Portnoy’s Complaint

"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 lrvington 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 ma

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 di