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 I07 bus from New York?

I had been treated to a perfect day by my sister and Morty Feibish, her fiance-a doubleheader at Ebbets Field, followed afterward by a seafood di

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 di

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 ca

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 di

… 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 di

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 A

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 amp; 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, A

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!