Portnoy's Complaint

IN EXILE

On Sunday mornings, when the weather is warm enough, twenty of the neighborhood men (this in the days of short center field) play a round of seven-inning softball games, starting at nine in the morning and ending about one in the afternoon, the stakes for each game a dollar a head. The umpire is our dentist, old Dr. Wolfenberg, the neighborhood college graduate—night school on High Street, but as good as Oxford to us. Among the players is our butcher, his twin brother our plumber, the grocer, the owner of the service station where my father buys his gasoline—all of them ranging in age from thirty to fifty, though I think of them not in terms of their years, but only as “the men.” In the on-deck circle, even at the plate, they roll their jaws on the stumps of soggy cigars. Not boys, you see, but men. Belly! Muscle! Forearms black with hair! Bald domes! And then the voices they have on them—cannons you can hear go off from as far as our front stoop a block away. I imagine vocal cords inside them thick as clotheslines! lungs the size of zeppelins! Nobody has to to tell them to stop mumbling and speak up, never! And the outrageous things they say! The chatter in the infield isn’t chatter, it’s kibbitzing, and (to this small boy, just beginning to learn the art of ridicule) hilarious, particularly the insults that emanate from the man my father has labeled “The Mad Russian,” Biderman, owner of the corner candy store (and bookie joint) who has a “hesitation” side-arm delivery, not only very funny but very effective. “Abracadabra,” he says, and pitches his backbreaking drop. And he is always giving it to Dr. Wolfenberg: “A blind ump, okay, but a blind dentist?” The idea causes him to smote his forehead with his glove. “Play ball, comedian,” calls Dr. Wolfenberg, very Connie Mack in his perforated two-tone shoes and Panama hat, “start up the game, Biderman, unless you want to get thrown out of here for insults—!” “But how do they teach you in that dental school. Doc, by Braille?”

Meanwhile, all the way from the outfield comes the badinage of one who in appearance is more cement-mixer than Homo sapiens, the prince of the produce market, Allie Sokolow. The pisk he opens on him! (as my mother would put it). For half an inning the invective flows in toward home plate from his position in deep center field, and then when his team comes to bat, he stations himself in the first-base coaching box and the invective flows uninterruptedly out in the opposite direction—and none of it has anything to do with any contretemps that may actually be taking place on the field. Quite the opposite. My father, when he is not out working on Sunday mornings, comes by to sit and watch a few innings with me; he knows Allie Sokolow (as he knows many of the players), since they were all boys together in the Central Ward, before he met my mother and moved to Jersey City. He says that Allie has always been like this, “a real showman.” When Allie charges in toward second base, screaming his gibberish and double-talk in the direction of home plate (where there isn’t even a batter as yet—where Dr. Wolfenberg is merely dusting the plate with the whisk broom he brings to the game), the people in the stands couldn’t be more delighted: they laugh, they clap, they call out, “You tell him, Allie! You give it to him, Sokolow!” And invariably Dr. Wolfenberg, who takes himself a little more seriously than your ordinary nonprofessional person (and is a German Jew to boot), holds up his palm, halting an already Sokolow-stopped game, and says to Biderman, “Will you please get that meshuggener back in the outfield?”

I tell you, they are an endearing lot! I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling that sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of rsy fielder’s mitt—sweat, leather, vaseline—and laughing my head off. I cannot imagine myself living out my life any other place but here. Why leave, why go, when there is everything here that I will ever want? The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending—anything for a laugh! I love it! And yet underneath it all, they mean it, they are in dead earnest. You should see them at the end of the seven innings when that dollar has to change hands. Don’t tell me they don’t mean it! Losing and winning is not a joke . . . and yet it is! And that’s what charms me most of all. Fierce as the competition is, they cannot resist clowning and kibbitzing around. Putting on a show! How I am going to love growing up to be a Jewish man! Living forever in the Weequahic section, and playing softball on Chancellor Avenue from nine to one on Sundays, a perfect joining of clown and competitor, kibbitzing wiseguy and dangerous long-ball bitter.

I remember all this where? when? While Captain Meyerson is making his last slow turn over the Tel Aviv airport. My face is against the window. Yes, I could disappear, I think, change my mime and never be heard from again—then Meyerson banks the wing on my side, and I look down for the first time upon the continent of Asia, I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the Land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.

The elderly couple seated beside me (the Solomons, Edna and Felix), who have told me in an hour’s flight time all about their children and grandchildren in Cincinnati (with, of course, a walletful of visual aids), now nudge each other and nod together in silent satisfaction; they even poke some friends across the aisle, a couple from Mount Vernon they’ve just met (the Peris, Sylvia and Bernie), and these two kvell also to see a tall, good-looking, young Jewish lawyer (and single! a match for somebody’s daughter!) suddenly begin to weep upon making contact with a Jewish airstrip. However, what has produced these tears is not, as the Solomons and Peris would have it, a first glimpse of the national homeland, the in gathering of an exile, but the sound in my ear of my own nine-year-old little boy’s voice—my voice, I mean, at nine. Nine-year-old me! Sure a sourpuss, a face-maker, a little back-talker and kvetch, sure my piping is never without its nice infuriating whiny edge of permanent disgruntlement and grievance (“as though,” my mother says, “the world owes him a living—at nine years old”), but a laugher and kidder too, don’t forget that, an enthusiast! a romantic! a mimic! a nine-year-old lover of life! fiery with such simple, neighborhoody dreams!—“I’m going up the field,” I call into the kitchen, fibers of pink lox lodged like sour dental floss in the gaps between my teeth, “I’m going up the field, Ma,” pounding my mitt with my carpy-smelling little fist, “I’ll be back around one—” “Wait a minute. What time? Where?” “Up the field,” I holler—I’m very high on hollering to be heard, it’s like being angry, except without the consequences, “—to watch the men!”

And that’s the phrase that does me in as we touch down upon Eretz Yisroel : to watch the men.

Because I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men! To be going home to Sunday dinner at one o’clock, sweat socks pungent from twenty-one innings of softball, underwear athletically gamy, and in the muscle of my throwing arm, a faint throbbing from the low and beautiful pegs I have been unleashing all morning long to hold down the opposition on the base paths; yes, hair disheveled, teeth gritty, feet beat and kishkas sore from laughing, in other words, feeling great, a robust Jewish man now gloriously pooped—yes, home I head for resuscitation . . . and to whom? To my wife and my children, to a family of my own, and right there in the Weequahic section! I shave and shower—rivulets of water stream off my scalp a filthy brown, ah, it’s good, ah yes, it’s a regular pleasure standing there nearly scalding myself to death with hot water. It strikes me as so manly, converting pain to pleasure. Then into a pair of snappy slacks and a freshly dry-cleaned “gaucho” shirt—perfecto! I whistle a popular song, I admire my biceps, I shoot a rag across my shoes, making it pop, and meanwhile my kids are riffling through the Sunday papers ( reading with eyes the exact color of my own), giggling away on the living-room rug; and my wife, Mrs. Alexander Portnoy, is setting the table in the dining room—we will be having my mother and father as guests, they will be walking over any minute, as they do every Sunday. A future, see! A simple and satisfying future! Exhausting, exhilarating softball in which to spend my body’s force—that for the morning—then in the afternoon, the brimming, hearty stew of family life, and at night three solid hours of the best line-up of radio entertainment in the world: yes, as I delighted in Jack Benny’s trips down to his vault in the company of my father, and Fred Alien’s conversations with Mrs. Nussbaum, and Phil Harris’ with Frankie Remley, also shall my children delight in them with me, and so unto the hundredth generation. And then after Kenny Baker, I double-lock the front and back doors, turn off all the lights (check and—as my father does—double-check the pilot on the gas range so that our lives will not be stolen from us in the night). I kiss good night my pretty sleepy daughter and my clever sleepy son, and in the arms of Mrs. A. Portnoy, that kind and gentle (and in my sugary but modest fantasy, faceless) woman, I bank the fires of my abounding pleasure. In the morning I am off to downtown Newark, to the Essex County Court House, where I spend my workdays seeking justice for the poor and the oppressed.

Our eighth-grade class visits the courthouse to observe the architecture. Home and in my room that night, I write in my fresh new graduation autograph album, under YOUR FAVORITE MOTTO, “Don’t Step on the Underdog.” MY FAVORITE PROFESSION? “Lawyer.” MY FAVORITE HERO? “Tom Paine and Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln sits outside the courthouse (in Gutzon Borglum’s bronze), looking tragic and fatherly: you just know how much he cares. A statue of Washington, standing erect and authoritarian in front of his horse, overlooks Broad Street; it is the work of J. Massey Rhind (we write this second unname-like name of a sculptor in our notebooks ); our art teacher says that the two statues are “the city’s pride,” and we head off in pairs for the paintings at the Newark Museum. Washington, I must confess, leaves me cold. Maybe it’s the horse, that he’s leaning on a horse. At any rate, he is so obviously a goy. But Lincoln! I could cry. Look at him sitting there, so oysgemitchet. How he labored for the downtrodden—as will I!

A nice little Jewish boy? Please, I am the nicest little Jewish boy who ever lived! Only look at the fantasies, how sweet and savior-like they are! Gratitude to my parents, loyalty to my tribe, devotion to the cause of justice!

And? What’s so wrong? Hard work in an idealistic profession; games played without fanaticism or violence, games played among like-minded people, and with laughter; and family forgiveness and love. What was so wrong with believing in all that? What happened to the good sense I had at nine, ten, eleven years of age? How have I come to be such an enemy and flayer of myself? And so lone!Oh, so alone! Nothing but self! Locked up in me! Yes, I have to ask myself (as the airplane carries me—I believe—away from my tormentor), what has become of my purposes, those decent and worthwhile goals? Home? I have none. Family? No! Things I could own just by snapping my fingers . . . so why not snap them then, and get on with my life? No, instead of tucking in my children and lying down beside a loyal wife ( to whom I am loyal too), I have, on two different evenings, taken to bed with me—coinstantaneously, as they say in the whorehouses—a fat little Italian whore and an illiterate, unbalanced American mannequin. And that isn’t even my idea of a good time, damn it! What is? I told you! And meant it—sitting at home listening to Jack Benny with my kids! Raising intelligent, loving, sturdy children! Protecting some good woman! Dignity! Health! Love! Industry! Intelligence! Trust! Decency! High Spirits! Compassion! What the hell do I care about sensational sex? How can I be floundering like this over something so simple, so silly, as pussy! How absurd that I should have finally come down with VD! At my age! Because I’m sure of it: I have contracted something from that Lina! It is just a matter of waiting for the chancre to appear. But I won’t wait, I can’t: In Tel Aviv a doctor, first thing, before the chancre or the blindness sets in!

Only what about the dead girl back at the hotel? For she will have accomplished it by now. I’m sure. Thrown herself off the balcony in her underpants. Walked into the sea and drowned herself, wearing the world’s tiniest bikini. No, she will take hemlock in the moonlit shadows of the Acropolis—in her Balenciaga evening gown! That empty-headed, exhibitionistic, suicidal twat! Don’t worry, when she does it, it’ll be photographable—it’ll come out looking like an ad for ladies’ lingerie! There she’ll be, as usual, in the Sunday magazine section—only dead! I must turn back before I have this ridiculous suicide forever on my conscience! I should have telephoned Harpo! I didn’t even think of it—just ran formy life. Gotten her to a phone to talk to her doctor. But would he have talked? I doubt it! That mute bastard, he has to, before she takes her unreversible revenge! MODEL SLITS THROAT IN AMPHITHEATRE; Medea Interrupted by Suicide . . . and they’ll publish the note they find, more than likely in a bottle stuffed up her snatch. “Alexander Portnoy is responsible. He forced me to sleep with a whore and then wouldn’t make me an honest woman. Mary Jane Reed.” Thank God the moron can’t spell! It’ll all be Greek to those Greeks! Hope fully.

Running away! In flight, escaping again—and from what? From someone else who would have me a saint! Which I ain’t! And do not want or intend to be! No, any guilt on my part is comical! I will not hear of it! If she kills herself—But that’s not what she’s about to do. No, it’ll be more ghastly than that: she’s going to telephone the Mayor! And that’s why I’m running! But she wouldn’t. But she would. She will! More than likely already has. Remember? I’ll expose you, Alex. I’ll call long-distance to John Lindsay. I’ll telephone Jimmy Breslin. And she is crazy enough to do it! Breslin, that cop! That precinct station genius! Oh Jesus, let her be dead then! Jump, you ignorant destructive bitch—better you than me! Sure, all I need is she should start telephoning around to the wire services: I can see my father going out to the corner after dinner, picking up the Newark News—and at long last, the word SCANDAL printed in bold type above a picture of his darling son! Or turning on the seven o’clock news to watch the CBS correspondent in Athens interviewing The Monkey from her hospital bed. “Portnoy, that’s right. Capital P. Then 0. Then I think R. Oh, I can’t remember he rest, but I swear on my wet pussy, Mr. Rudd, he made me sleep with a whore!” No, no, I am not exaggerating: think a moment about the character, or absence of same. Remember Las Vegas? Remember her desperation? Then you see that this wasn’t just my conscience punishing me; no, whatever revenge I might imagine, she could imagine too. And will yet! Believe me, we have not heard the last of Mary Jane Reed. I was supposed to save her life—and didn’t. Made her sleep with whores instead! So don’t think we have heard the last word from her!

And there, to cause me to kick my ass even more, there all blue below me, the Aegean Sea. The Pumpkin’s Aegean! My poetic American girl! Sophocles! Long ago! Oh, Pumpkin—baby, say it again, Why would I want to do a thing like that? Someone who knew who she was! Psychologically so intact as not to be in need of salvation or redemption by me! Not in need of conversion to my glorious faith! The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch, the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way . . . oh, why did I ever let her go! I can’t believe it—because she wouldn’t be Jewish? “The eternal note of sadness—” “The turbid ebb and flow of human misery—”

Only, is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering—something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that’s Portnoy’s slogan. That’s the story of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words. A travesty! My politics, descended entirely to my putz! JERK-OFF ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS! The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving! And on the brink of becoming John Lindsay’s Profumo!

So it seemed, an hour out of Athens.

Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Beer-She’va, the Dead Sea, Sedom, ’Ein Gedi, then north to Caesarea, Haifa, Akko, Tiberias, Safed, the upper Galilee . . . and always it is more dreamy than real. Not that I courted the sensation either. I’d had enough of the improbable with my companion in Greece and Rome. No, to make some sense out of the impulse that had sent me running aboard the El Al flight to begin with, to convert myself from this bewildered runaway into a man once again—in control of my will, conscious of my intentions, doing as I wished, not as I must—I set off traveling about the country as though the trip had been undertaken deliberately, with forethought, desire, and for praiseworthy, if conventional, reasons. Yes, I would have (now that I was unaccountably here) what is called an educational experience. I would improve myself, which is my way, after all. Or was, wasn’t it? Isn’t that why I still read with a pencil in my hand? To learn? To become better? (than whom?) So, I studied maps in my bed, bought historical and archeological texts and read them with my meals, hired guides, rented cars—doggedly in that sweltering heat, I searched out and saw everything I could: tombs, synagogues, fortresses, mosques, shrines, harbors, ruins, the new ones, the old. I visited the Carmel Caves, the Chagall windows (me and a hundred ladies from the Detroit Hadassah), the Hebrew University, the Bet She’an excavations—toured the green kibbutzirn, the baked wastelands, the rugged border outposts in the mountains; I even climbed a little ways up Masada under the full artillery fire of the sun. And everything I saw, I found I could assimilate and understand. It was history, it was nature, it was art. Even the Negev, that hallucination, I experienced as real and of this world. A desert. No, what was incredible and strange to me, more novel than the Dead Sea, or even the dramatic wilderness of Tsin, where for an eerie hour I wandered in the light of the bleaching sun, between white rocks where (I learn from my guidebook) the tribes of Israel wandered for so long (where I picked up as a souvenir—and have in fact right here in my pocket—such a stone as my guide informed me Zipporah used to circumcise the son of Moses—) what gave my entire sojourn the air of the preposterous was one simple but wholly (to me) implausible fact: lamina Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish.

My dream begins as soon as I disembark. I am in an airport where I have never been before and all the people I see—passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers—are Jews. Is that so unlike the dreams that your dreaming patients recount? Is that so unlike the kind of experience one has while asleep? But awake, who ever heard of such a thing? The writing on the walls is Jewish—Jewish graffiti! The flag is Jewish. The faces are the faces you see on Chancellor Avenue! The faces of my neighbors, my uncles, my teachers, the parents of my boyhood friends. Faces like my own face! only moving before a backdrop of white wall and blazing sun and spikey tropical foliage. And it ain’t Miami Beach, either. No, the faces of Eastern Europe, but only a stone’s throw from Africa! In their short pants the men remind me of the head counselors at the Jewish summer camps I worked at during college vacations—only this isn’t summer camp, either. It’s home! These aren’t Newark high school teachers off for two months with a clipboard and a whistle in the Hopatcong mountains of New Jersey. These are (there’s no other word!) the natives. Returned! This is where it all began! Just been away on a long vacation, that’s all! Hey, here we’re the WASPs! My taxi passes through a big square surrounded by sidewalk cafés such as one might see in Paris or Rome. Only the cafés are crowded with Jews. The taxi overtakes a bus. I look inside its windows. More Jews. Including the driver. Including the policemen up ahead directing traffic! At the hotel I ask the clerk for a room. He has a thin mustache and speaks English as though he were Ronald Colman. Yet he is Jewish too.

And now the drama thickens:

It is after midnight. Earlier in the evening. the promenade beside the sea was a gay and lively crush of Jews—Jews eating ices, Jews drinking soda pop, Jews conversing, laughing, walking together arm-in-arm. But now as I start back to my hotel, I find myself virtually alone. At the end of the promenade, which I must pass beyond to reach my hotel, I see five youths smoking cigarettes and talking. Jewish youths, of course. As I approach them, it becomes clear to me that they have been anticipating my arrival. One of them steps forward and addresses me in English. “What time is it?” I look at my watch and realize that they are not going to permit me to pass. They are going to assault me! But how can that be? If they are Jewish and I am Jewish, what motive can there be for them to do me any harm?

I must tell them that they are making a mistake. Surely they do not really want to treat me as a gang of anti-Semites would. “Pardon me,” I say, and edge my body between them, wearing a stern expression on my pale face. One of them calls, “Mister, what time—?” where-upon I quicken my pace and continue rapidly to the hotel, unable to understand why they should have wished to frighten me so, when we are all Jews.

Hardly defies interpretation, wouldn’t you say?

In my room I quickly remove my trousers and shorts and under a reading lamp examine my penis. I find the organ to be unblemished and without any apparent signs of disease, and yet I am not relieved. It may be that in certain cases (perhaps those that are actually most severe) there is never any outward manifestation of infection. Rather, the debilitating effects take place within the body, unseen and unchecked, until at last the progress of the disorder is irreversible, and the patient is doomed. In the morning I am awakened by the noise from beyond my window. It is just seven o’clock, yet when I look outside I see the beach already swarming with people. It is a startling sight at such an early hour, particularly as the day is Saturday and I was anticipating a sabbath mood of piety and solemnity to pervade the city. But the crowd of Jews—yet again!—is gay. I examine my member in the strong morning light and am—yet again—overcome with apprehension to discover that it appears to be in a perfectly healthy condition.

I leave my room to go and splash in the sea with the happy Jews. I bathe where the crowd is most dense. I amplaying in a sea full of Jews! Frolicking, gamboling Jews! Look at their Jewish limbs moving through the Jewish water! Look at the Jewish children laughing, acting as if they own the place . . . Which they do! And the lifeguard, yet another Jew! Up and down the beach, so far as I can see, Jews—and more pouring in throughout the beautiful morning, as from a cornucopia. I stretch out on the beach, I close my eyes. Overhead I hear an engine: no fear, a Jewish plane. Under me the sand is warm: Jewish sand. I buy a Jewish ice cream from a Jewish vendor. “Isn’t this something?” I say to myself. “A Jewish country!” But the idea is more easily expressed than understood; I cannot really grasp hold of it. Alex in Wonderland.

In the afternoon I befriend a young woman with green eyes and tawny skin who is a lieutenant in the Jewish Army. The Lieutenant takes me at night to a bar in the harbor area. The customers, she says, are mostly longshoremen. Jewish longshoremen? Yes. I laugh, and she asks me what’s so funny. I am excited by her small, voluptuous figure nipped at the middle by the wide webbing of her khaki belt. But what a determined humorless self-possessed little thing! I don’t know if she would allow me to order for her even if I spoke the language. “Which do you like better?” she asks me, after each of us has downed a bottle of Jewish beer, “tractors, or bulldozers, or tanks?” I laugh again.

I ask her back to my hotel. In the room we struggle, we kiss, we begin to undress, and promptly I lose my erection. “See,” says The Lieutenant, as though confirmed now in her suspicion, “you don’t like me. Not at all.” “Yes, oh yes,” I answer, “since I saw you in the sea, I do, I do, you are sleek as a little seal—” but then, in my shame, baffled and undone by my detumescence, I burst out—“but I may have a disease, you see. It wouldn’t be fair.” “Do you think that is funny too?” she hisses, and angrily puts her uniform back on and leaves.

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight! The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread! The coincidences of dreams, the symbols, the terrifyingly laughable situations, the oddly ominous banalities, the accidents and humiliations, the bizarrely appropriate strokes of luck or misfortune that other people experience with their eyes shut, I get with mine open! Who else do you know whose mother actually threatened him with the dreaded knife? Who else was so lucky as to have the threat of castration so straight-forwardly put by his momma? Who else, on top of this mother, had a testicle that wouldn’t descend? A nut that had to be coaxed and coddled, persuaded, drugged! to get it to come down and live in the scrotum like a man! Who else do you know broke a leg chasing shikses? Or came in his eye first time out? Or found a real live monkey right in the streets of New York, a girl with a passion for The Banana? Doctor, maybe other patients dream—with me,everything happens. I have a life without latent content. The dream thing happens! Doctor: I couldn’t get it up in the State of Israel! How’s that for symbolism, bubi? Let’s see somebody beat that, for acting-out! Could not maintain an erection in The Promised Land! At least not when I needed it, not when I wanted it, not when there was something more desirable than my own hand to stick it into. But, as it turns out, you can’t stick tapioca pudding into anything. Tapioca pudding I am offering this girl. Wet sponge cake! A thimbleful of something melted. And all the while that self-assured little lieutenant, so proudly flying those Israeli tits, prepared to be mounted by some tank commander!

And then again, only worse. My final downfall and humiliation—Naomi, The Jewish Pumpkin, The Heroine, that hardy, red-headed, freckled, ideological hunk of a girl! I picked her up hitchhiking down to Haifa from a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, where she had been visiting her parents. She was twenty-one years old, nearly six feet tall, and gave the impression that she was still growing. Her parents were Zionists from Philadelphia who had come to Palestine just before the outbreak of World War Two. After completing her Army service, Naomi had decided not to return to the kibbutz where she had been born and raised, but instead to join a commune of young native-born Israelis clearing boulders of black volcanic rock from a barren settlement in the mountains overlooking the boundary with Syria. The work was rugged, the living conditions were primitive, and there was always the danger of Syrian infiltrators slipping into the encampment at night, with hand grenades and land mines. And she loved it. An admirable and brave girl! Yes, a Jewish Pumpkin! I am being given a second chance.

Interesting. I associate her instantly with my lost Pumpkin, when in physical type she is, of course, my mother. Coloring, size, even temperament, it turned out—a real fault-finder, a professional critic of me. Must have perfection in her men. But all this I am blind to: the resemblance between this girl and the picture of my mother in her high school yearbook is something I do not even see.

Here’s how unhinged and hysterical I was in Israel. Within minutes of picking her up on the road, I was seriously asking myself, “Why don’t I marry her and stay? Why don’t I go up to that mountain and start a new life?”

Right off we began making serious talk about mankind. Her conversation was replete with passionate slogans not unlike those of my adolescence. A just society. The common struggle. Individual freedom. A socially productive life. But how naturally she wore her idealism, I thought. Yes, this was my kind of girl, all right—innocent, good-hearted, zaftig, unsophisticated and unfucked-up. Of course! I don’t want movie stars and mannequins and whores, or any combination thereof. I don’t want a sexual extravaganza for a life, or a continuation of this masochistic extravaganza I’ve been living, either. No, I want simplicity, I want health, I want her!

She spoke English perfectly, if a little bookishly—just a hint of some kind of general European accent. I kept looking at her for signs of the American girl she would have been had her parents never left Philadelphia. This might have been my sister, I think, another big girl with high ideals. I can even imagine Hannah having emigrated to Israel, had she not found Morty to rescue her. But who was there to rescue me? My shikses? No, no, I rescue them. No, my salvation is clearly in this Naomi! Her hair is worn like a child’s, in two long braids—a ploy, of course, a dream-technique if ever there was one, designed to keep me from remembering outright that high school picture of Sophie Ginsky, who the boys called “Red,” who would go so far with her big brown eyes and her clever head. In the evening, after spending the day (at my request) showing me around the ancient Arab city of Akko, Naomi pinned her braids up in a double coil around her head, like a grand mother, I remember thinking. “How unlike my model friend,” I think, “with the wigs and the hairpieces, and the hours spent at Kenneth’s. How my life would change! A new man!—with this woman!”

Her plan for herself was to camp out at night in a sleeping bag. She was on her week’s vacation away from the settlement, traveling on the few pounds that her family had been able to give her for a birthday present. The more fanatical of her fellows, she told me, would never have accepted such a gift, and would probably disapprove of her for failing to do so. She re-created for me a discussion that had raged in her parents’ kibbutz when she was still a little girl, over the fact that some people owned watches and others didn’t. It was settled, after several impassioned meetings of the kibbutz membership, by deciding to rotate the watches every three months.

During the day, at dinner, then as we walked along the romantic harbor wall at Akko that night, I told her about my life. I asked if she would come back with me and have a drink at my hotel in Haifa. She said she would, she had much to say about my story. I wanted to kiss her then, but thought, “What if I do have some kind of venereal infection?” I still hadn’t been to see a doctor, partly because of a reluctance to tell some stranger that I had had contact with a whore, but largely because I had no symptoms of any kind. Clearly nothing was wrong with me, and I didn’t need a doctor. Nevertheless, when I turned to ask her back to the hotel, I resisted an impulse to press my lips against her pure socialistical mouth.

“American society,” she said, dropping her knapsack and bedroll on the floor, and continuing the lecture she had begun as we drove around the bay to Haifa, “not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possessions, money, property—on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success. Meanwhile,” she said, perching herself cross-legged upon the bed, “great segments of your population are deprived of the minimal prerequisites for a decent life. Is that not true, too? Because your system is basically exploitive, inherently debasing and unjust. Consequently, Alex”—she used my name as a stern teacher would, there was the thrust of admonition in it—“there can never be anything resembling genuine equality in such an environment. And that is indisputable, you cannot help but agree, if you are at all honest.”

“For instance, what did you accomplish with your quiz-scandal hearings? Anything? Nothing, if I may say so. You exposed the corruption of certain weak individuals. But as for the system that trained them in corruption, on that you had not the slightest effect. The system was unshaken. The system was untouched. And why? Because, Alex”—uh-oh, here it comes—“you are yourself as corrupted by the system as Mr. Charles Van Horn.” (By gum, still imperfect! Dang!) “You are not the enemy of the system. You are not even a challenge to the system, as you seem to think. You are only one of its policemen, a paid employee, an accomplice. Pardon me, but I must speak the truth: you think you serve justice, but you are only a lackey of the bourgeoisie. You have a system inherently exploitive and unjust, inherently cruel and inhumane, heedless of human values, and your job is to make such a system appear legitimate and moral by acting as though justice, as though human rights and human dignity could actually exist in that society—when obviously no such thing is possible.

“You know, Alex”—what now?—“you know why I don’t worry about who wears a watch, or about accepting five pounds as a gift from my ‘prosperous’ parents? You know why such arguments are silly and I have no patience with them? Because I know that inherently—do you understand, inherently!”—yes, I understand! English happens, oddly enough, to be my mother tongue!—“inherently the system in which I participate (and voluntarily, that is crucial too—voluntarily!), that that system is humane and just. As long as the community owns the means of production, as long as all needs are provided by the community, as long as no man has the opportunity to accumulate wealth or to live off the surplus value of another man’s labor, then the essential character of the kibbutz is being maintained. No man is without dignity. In the broadest sense, there is equality. And that is what matters most.”

“Naomi, I love you.”

She narrowed those wide idealistic brown eyes. “How can you love me? What are you saying?”

“I want to marry you.”

Boom, she jumped to her feet. Pity the Syrian terrorist who tried to take her by surprise! “What is the matter with you? Is this supposed to be humorous?”

“Be my wife. Mother my children. Every shtunk with a picture window has children. Why not me? I carry the family name!”

“You drank too much beer at dinner. Yes, I think I should go.”

“Don’t!” And again told this girl I hardly knew, and didn’t even like, how deeply in love with her I was. “Love”—oh, it makes me shudder!—“loooove,” as though I could summon forth the feeling with the word.

And when she tried to leave I blocked the door. I pleaded with her not go out and lie down on a clammy beach somewhere, when there was this big comfortable Hilton bed for the two of us to share. “I’m not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.”

“Sexual intercourse?” she replied. “With you?”

“Yes! With me! Fresh from my inherently unjust system! Me, the accomplice! Yes! Imperfect Portnoy!”

“Mr. Portnoy, excuse me, but between your silly jokes, if that is even what they are—”

Here a little struggle took place as I rushed her at the side of the bed. I reached for a breast, and with a sharp upward snap of the skull, she butted me on the underside of the jaw.

“Where the hell did you learn that,” I cried out, “in the Army?”

“Yes.”

I collapsed into my chair. “That’s some training to give to girls.”

“Do you know,” she said, and without a trace of charity, “there is something very wrong with you.”

“My tongue is bleeding, for one—!”

“You are the most unhappy person I have ever known. You are like a baby.”

“No! Not so,” but she waved aside any explanation I may have had to offer, and began to lecture me on my shortcomings as she had observed them that day.

“The way you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do. You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘funny.’ All day long the same thing. In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. Self-depreciating?”

“Self-deprecating. Self-mocking.”

“Exactly! And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable. The contribution you could make! Such stupid self-deprecation! How disagreeable!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”

“Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor.”

Not much love in that remark. I’ll tell you. By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.”

Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating,” unmanned and corrupted by life in the entire world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious.

When she finished I said, “Wonderful. Now let’s fuck.”

“You are disgusting!”

“Right! You begin to get the point, gallant Sabra! You go be righteous in the mountains, okay? You go be a model for mankind! Fucking Hebrew saint!”

“Mr. Portnoy,” she said, raising her knapsack from the floor, “you are nothing but a self-hating Jew.”

“Ah, but Naomi, maybe that’s the best kind.”

“Coward!”

“Tomboy.”

“Shlemiel!”

And made for the door. Only I leaped from behind, and with a flying tackle brought this big red-headed didactic dish down with me onto the floor. I’ll show her who’s a shlemiel! And baby! And if I have VD? Fine! Terrific! All the better! Let her carry it secretly back in her bloodstream to the mountains! Let it spread forth from her unto all those brave and virtuous Jewish boys and girls! A dose of clap will do them all good! This is what it’s like in the Diaspora, you saintly kiddies, this is what it’s like in the exile! Temptation and disgrace! Corruption and self-mockery! Self-deprecation—and self-defecation too! Whining, hysteria, compromise, confusion, disease! Yes, Naomi, I am soiled, oh, I am impure—and also pretty fucking tired, my dear, of never being quite good enough for The Chosen People!

But what a battle she gave me, this big farm cunt! this ex-G.I.! This mother-substitute! Look, can that be so? Oh please, it can’t be as simplistic as that! Notme! Or with a case like mine, is it actually that you can’t be simplistic enough! Because she wore red hair and freckles, this makes her, according to my unconscious one-track mind, my mother? Just because she and the lady of my past are off-spring of the same pale Polish strain of Jews? This then is the culmination of the Oedipal drama. Doctor? More farce, my friend! Too much to swallow. I’m afraid! Oedipus Rex is a famous tragedy, schmuck, not another joke! You’re a sadist, you’re a quack and a lousy comedian! I mean this is maybe going too far for a laugh, Doctor Spielvogel, Doctor Freud, Doctor Kronkite! How about a little homage, you bastards, to The Dignity of Man! Oedipus Rex is the most horrendous and serious play in the history of literature—it is not a gag!

Thank God, at any rate, for Heshie’s weights. They became mine after he died. I would carry them into the backyard, and out in the sunshine I would lift and lift and lift, back when I was fourteen and fifteen years old. “You’re going to give yourself a tsura yet with those things,” my mother would warn me from her bedroom window. “You’re going to get a cold out there in that bathing suit.” I sent away for booklets from Charles Atlas and Joe Bonomo. I lived for the sight of my torso swelling up in my bedroom mirror. I flexed under my clothes in school. I examined my forearms on the street corner for bulge. I admired my veins on the bus. Somebody someday would take a swing at me and my deltoids, and they would live to regret it! But nobody swung, thank God.

Till Naomi! For her, then, I had done all that puffing and quivering under the disapproving gaze of my mother. That isn’t to say that she still didn’t have it over me in the calves and the thighs—but in the shoulders and chest I had the edge, and forced her body down beneath me—and shot my tongue into her ear, tasting there the grit of our day’s journey, all that holy soil. “Oh, I am going to fuck you, Jew girl,” I whispered evilly.

“You are crazy!” and heaved up against me with all her considerable strength. “You are a lunatic on the loose!”

“No, oh no,” I told her, growling from my throat, “oh no, you have got a lesson to learn, Naomi,” and pressed, pressed hard, to teach my lesson: O you virtuous Jewess, the tables are turned, tsatskeleh! You on the defensive now, Naomi—explaining your vaginal discharge to the entire kibbutz! You think they got worked up over those watches! Wait’ll they get a whiff of this! What I wouldn’t give to be at that meeting when you get arraigned on the charge of contaminating the pride and future of Zion! Then perhaps youll come to have the proper awe for us fallen psychoneurotic Jewish men! Socialism exists, but so too do spirochetes, my love! So here’s your introduction, dear, to the slimier side of things. Down, down with these patriotic khaki shorts, spread your chops, blood of my blood, unlock your fortressy thighs, open wide that messianic Jewish hole! Make ready, Naomi, I am about to poison your organs of reproduction! I am about to change the future of the race!

But of course I couldn’t. Licked her earholes, sucked at her unwashed neck, sank my teeth into the coiled braids of hair . . . and then, even as resistance may actually have begun to recede under my assault, I rolled off of her and came to rest, defeated, against the wall—on my back. “It’s no good,” I said, “I can’t get a hard-on in this place.”

She stood up. Stood over me. Got her wind. Looked down. It occurred to me that she was going to plant the sole of her sandal on my chest. Or maybe proceed to kick the shit out of me. I remembered myself as a little schoolboy pasting all those reinforcements into my notebook. How has it come to this?

“‘Im-po-tent in Is-rael, da da daaah,’” to the tune of “Lullaby in Birdland.”

“Another joke?” she asked.

“And another. And another. Why disclaim my life?”

Then she said a kind thing. She could afford to, of course, way up there. “You should go home.”

“Sure, that’s what I need, back into the exile.”

And way way up there, she grinned. That healthy, monumental Sabra! The work-molded legs, the utilitarian shorts, the battle-scarred buttonless blouse—the beneficent, victorious smile! And at her crusty, sandaled feet, this . . . this what? This son! This boy! This baby! Alexander Portnoise! Portnose! Portnoy-oy-oy-oy-oy!

“Look at you,” I said, “way up there. How big big women are! Look at you—how patriotic! You really like victory, don’t you, honey? Know how to take it in your stride! Wow, are you guiltless! Terrific, really—an honor to have met you. Look, take me with you. Heroine! Up to the mountain. I’ll clear boulders till I drop, if that’s what it takes to be good. Because why not be good, and good and good and good—right? Live only according to principle! Without compromise! Let the other guy be the villain, right? Let the goyim make a shambles, let the blame fall solely on them. If I was born to be austere about myself, so be it! A grueling and gratifying ethical life, opulent with self-sacrifice, voluptuous with restraint! Ah, sounds good. Ah, I can just taste those rocks! What do you say, take me back with you—into the pure Portnovian existence!”

“You should go home.”

“On the contrary! I should stay. Yes, stay! Buy a pair of those khaki short pants—become a man!”

“Do as you wish,” she said. “I am leaving you.”

“No, Heroine, no,” I cried—for I was actually beginning to like her a little. “Oh, what a waste.”

She liked that. She looked at me very victoriously, as though I had finally confessed to the truth about myself. Screw her. “I mean, not being able to fuck away at a big healthy girl like you.”

She shivered with loathing. “Tell me, please, why must you use that word all the time?”

“Don’t the boys say ‘fuck’ up in the mountains?”

“No,” she answered, condescendingly, “not the way that you do.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose they’re not as rich with rage as I am. With contempt.” And I lunged for her leg. Because never enough. NEVER! I have TO HAVE.

But have what?

“No!” she screamed down at me.

“Yes!”

“No!”

“Then,” I pleaded, as she began to drag me by her powerful leg across toward the door, “at least let me eat your pussy. I know I can still do that.”

“Pig!”

And kicked. And landed! Full force with that pioneer’s leg, just below the heart. The blow I had been angling for? Who knows what I was up to? Maybe I was up to nothing. Maybe I was just being myself. Maybe that’s all I really am, a lapper of cunt, the slavish mouth for some woman’s hole. Eat! And so be it! Maybe the wisest solution for me is to live on all fours! Crawl through life feasting on pussy, and leave the righting of wrongs and the fathering of families to the upright creatures! Who needs monuments erected in his name, when there is this banquet walking the streets?

Crawl through life then—if I have a life left! My head went spinning, the vilest juices rose in my throat. Ow, my heart! And in Israel! Where other Jews find refuge, sanctuary and peace, Portnoy now perishes! Where other Jews flourish, I now expire! And all I wanted was to give a little pleasure—and make a little for myself. Why, why can I not have some pleasure without the retribution following behind like a caboose! Pig? Who, me? And all at once it happens again, I am impaled again upon the long ago, what was, what will never be! The door slams, she is gone—my salvation! my kin!—and I am whimpering on the floor with MY MEMORIES! My endless childhood! Which I won’t relinquish—or which won’t relinquish me! Which is it! Remembering radishes—the ones I raised so lovingly in my Victory Garden. In that patch of yard beside our cellar door. My kibbutz. Radishes, parsley, carrots—yes, I am a patriot too, you, only in another place! (Where I also don’t feel at home! ) But the silver foil I collected, how about that? The newspapers I carted to school! My booklet of defense stamps, all neatly pasted in rows so as to smash the Axis! My model airplanes—my Piper Cub, my Hawker Hurricane, my Spitfire! How can this be happening to that good kid I was, with my love for the R.A.F. and the Four Freedoms! My hope for Yalta and Dumbarton Oaks! My prayers for the U.N.O.! Die? Why? Punishment? For what? Impotent? For what good reason?

The Monkey’s Revenge. Of course.

“ALEXANDER PORTNOY, FOR DEGRADING THE HUMANITY OF MARY JANE REED TWO NIGHTS RUNNING IN ROME, AND FOR OTHER CRIMES TOO NUMEROUS TO MENTION INVOLVING THE EXPLOITATION OF HER CUNT, YOU ARE SENTENCED TO A TERRIBLE CASE OF IMPOTENCE. ENJOY YOURSELF.” “But, Your Honor, she is of age, after all, a consenting adult—” “DON’T BULLSHIT ME WITH LEGALISMS, PORTNOY. YOU KNEW RIGHT FROM WRONG. YOU KNEW YOU WERE DEGRADING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING. AND FOR THAT, WHAT YOU DID AND HOW YOU DID IT, YOU ARE JUSTLY SENTENCED TO A LIMP DICK. GO FIND ANOTHER WAY TO HURT A PERSON.” “But if I may, Your Honor, she was perhaps somewhat degraded before I met her. Need I say more than ‘Las Vegas’?” “OH, WONDERFUL DEFENSE, JUST WONDERFUL. GUARANTEED TO SOFTEN THE COURT’S JUDGMENT. THAT’S HOW WE TREAT UNFORTUNATES, EH, COMMISSIONER? THAT’S GIVING A PERSON THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE DIGNIFIED AND HUMAN ACCORDING TO YOUR DEFINITION? SON OF A BITCH!” “Your Honor, please, if I may approach the bench—what after all was I doing but just trying to have . . . well, what? . . . a little fun, that’s all.” “OH, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Well, why, damn it, can’t I have some fun! Why is the smallest thing I do for pleasure immediately illicit—while the rest of the world rolls laughing in the mud! Pig? She ought to see the charges and complaints that are filed in my office in a single hatred! For dough! For power! For spite! For nothing! What they put a shvartze through to get a mortgage on a home! A man wants what my father used to call an umbrella for a rainy day—and you ought to see those pigs go to work on him! And I mean the real pigs, the pros! Who do you think got the banks to begin to recruit Negroes and Puerto Ricans for jobs in this city, to send personnel people to interview applicants in Harlem? To do that simple thing? This pig, lady—Portnoy! You want to talk pigs, come down to the office, take a look through my In basket any morning of the week, I’ll show you pigs! The things that other men do—and get away with! And with never a second thought! To inflict a wound upon a defenseless person makes them smile, for Christ’s sake, gives a little lift to their day! The lying, the scheming, the bribing, the thieving—the larceny, Doctor, conducted without batting an eye. The indifference! The total moral indifference! They don’t come down from the crimes they commit with so much as a case of indigestion! But me, I dare to steal a slightly unusual kind of a hump, and while away on myvacation—and now I can’t get it up! I mean, God forbid I should tear the tag from my mattress that says, “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law”—what would they give me for that, the chair? It makes me want to scream, the ridiculous disproportion of the guilt! May I? Will that shake them up too much out in the waiting room? Because that’s maybe what I need most of all, to howl. A pure howl, without any more words between me and it! “This is the police speaking. You’re surrounded, Portnoy. You better come on out and pay your debt to society.” “Up society’s ass, Copper!” “Three to come out with those hands of yours up in the air. Mad Dog, or else we come in after you, guns blazing. One.” “Blaze, you bastard cop, what do I give a shit? I tore the tag off my mattress—” “Two.” “—But at least while I lived, I lived big!”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa­aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa­aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa­aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa­aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!