEN IS ALEXANDER PORTNOY GOING TO STOP BEING SELFISH AND GIVE HIS PARENTS, WHO ARE SUCH WONDERFUL PEOPLE, GRANDCHILDREN? “Well,” says my father, the tears brimming up in his eyes, “well,” he asks, every single time I see him, “is there a serious girl in the picture. Big Shot? Excuse me for asking. I’m only your father, but since I’m not going to be alive forever, and you in case you forgot carry the family name, I wonder if maybe you could let me in on the secret.”

Yes, shame, shame, on Alex P., the only member of his graduating class who hasn’t made grandparents of his Mommy and his Daddy. While everybody else has been marrying nice Jewish girls, and having children, and buying houses, and (my father’s phrase) putting down roots, while all the other sons have been carrying forward the family name, what he has been doing is—chasing cunt. And shikse cunt, to boot! Chasing it, sniffing it, lapping it, shtupping it, but above all, thinking about it. Day and night, at work and on the street—thirty-three years old and still he is roaming the streets with his eyes popping. A wonder he hasn’t been ground to mush by a taxicab, given how he makes his way across the major arteries of Manhattan during the lunch hour. Thirty-three, and still ogling and daydreaming about every girl who crosses her legs opposite him in the subway! Still cursing himself for speaking not a word to the succulent pair of tits that rode twenty-five floors alone with him in an elevator! Then cursing himself for the opposite as well! For he has been known to walk up to thoroughly respectable-looking girls in the street, and despite the fact that since his appearance on Sunday morning TV his face is not entirely unknown to an enlightened segment of the public—despite the fact that he may be on his way to his current mistress’ apartment for his dinner—he has been known on one or two occasions to mutter, “Look, would you like to come home with me?” Of course she is going to say “No.” Of course she is going to scream, “Get out of here, you!” or answer curtly, “I have a nice home of my own, thank you, with a husband in it.” What is he doing to himself, this fool! this idiot! this furtive boy ! This sex maniac! He simply cannot—will not—control the fires in his putz, the fevers in his brain, the desire continually burning within for the new, the wild, the unthought-of and, if you can imagine such a thing, the undreamt-of. Where cunt is concerned he lives in a condition that has neither diminished nor in any significant way been refined from what it was when he was fifteen years old and could not get up from his seat in the classroom without hiding a hard-on beneath his three-ring notebook. Every girl he sees turns out (hold your hats) to be carrying around between her legs—a real cunt. Amazing! Astonishing! Still can’t get over the fantastic idea that when you are looking at a girl, you are looking at somebody who is guaranteed to have on her—a cunt! They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts—for fucking! And, Doctor, Your Honor, whatever your name is—it seems to make no difference how much the poor bastard actually gets, for he is dreaming about tomorrow’s pussy even while pumping away at today’s!

Do I exaggerate? Am I doing myself in only as a clever way of showing off? Or boasting perhaps? Do I really experience this restlessness, this horniness, as an affliction—or as an accomplishment? Both? Could be. Or is it only a means of evasion? Look, at least I don’t find myself still in my early thirties locked into a marriage with some nice person whose body has ceased to be of any genuine interest to me—at least I don’t have to get into bed every night with somebody who by and large I fuck out of obligation instead of lust. I mean, the nightmarish depression some people suffer at bedtime . . . On the other hand, even I must admit that there is maybe, from a certain perspective, something a little depressing about my situation, too. Of course you can’t have everything, or so I understand—but the question I am willing to face is: have I anything? How much longer do I go on conducting these experiments with women? How much longer do I go on sticking this thing into the holes that come available to it—first this hole, then when I tire of this hole, that hole over there . . . and so on. When will it end? Only why should it end! To please a father and mother? To conform to the norm? Why on earth should I be so defensive about being what was honorably called some years ago, a bachelor? After all, that’s all this is, you know—bachelorhood. So what’s the crime? Sexual freedom? In this day and age? Why should I bend to the bourgeoisie? Do I ask them to bend to me? Maybe I’ve been touched by the tarbrush of Bohemia a little—is that so awful? Whom am I banning with my lusts? I don’t blackjack the ladies, I don’t twist arms to get them into bed with me. I am, if I may say so, an honest and compassionate man; let me tell you, as men go I am . . . But why must I explain myself! Excuse myself! Why must I justify with my Honesty and Compassion my desires! So I have desires-only they’re endless. Endless! And that, that may not be such a blessing, taking for the moment a psychoanalytic point of view . . . But then all the unconscious can do anyway, so Freud tells us, is want. And want! And WANT! Oh, Freud, do I know! This one has a nice ass, but she talks too much. On the other hand, this one here doesn’t talk at all, at least not so that she makes any sense—but, boy, can she suck! What cock know-how! While here is a honey of a girl, with the softest, pinkest, most touching nipples I have ever drawn between my lips, only she won’t go down on me. Isn’t that odd? And yet—go understand people—it is her pleasure while being boffed to have one or the other of my forefingers lodged snugly up her anus. What a mysterious business it is! The endless fascination of these apertures and openings! You see, I just can’t stop! Or tie myself to any one. I have affairs that last as long as a year, a year and a half, months and months of love, both tender and voluptuous, but in the end—it is as inevitable as death—time marches on and lust peters out. In the end, I just cannot take that step into marriage. But why should I? Why? Is there a law saying Alex Portnoy has to be somebody’s husband and father? Doctor, they can stand on the window ledge and threaten to splatter themselves on the pavement below, they can pile the Seconal to the ceiling—I may have to live for weeks and weeks on end in terror of these marriage-bent girls throwing themselves beneath the subway train, but I simply cannot, I simply will not, enter into a contract to sleep with just one woman for the rest of my days. Imagine it: suppose I were to go ahead and marry A, with her sweet tits and so on, what will happen when B appears, whose are even sweeter—or, at any rate, newer? Or C, who knows how to move her ass in some special way I have never experienced; or D, or E, or F. I’m trying to be honest with you, Doctor—because with sex the human imagination runs to Z, and then beyond! Tits and cunts and legs and lips and mouths and tongues and assholes! How can I give up what I have never even had, for a girl, who delicious and provocative as once she may have been, will inevitably grow as familiar to me as a loaf of bread? For love? What love? Is that what binds all these couples we know together—the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn’t it something more like weakness? Isn’t it rather convenience and apathy and guilt? Isn’t it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that “love” that the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? Please, let us not bullshit one another about “love” and its duration. Which is why I ask: how can I marry someone I “love” knowing full well that five, six, seven years hence I am going to be out on the streets hunting down the fresh new pussy—all the while my devoted wife, who has made me such a lovely home, et cetera, bravely suffers her loneliness and rejection? How could I face her terrible tears? I couldn’t. How could I face my adoring children? And then the divorce, right? The child support. The alimony. The visitation rights. Wonderful prospect, just wonderful. And as for anybody who kills herself because I prefer not to be blind to the future, well, she is her worry—she has to be! There is surely no need or justification for anybody to threaten suicide just because I am wise enough to see what frustrations and recriminations he ahead . . . Baby, please, don’t howl like that please—somebody is going to think you’re being strangled to death. Oh baby (I hear myself pleading, last year, this year, every year of my life!), you’re going to be all right, really, truly you are; you’re going to be just fine and dandy and much better off, so please, you bitch, come back inside this room and let me go! “You! You and your filthy cock!” cries the most recently disappointed (and self-appointed) bride-to-be, my strange, lanky, and very batty friend, who used to earn as much in an hour posing for underwear ads as her illiterate father would earn in a week in the coal mines of West Virginia: “I thought you were supposed to be a superior person, you muff-diving, mother-fucking son of a bitch!” This beautiful girl, who has got me all wrong, is called The Monkey, a nickname that derives from a little perversion she once engaged in shortly before meeting me and going on to grander things. Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams—but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening and perfumes, she has a very low opinion of herself, and simultaneously—and here is the source of much of our trouble—a ridiculously high opinion of me. And simultaneously, a very low opinion of me! She is one confused Monkey, and, I’m afraid, not too very bright. “An intellectual!” she screams. “An educated, spiritual person! You mean, miserable hard-on you, you care more about the niggers in Harlem that you don’t even know, than you do about me, who’s been sucking you off for a solid year!” Confused, heartbroken, and also out of her mind. For all this comes to me from the balcony of our hotel room in Athens, as I stand in the doorway, suitcases in hand, begging her to please come back inside so that I can catch a plane out of that place. Then the angry little manager, all olive oil, mustache, and outraged respectability, is running up the stairway waving his arms in the air—and so, taking a deep breath, I say, “Look, you want to jump, jump!” and out I go—and the last words I hear have to do with the fact that it was only out of love for me (“Love!” she screams) that she allowed herself to do the degrading things I forced quote unquote upon her.

Which is not the case, Doctor! Not the case at all! Which is an attempt on this sly bitch’s part to break me on the rack of guilt—and thus get herself a husband. Because at twenty-nine that’s what she wants, you see—but that does not mean, you see, that I have to oblige. “In September, you son of a bitch, I am going to be thirty years old!” Correct, Monkey, correct! Which is precisely why it is you and not me who is responsible for your expectations and your dreams! Is that clear? You! “I’ll tell the world about you, you cold-hearted prick! I’ll tell them what a filthy pervert you are, and the dirty things you made me do!”

The cunt! I’m lucky really that I came out of that affair alive. If I have!

But back to my parents, and how it seems that by remaining in my single state I bring these people, too, nothing but grief. That I happen, Mommy and Daddy, just happen to have recently been appointed by the Mayor to be Assistant Commissioner for The City of New York Commission on Human Opportunity apparently doesn’t mean shit to you in terms of accomplishment and stature—though this is not exactly the case, I know, for, to be truthful, whenever my name now appears in a news story in the Times, they bombard every living relative with a copy of the clipping. Half my father’s retirement pay goes down the drain in postage, and my mother is on the phone for days at a stretch and has to be fed intravenously, her mouth is going at such a rate about her Alex. In fact, it is exactly as it always has been: they can’t get over what a success and a genius I am, my name in the paper, an associate now of the glamorous new Mayor, on the side of Truth and Justice, enemy of slumlords and bigots and rats (“to encourage equality of treatment, to prevent discrimination, to foster mutual understanding and respect—” my commission’s humane purpose, as decreed by act of the City Council) . . . but still, if you know what I mean, still somehow not entirely perfect.

Now, can you beat that for a serpent’s tooth? All they have sacrificed for me and done for me and how they boast about me and are the best public relations firm (they tell me) any child could have, and it turns out that I still won’t be perfect. Did you ever hear of such a thing in your life? I just refuse to be perfect. What a pricky kid.

They come to visit: “Where did you get a rug like this?” my father asks, making a face. “Did you get this thing in a junk shop or did somebody give it to you?”

“I like this rug.”

“What are you talking,” my father says, “it’s a worn-out rug.”

Light-hearted. “It’s worn, but not out. Okay? Enough?”

“Alex, please,” my mother says, “it is a very worn rug.”

“You’ll trip on that thing,” my father says, “and throw your knee out of whack, and then you’ll really be in trouble.”

“And with your knee,” says my mother meaningfully, “that wouldn’t be a picnic.”

At this rate they are going to roll the thing up any minute now, the two of them, and push it out the window. And then take me home!

“The rug is fine. My knee is fine.”

“It wasn’t so fine,” my mother is quick to remind me, “when you had the cast on, darling, up to your hip. How he shlepped that thing around! How miserable he was!”

“I was fourteen years old then. Mother.”

“Yeah, and you came out of that thing,” my father says, “you couldn’t bend your leg, I thought you were going to be a cripple for the rest of your life. I told him, ‘Bend it! Bend it!’ I practically begged him morning, noon, and night, ‘Do you want to be a cripple forever? Bend that leg!’”

“You scared the daylights out of us with that knee.”

“But that was in nineteen hundred and forty-seven. And this is nineteen sixty-six. The cast has been off nearly twenty years!”

My mother’s cogent reply? “You’ll see, someday you’ll be a parent, and you’ll know what it’s like. And then maybe you won’t sneer at your family any more.”

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the body of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.

“You think,” my father the ironist asks, “it’ll be in our lifetime, Alex? You think it’ll happen before I go down into the grave? No—he’d rather take chances with a worn-out rug!” The ironist—and logician! “—And crack his head open! And let me ask you something else, my independent son—who would even know you were here if you were lying bleeding to death on the floor? Half the time you don’t answer the phone, I see you lying here with God only knows what’s wrong—and who is there to take care of you? Who is there even to bring you a bowl of soup, if God forbid something terrible should happen?”

“I can take care of myself! I don’t go around like some people”—boy, still pretty tough with the old man, eh, Al?—“some people I know in continual anticipation of total catastrophe!”

“You’ll see,” he says, nodding miserably, “you’ll get sick”—and suddenly a squeal of anger, a whine out of nowhere of absolute hatred of me!—“you’ll get old, and you won’t be such an independent big shot then!”

“Alex, Alex,” begins my mother, as my father walks to my window to recover himself, and in passing, to comment contemptuously about “the neighborhood he lives in.” I work for New York, and he still wants me to live in beautiful Newark!

“Mother, I’m thirty-three! I am the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York! I graduated first in my law school class! Remember? I have graduated first from every class I’ve ever been in! At twenty-five I was already special counsel to a House Sub-committee-of the United States Congress, Mother! Of America! If I wanted Wall Street, Mother, I could be on Wall Street! I am a highly respected man in my profession, that should be obvious! Right this minute, Mother, I am conducting an investigation of unlawful discriminatory practices in the building trades in New York—racialdiscrimination! Trying to get the Ironworkers’ Union, Mother, to tell me their little secrets! That’s what I did just today! Look, I helped solve the television quiz scandal, do you remember—?” Oh, why go on? Why go on in my strangled high-pitched adolescent voice? Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

Anyway, Sophie has by this time taken my hand, and with hooded eyes, waits until I sputter out the last accomplishment I can think of, the last virtuous deed I have done, then speaks: “But to us, to us you’re still a baby, darling.” And next comes the whisper, Sophie’s famous whisper that everybody in the room can hear without even straining, she’s so considerate: “Tell him you’re sorry. Give him a kiss. A kiss from you would change the world.”

A kiss from me would change the world! Doctor! Doctor! Did I say fifteen? Excuse me, I meant ten! I meant five! I meant zero! A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! Listen, come to my aid, will you—and quick! Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it’s beginning to pall a little, at thirty-three! And also it hoits, you know, there is pain involved, a little human suffering is being felt, if I may take it upon myself to say so—only that’s the part Sam Levenson leaves out! Sure, they sit in the casino at the Concord, the women in their minks and the men in their phosphorescent suits, and boy, do they laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh—“Help, help, my son the doctor is drowning!”—ha ha ha, ha ha ha, only what about the pain, Myron Cohen! What about the guy who is actually drowning! Actually sinking beneath an ocean of parental relentlessness! What about him—who happens, Myron Cohen, to be me! Doctor, please, I can’t live any more in a world given its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some—some black humorist! Because that’s who the black humorists are—of course!—the Henny Youngmans and the Milton Berles brealdng them up down there in the Fountainebleau, and with what? Stories of murder and mutilation! “Help,” cries the woman running along the sand at Miami Beach, “help, my son the doctor is drowning!” Ha ha ha—only it is my son the patient, lady! And is he drowning! Doctor, get these people off my ass, will you please? The macabre is very funny on the stage—but not to live it, thank you! So just tell me how, and I’ll do it! Just tell me what, and I’ll say it right to their faces! Scat, Sophie! Fuck off, Jack! Go away from me already!

I mean here’s a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me. It’s this past summer, just before I am to leave on my vacation. We have had our dinner (“You got a piece of fish?” my father asks the waiter in the fancy French restaurant I take them to, to show I am grown-up—“Oui, monsieur, we have—” “All right, give me a piece of fish,” says my father, “and make sure it’s hot “), we have had our dinner, and afterward, chewing on my Titralac ( for relief of gastric hyperacidity), I walk a ways with them before putting them in a taxi for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Immediately my father starts in about how I haven’t come to visit in five weeks ( ground I thought we two had already covered in the restaurant, while my mother was whispering to the waiter to make sure her “big boy’s” piece of fish—that’s me, folks!—was well-done), and now I am going away for a whole month, and all in all when do they ever see their own son? They see their daughter, and their daughter’s children, and not infrequently, but that is not successful either. “With that son-in-law,” my father says, “if you don’t say the right psychological thing to his kids, if I don’t talk straight psychology to my own granddaughters, he wants to put me in jail! I don’t care what he calls himself, he still thinks like a Communist to me. My own grandchildren, and everything I say has to pass by him, Mr. Censor!” No, their daughter is now Mrs. Feibish, and her little daughters are Feibishes too. Where are the Portnoys he dreamed of? In my nuts. “Look,” I cry in my strangulated way, “you’re seeing me now! You’re with me right this minute!” But he is off and running, and now that he hasn’t fishbones to worry about choking on, there is no reining him in—Mr. and Mrs. Schmuck have Seymour and his beautiful wife and their seven thousand brilliant and beautiful children who come to them every single Friday night—“Look, I am a very busy person! I have a briefcase full of important things to do—!” “Come on,” he replies, “you gotta eat, you can come for a meal once a week, because you gotta eat anyway comes six o’clock—well, don’t you?” Whereupon who pipes up but Sophie, informing him that when she was a little girl her family was always telling her to do this and do that, and how unhappy and resentful it sometimes would cause her to feel, and how my father shouldn’t insist with me because, she concludes, “Alexander is a big boy. Jack, he has a right to make his own decisions, that’s something I always told him.” You always what? What did she say?

Oh, why go on? Why be so obsessed like this? Why be so petty? Why not be a sport like Sam Levenson and laugh it all off—right?

Only let me finish. So they get into the taxi. “Kiss him,” my mother whispers, “you’re going all the way to Europe.”

Of course my father overhears-that’s why she lowers her voice, so we’ll all listen—and panic sweeps over him. Every year, from September on, he is perpetually asking me what my plans are for the following August—now he realizes that he has been outfoxed: bad enough I am leaving on a midnight plane for another continent, but worse, he hasn’t the slightest idea of my itinerary. I did it! I made it!

“—But where in Europe? Europe is half the whole globe—” he cries, as I begin to close the taxi door from the outside.

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean? You gotta know! How will you get there yourself, if you ‘don’t know’—”

“Sorry, sorry—”

Desperately now his body comes lurching across my mother’s—just as I slam shut the door—oy, not on his fingers, please! Jesus, this father! Whom I have had forever! Whom I used to find in the morning fast asleep on the toilet bowl, his pajamas around his knees and his chin hanging onto his chest. Up at quarter to six in the morning, so as to give himself a full uninterrupted hour on the can, in the fervent hope that if he is so kind and thoughtful as this to his bowels, they will relent, they will give in, they will say finally, “Okay, Jack, you win,” and make a present to the poor bastard of five or six measly lumps of shit. “Jesus Christ!” he groans, when I awaken him so as to wash up for school, and he realizes that it is nearly seven-thirty and down in the bowl over which he has been sleeping for an hour, there is, if he’s lucky, one brown angry little pellet such as you expect from the rectum of a rabbit maybe—but not from the rear-end of a man who now has to go out all clogged up to put in a twelve-hour day. “Seven–thirty? Why didn’t you say something!” Zoom, he’s dressed, and in his hat and coat, and with his big black collection book in one hand he bolts his stewed prunes and his bran flakes standing up, and fills a pocket with a handful of dried fruits that would bring on in an ordinary human being something resembling dysentery. “I ought to stick a hand grenade up my ass, if you want the truth,” he whispers privately to me, while my mother occupies the bathroom and my sister dresses for school in her “room,” the sun parlor—“I got enough All-Bran in me to launch a battleship. It’s backed up to my throat, for Christ’s sake.” Here, because he has got me snickering, and is amusing himself too in his own mordant way, he opens his mouth and points downward inside himself with a thumb. “Take a look. See where it starts to get dark? That ain’t just dark—that’s all those prunes rising up where my tonsils used to be. Thank God I had those things out, otherwise there wouldn’t be room.”

“Very nice talk,” my mother calls from the bathroom. “Very nice talk to a child.”

“Talk?” he cries. “It’s the truth,” and in the very next instant is thomping angrily around the house hollering, “My hat. I’m late, where’s my hat? who saw my hat?” and my mother comes into the kitchen and gives me her patient, eternal, all-knowing sphinx-look . . . and waits . . . and soon he is back in the hallway, apoplectic and moaning, practically in grief, “Where is my hat? Where is that hat!” until softly, from the depths of her omniscient soul, she answers him, “Dummy, it’s on your head.” Momentarily his eyes seem to empty of all signs of human experience and understanding; he stands there, a blank, a thing, a body full of shit and no more. Then consciousness returns—yes, he will have to go out into the world after all, for his hat has been found, on his head of all places. “Oh yeah,” he says, reaching up in wonderment—and then out of the house and into the Kaiser, and Superman is gone until dark.

The Kaiser, time for my story about the Kaiser: how he proudly took me with him when he went after the war to trade in the ’39 Dodge for a new automobile, new make, new model, new everything—what a perfect way for an American dad to impress his American son!—and how the fast-talking salesman acted as though he just couldn’t believe his ears, was simply incredulous, each time my father said “No” to one after another of the thousand little accessories the cock-sucker wanted to sell us to hang on the car. “Well, I’ll tell you my opinion for whatever it’s worth,” says that worthless son of a bitch, “she’d look two hun-erd percent better with the whitewalls—don’t you think so, young fella? Wouldn’t you like your dad to get the whitewalls, at least?” At least. Ah, you slimy prick, you! Turning to me like that, to stick it into my old man—you miserable lowlife thieving son of a bitch! Just who the fuck are you, I wonder, to lord it over us—a God damn Kaiser-Fraser salesman! Where are you now, you intimidating bastard? “No, no whitewalls,” mumbles my humbled father, and I simply shrug my shoulders in embarassment over his inability to provide me and my family with the beautiful things in life.

Anyway, anyway—off to work in the radio-less whitewall-less Kaiser, there to be let into the office by the cleaning lady. Now, I ask you, why must he be the one to raise the shades in that office in the morning? Why must he work the longest day of any insurance agent in history? For whom? Me? Oh, if so, if so, if that is his reason, then it is all really too fucking tragic to bear. The misunderstanding is too great! For me? Do me a favor and don’t do it for me! Don’t please look around for a reason for your life being what it is and come up with Alex! Because I am not the be-all and end-all of everybody’s existence! I refuse to shlep those bags around for the rest of my life! Do you hear me? I refuse! Stop making it incomprehensible that I should be flying to Europe, thousands and thousands of miles away, just when you have turned sixty-six and are all ready to keel over at any minute, like you read about first thing every morning in the Times. Men his age and younger, they die—one minute they’re alive, and the next dead, and apparently what he thinks is that if I am only across the Hudson instead of the Atlantic . . . Listen, what does he think? That with me around it simply won’t happen? That I’ll race to his side, take hold of his hand, and thereby restore him to life? Does he actually believe that I somehow have the power to destroy death? That I am the resurrection and the life? My dad, a real believing Christer! And doesn’t even know it!

His death. His death and his bowels: the truth is I am hardly less preoccupied with either than he is himself. I never get a telegram, never get a phone call after midnight, that I do not feel my own stomach empty out like a washbasin, and say aloud—aloud!—“He’s dead.” Because apparently I believe it too, believe that I can somehow save him from annihilation—can, and must! But where did we all get this ridiculous and absurd idea that I am so—powerful, so precious, so necessary to everybody’s survival! What was it with these Jewish parents—because I am not in this boat alone, oh no, I am on the biggest troop ship afloat . . . only look in through the portholes and see us there, stacked to the bulkheads in our bunks, moaning and groaning with such pity for ourselves, the sad and watery-eyed sons of Jewish parents, sick to the gills from rolling through these heavy seas of guilt—so I sometimes envision us, me and my fellow wailers, melancholics, and wise guys, still in steerage, like our forebears—and oh sick, sick as dogs, we cry out intermittently, one of us or another, “Poppa, how could you?” “Momma, why did you?” and the stories we tell, as the big ship pitches and rolls, the vying we do—who had the most castrating mother, who the most benighted father, I can match you, you bastard, humiliation for humiliation, shame for shame . . . the retching in the toilets after meals, the hysterical deathbed laughter from the bunks, and the tears-here a puddle wept in contrition, here a puddle from indignation—in the blinking of an eye, the body of a man (with the brain of a boy) rises in impotent rage to flail at the mattress above, only to fall instantly back, lashing itself with reproaches. Oh, my Jewish men friends! My dirty-mouthed guilt-ridden brethren! My sweethearts! My mates! Will this fucking ship ever stop pitching? When? When, so that we can leave off complaining how sick we are—and go out into the air, and live!

Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame—blaming is still ailing, of course, of course—but nonetheless, what was it with these Jewish parents, what, that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood-saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little shits, little ingrates, on the other!

“But in Europewhere—?” he calls after me, as the taxi pulls away from the curb.

“I don’t know where,” I call after him, gleefully waving farewell. I am thirty-three, and free at last of my mother and father! For a month.

“But how will we know your address?”

Joy! Sheer joy! “You won’t!”

“But what if in the meantime—?”

“What if what?” I laugh. “What if what are you worried about now?”

“What if—?” And my God, does he really actually shout it out the taxi window? Is his fear, his greed, his need and belief in me so great that he actually shouts these words out into the streets of New York? “What if I die?”

Because that is what I hear, Doctor. The last words I hear before flying off to Europe-and with The Monkey, somebody whom I have kept a total secret from them. “What if I die?” and then off I go for my orgiastic holiday abroad.

. . . Now, whether the words I hear are the words spoken is something else again. And whether what I hear I hear out of compassion for him, out of my agony over the inevitability of this horrific occurrence, his death, or out of my eager anticipation of that event, is also something else again. But this of course you understand, this of course is your bread and your butter.

I was saying that the detail of Ronald Nimkin’s suicide that most appeals to me is the note to his mother found pinned to that roomy straitjacket, his nice stiffly laundered sports shirt. Know what it said? Guess. The last message from Ronald to his momma? Guess.

Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.

Ronald

Now, how’sthat for good to the last drop? How’s that for a good boy, a thoughtful boy, a kind and courteous and well-behaved boy, a nice Jewish boy such as no one will ever have cause to be ashamed of? Say thank you, darling. Say you’re welcome, darling. Say you’re sorry, Alex. Say you’re sorry! Apologize! Yeah, for what? What have I done now? Hey, I’m hiding under my bed, my back to the wall, refusing to say I’m sorry, refusing, too, to come out and take the consequences. Refusing! And she is after me with a broom, trying to sweep my rotten carcass into the open. Why, shades of Gregor Sarnsa! Hello Alex, goodbye Franz! “You better tell me you’re sorry, you, or else! And I don’t mean maybe either!” I am five, maybe six, and she is or-elsing me and not—meaning—maybe as though the firing squad is already outside, lining the street with newspaper preparatory to my execution.

And now comes the father: after a pleasant day of trying to sell life insurance to black people who aren’t even exactly sure they’re alive, home to a hysterical wife and a metamorphosed child—because what did I do, me, the soul of goodness? Incredible, beyond belief, but either I kicked her in the shins, or I bit her. I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but I do believe it was both.

“Why?” she demands to know, kneeling on the floor to shine a flashlight in my eyes, “why do you do such a thing?” Oh, simple, why did Ronald Nimkin give up his ghost and the piano? BECAUSE WE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE! BECAUSE YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH TO BEAR! I have read Freud on Leonardo, Doctor, and pardon the hubris, but my fantasies exactly: this big smothering bird beating frantic wings about my face and mouth so that I cannot even get my breath. What do we want, me and

Ronald and Leonardo? To be left alone! If only for half an hour at a time! Stop already hocking us to be good! hocking us to be nice! Just leave us alone, God damn it, to pull our little dongs in peace and think our little selfish thoughts—stop already with the respectabilizing of our hands and our tushies and our mouths! Fuck the vitamins and the cod liver oil! Just give us each day our daily flesh! And forgive us our trespasses—which aren’t even trespasses to begin with!

“—a little boy you want to be who kicks his own mother in the shins—?” My father speaking . . . and look at his arms, will you? I have never really noticed before the size of the forearms the man has got on him. He may not have whitewall tires or a high school education, but he has arms on him that are no joke. And, Jesus, is he angry. But why? In part, you schmuck, I kicked her for you!

“—a human bite is worse than a dog bite, do you know that, you? Get out from under that bed! Do you hear me, what you did to your mother is worse than a dog could do!” And so loud is his roar, and so convincing, that my normally placid sister runs to the kitchen, great gruntfuls of fear erupting from her mouth, and in what we now call the fetal position crouches down between the refrigerator and the wall. Or so I seem to remember it—though it would make sense, I think, to ask how I know what is going on in the kitchen if I am still hiding beneath my bed.

“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 horseshit 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 Ihate 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 barn! 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-ma, 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, “Cmon, 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 you 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, Ugt 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 patz 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.

Unless you share with The Monkey her contention that the most heinous crime of my career was abandoning her in Greece. Second most heinous: leading her into that triumverate in Rome. In her estimation—some estimation, that!—I am solely responsible for making that ménag e, because mine is the stronger and more moral nature. “The Great Humanitarian!” she cries. “The one whose job it is to protect the poor poor people against their landlords! You, who gave me that U.S.A. to read! You’re why I got that application blank to Hunter! You’re why I’m killing myself to be something more than just somebody’s dumb and stupid piece of ass! And now you want to treat me like I’m nothing but just some hump, to use—use for every kinky weirdo thing you want to do—and like you’re supposed to be the superior intellectual! Who goes on educational fucking television!”

You see, in this Monkey’s estimation it was my mission to pull her up from those very abysses of frivolity and waste, of perversity and wildness and lust, into which I myself have been so vainly trying all my life successfully to sink—I am supposed to rescue her from those very temptations I have been struggling all these years to yield to! And it is of no consequence to her whatsoever that in bed she herself has been fantasying about this arrangement no less feverishly than I have. Doctor, I ask you, who was it that made the suggestion in the first place? Since the night we met, just who has been tempting whom with the prospect of yet another woman in our bed? Believe me. I’m not trying to slither out of my slime—I am trying to slither into it!—but it must be made absolutely clear, to you and me if not to her, that this hopelessly neurotic woman, this pathetic screwy hillbilly cunt, is hardly what could be called my victim. I simply will not bend to that victim shit! Now she’s thirty, wants to be married and a mother, wants to be respectable and live in a house with a husband (particularly as the high-paying years of her glamorous career appear to be just about over), but it does not follow that just because she imagines herself victimized and deprived and exploited ( and may even be, taking a long view of her life ), that I am the one upon whom they are going to pin the rap. I didn’t make her thirty years old and single. I didn’t take her from the coal fields of West Virginia and make her my personal charge—and I didn’t put her in bed with that streetwalker either! The fact is that it was The Monkey herself, speaking her high-fashion Italian, who leaned out of our rented car and explained to the whore what it was we wanted and how much we were willing to pay. I simply sat there behind the wheel, one foot on the gas pedal, like the get-away driver that I am . . . And, believe me, when that whore climbed into the back seat, I thought no; and at the hotel, where we managed to send her up alone to our room, by way of the bar, I thought no again. No! No! No!

She wasn’t bad-looking, this whore, sort of round and dumpy, but in her early twenties and with a big pleasant open face—and just stupendous tits. Those were what we’d picked her out for, after driving slowly up and down the Via Veneto examining the merchandise on parade. The whore, whose name was Lina, took her dress off standing in the middle of the room; underneath she wore a “merry widow” corset, from which the breasts bubbled up at one end, and the more than ample thighs rippled out at the other. I was astonished by the garment and its theatricality—but then I was astonished by everything, above all, that we had gone ahead after all these months of talking, and finally done it.

The Monkey came out of the bathroom in her short chemise (ordinarily a sight that made me very hot, that cream-colored silk chemise with a beautiful Monkey in it), and I meanwhile took off all my clothes and sat naked at the foot of the bed. That Lina spoke not a word of English only intensified the feeling that began to ebb and flow between The Monkey and myself, a kind of restrained sadism: we could speak to one another, exchange secrets and plans without the whore’s understanding—as she and The Monkey could whisper in Italian without my knowledge of what they might be saying, or plotting . . . Lina spoke first and The Monkey turned to translate. “She says you have a big one.” “Ill bet she says that to all the boys.” Then they stood there in their underwear looking my way—waiting. But so was I waiting too. And was my heart pounding. It had to come to pass, two women and me . . . so now what happens? Still, you see, I’m saying to myself No!

“She wants to know,” said The Monkey, after Lina had spoken a second time, “where the signore would like her to begin.” “The signore,” said I, “wishes her to begin at the beginning . . .” Oh, very witty that reply, very nonchalant indeed, only we continue to sit there motionless, me and my hard-on, all undressed and no place to go. Finally it is The Monkey who sets our lust in motion. She moves across to Lina, above whom she towers (oh God, isn’t she enough? isn’t she really sufficient for my needs? how many cocks have I got?), and puts her hand between the whore’s legs. We had imagined it beforehand in all its possibilities, dreamed it all out loud for many many months now, and yet I am dumbstruck at the sight of The Monkey’s middle finger disappearing up into Lina’s cunt.

I can best describe the state I subsequently entered as one of unrelieved busy-ness. Boy, was I busy! I mean there was just so much to do. You go here and I’ll go there—okay, now you go here and I’ll go there—all right, now she goes down that way, while I head up this way, and you sort of half turn around on this . . . and so it went, Doctor, until I came my third and final time. The Monkey was by then the one with her back on the bed, and I the one with my ass to the chandelier (and the cameras, I fleetingly thought)-and in the middle, feeding her tits into my Monkey’s mouth, was our whore. Into whose hole, into what sort of hole, I deposited my final load is entirely a matter for conjecture. It could be that in the end I wound up fucking some dank, odoriferous combination of sopping Italian pubic hair, greasy American buttock, and absolutely rank bedsheet. Then I got up, went into the bathroom, and, you’ll all be happy to know, regurgitated my dinner. My kishkas. Mother—threw them right up into the toilet bowl. Isn’t that a good boy?

When I came out of the bathroom. The Monkey and Lina were lying asleep in one another’s arms.

The Monkey’s pathetic weeping, the recriminations and the accusations, began immediately after Lina had dressed and departed. I bad delivered her into evil. “Me? You’re the one who stuck your finger up her snatch and got the ball rolling! You kissed her on the fucking lips—!” “Because,” she screamed, “if I’m going to do something, then like I do it! But that doesn’t mean I want to!” And then. Doctor, she began to berate me about Lina’s tits, how I hadn’tplayed with them enough. “All you ever talk about and think about is tits! Other people’s tits! Mine are so small and everybody else’s in the world you see are so huge—so you finally get a pair that are tremendous, and what do you do? Nothing!” “Nothing is an exaggeration, Monkey—the fact of the matter is that I couldn’t always fight my way past you—” “I am not a lesbian! Don’t you dare call me a lesbian! Because if I am, you made me one!” “Oh Jesus, no—I” “I did it for you, yes—and now you hate me for it!” “Then we won’t do it again, for me, all right? Not if this is the fucking ridiculous result!”

Except the next night we got each other very steamed up at dinner—as in the early days of our courtship, The Monkey retired at one point to the ladies’ room at Ranieri’s and returned to the table with a finger redolent of pussy, which I held beneath my nose to sniff and kiss at till the main dish arrived—and after a couple of brandies at Doney’s, accosted Lina once again at her station and took her with us to the hotel for round two. Only this time I relieved Lina of her undergarments myself and mounted her even before The Monkey had come back into the bedroom from the john. If I’m going to do it, I thought. I’m going to do it! All the way! Everything! And no vomiting, either! You’re not in Weequahic High School any more! You’re nowherenear New Jersey!

When The Monkey stepped out of the bathroom and saw that the ball game was already under way, she wasn’t entirely pleased. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her little features smaller than I had ever seen them, and declining an invitation to participate, silently watched until I had had my orgasm and Lina had finished faking hers. Obligingly then—sweetly, really—Lina made for between my mistress’ long legs, but The Monkey pushed her away and went off to sit and sulk in a chair by the window. So Lina—not a person overly sensitive to interpersonal struggle—lay back on the pillow beside me and began to tell us all about herself. The bane of existence was the abortions. She was the mother of one child, a boy, with whom she lived on Monte Mario (“in a beautiful new building,” The Monkey translated). Unfortunately she could not manage, in her situation, any more than one—“though she loves children”—and so was always in and out of the abortionist’s office. Her only precautionary device seemed to be a spermicidal douche of no great reliability.

I couldn’t believe that she had never heard of either the diaphragm or the birth-control pill. I told The Monkey to explain to her about modern means of contraception that she could surely avail herself of, probably with only a little ingenuity. I got from my mistress a very wry look. The whore listened but was skeptical. It distressed me considerably that she should be so ignorant about a matter pertaining to her own well-being (there on the bed with her fingers wandering around in my damp pubic hair): That fucking Catholic church, I thought . . .

So, when she left us that night, she had not only fifteen thousand of my lire in her handbag, but a month’s supply of The Monkey’s Enovid—that I had given to her.

“Oh, you are some savior!” The Monkey shouted, after Lina had left.

“What do you want her to do—get knocked up every other week? What sense does that make?”

“What do I care what happens to her!” said The Monkey, her voice turning rural and mean. “She’s the whore! And all you really wanted to do was to fuck her! You couldn’t even wait until I was out of the john to do it! And then you gave her my pills!”

“And what’s that mean, hub? What exactly are you trying to say? You know, one of the things you don’t always display, Monkey, is a talent for reason. A talent for frankness, yes—for reason, no!”

“Then leave me! You’ve got what you wanted! Leave!”

“Maybe I will!”

“To you I’m just another her, anyway! You, with all your big words and big shit holy ideals and all I am in your eyes is just a cunt—and a lesbian!—and a whore!”

Skip the fight. It’s boring. Sunday: we emerge from the elevator, and who should be coming through the front door of the hotel but our Lina—and with her a child of about seven or eight, a fat little boy made out of alabaster, dressed all in ruffles and velvet and patent leather. Lina’s hair is down and her dark eyes, fresh from church, have a familiarly Itahan mournful expression. A nice-looking person really. A sweet person (I can’t get over this!). And she has come to show off her bambino ! Or so it looks.

Pointing to the little boy, she whispers to The Monkey, “Molto elegante, no?” But then she follows us out to our car, and while the child is preoccupied with the door-man’s uniform, suggests that maybe we would like to come to her apartment on Monte Mario this afternoon and all of us do it with another man. She has a friend, she says—mind you, I get all this through my translator—she has a friend who she is sure, she says, would like to fuck the signorina. I can see the tears sliding out from beneath The Monkey’s dark glasses, even as she says to me, “Well, what do I tell her, yes or no?” “No, of course. Positively not.” The Monkey exchanges some words with Lina and then turns to me once again: “She says it wouldn’t be for money, it would just be for—”

“No! No!”

All the way to the Villa Adriana she weeps: “I want a child too! And a home! And a husband! I am not a lesbian! I am not a whore!” She reminds me of the evening the previous spring when I took her up to the Bronx with me, to what we at the H. O. commission call “Equal Opportunity Night.” “All those poor Puerto Rican people being overcharged in the supermarket! In Spanish you spoke, and oh I was so impressed! Tell me about your bad sanitation, tell me about your rats and vermin, tell me about your police protection! Because discrimination is against the law! A year in prison or a five-hundred-dollar fine! And that poor Puerto Rican man stood up and shouted, ‘Both!’ Oh, you fake, Alex! You hypocrite and phony! Big shit to a bunch of stupid spies, but I know the truth, Alex! You make women sleep with whores!”

“I don’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do.”

“Human opportunities! Human! How you love that word! But do you know what it means, you son of a bitch pimp! I’ll teach you what it means! Pull this car over, Alex!”

“Sorry, no.”

“Yes! Yes! Because I’m getting out! I’m finding a phone! I’m going to call long-distance to John Lindsay and tell him what you made me do.”

“The fuck you will.”

“I’ll expose you, Alex—I’ll call Jimmy Breslin!”

Then in Athens she threatens to jump from the balcony unless I marry her. So I leave.

Shikses! In winter, when the polio germs are hibernating and I can bank upon surviving outside of an iron lung until the end of the school year, I ice-skate on the lake in Irvington Park. In the last light of the weekday afternoons, then all day long on crisply shining Saturdays and Sundays, I skate round and round in circles behind the shikses who live in Irvington, the town across the city line from the streets and houses of my safe and friendly Jewish quarter. I know where the shikses live from the kinds of curtains their mothers hang in the windows. Also, the goyim hang a little white cloth with a star in the front window, in honor of themselves and their boys away in the service—a blue star if the son is living, a gold star if he is dead. “A Gold Star Morn,” says Ralph Edwards, solemnly introducing a contestant on “Truth or Consequences,” who in just two minutes is going to get a bottle of seltzer squirted at her snatch, followed by a brand-new refrigerator for her kitchen . . . A Gold Star Morn is what my Aunt Clara upstairs is too, except here is the difference—she has no gold star in her window, for a dead son doesn’t leave her feeling proud or noble, or feeling anything, for that matter. It seems instead to have turned her, in my father’s words, into “a nervous case” for life. Not a day has passed since Heshie was killed in the Normandy invasion that Aunt Clara has not spent most of it in bed, and sobbing so badly that Doctor Izzie has sometimes to come and give her a shot to calm her hysteria down . . . But the curtains—the curtains are embroidered with lace, or “fancy” in some other way that my mother describes derisively as “goyisch e taste.” At Christmastime, when I have no school and can go off to ice-skate at night under the lights, I see the trees blinking on and off behind the gentile curtains. Not on our block—God forbid!—or on Leslie Street, or Schley Street, or even Fabian Place, but as I approach the Irvington line, here is a goy, and there is a goy, and there still another—and then I am into Irvington and it is simply awful: not only is there a tree conspicuously ablaze in every parlor, but the houses themselves are outlined with colored bulbs advertising Christianity, and phonographs are pumping “Silent Night” out into the street as though—as though?—it were the national anthem, and on the snowy lawns are set up little cut-out models of the scene in the manger—really, it’s enough to make you sick. How can they possibly believe this shit? Not just children but grownups, too, stand around on the snowy lawns smiling down at pieces of wood six inches high that are called Mary and Joseph and little Jesus—and the little cut-out cows and horses are smiling too! God! The idiocy of the Jews all year long, and then the idiocy of the goyim on these holidays! What a country! Is it any wonder we’re all of us half nuts?

But the shikses, ah, the shikses are something else again. Between the smell of damp sawdust and wet wool in the overheated boathouse, and the sight of their fresh cold blond hair spilling out of their kerchiefs and caps, I am ecstatic. Amidst these flushed and giggling girls, I lace up my skates with weak, trembling fingers, and then out into the cold and after them I move, down the wooden gangplank on my toes and off onto the ice behind a fluttering covey of them—a nosegay of shikses, a garland of gentile girls. I am so awed that I am in a state of desire beyond a hard-on. My circumcised little dong is simply shriveled up with veneration. Maybe it’s dread. How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blond? My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak—the lives they must lead behind those goyische curtains! Maybe a pride of shikses is more like it—or is it a pride of shkotzim? For these are the girls whose older brothers are the engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks for the college football teams called Northwestern and Texas Christian and UCLA. Their fathers are men with white hair and deep voices who never use double negatives, and their mothers the ladies with the kindly smiles and the wonderful manners who say things like, “I do believe, Mary, that we sold thirty-five cakes at the Bake Sale.” “Don’t be too late, dear,” they sing out sweetly to their little tulips as they go bouncing off in their bouffant taffeta dresses to the Junior Prom with boys whose names are right out of the grade-school reader, not Aaron and Arnold and Marvin, but Johnny and Billy and Jimmy and Tod. Not Portnoy or Pincus, but Smith and Jones and Brown! These people are the Americans, Doctor—like Henry Aldrich and Homer, like the Great Gildersleeve and his nephew LeRoy, like Corliss and Veronica, like “Oogie Pringle” who gets to sing beneath Jane Powell’s window in A Date with Judy—these are the people for whom Nat “King” Cole sings every Christmastime, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose . . .” An open fire, in my house? No, no, theirs are the noses whereof he speaks. Not his flat black one or my long bumpy one, but those tiny bridgeless wonders whose nostrils point northward automatically at birth. And stay that way for life! These are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN—these are the girls and boys who live “next door,” the lads who are always asking for “the jalopy” and getting into “jams” and then out of them again in time for the final commercial—the kids whose neighbors aren’t the Silversteins and the Landaus, but Fibber McCee and Molly, and Ozzie and Harriet, and Ethel and Albert, and Lorenzo Jones and his wife Belle, and Jack Armstrong! Jack Armstrong, the All-American Goy!—and Jack as in John, not Jack as in Jake, like my father . . . Look, we ate our meals with that radio blaring away right through to the dessert, the glow of the yellow station band is the last light I see each night before sleep-so don’t tell me we’re Just as good as anybody else, don’t tell me we’re Americans just like they are. No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place, and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either. O America! America! it may have been gold in the streets to my grandparents, it may have been a chicken in every pot to my father and mother, but to me, a child whose earliest movie memories are of Ann Rutherford and Alice Faye, America is a shikse nestling under your arm whispering love love love love love!

So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange shikse teaches me the meaning of the word longing. It is almost more than an angry thirteen-year-old little Jewish Momma’s Boy can bear. Forgive the luxuriating, but these are probably the most poignant hours of my life I’m talking about—I learn the meaning of the word longing, I learn the meaning of the word pang. There go the darling things dashing up the embankment, clattering along the shoveled walk between the evergreens—and so here I go too (if I dare!). The sun is almost all the way down, and everything is purple (including my prose) as I follow at a safe distance until they cross the street on their skates, and go giggling into the little park-side candy store. By the time I get up the nerve to come through the door—every eye will surely be upon me!—they have already loosened their mufflers and unzipped their jackets, and are raising cups of hot chocolate between their smooth and burning cheeks—and those noses, mystery of mysteries! each disappears entirely into a cup full of chocolate and marshmallows and comes out at the other end unblemished by liquid! Jesus, look how guiltlessly they eat between meals! What girls! Crazily, impetuously, I order a cup of chocolate myself—and proceed to ruin my appetite for dinner, served promptly by my Jumping-jack mother at five-thirty, when my father walks into the house “starved.” Then I follow them back to the lake. Then I follow them around the lake. Then at last my ecstasy is over—they go home to the grammatical fathers and the composed mothers and the self-assured brothers who all live with them in harmony and bliss behind their goyische curtains, and I start back to Newark, to my palpitating life with my family, lived now behind the aluminum “Venetians” for which my mother has been saving out of her table-money for years.

What a rise in social class we have made with those blinds! Headlong, my mother seems to feel, we have been catapulted into high society. A good part of her life is now given over to the dusting and polishing of the slats of the blinds; she is behind them wiping away during the day, and at dusk, looks out from between her clean slats at the snow, where it has begun to fall through the light of the street lamp—and begins pumping up the worry-machine. It is usually only a matter of minutes before she is appropriately frantic. “Where is he already?” she moans, each time a pair of headlights comes sweeping up the street and are not his. Where, oh where, our Odysseus! Upstairs Uncle Hymie is home, across the street Landau is home, next door Silverstein is home—everybody is home by five forty-five except my father, and the radio says that a blizzard is already bearing down on Newark from the North Pole. Well, there is just no doubt about it, we might as well call Tuckerman & Farber about the funeral arrangements, and start inviting the guests. Yes, it needs only for the roads to begin to glisten with ice for the assumption to be made that my father, fifteen minutes late for dinner, is crunched up against a telegraph pole somewhere, lying dead in a pool of his own blood. My mother comes into the kitchen, her face by now a face out of El Greco. “My two starving Armenians,” she says in a breaking voice, “eat, go ahead, darlings—start, there’s no sense waiting—” And who wouldn’t be grief-struck? Just think of the years to come—her two babies without a father, herself without a husband and provider, all because out of nowhere, just as that poor man was starting home, it had to begin to snow.

Meanwhile I wonder if with my father dead I will have to get a job after school and Saturdays, and consequently give up skating at Irvington Park—give up skating with my shikses before I have even spoken a single word to a one of them. I am afraid to open my mouth for fear that if I do no words will come out—or the wrong words. “Portnoy, yes, it’s an old French name, a corruption of porte noir, meaning black door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to our family manor house was painted . . .” et cetera and so forth. No, no, they will hear the oy at the end, and the jig will be up. Al Port then, Al Parsons! “How do you do. Miss McCoy, mind if I skate alongside, my name is Al Parsons—” but isn’t Alan as Jewish and foreign as Alexander? I know there’s Alan Ladd, but there’s also my friend Alan Rubin, the shortstop for our softball team. And wait’ll she hears I’m from Weequahic. Oh, what’s the difference anyway, I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? “You seem like a very nice person, Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?” Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out toward God! Porte-Noir and Parsons my ass, kid, you have got J-E-W written right across the middle of that face—look at the shnoz on him, for God’s sakes! That ain’t a nose, it’s a hose! Screw off, Jewboy! Get off the ice and leave these girls alone!

And it’s true. I lower my head to the kitchen table and on a piece of my father’s office stationery outline my profile with a pencil. And it’s terrible. How has this happened to me who was so gorgeous in that carriage. Mother! At the top it has begun to aim toward the heavens, while simultaneously, where the cartilage ends halfway down the slope, it is beginning to bend back toward my mouth. A couple of years and I won’t even be able to eat, this thing will be directly in the path of the food! No! No! It can’t be! I go into the bathroom and stand before the mirror, I press the nostrils upward with two fingers. From the side it’s not too bad either, but in front, where my upper lip used to be, there is now just teeth and gum. Some goy. I look like Bugs Bunny! I cut pieces from the cardboard that comes back in the shirts from the laundry and Scotch-tape them to either side of my nose, thus restoring in profile the nice upward curve that I sported all through my childhood . . . but which is now gone! It actually seems that this sprouting of my beak dates exactly from the time that I discovered the shikses skating in Irvington Park—as though my own nose bone has taken it upon itself to act as my parents’ agent! Skating with shikses? Just you try it, wise guy. Remember Pinocchio? Well, that is nothing compared with what is going to happen to you. They’ll laugh and laugh, howl and hoot—and worse, calling you Goldberg in the bargain, send vou on your wav roasting with fury and resentment. Who do you think they’re always giggling about as it is? You! The skinny Yid and his shnoz following them around the ice every single afternoon—and can’t talk! “Please, will you stop playing with your nose,” my mother says. “I’m not interested, Alex, in what’s growing up inside there, not at dinner.” “But it’s too big” “What? What’s too big?” says my father. “My nose!” I scream. “Please, it gives you character,” my mother says, “so leave it alone!”

But who wants character? I want The real McCoy! In her blue parka and her red earmuffs and her big white mittens—Miss America, on blades! With her mistletoe and her plum pudding (whatever that may be), and her one-family house with a banister and a staircase, and parents who are tranquil and patient and dignified, and also a brother Billy who knows how to take motors apart and says “Much obliged,” and isn’t afraid of anything physical, and oh the way she’ll cuddle next to me on the sofa in her Angora sweater with her legs pulled back up beneath her tartan skirt, and the way shell turn at the doorway and say to me, “And thank you ever so much for a wonderful wonderful evening,” and then this amazing creature—to whom no one has ever said “Shah!” or “I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!”—this perfect, perfect-stranger, who is as smooth and shiny and cool as custard, will kiss me—raising up one shapely calf behind her—and my nose and my name will have become as nothing.

Look, I’m not asking for the world—I just don’t see why I should get any less out of life than some schmuck like Oogie Pringle or Henry Aldrich. I want Jane Powell too, God damn it! And Corliss and Veronica. I too want to be the boyfriend of Debbie Reynolds—it’s the Eddie Fisher in me coming out, that’s all, the longing in all us swarthy Jewboys for those bland blond exotics called shikses . . . Only what I don’t know yet in these feverish years is that for every Eddie yearning for a Debbie, there is a Debbie yearning for an Eddie—a Marilyn Monroe yearning for her Arthur Miller—even an Alice Faye yearning for Phil Harris. Even Jayne Mansfield was about to marry one, remember, when she was suddenly killed in a car crash? Who knew, you see, who knew back when we were watching National Velvet, that this stupendous purple-eyed girl who had the supreme goyische gift of all, the courage and know-how to get up and ride around on a horse (as opposed to having one pull your wagon, like the rag-seller for whom I am named)—who would have believed that this girl on the horse with the riding breeches and the perfect enunciation was lusting for our kind no less than we for hers? Because you know what Mike Todd was—a cheap facsimile of my Uncle Hymie upstairs! And who in his right mind would ever have believed that Elizabeth Taylor had the hots for Uncle Hymie? Who knew that the secret to a shikses heart (and box) was not to pretend to be some hook-nosed variety of goy, as boring and vacuous as her own brother, but to be what one’s uncle was, to be what one’s father was, to be whatever one was oneself, instead of doing some pathetic little Jewish imitation of one of those half-dead, ice-cold shaygets pricks, Jimmy or Johnny or Tod, who look, who think, who feel, who talk like fighter-bomber pilots!

Look at The Monkey, my old pal and partner in crime. Doctor, just saying her name, just bringing her to mind, gives me a hard-on on the spot! But I know I shouldn’t call her or see her ever again. Because the bitch is crazy! The sex-crazed bitch is out of her mind! Pure trouble!

But—what, what was I supposed to be but her Jewish savior? The Knight on the Big White Steed, the fellow in the Shining Armor the little girls used to dream would come to rescue them from the castles in which they were always imagining themselves to be imprisoned, well, as far as a certain school of shikse is concerned ( of whom The Monkey is a gorgeous example), this knight turns out to be none other than a brainy, balding, beaky Jew, with a strong social conscience and black hair on his balls, who neither drinks nor gambles nor keeps show girls on the side; a man guaranteed to give them kiddies to rear and Kafka to read—a regular domestic Messiah! Sure, he may as a kind of tribute to his rebellious adolescence say shit and fuck a lot around the house—in front of the children even—but the indisputable and heartwarming fact is that he is always around the house. No bars, no brothels, no race tracks, no backgammon all night long at the Racquet Club (about which she knows from her stylish past) or beer till all hours down at the American Legion (which she can remember from her mean and squalid youth). No, no indeed—what we have before us, ladies and gentlemen, direct from a long record-breaking engagement with his own family, is a Jewish boy just dying in his every cell to be Good, Responsible, & Dutiful to a family of his own. The same people who brought Harry Golden’s For 2¢ Plain bring you now—The Alexander Portnoy Show! If you liked Arthur Miller as a savior of shikses, you’ll just love Alex! You see, my background was in every way that was crucial to The Monkey the very opposite of what she had had to endure eighteen miles south of Wheeling, in a coal town called Moundsville—while I was up in New Jersey drowning in schmaltz (lolling in Jewish “warmth,” as The Monkey would have it), she was down in West Virginia virtually freezing to death, nothing but chattel really to a father who was, as she describes him, himself little more than first cousin to a mule, and some kind of incomprehensible bundle of needs to a mother who was as well-meaning as it was possible to be if you were a hillbilly one generation removed from the Alleghenies, a woman who could neither read nor write nor count all that high, and to top things off, hadn’t a single molar in her head.

A story of The Monkey’s which made a strong impression on me (not that all her stories didn’t compel this particular neurotic’s attention, with their themes of cruelty, ignorance, and exploitation): Once when she was eleven, and against her father’s will had sneaked off on a Saturday to a ballet class given by the local “artiste” (called Mr. Maurice), the old man came after her with a belt, beat her with it around the ankles all the way home, and then locked her in the closet for the rest of the day—and with her feet tied together for good measure. “Ketch you down by that queer again, you, and won’t just tie ’em up. I’ll do more’n that, don’t you worry!”

When she first arrived in New York, she was eighteen and hadn’t any back teeth to speak of, either. They had all been extracted (for a reason she still can’t fathom) by the local Moundsville practitioner, as gifted a dentist as she remembers Mr. Maurice to have been a dancer. When we two met, nearly a year ago now. The Monkey had already been through her marriage and her divorce. Her husband had been a fifty-year-old French industrialist, who had courted and married her one week in Florence, where she was modeling in a show at the Pitti Palace. Subsequent to the marriage, his sex life consisted of getting into bed with his young and beautiful bride and jerking off into a copy of a magazine called Garter Belt, which he had flown over to him from Forty-second Street. The Monkey has at her disposal a kind of dumb, mean, rural twang which she sometimes likes to use, and would invariably drop down into it when describing the excesses to which she was expected to be a witness as the tycoon’s wife. She could be very funny about the fourteen months she had spent with him, despite the fact that it was probably a grim if not terrifying experience. But he had flown her to London after the marriage for five thousand dollars’ worth of dental work, and then back in Paris, hung around her neck several hundred thousand dollars more in jewelry, and for the longest while, says The Monkey, this caused her to feel loyal to him. As she put it (before I forbade her ever again to say like, and man, and swinger, and crazy, and a groove ): “It was, like ethics.”

What caused her finally to run for her life were the little orgies he began to arrange after jerking off into Garter Belt (or was it Spiked Heels? ) became a bore to both of them. A woman, preferably black, would be engaged for a very high sum to squat naked upon a glass coffee table and take a crap while the tycoon lay flat on his back, directly beneath the table, and jerked his dong off. And as the shit splattered on the glass six inches above her beloved’s nose, The Monkey, our poor Monkey, was expected to sit on the red damask sofa, fully clothed, sipping cognac and watching.

It was a couple of years after her return to New York—I suppose she’s about twenty-four or twenty-five by this time—that The Monkey tried to kill herself a little by making a pass at her wrists with a razor, all on account of the way she had been treated at Le Club, or El Morocco, or maybe L’Interdit, by her current boyfriend, one or another of the hundred best-dressed men in the world. Thus she found her way to the illustrious Dr. Morris Frankel, henceforth to be known in these confessions as Harpo. Off and on during these past five years The Monkey has thrashed around on Harpo’s couch, waiting for him to tell her what she must do to become somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother. Why, cries The Monkey to Harpo, why must she always be involved with such hideous and cold-hearted shits, instead of with men? Why? Harpo, speak! Say something to me! Anything! “Oh, I know he’s alive,” The Monkey used to say, her little features scrunched up in anguish, “I just know it. I mean, who ever heard of a dead man with an answering service?” So, in and out of therapy (if that’s what it is) The Monkey goes–in whenever some new shit has broken her heart, out whenever the next likely knight has made his appearance.

I was “a breakthrough.” Harpo of course didn’t say yes, but then he didn’t say no, either, when she suggested that this was who I might be. He did cough, however, and this The Monkey takes as her confirmation. Sometimes he coughs, sometimes he grunts, sometimes he belches, once in a while he farts, whether voluntarily or not who knows, though I hold that a fart has to be interpreted as a negative transference reaction on his part. “Breakie, you’re so brilliant!” “Breakie” when she is being my sex kitten and cat-and when she is fighting for her life: “You big son of a bitch Jew? I want to be married and human!”

So, I was to be her breakthrough . . . but wasn’t she to be mine? Who like The Monkey had ever happened to me before—or will again? Not that I had not prayed, of course. No, you pray and you pray and you pray, you lift your impassioned prayers to God on the altar of the toilet seat, throughout your adolescence you deliver up to Him the living sacrifice of your spermatazoa by the gallon—and then one night, around midnight, on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-second, when you have come really to the point of losing faith in the existence of such a creature as you have been imagining for yourself even unto your thirty-second year, there she is, wearing a tan pants suit, and trying to hail a cab—lanky, with dark and abundant hair, and smallish features that give her face a kind of petulant expression, and an absolutely fantastic ass.

Why not? What’s lost? What’s gained, however? Go ahead, you shackled and fettered son of a bitch, speak to her. She has an ass on her with the swell and the cleft of the world’s most perfect nectarine! Speak!

“Hi”—softly, and with a little surprise, as though I might have met her somewhere before . . .

“What do you want?”

“To buy you a drink,” I said.

“A real swinger,” she said, sneering.

Sneering! Two seconds—and two insults! To the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for this whole city! “To eat your pussy, baby, how’s that?” My God! She’s going to call a cop! Who’ll turn me in to the Mayor!

“That’s better,” she replied.

And so a cab pulled up, and we went to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and said, “Go ahead.”

My incredulity! That such a thing was happening to me! Did I eat! It was suddenly as though my life were taking place in the middle of a wet dream. There I was, going down at last on the star of all those pornographic films that I had been producing in my head since I first laid a hand upon my own joint . . . “Now me you,” she said, “—one good turn deserves another,” and. Doctor, this stranger then proceeded to suck me off with a mouth that might have gone to a special college to learn all the wonderful things it knew. What a find, I thought, she takes it right down to the root! What a mouth I have fallen into! Talk about opportunities! And simultaneously: Get out! Go! Who and what can this person be!

Later we had a long, serious, very stirring conversation about perversions. She began by asking if I had ever done it with a man. I said no. I asked ( as I gathered she wanted me to) if she had ever done it with another woman.

“. . . Nope.”

“. . . Would you like to?”

“. . . Would you like me to?”

“. . . Why not, sure.”

“. . . Would you like to watch?”

“. . . I suppose so.”

“. . . Then maybe it could be arranged.”

“. . . Yes?”

“. . . Yes.”

“. . . Well, I might like that.”

“Oh,” she said, with a nice sarcastic edge, “I think you might.”

She told me then that only a month before, when she had been ill with a virus, a couple she knew had come by to make dinner for her. After the meal they said they wanted her to watch them screw. So she did. She sat up on the bed with a temperature of 102, and they took off their clothes and went at it on the bedroom rug—”And you know what they wanted me to do, while they were making it?”

“No.”

“I had some bananas on the counter in the kitchen, and they wanted me to eat one. While I watched.”

“For the arcane symbolism, no doubt.”

“The what?”

“Why did they want you to eat the banana?”

“Man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to know I was really there. They wanted to like hear me. Chewing. Look, do you just suck, or do you fuck, too?”

The real McCoy! My slut from the Empire Burlesque—without the tits, but so beautiful!

“I fuck too.”

“Well, so do I.”

“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said, “us running into each other.”

She laughed for the first time, and instead of that finally putting me at my ease, suddenly I knew—some big spade was going to leap out of the bedroom closet and spring for my heart with his knife—or she herself was going to go berserk, the laughter would erupt into wild hysterics—and God only knew what catastrophe would follow. Eddie

Wait! us!

Was she a call girl? A maniac? Was she in cahoots with some Puerto Rican pusher who was about to make his entrance into my life? Enter it-and end it, for the forty dollars in my wallet and a watch from Korvette’s?

“Look,” I said, in my clever way, “do you do this, more or less, all the time . . . ?”

“What kind of question is that! What kind of shit-eating remark is that supposed to be! Are you another heartless bastard too? Don’t you think I have feelings too!”

“I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

But suddenly, where there had been fury and outrage, there were only tears. Did I need any more evidence that this girl was, to say the least, a little erratic psychologically? Any man in his right mind would surely then have gotten up, gotten dressed, and gotten the hell out in one piece. And counting his blessings. But don’t you see—my right mind is just another name for my fears! My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with he should be strung up, that son of a bitch, hung by his fucking storm-trooper’s boots till he’s dead! In the street, who had been trembling, me or the girl? Me! Who had the boldness, the daring, the guts, me or the girl? The girl! The fucking girl!

“Look,” she said, wiping away the tears with the pillowcase, “look, I lied to you before, in case you’re interested, in case you’re writing this down or something.”

“Yeah? About what?” And here he comes, I thought, my shvartze, out of the closet,—eyes, teeth, and razor blade flashing! Here comes the headline: ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL’S APT!

“I mean like what the fuck did I lie for, to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I can’t tell you.”

“I mean they didn’t want me to eat the banana. My friends didn’t want me to eat any banana. I wanted to.”

Thus: The Monkey.

As for why she did lie, tome? I think it was her way of informing herself right off—semiconsciously, I suppose—that she had somehow fallen upon a higher-type person: that pickup on the street notwithstanding, and the whole-hearted suck in her bed notwithstanding—followed by that heart-stirring swallow—and the discussion of perversions that followed that . . . still, she really hadn’t wanted me to think of her as given over wholly to sexual excess and adventurism . . . Because a glimpse of me was apparently all it took for her to leap imaginatively ahead into playboys in their Cardin suits; no more married, desperate advertising executives in overnight from Connecticut; no more faggots in British warmers for lunch at Serendipity, or aging lechers from the cosmetics industry drooling into their hundred-dollar dinners at Le Pavilion at night . . . No, at long last the figure who had dwelled these many years at the heart of her dreams (so it turned out), a man who would be good to a wife and to children . . . a Jew. And what a Jew! First he eats her, and then, immediately after, comes slithering on up and begins talking and explaining things, making judgments left and right, advising her what books to read and how to vote, telling her how life should and should not be lived. “How do you know that?” she used to ask warily. “I mean that’s just your opinion.” “What do you mean opinion—it’s not my opinion, girlie, it’s the truth.” “I mean, is that like something everybody knows . . . or just you?” A Jewish man, who cared about the welfare of the poor of the City of New York, was eating her pussy! Someone who had appeared on educational TV was shooting off into her mouth! In a flash, Doctor, she must have seen it all—can that be? Are womenthat calculating? Am I actually a naif about cunt? Saw and planned it all, did she, right out there on Lexington Avenue? . . . The gentle fire burning in the book-lined living room of our country home, the Irish nanny bathing the children before Mother puts them to bed, and the willowy ex-model, jet-setter, and sex deviant, daughter of the mines and mills of West Virginia, self-styled victim of a dozen real bastards, seen here in her Saint Laurent pajamas and her crushed-kid boots, dipping thoughtfully into a novel by Samuel Beckett . . . seen here on a fur rug with her husband, whom People Are Talking About, The Saintliest Commissioner of the City of New York . . . seen here with his pipe and his thinning kinky black Hebe hair, in all his Jewish messianic fervor and charm . . .

What happened finally at Irvington Park: late on a Saturday afternoon I found myself virtually alone on the frozen lake with a darling fourteen-year-old shikseleh whom I had been watching practicing her figure eights since after lunch, a girl who seemed to me to possess the middle-class charms of Margaret O’Brien-that quickness and cuteness around the sparkling eyes and the freckled nose—and the simplicity and plainness, the lower-class availability, the lank blond hair of Peggy Ann Garner. You see, what looked like movie stars to everyone else were just different kinds of shikses to me. Often I came out of the movies trying to figure out what high school in Newark Jeanne Grain (and her cleavage) or Kathryn Grayson (and her cleavage) would be going to if they were my age. And where would I find a shikse like Gene Tiemey, who I used to think might even be a Jew, if she wasn’t actually part Chinese. Meanwhile Peggy Ann O’Brien has made her last figure eight and is coasting lazily off for the boathouse, and I have done nothing about her, or about any of them, nothing all winter long, and now March is almost upon us-the red skating flag will come down over the park and once again we will be into polio season. I may not even live into the following winter, so what am I waiting for? “Now! Or never!” So after her—when she is safely out of sight—I madly begin to skate. “Excuse me,” I will say, “but would you mind if I walk you home?” If I walked, or if I walk—which is more correct? Because I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it. “Would you care perhaps to have a hot chocolate? May I have your phone number and come to call some evening? My name? I am Alton Peterson”—a name I had picked for myself out of the Montclair section of the Essex County phone book—totally goy I was sure, and sounds like Hans Christian Andersen into the bargain. What a coup! Secretly I have been practicing writing “Alton Peterson” all winter long, practicing on sheets of paper that I subsequently tear from my notebook after school and burn so that they won’t have to be explained to anybody in my house. I am Alton Peterson, I am Alton Peterson—Alton Christian Peterson? Or is that going a little too far? Alton C. Peterson? And so preoccupied am I with not forgetting whom I would now like to be, so anxious to make it to the boathouse while she is still changing out of her skates—and wondering, too, what I’ll say when she asks about the middle of my face and what happened to it (old hockey injury? Fell off my horse while playing polo after church one Sunday morning—too many sausages for breakfast, ha ha ha!)—I reach the edge of the lake with the tip of one skate a little sooner than I had planned—and so go hurtling forward onto the frostbitten ground, chipping one front tooth and smashing the bony protrusion at the top of my tibia.

My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer’s Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury—while my father cries, “Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!”

For skating after shikses, under an alias, I would be a cripple for the rest of my days.

With a life like mine. Doctor, who needs dreams?

Bubbles Girardi, an eighteen-year-old girl who had been thrown out of Hillside High School and was subsequently found floating in the swimming pool at Olympic Park by my lascivious classmate, Smolka, the tailor’s son . . .

For myself, I wouldn’t go near that pool if you paid me—it is a breeding ground for polio and spinal meningitis, not to mention diseases of the skin, the scalp, and the asshole-it is even rumored that some kid from Weequahic once stepped into the footbath between the locker room and the pool and actually came out at the other end without his toenails. And yet that is where you find the girls who fuck. Wouldn’t you know it? That is the place to find the kinds of shikses Who Will Do Anything! If only a person is willing to risk polio from the pool, gangrene from the footbath, ptomaine from the hot dogs, and elephantiasis from the soap and the towels, he might possibly get laid.

We sit in the kitchen, where Bubbles was working over the ironing board when we arrived—in her slip) Mandel and I leaf through back numbers of Ring magazine, while in the living room Smolka tries to talk Bubbles into taking on his two friends as a special favor to him. Bubbles’ brother, who in a former life was a paratrooper, is nobody we have to worry about, Smolka assures us, because he is off in Hoboken boxing in a feature event under the name Johnny “Geronimo” Girardi. Her father drives a taxi during the day, and a car for The Mob at night—he is out somewhere chauffeuring gangsters around and doesn’t get home until the early hours, and the mother we don’t have to worry about because she’s dead. Perfect, Smolka, perfect, I couldn’t feel more secure. Now I have absolutely nothing to worry about except the Trojan I have been carrying around so long in my wallet that inside its tinfoil wrapper it has probably been half eaten away by mold. One spurt and the whole thing will go flying in pieces all over the inside of Bubbles Girardi’s box—andthen what do I do?

To be sure that these Trojans really hold up under pressure, I have been down in my cellar all week filling them with quart after quart of water—expensive as it is, I have been using them to jerk off into, to see if they will stand up under simulated fucking conditions. So far so good. Only what about the sacred one that has by now left an indelible imprint of its shape upon my wallet, the very special one I have been saving to get laid with, with the lubricated tip? How can I possibly expect no damage to have been done after sitting on it in school—crushing it in that wallet—for nearly six months? And who says Geronimo is going to be all night in Hoboken? And what if the person the gangsters are supposed to murder has already dropped dead from fright by the time they arrive, and Mr. Girardi is sent home early for a good night’s rest? What if the girl has the syph! But then Smolka must have it too!—Smolka, who is always dragging drinks out of everybody else’s bottle of cream soda, and grabbing with his hand at your putz! That’s all I need, with my mother! I’d never hear the end of it! “Alex, what is that you’re hiding under your foot?” “Nothing.” “Alex, please, I heard a definite clink. What is that that fell out of your trousers that you’re stepping on it with your foot? Out of your good trousers!” “Nothing! My shoe! Leave me alone!” “Young man, what are you—oh my God! Jack! Come quick! Look—look on the floor by his shoe!” With his pants around his knees, and the Newark News turned back to the obituary page and clutched in his hand, he rushes into the kitchen from the bathroom—Now what?” She screams (that’s her answer) and points beneath my chair. “What is that, Mister—some smart high-school joke?” demands my father, in a fury—“What is that black plastic thing doing on the kitchen floor?” “It’s not a plastic one,” I say, and break into sobs. “It’s my own. I caught the syph from an eighteen-year—old Italian girl in Hillside, and now, now, I have no more p-p-p-penis!” “His little thing,” screams my mother, “that I used to tickle it to make him go wee-wee—” “DON’T TOUCH IT NOBODY MOVE,” cries my father, for my mother seems about to leap forward onto the floor, like a woman into her husband’s grave—“call the Humane Society—” “Like for a rabies dog?” she weeps. “Sophie, what else are you going to do? Save it in a drawer somewhere? To show his children? He ain’t going to have no children!” She begins to howl pathetically, a grieving animal, while my father . . . but the scene fades quickly, for in a matter of seconds I am blind, and within the hour my brain is the consistency of hot Farina.

Tacked above the Girardi sink is a picture of Jesus Christ floating up to Heaven in a pink nightgown. How disgusting can human beings be! The Jews I despise for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority—but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. What kind of base and brainless schmucks are these people to worship somebody who, number one, never existed, and number two, if he did, looking as he does in that picture, was without a doubt The Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut, with a Palmolive complexion—and wearing a gown that I realize today must have come from Fredericks of Hollywood! Enough of God and the rest of that garbage! Down with religion and human groveling! Up with socialism and the dignity of man! Actually, why I should be visiting the Girardi home is not so as to lay their daughter—please God!—but to evangelize for Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. Of course! For who are the Girardis if not the people, on whose behalf, for whose rights and liberties and dignities, I and my brother-in-law-to-be wind up arguing every Sunday afternoon with our hopelessly ignorant elders (who vote Democratic and think Neanderthal), my father and my uncle. If we don’t like it here, they tell us, why don’t we go back to Russia where everything is hunky-dory? “You’re going to turn that kid into a Communist,” my father warns Morty, whereupon I cry out, “You don’t understand! All men are brothers!” Christ, I could strangle him on the spot for being so blind to human brotherhood!

Now that he is marrying my sister, Morty drives the truck and works in the warehouse for my uncle, and in a manner of speaking, so do I: three Saturdays in a row now I have risen before dawn to go out with him delivering cases of Squeeze to general stores off in the rural wilds where New Jersey joins with the Poconos. I have written a radio play, inspired by my master, Norman Corwin, and his celebration of V-E Day, On a Note of Triumph (a copy of which Morty has bought me for my birthday). So the enemy is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse; take a bow, G.I., take a bow, little guy . . . Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise, ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!—“we will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na- tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men ! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”

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. And, 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 us 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? Ill 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—”

Mother, how? How else? Consorting with Christian girls.

Mandel the next day tells me that within half an hour after my frenetic departure. Bubbles was down on her fucking dago knees sucking his cock.

The top of my head comes off: “She was?”

“Right on her fucking dago knees,” says Mandel. “Schmuck, what’d you go home for?”

“She called me a kike!” I answer self-righteously. “I thought I was blind. Look, she’s anti-Semitic, Ba-ba-lu.”

“Yeah, what do I give a shit?” says Mandel. Actually I don’t think he knows what anti-Semitic means. “All I know is I got laid, twice.”

“You did? With a rubber?”

“Fuck, I didn’t use nothing.”

“But she’ll get pregnant!” I cry, and in anguish, as though it’s me who will be held accountable.

“What do I care?” replies Mandel.

Why do I worry then! Why do I alone spend hours testing Trojans in my basement? Why do I alone live in mortal terror of the syph? Why do I run home with my little bloodshot eye, imagining myself blinded forever, when half an hour later Bubbles will be down eating cock on her knees! Home—to my mommy! To my Tollhouse cookie and my glass of milk, home to my nice clean bed! Oy, civilization and its discontents! Ba-ba-lu, speak to me, talk to me, tell me what it was like when she did it! I have to know, and with details—exact details! What about her tits? What about her nipples? What about her thighs? What does she do with her thighs, Ba-ba-lu, does she wrap them around your ass like in the hot books, or does she squeeze them tight around your cock till you want to scream, like in my dreams? And what about her hair down there? Tell me everything there is to tell about pubic hairs and the way they smell, I don’t care if I heard it all before. And did she really kneel, are you shitting me? Did she actually kneel on her knees? And what about her teeth, where do they go? And does she suck on it, or does she blow on it, or somehow is it that she does both? Oh God, Ba-ba-lu, did you shoot in her mouth? Oh my God! And did she swallow it right down, or spit it out, or get mad—tell me! what did she do with your hot come! Did you warn her you were going to shoot, or did you just come off and let her worry? And who put it in—did she put it in or did you put it in, or does it just get drawn in by itself? And where were all your clothes?—on the couch? on the floor? exactly where? I want details! Details! Actual details! Who took off her brassiere, who took off her panties—her panties—did you? did she? When she was down there blowing, Ba-ba-lu, did she have anything on at all? And how about the pillow under her ass, did you stick a pillow under her ass like it says to do in my parents’ marriage manual? What happened when you came inside her? Did she come too? Mandel, clarify something that I have to know—do they come? Stuff? Or do they just moan a lot—or what? How does she come! What is it like! Before I go out of my head. I have to know what it’s like!