Portnoy’s Complaint

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 fu

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 di

"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 ru

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

Waitkus!

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, to me? 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 Co