Portnoy's Complaint

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 u

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 ma

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.

Ru

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 ru