Portnoy’s Complaint: Excerpts of mommy (& daddy) issues mixed with poop jokes

The constipated father

Early in the book Portnoy describes his mother as someone with an overbearing and doting character. Then he explains how his father dealt with it:

He drank—of course, not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia; and chewed on Ex-Lax; and ate All-Bran morning and night; and downed mixed dried fruits by the pound bag. He suffered—did he suffer! – from constipation. Her ubiquity and his constipation, my mother flying in through the bedroom window, my father reading the evening paper with a suppository up his ass… these, Doctor, are the earliest impressions I have of my parents, of their attributes and secrets.He used to brew dried senna leaves in a saucepan, and that, along with the suppository melting invisibly in his rectum, comprised his witchcraft: brewing those vein green leaves, stirring with a spoon the evil-smelling liquid, then carefully pouring it into a strainer, and hence into his blockaded body, through that weary and afflicted expression on his face. And then hunched silently above the empty glass, as though listening for distant thunder, he awaits the miracle… As a little boy I sometimes sat in the kitchen and waited with him. But the miracle never came, not at least as we imagined and prayed it would, as a lifting of the sentence, a total deliverance from the plague. I remember that when they announced over the radio the explosion of the first atom bomb, he said aloud, “Maybe that would do the job.” But all catharses were in vain for that man: his kishkas were gripped by the iron hand of outrage and frustration. Among his other misfortunes, I was his wife’s favorite.

To make life harder, he loved me himself. He too saw in me the family’s opportunity to be “as good as anybody,” our chance to win honor and respect-though when I was small the way he chose to talk of his ambitions for me was mostly in terms of money. “Don’t be dumb like your father,” he would say, joking with the little boy on his lap, “don’t marry beautiful, don’t marry love-marry rich.” ¹Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 4-6.

(so I heard him one night, bellowing behind his bedroom door)—and thus keeping him, you see, from being a hero in the eyes of his wife and children. What wrath! What fury! And there was really no one to unleash it on-except himself. ²Ibid., 8

[W]hat terrified me most about my father was not the violence I expected him momentarily to unleash upon me, but the violence I wished every night at the dinner table to commit upon his ignorant, barbaric carcass. ³Ibid., 41

Portnoy’s inferiority complex about his father’s job as an insurance salesman:

He descends into the colored neighborhood each and every Sunday morning because, as he tells me, that is the best time to catch those unwilling to fork over the ten or fifteen measly cents necessary to meet their weekly premium payments. He lurks about where the husbands sit out in the sunshine, trying to extract a few thin dimes from them before they have drunk themselves senseless on their bottles of “Morgan Davis” wine, he emerges from alleyways like a shot to catch between home and church the pious cleaning ladies, who are off in other people’s houses during the daylight hours of the week, and in hiding from him on weekday nights. “Uh-oh,” someone cries, “Mr. Insurance Man here!” and even the children run for cover—the children, he says in disgust, so tell me, what hope is there for these niggers’ ever improving their lot? How will they ever lift themselves if they ain’t even able to grasp the importance of life insurance? Don’t they give a single crap for the loved ones they leave behind? Because “they’s all” going to die too, you know—”oh,” he says angrily, “they sho’ is!” Please, what kind of man is it, who can think to leave children out in the rain without even a decent umbrella for protection! ⁴Ibid., 9-10

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 dinner one night when I was still a boy: a thin, tense, shy, deferential, soft-spoken, aging cashier from his office named Anne McCaffery.

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 Anne—and so on and so forth… and meanwhile, though her arms were long and white and skinny and freckled (Irish arms, I thought) inside her smooth white blouse, I could see she had breasts that were nice and substantial-and I kept taking peeks at her legs, too. I was only eight or nine, but she really did have such a terrific pair of legs that I couldn’t keep my eyes away from them, the kind of legs that every once in a while it surprises you to find some pale spinster with a pinched face walking around on top of… With those legs-why, of course he was shtupping her… Wasn’t he?

Why he brought her home, he said, was “for a real Jewish meal.”

[…]

Did Sophie [Portnoy’s mother] put together the two tits and the two legs and come up with four? Me it seems to have taken two and a half decades to do such steep calculation. Oh, I must be making this up, really. My father… and a shikse? Can’t be. Was beyond his ken. My own father—fucked shikses? I’ll admit under duress that he fucked my mother… but shikses? I can no more imagine him knocking over a gas station. ⁵Ibid., 82-85

The domineering, overprotective mother

In contrast to how he perceived his father, he spoke of obsessive admiration of his mother:

She could make jello, for instance, with sliced peaches hanging in it, peaches just suspended there, in defiance of the law of gravity. She could bake a cake that tasted like a banana. Weeping, suffering, she grated he own horseradish rather than buy the pishachs they sold in a bottle at the delicatessen. She watched the butcher, as she put it, “like a hawk,” to be certain that he did not forget to put her chopped meat through the kosher grinder. She would telephone all the other women in the building drying clothes on the back lines—called even the divorced goy on the top floor one magnanimous day—to tell them rush, take in the laundry, a drop of rain had fallen on our windowpane. What radar on that woman! And this is before radar! The energy on her! The thoroughness! For mistakes she checked my sums; for holes, my socks; for dirt, my nails, my neck, every seam and crease of my body. She even dredges the furthest recesses of my ears by pouring cold peroxide into my head. It tingles and pops like an earful of ginger ale, and brings to the surface, in bits and pieces, the hidden stores of yellow wax, which can apparently endanger a person’s hearing. ⁶Ibid., 11

He recalls with agony the time when he, as a child, refused to eat his beans and potato:

Doctor, why, why oh why oh why oh why does a mother pull a knife on her own son? I am six, seven years old, how do I know she really wouldn’t use it? What am I supposed to do, try bluffing her out, at seven? I have no complicated sense of strategy, for Christ’s sake—I probably don’t even weigh sixty pounds yet! Someone waves a knife in my direction, I believe there is an intention lurking somewhere to draw my blood! Only why? What can she possibly be thinking in her brain? How crazy can she possibly be? Suppose she had let me win—what would have been lost? Why a knife, why the threat of murder, why is such total and annihilating victory necessary. ⁷Ibid., 16

He recounts how his mother taught him to urinate standing up:

I stand over the circle of water, my baby’s weeny jutting cutely forth, while my momma sits beside the toilet on the rim of the bathtub, one hand controlling the tap of the tub (from which a trickle runs that I am supposed to imitate) and her other hand tickling the underside of my prick. I repeat: tickling my prickling! I guess she thinks that’s how to get stuff to come out of the front of that thing, and let me tell you, the lady is right. Make a nice sis, bubala, make a nice little sissy for Mommy, sings Mommy to me, while in actuality what I am standing there making with her hand on my prong is in all probability my future! Imagine! The ludicrousness! A man’s character is being forged, a destiny is being shaped… oh, maybe not… At any rate, for what the information is worth, in the presence of another man I simply cannot draw my water. To this very day. ⁸Ibid., 133

He recalls the following conversation between his parents:

“You, did you move your bowels?” she asks him.

“Of course I didn’t move my bowels.”

“Jack, what is it going to be with you, with those bowels?”

“They’re turning into concrete, that’s what it’s going to be.”

“Because you eat too fast.”

“I don’t eat too fast.”

“How then, slow?”

“I eat regular.”

“You eat like a pig, and somebody should tell you.”

“Oh, you got a wonderful way of expressing yourself sometimes, do you know that?”

“I’m only speaking the truth,” she says. “I stand on my feet all day in this kitchen, and you eat like there’s a fire somewhere, and this one [little Portnoy]—this one has decided that the food I cook isn’t good enough for him. He’d rather be sick and scare the living daylights out of me.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t want to upset you,” she says. “Let’s just forget the whole thing.” But she can’t, so now she begins to cry. ⁹Ibid., 30-31

I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. “Now this time don’t flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!”

Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own. You should have watched her at work during polio season! She should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes! Open your mouth. Why is your throat red? Do you have a headache you’re not telling me about? You’re not going to any baseball game, Alex, until I see you move your neck. Is your neck stiff? Then why are you moving it that way? You ate like you were nauseous, are you nauseous? Well, you ate like you were nauseous. I don’t want you drinking from the drinking fountain in that playground. If you’re thirsty wait until you’re home. Your throat is sore, isn’t it? I can tell how you’re swallowing. I think maybe what you are going to do, Mr. Joe Di Maggie, is put that glove away and lie down. I am not going to allow you to go outside in this heat and run around, not with that sore throat, I’m not. I want to take your temperature. I don’t like the sound of this throat business one bit. To be very frank, I am actually beside myself that you have been walking around all day with a sore throat and not telling your mother. Why did you keep this a secret? Alex, polio doesn’t know from baseball games. It only knows from iron lungs and crippled forever! I don’t want you running around, and that’s final. Or eating hamburgers out. Or mayonnaise. Or chopped liver. Or tuna. Not everybody is careful the way your mother is about spoilage. You’re used to a spotless house, you don’t begin to know what goes on in restaurants. Do you know why your mother when we go to the Chink’s will never sit facing the kitchen? Because I don’t want to see what goes on back there. Alex, you must wash everything, is that clear? Everything! God only knows who touched it before you did. ¹⁰Ibid., 33-34

Doctor, these people are incredible! These people are unbelievable! These two are the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time! They render it from me like fat from a chicken! “Call, Alex. Visit, Alex. Alex, keep us informed. Don’t go away without telling us, please, not again. Last time you went away you didn’t tell us, your father was ready to phone the police. You know how many times a day he called and got no answer? Take a guess, how many?” “Mother,” I inform her, from between my teeth, “if I’m dead they’ll smell the body in seventy-two hours, I assure you!” “Don’t talk like that! God forbid!” she cries. Oh, and now she’s got the beauty, the one guaranteed to do the job. Yet how could I expect otherwise? Can I ask the impossible of my own mother? “Alex, to pick up a phone is such a simple thing—how much longer will we be around to bother you anyway?”¹¹Ibid., 36

Oh, thank God! thank God! at least he had the cock and the balls! Pregnable (putting it mildly) as his masculinity was in this world of goyim with golden hair and silver tongues, between his legs (God bless my father!) he was constructed like a man of consequence, two big healthy balls such as a king would be proud to put on display, and a shlong of magisterial length and girth. And they were his: yes, of this I am absolutely certain, they hung down off of, they were connected on to, they could not be taken away from, him!

Of course, around the house I saw less of his sexual apparatus than I did of her erogenous zones. And once I saw her menstrual blood… saw it shining darkly up at me from the worn linoleum in front of the kitchen sink. Just two red drops over a quarter of a century ago, but they glow still in that icon of her that hangs, perpetually illuminated, in my Modern Museum of Gripes and Grievances (along with the box of Kotex and the nylon stockings, which I want to come to in a moment). Also in this icon is an endless dripping of blood down through a drainboard into a dishpan. It is the blood she is draining from the meat so as to make it kosher and fit for consumption. Probably I am confusing things—I sound like a son of the House of Atreus with all this talk of blood—but I see her standing at the sink salting the meat so as to rid it of its blood, when the attack of “woman’s troubles” sends her, with a most alarming moan, rushing off to her bedroom. I was no more than four or five, and yet those two drops of blood that I beheld on the floor of her kitchen are visible to me still… as is the box of Kotex… as are the stockings sliding up her legs… as is—need I even say it?-the bread knife with which my own blood would be threatened when I refuse to eat my dinner.

[…]

It was years later that she called from the bathroom, Run to the drugstore! bring a box of Kotex! immediately! And the panic in her voice. Did I run! And then at home again, breathlessly handed the box to the white fingers that extended themselves at me through a narrow crack in the bathroom door . . . Though her menstrual troubles eventually had to be resolved by surgery, it is difficult nevertheless to forgive her for having sent me on that mission of mercy. Better she should have bled herself out on our cold bathroom floor, better that, than to have sent an eleven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of sanitary napkins! Where was my sister, for Christ’s sake? Where was her own emergency supply? Why was this woman so grossly insensitive to the vulnerability of her own little boy—on the one hand so insensitive to my shame, and yet on the other, so attuned to my deepest desires!

. . . I am so small I hardly know what sex I am, or so you would imagine. It is early in the afternoon, spring of the year Four. […] While I crayon a picture for her, she showers—and now in the sunshine of her bedroom, she is dressing to take me downtown. She sits on the edge of the bed in her padded bra and her girdle, rolling on her stockings and chattering away. Who is Mommy’s good little boy? Who is the best little boy a mommy ever had? Who does Mommy love more than anything in the whole wide world? I am absolutely punchy with delight, and meanwhile follow in their tight, slow, agonizingly delicious journey up her legs the transparent stockings that give her flesh a hue of stirring dimensions. I sidle close enough to smell the bath powder on her throat—also to appreciate better the elastic intricacies of the dangling straps to which the stockings will presently be hooked (undoubtedly with a flourish of trumpets). I smell the oil with which she has polished the four gleaming posts of the mahogany bedstead, where she sleeps with a man who lives with us at night and on Sunday afternoons. My father they say he is. On my fingertips, even though she has washed each one of those little piggies with a warm wet cloth, I smell my lunch, my tuna fish salad. Ah, it might be cunt I’m sniffing. Maybe it is! Oh, I want to growl with pleasure. Four years old, and yet I sense in my blood—uh-huh, again with the blood—how rich with passion is the moment, how dense with possibility. This fat person with the long hair whom they call my sister is away at school. This man, my father, is off somewhere making money, as best he is able. These two are gone, and who knows, maybe I’ll be lucky, maybe they’ll never come back… In the meantime, it is afternoon, it is spring, and for me and me alone a woman is rolling on her stockings and singing a song of love. Who is going to stay with Mommy forever and ever? Me. Who is it who goes with Mommy wherever in the whole wide world Mommy goes? Why me, of course. What a silly question—but don’​t get me wrong, I​ll play the game! Who had a nice lunch with Mommy, who goes downtown like a good boy on the bus with Mommy, who goes into the big store with Mommy… and on and on and on… so that only a week or so ago, upon my safe return from Europe, Mommy had this to say—
“Feel.”
“What?”—even as she takes my hand in hers and draws it toward her body—”Mother—”
“I haven’t gained five pounds, she says, since you were born. Feel,” she says, and holds my stiff fingers against the swell of her hips, which aren’t bad…
And the stockings. More than twenty-five years have passed (the game is supposed to be over!), but Mommy still hitches up the stockings in front of her little boy. Now, however, he takes it upon himself to look the other way when the flag goes fluttering up the pole—and out of concern not just for his own mental health. That’s the truth, I look away not for me but for the sake of that poor man, my father! Yet what preference does Father really have? If there in the living room their grownup little boy were to tumble all at once onto the rug with his mommy, what would Daddy do? Pour a bucket of boiling water on the raging, maddened couple? Would he draw his knife—or would he go off to the other room and watch television until they were finished? “What are you looking away—?” asks my mother, amused in the midst of straightening her seams. “You’d think I was a twenty-one-year old girl; you’d think I hadn’t wiped your backside and kissed your little tushy for you all those years. Look at him”—this to my father, in case he hasn’t been giving a hundred percent of his attention to the little floor show now being performed—”look, acting like his own mother is some sixty-year-old beauty queen.”

Once a month my father took me with him down to the shvitz bath, there to endeavor to demolish—with the steam, and a rubdown, and a long deep sleep—the pyramid of aggravation he has built himself into during the previous weeks of work. Our street clothes we lock away in the dormitory on the top floor. On rows of iron cots running perpendicular to the lockers, the men who have already been through the ringer down below are flung out beneath white sheets like the fatalities of a violent catastrophe. If it were not for the abrupt thunderclap of a fart, or the snores sporadically shooting up around me like machine-gun fire, I would believe we were in a morgue, and for some strange reason undressing in front of the dead. I do not look at the bodies, but like a mouse hop frantically about on my toes, trying to clear my feet of my undershorts before anybody can peek inside, where, to my chagrin, to my bafflement, to my mortification, I always discover in the bottommost seam a pale and wispy brush-stroke of my shit Oh, Doctor, I wipe and I wipe and I wipe, I spend as much time wiping as I do crapping, maybe even more. I use toilet paper like it grew on trees—so says my envious father—I wipe until that little orifice of mine is red as a raspberry; but still, much as I would like to please my mother by dropping into her laundry hamper at the end of each day jockey shorts such as might have encased the asshole of an angel, I deliver forth instead (deliberately, Herr Doctor?—or just inevitably?) the fetid little drawers of a boy.

But here in a Turkish bath, why am I dancing around? There are no women here. No women—and no goyim. Can it be? There is nothing to worry about!

Following the folds at the base of his white buttocks, I proceed out of the dormitory and down the metal stairs to that purgatory wherein the agonies that come of being an insurance agent, a family man, and a Jew will be steamed and beaten from my father’s body. At the bottom landing we sidestep a pile of white sheets and a mound of sopping towels, my father pushes a shoulder against a heavy windowless door, and we enter a dark quiet region redolent of wintergreen. The sounds are of a tiny, unenthusiastic audience applauding the death scene in some tragedy: it is the two masseurs walloping and potching at the flesh of their victims, men half-clad in sheets and stretched out across marble slabs. They smack them and knead them and push them around, they slowly twist their limbs as though to remove them in a piece from their sockets—I am hypnotized, but continue to follow after my father as we pass alongside the pool, a small green cube of heart-stopping ice water, and come at last to the steam room.

[…]

It is as though all the Jewish men ducking beneath the cold dribble of shower off in the corner of the steam room, then lumbering back for more of the thick dense suffocating vapors, it is as though they have ridden the time-machine back to an age when they existed as some herd of Jewish animals, whose only utterance is oy, oy . . . for this is the sound they make as they drag themselves from the shower into the heavy gush of fumes. They appear, at long last, my father and his fellow sufferers, to have returned to the habitat in which they can be natural. A place without goyim and women.

I stand at attention between his legs as he coats me from head to toe with a thick lather of soap—and eye with admiration the baggy substantiality of what overhangs the marble bench upon which he is seated. His scrotum is like the long wrinkled face of some old man with an egg tucked into each of his sagging jowls—while mine might hang from the wrist of some little girl’s dolly like a teeny pink purse. And as for his shlong, to me, with that fingertip of a prick that my mother likes to refer to in public (once, okay, but that once will last a lifetime) as my little thing, his shlong brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Shlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty, and unselfconscious dangle of that living piece of hose through which he passes streams of water as thick and strong as rope—while I deliver forth slender yellow threads that my euphemistic mother calls a sis. A sis, I think, is undoubtedly what my sister makes, little yellow threads that you can sew with . . . Do you want to make a nice sis? she asks me—when I want to make a torrent, I want to make a flood: I want like he does to shift the tides of the toilet bowl! Jack, my mother calls to him, would you close that door, please? Some example you’re setting for you know who. But if only that had been so, Mother! If only you-know-who could have found some inspiration in what’s-his-name’s coarseness! If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame—every place I turn something else to be ashamed of. ¹²Ibid., 41-50

Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not contaminate our humanity thus. Let them (if you know who I mean) gorge themselves upon anything and everything that moves, no matter how odious and abject the animal, no matter how grotesque or shmutzig or dumb the creature in question happens to be. Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like-a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. All they know, these imbecilic eaters of the execrable, is to swagger, to insult, to sneer, and sooner or later to hit. Oh, also they know how to go out into the woods with a gun, these geniuses, and kill innocent wild deer, deer who themselves nosh quietly on berries and grasses and then go on their way, bothering no one. You stupid goyim! Reeking of beer and empty of ammunition, home you head, a dead animal (formerly alive) strapped to each fender, so that all the motorists along the way can see how strong and manly you are; and then, in your houses, you take these deer-who have done you, who have done nothing in all of nature, not the least bit of harm-you take these deer, cut them up into pieces, and cook them in a pot. There isn’t enough to eat in this world, they have to eat up the deer as well! They will eat anything, anything they can get their big goy hands on! And the terrifying corollary, they will do anything as well. Deer eat what deer eat, and Jews eat what Jews eat, but not these goyim. Crawling animals, wallowing animals, leaping and angelic animals -it makes no difference to them-what they want they take, and to hell with the other thing’s feelings (let alone kindness and compassion). Yes, it’s all written down in history, what they have done, our illustrious neighbors who own the world and know absolutely nothing of human boundaries and limits. ¹³Ibid., 81-82

Even in the Chinese restaurant, where the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel, the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Mom) to be totally out of the question. Why we can eat pig on Pell Street and not at home is because… frankly I still haven’t got the whole thing figured out, but at the time I believe it has largely to do with the fact that the elderly man who owns the place, and whom amongst ourselves we call “Shmendrick,” isn’t somebody whose opinion of us we have cause to worry about. Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white—and maybe even Anglo-Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP! Boy, do we eat! Suddenly even the pig is no threat-though, to be sure, it comes to us so chopped and shredded, and is then set afloat on our plates in such oceans of soy sauce, as to bear no resemblance at all to a pork chop, or a hambone, or, most disgusting of all, a sausage (ucchh!)… But why then can’t we eat a lobster, too, disguised as something else? Allow my mother a logical explanation. The syllogism, Doctor, as used by Sophie Portnoy. Ready? Why we can’t eat lobster. “Because it can kill you! Because I ate it once, and I nearly died!” ¹⁴Ibid., 90

I am reminded at this joyous little juncture of when we lived in Jersey City, back when I was still very much my mother’s papoose, still very much a sniffer of her body perfumes and a total slave to her kugel and grieben and ruggelech—there was a suicide in our building. A fifteen-year-old boy named Ronald Nimkin, who had been crowned by women in the building “José Iturbi the Second,” hanged himself from the shower head in his bathroom. “With those golden hands!” the women wailed, referring of course to his piano playing-“With that talent!” Followed by, “You couldn’t look for a boy more in love with his mother than Ronald!”

I swear to you, this is not bullshit or a screen memory, these are the very words these women use. The great dark operatic themes of human suffering and passion come rolling out of those mouths like the prices of Oxydol and Del Monte canned corn! My own mother, let me remind you, when I returned this past summer from my adventure in Europe, greets me over the phone with the following salutation: “Well, how’s my lover?” Her lover she calls me, while her husband is listening on the other extension! And it never occurs to her, if I’m her lover, who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with? No, you don’t have to go digging where these people are concerned-they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!

Mrs. Nimkin, weeping in our kitchen: “Why? Why? Why did he do this to us?” Hear? Not what might we have done to him, oh no, never that-why did he do this to us? To us! Who would have given our arms and legs to make him happy and a famous concert pianist into the bargain! Really, can they be this blind? Can people be so abysmally stupid and live? Do you believe it? Can they actually be equipped with all the machinery, a brain, a spinal cord, and the four apertures for the ears and eyes—equipment, Mrs. Nimkin, nearly as impressive as color TV—and still go through life without a single clue about the feelings and yearnings of anyone other than themselves? Mrs. Nimkin, you shit, I remember you, I was only six, but I remember you, and what killed your Ronald, the concert-pianist-to-be is obvious: YOUR FUCKING SELFISHNESS AND STUPIDITY! “All the lessons we gave him,” weeps Mrs. Nimkin… Oh look, look, why do I carry on like this? Maybe she means well, surely she must-at a time of grief, what can I expect of these simple people? It’s only because in her misery she doesn’t know what else to say that she says that God-awful thing about all the lessons they gave to somebody who is now a corpse. What are they, after all, these Jewish women who raised us up as children? In Calabria you see their suffering counterparts sitting like stones in the churches, swallowing all that hideous Catholic bullshit; in Calcutta they beg in the streets, or if they are lucky, are off somewhere in a dusty field hitched up to a plow… Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles-and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic. Yes, yes, maybe that’s the solution then: think of them as cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg. Why not be charitable in one’s thinking, right. Doctor?

My favorite detail from the Ronald Nimkin suicide: even as he is swinging from the shower head, there is a note pinned to the dead young pianist’s short-sleeved shirt—which is what I remember most about Ronald: this tall emaciated teen-age catatonic, swimming around all by himself in those oversized short-sleeved sport shirts, and with their lapels starched and ironed back so fiercely they looked to have been bulletproofed… And Ronald himself, every limb strung so tight to his backbone that if you touched him, he would probably have begun to hum… and the fingers, of course, those long white grotesqueries, seven knuckles at least before you got down to the nicely gnawed nail, those Bela Lugosi hands that my mother would tell me—and tell me—and tell me-because nothing is ever said once—nothing!—were “the hands of a born pianist.”

Pianist! Oh, that’s one of the words they just love, almost as much as doctor, Doctor. And residency. And best of all, his own office. He opened his own office in Livingston. “Do you remember Seymour Schmuck, Alex?” she asks me, or Aaron Putz or Howard Shiong, or some yo-yo I am supposed to have known in grade school twenty-five years ago, and of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. “Well, I met his mother on the street today, and she told me that Seymour is now the biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere. He owns six different split-level ranch-type houses made all of fieldstone in Livingston, and belongs to the boards of eleven synagogues, all brand-new and designed by Marc Kugel, and last year with his wife and his two little daughters, who are so beautiful that they are already under contract to Metro, and so brilliant that they should be in college-he took them all to Europe for an eighty-million-dollar tour of seven thousand countries, some of them you never even heard of, that they made them just to honor Seymour, and on top of that, he’s so important, Seymour, that in every single city in Europe that they visited he was asked by the mayor himself to stop and do an impossible operation on a brain in hospitals that they also built for him right on the spot, and-listen to this-where they pumped into the operating room during the operation the theme song from Exodus so everybody should know what religion he is-and that’s how big your friend Seymour is today! And how happy he makes his parents!”

And you, the implication is, when are you going to get married already? In Newark and the surrounding suburbs this apparently is the question on everybody’s lips: WHEN IS ALEXANDER PORTNOY GOING TO STOP BEING SELFISH AND GIVE HIS PARENTS, WHO ARE SUCH WONDERFUL PEOPLE, GRANDCHILDREN? “Well,” says my father, the tears brimming up in his eyes, “well,” he asks, every single time I see him, “is there a serious girl in the picture. Big Shot? Excuse me for asking. I’m only your father, but since I’m not going to be alive forever, and you in case you forgot carry the family name, I wonder if maybe you could let me in on the secret.” ¹⁵Ibid., 96-100

I was saying that the detail of Ronald Nimkin’s suicide that most appeals to me is the note to his mother found pinned to that roomy straitjacket, his nice stiffly laundered sports shirt. Know what it said? Guess. The last message from Ronald to his momma? Guess.

Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.
Ronald

Now, how’s that for good to the last drop? How’s that for a good boy, a thoughtful boy, a kind and courteous and well-behaved boy, a nice Jewish boy such as no one will ever have cause to be ashamed of? Say thank you, darling. Say you’re welcome, darling. Say you’re sorry, Alex. Say you’re sorry! Apologize! Yeah, for what? What have I done now? Hey, I’m hiding under my bed, my back to the wall, refusing to say I’m sorry, refusing, too, to come out and take the consequences. Refusing! And she is after me with a broom, trying to sweep my rotten carcass into the open. Why, shades of Gregor Samsa! Hello Alex, goodbye Franz! “You better tell me you’re sorry, you, or else! And I don’t mean maybe either!” I am five, maybe six, and she is or-elsing me and not-meaning-maybe as though the firing squad is already outside, lining the street with newspaper preparatory to my execution.

And now comes the father: after a pleasant day of trying to sell life insurance to black people who aren’t even exactly sure they’re alive, home to a hysterical wife and a metamorphosed child-because what did I do, me, the soul of goodness? Incredible, beyond belief, but either I kicked her in the shins, or I bit her. I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but I do believe it was both.

“Why?” she demands to know, kneeling on the floor to shine a flashlight in my eyes, “why do you do such a thing?” Oh, simple, why did Ronald Nimkin give up his ghost and the piano? BECAUSE WE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE! BECAUSE YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH TO BEAR! I have read Freud on Leonardo, Doctor, and pardon the hubris, but my fantasies exactly: this big smothering bird beating frantic wings about my face and mouth so that I cannot even get my breath. What do we want, me and Ronald and Leonardo? To be left alone! If only for half an hour at a time! Stop already hocking us to be good! hocking us to be nice! Just leave us alone, God damn it, to pull our little dongs in peace and think our little selfish thoughts—stop already with the respectabilizing of our hands and our tushies and our mouths! Fuck the vitamins and the cod liver oil! Just give us each day our daily flesh! And forgive us our trespasses—which aren’t even trespasses to begin with!

[…]

Shit, Sophie, just try, why don’t you? Why don’t we all try! Because to be bad. Mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad-and to enjoy it! That is what makes men of us boys. Mother. But what my conscience, so-called, has done to my sexuality, my spontaneity, my courage! Never mind some of the things I try so hard to get away with – because the fact remains, I don’t. I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear. See, I am too good too, Mother, I too am moral to the bursting point—just like you! Did you ever see me try to smoke a cigarette? I look like Bette Davis. Today boys and girls not even old enough to be bar-mitzvahed are sucking on marijuana like it’s peppermint candy, and I’m still all thumbs with a Lucky Strike. Yes, that’s how good I am, Momma. Can’t smoke, hardly drink, no drugs, don’t borrow money or play cards, can’t tell a lie without beginning to sweat as though I’m passing over the equator. Sure, I say fuck a lot, but I assure you, that’s about the sum of my success with transgressing. Look what I have done with The Monkey-given her up, run from her in fear, the girl whose cunt I have been dreaming about lapping all my life. Why is a little turbulence so beyond my means? Why must the least deviation from respectable conventions cause me such inner hell? When I hate those fucking conventions! When I know better than the taboos! Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID! Liberate this nice Jewish boy’s libido, will you please? Raise the prices if you have to—I’ll pay anything! Only enough cowering in the face of the deep, dark pleasures! Ma, Ma, what was it you wanted to turn me into anyway, a walking zombie like Ronald Nimkin? Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires! “Alex,” you say, as we leave the Weequahic Diner-and don’t get me wrong, I eat it up: praise is praise, and I take it however it comes—”Alex,” you say to me all dressed up in my clip-on tie and my two-tone “loafer” jacket, “the way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never saw such a little gentleman with his little napkin in his lap like that!” Fruitcake, Mother. Little fruitcake is what you saw—and exactly what the training program was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I’m not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I’m not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand in Bloomingdale’s on Saturday mornings. Mother, the beach at Fire Island is strewn with the bodies of nice Jewish boys, in bikinis and Bain de Soleil, also little gentlemen in restaurants, I’m sure, also who helped mommies set up mah-jongg tiles when the ladies came on Monday night to play. Christ Almighty! After all those years of setting up those tiles—one barn! two crack! mah-jongg!—how I made it into the world of pussy at all, that’s the mystery. I close my eyes, and it’s not so awfully hard—I see myself sharing a house at Ocean Beach with somebody in eye make-up named Sheldon. “Oh, fuck you, Shelly, they’re your friends, you make the garlic bread.” Mother, your little gentlemen are all grown up now, and there on lavender beach towels they lie, in all their furious narcissism. And oy Gut, one is calling out-to me! “Alex? Alexander the King? Baby, did you see where I put my tarragon?” There he is, Ma, your little gentleman, kissing someone named Sheldon on the lips! Because of his herb dressing! “Do you know what I read in Cosmopolitan?” says my mother to my father. “That there are women who are homosexual persons.” “Come on,” grumbles Poppa Bear, “what kind of garbage is that, what kind of crap is that-?” “Jack, please. I’m not making it up. I read it in Cosmo! I’ll show you the article!” “Come on, they print that stuff for the circulation—” Momma! Poppa! There is worse even than that—there are people who fuck chickens! There are men who screw stiffs! You simply cannot imagine how some people will respond to having served fifteen—and twenty-year sentences as some crazy bastard’s idea of “good”! So if I kicked you in the shins, Ma-ma, if I sunk my teeth into your wrist clear through to the bone, count your blessings! For had I kept it all inside me, believe me, you too might have arrived home to find a pimply adolescent corpse swinging over the bathtub by his father’s belt. Worse yet, this last summer, instead of sitting shiva over a son running off to faraway Europe, you might have found yourself dining out on my “deck” on Fire Island-the two of you, me, and Sheldon. And if you remember what that goyische lobster did to your kishkas, imagine what it would have been like trying to keep down Shelly’s sauce béarnaise.¹⁶Ibid., 120-126

His parents visit him one time in New York City where he works and they argue about a “worn-out” rug which he shouldn’t keep. Then the argument devolves into one about respect and obedience to his parents:

“Mother, I’m thirty-three! I am the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York! I graduated first in my law school class! Remember? I have graduated first from every class I’ve ever been in! At twenty-five I was already special counsel to a House Sub-committee-of the United States Congress, Mother! Of America! If I wanted Wall Street, Mother, I could be on Wall Street! I am a highly respected man in my profession, that should be obvious! Right this minute, Mother, I am conducting an investigation of unlawful discriminatory practices in the building trades in New York-racial discrimination! Trying to get the Ironworkers’ Union, Mother, to tell me their little secrets! That’s what I did just today! Look, I helped solve the television quiz scandal, do you remember-?” Oh, why go on? Why go on in my strangled high-pitched adolescent voice? Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

Anyway, Sophie has by this time taken my hand, and with hooded eyes, waits until I sputter out the last accomplishment I can think of, the last virtuous deed I have done, then speaks: “But to us, to us you’re still a baby, darling.” And next comes the whisper, Sophie’s famous whisper that everybody in the room can hear without even straining, she’s so considerate: “Tell him you’re sorry. Give him a kiss. A kiss from you would change the world.”

A kiss from me would change the world! Doctor! Doctor! Did I say fifteen? Excuse me, I meant ten! I meant five! I meant zero! A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! Listen, come to my aid, will you-and quick! Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it’s beginning to pall a little, at thirty-three! And also it hoits, you know, there is pain involved, a little human suffering is being felt, if I may take it upon myself to say so—only that’s the part Sam Levenson leaves out! Sure, they sit in the casino at the Concord, the women in their minks and the men in their phosphorescent suits, and boy, do they laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh-“Help, help, my son the doctor is drowning!” —ha ha ha, ha ha ha, only what about the pain, Myron Cohen! What about the guy who is actually drowning! Actually sinking beneath an ocean of parental relentlessness! What about him—who happens, Myron Cohen, to be me! Doctor, please, I can’t live any more in a world given its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some—some black humorist! Because that’s who the black humorists are—of course!—the Henny Youngmans and the Milton Berles breaking them up down there in the Fountainebleau, and with what? Stories of murder and mutilation! “Help,” cries the woman running along the sand at Miami Beach, “help, my son the doctor is drowning!” Ha ha ha-only it is my son the patient, lady! And is he drowning! Doctor, get these people off my ass, will you please? The macabre is very funny on the stage-but not to live it, thank you! So just tell me how, and I’ll do it! Just tell me what, and I’ll say it right to their faces! Scat, Sophie! Fuck off, Jack! Go away from me already! ¹⁷Ibid., 107-112

In the above joke, even though her son is drowning, the Jewish mother who’s obsessively proud of her boy’s achievements couldn’t say the words “my son” without adding “the doctor.”

Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.