“Is this the Jewish Suffering?”
Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish ioke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, “Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!” and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat? Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough! 1Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 36-37.
[I]s 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! 2Ibid., 251
Jerking off at home
Then came adolescence-half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth-though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil. Through a world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled Kleenex and stained pajamas, I moved my raw and swollen penis, perpetually in dread that my loathsomeness would be discovered by someone stealing upon me just as I was in the frenzy of dropping my load. Nevertheless, I was wholly incapable of keeping my paws from my dong once it started the climb up my belly. In the middle of a class I would raise a hand to be excused, rush down the corridor to the lavatory, and with ten or fifteen savage strokes, beat off standing up into a urinal. At the Saturday afternoon movie I would leave my friends to go off to the candy machine-and wind up in a distant balcony seat, squirting my seed into the empty wrapper from a Mounds bar. On an outing of our family association, I once cored an apple, saw to my astonishment (and with the aid of my obsession) what it looked like, and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had. “Oh shove it in me, Big Boy,” cried the cored apple that I banged silly on that picnic. “Big Boy, Big Boy, oh give me all you’ve got,” begged the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our storage bin in the basement, to drive wild after school with my vaselined upright. “Come, Big Boy, come,” screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.
It was at the end of my freshman year of high school-and freshman year of masturbating-that I discovered on the underside of my penis, just where the shaft meets the head, a little discolored dot that has since been diagnosed as a freckle. Cancer. I had given myself cancer. All that pulling and tugging at my own flesh, all that friction, had given me an incurable disease. And not yet fourteen! In bed at night the tears rolled from my eyes. “No!” I sobbed. “I don’t want to die! Please-no!” But then, because I would very shortly be a corpse anyway, I went ahead as usual and jerked off into my sock. I had taken to carrying the dirty socks into bed with me at night so as to be able to use one as a receptacle upon retiring, and the other upon awakening.
If only I could cut down to one hand-job a day, or hold the line at two, or even three! But with the prospect of oblivion before me, I actually began to set new records for myself. Before meals. After meals. During meals. Jumping up from the dinner table, I tragically clutch at my belly-diarrhea! I cry, I have been stricken with diarrhea!—and once behind the locked bathroom door, slip over my head a pair of underpants that I have stolen from my sister’s dresser and carry rolled in a handkerchief in my pocket. So galvanic is the effect of cotton panties against my mouth—so galvanic is the word “panties”—that the trajectory of my ejaculation reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and horror, it hits and it hangs. Wildly in the first moment I cover my head, expecting an explosion of glass, a burst of flames—disaster, you see, is never far from my mind. Then quietly as I can I climb the radiator and remove the sizzling gob with a wad of toilet paper. I begin a scrupulous search of the shower curtain, the tub, the tile floor, the four tooth-brushes—God forbid!—and just as I am about to unlock the door, imagining I have covered my tracks, my heart lurches at the sight of what is hanging like snot to the toe of my shoe. I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off—the sticky evidence is everywhere! Is it on my cuffs too? in my hair? my ear? All this I wonder even as I come back to the kitchen table, scowling and cranky, to grumble self-righteously at my father when he opens his mouth full of red jello and says, “I don’t understand what you have to lock the door about. That to me is beyond comprehension. What is this, a home or a Grand Central station?”… privacy… a human being… around here never,” I reply, then push aside my dessert to scream, “I don’t feel well—will everybody leave me alone?”
After dessert-which I finish because I happen to like jello, even if I detest them-after dessert I am back in the bathroom again. I burrow through the week’s laundry until I uncover one of my sister’s soiled brassieres. I string one shoulder strap over the knob of the bathroom door and the other on the knob of the linen closet: a scarecrow to bring on more dreams. “Oh beat it, Big Boy, beat it to a red-hot pulp—” so I am being urged by the little cups of Hannah’s brassiere, when a rolled-up newspaper smacks at the door. And sends me and my handful an inch off the toilet seat. “—Come on, give somebody else a crack at that bowl, will you?” my father says. “I haven’t moved my bowels in a week.”
I recover my equilibrium, as is my talent, with a burst of hurt feelings. “I have a terrible case of diarrhea! Doesn’t that mean anything to anyone in this house?”—in the meantime resuming the stroke, indeed quickening the tempo as my cancerous organ miraculously begins to quiver again from the inside out.
Then Hannah’s brassiere begins to move. To swing to and fro! I veil my eyes, and behold!—Lenore Lapidus! who has the biggest pair in my class, running for the bus after school, her great untouchable load shifting weightily inside her blouse, oh I urge them up from their cups, and over, LENORE LAPIDUS’S ACTUAL TITS, and realize in the same split second that my mother is vigorously shaking the doorknob. Of the door I have finally forgotten to lock! I knew it would happen one day! Caught! As good as dead!
“Open up, Alex. I want you to open up this instant.”
It’s locked, I’m not caught! And I see from what’s alive in my hand that I’m not quite dead yet either. Beat on then! beat on! “Lick me, Big Boy-lick me a good hot lick! I’m Lenore Lapidus’s big fat red-hot brassiere!”
“Alex, I want an answer from you. Did you eat French fries after school? Is that why you’re sick like this?”
“Nuhhh, nuhhh.”
“Alex, are you in pain? Do you want me to call the doctor? Are you in pain, or aren’t you? I want to know exactly where it hurts. Answer me.”
“Yuhh, yuhhh—”
“Alex, I don’t want you to flush the toilet,” says my mother sternly. “I want to see what you’ve done in there. I don’t like the sound of this at all.”
“And me,” says my father, touched as he always was by my accomplishments-as much awe as envy—”I haven’t moved my bowels in a week,” just as I lurch from my perch on the toilet seat, and with the whimper of a whipped animal, deliver three drops of something barely viscous into the tiny piece of cloth where my flat-chested eighteen-year-old sister has laid her nipples, such as they are. It is my fourth orgasm of the day. When will I begin to come blood?“Get in here, please, you,” says my mother. “Why did you flush the toilet when I told you not to?”
“I forgot.”
“What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”
“Diarrhea.”
“Was it mostly liquid or was it mostly poopie?”
“I don’t look! I didn’t look! Stop saying poopie to me—I’m in high school!”
“Oh, don’t you shout at me, Alex. I’m not the one who gave you diarrhea, I assure you. If all you ate was what you were fed at home, you wouldn’t be running to the bathroom fifty times a day. Hannah tells me what you’re doing, so don’t think I don’t know.”
She’s missed the underpants! I’ve been caught! Oh, let me be dead! I’d just as soon!
“Yeah, what do I do…?”
“You go to Harold’s Hot Dog and Chazerai Palace after school and you eat French fries with Melvin Weiner. Don’t you? Don’t lie to me either. Do you or do you not stuff yourself with French fries and ketchup on Hawthorne Avenue after school? Jack, come in here, I want you to hear this,” she calls to my father, now occupying the bathroom.
“Look, I’m trying to move my bowels,” he replies. “Don’t I have enough trouble as it is without people screaming at me when I’m trying to move my bowels?”
“You know what your son does after school, the A student, who his own mother can’t say poopie to anymore, he’s such a grown-up? What do you think your grown-up son does when nobody is watching him?”
“Can I please be left alone, please?” cries my father. “Can I have a little peace, please, so I can get something accomplished in here?”
“Just wait till your father hears what you do, in defiance of every health habit there could possibly be. Alex, answer me something. You’re so smart, you know all the answers now, answer me this: how do you think Melvin Weiner gave himself colitis? Why has that child spent half his life in hospitals?”
“Because he eats chazerai.”
“Don’t you dare make fun of me!”
“All right,” I scream, “how did he get colitis?”
“Because he eats chazerai! But it’s not a joke! Because to him a meal is an O Henry bar washed down by a bottle of Pepsi. Because his breakfast consists of, do you know what? The most important meal of the day—not according just to your mother, Alex, but according to the highest nutritionists-and do you know what that child eats?”
“A doughnut.”
“A doughnut is right, Mr. Smart Guy, Mr. Adult. And coffee. Coffee and a doughnut, and on this a thirteen-year-old pisher with half a stomach is supposed to start a day. But you, thank God, have been brought up differently. You don’t have a mother who gallivants all over town like some names I could name, from Barn’s to Hahne’s to Kresge’s all day long. Alex, tell me, so it’s not a mystery, or maybe I’m just stupid-only tell me, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to prove, that you should stuff yourself with such junk when you could come home to a poppyseed cookie and a nice glass of milk? I want the truth from you. I wouldn’t tell your father,” she says, her voice dropping significantly, “but I must have the truth from you.” Pause. Also significant. “Is it just French fries, darling, or is it more?… Tell me, please, what other kind of garbage you’re putting into your mouth so we can get to the bottom of this diarrhea! I want a straight answer from you, Alex. Are you eating hamburgers out? Answer me, please, is that why you flushed the toilet—was there hamburger in it?”
“I told you—I don’t look in the bowl when I flush it! I’m not interested like you are in other people’s poopie!”
“Oh, oh, oh—thirteen years old and the mouth on him! To someone who is asking a question about his health, his welfare!” The utter incomprehensibility of the situation causes her eyes to become heavy with tears. “Alex, why are you getting like this, give me some clue? Tell me please what horrible things we have done to you all our lives that this should be our reward?” I believe the question strikes her as original. I believe she considers the question unanswerable. And worst of all, so do I. What have they done for me all their lives, but sacrifice? Yet that this is precisely the horrible thing is beyond my understanding—and still, Doctor! To this day! 3Ibid., 17-25
I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That-she-it-wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty-and then had again on the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.
So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner. 4Ibid., 133-134
Jerking off on the bus
Did I mention that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 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 dinner at Sheepshead Bay. An exquisite day. Hannah and Morty were to stay overnight in Flatbush with Morty’s family, and so I was put on a subway to Manhattan about ten o’clock-and there boarded the bus for New Jersey, upon which I took not just my cock in my hands but my whole life, when you think about it. The passengers were mostly drowsing off before we had even emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel-including the girl in the seat beside me, whose tartan skirt folds I had begun to press up against with the corduroy of my trouser legs-and I had it out and in my fist by the time we were climbing onto the Pulaski Skyway.[…]
[I]magine 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! 5Ibid., 78-79
Just by the looks of the driver, he comes to the dubious conclusion that he’s a Pole. On several occasions throughout the novel, he vilifies Poles and this is one of them. Being a Jew, he believes they are his “worst enemies.” He accepts the bigoted views of his father on Poles, with whom he rarely agrees on anything. It should be noted that there’s a long history of East European persecution and pogroms against Jews behind this enmity.
What a pantomime I had to perform to get my zylon windbreaker off my back and into my lap so as to cover my joint that night I bared it to the elements. All for the benefit of the driver, within whose Polack power it lay merely to flip on the overhead lights and thus destroy in a single moment fifteen years of neat notebooks and good grades and teeth-cleaning twice a day and never eating a piece of fruit without thoroughly washing it beforehand… Is it hot in here! Whew, is it hot! Boy oh boy, I guess I just better get this jacket off and put it right down here in a neat little pile in my lap… Only what am I doing? A Polack’s day, my father has suggested to me, isn’t complete until he has dragged his big dumb feet across the bones of a Jew. Why am I taking this chance in front of my worst enemy? What will become of me if I’m caught!
Half the length of the tunnel it takes me to unzip my zipper silently-and there it is again, up it pops again, as always swollen, bursting with demands, like some idiot macrocephalic making his parents’ life a misery with his simpleton’s insatiable needs.
“Jerk me off,” I am told by the silky monster. “Here? Now?” “Of course here and now. When would you expect an opportunity like this to present itself a second time? Don’t you know what that girl is who is asleep beside you? Just look at that nose.” “What nose?” “That’s the point-it’s hardly even there. Look at that hair, like off a spinning wheel. Remember ‘flax’ that you studied in school? That’s human flax! Schmuck, this is the real McCoy. A shikse! And asleep! Or maybe she’s just faking it is a strong possibility too. Faking it, but saying under her breath, ‘Cmon, Big Boy, do all the different dirty things to me you ever wanted to do.’ ” “Could that be so?” “Darling,” croons my cock, “let me just begin to list the many different dirty things she would like you to start off with: she wants you to take her hard little shikse titties in your hands, for one.” “She does?” “She wants you to finger-fuck her shikse cunt till she faints.” “Oh God. Till she faints!” “This is an opportunity such as may never occur again. So long as you live.” “Ah, but that’s the point, how long is that likely to be? The driver’s name is all X’s and Y’s-if my father is right, these Polish people are direct descendants from the ox!” 6Ibid., 127-128
In the following paragraph, Portnoy shares a Yiddish proverb that means “when the penis is erect, the brain stops working”: Ven der putz [prick] shteht, ligt der sechel [brain] in drerd. “sechel in drerd” is equivalent to “brain goes to hell.”
Jerking off in a burlesque house
But who wins an argument with a hard-on? Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd. Know that famous proverb? When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground! When the prick stands up, the brains are as good as dead!
[…]The three-finger hand-job is what I have devised for jerking off in public places-already I have employed it at the Empire Burlesque house in downtown Newark. One Sunday morning-following the example of Smolka, my Tom Sawyer—I leave the house for the schoolyard, whistling and carrying a baseball glove, and when no one is looking (obviously a state of affairs I hardly believe in) I jump aboard an empty 14 bus, and crouch in my seat the length of the journey. You can just imagine the crowd outside the burlesque house on a Sunday morning. Downtown Newark is as empty of life and movement as the Sahara, except for those outside the Empire, who look like the crew off a ship stricken with scurvy. Am I crazy to be going in there? God only knows what kind of disease I am going to pick up off those seats! “Go in anyway, fuck the disease,” says the maniac who speaks into the microphone of my jockey shorts, “don’t you understand what you’re going to see inside there? A woman’s snatch.” “A snatch?” “The whole thing, right, all hot and dripping and ready to go.” “But I’ll come down with the syph from just touching the ticket. I’ll pick it up on the bottom of my sneaks and track it into my own house. Some nut will go berserk and stab me to death for the Trojan in my wallet. What if the cops come? Waving pistols—and somebody runs—and they shoot me by mistake! Because I’m underage. What if I get killed-or even worse, arrested! What about my parents!” “Look, do you want to see a cunt or don’t you want to see a cunt?” “I want to! I want to!” “They have a whore in there, kid, who fucks the curtain with her bare twat.” “Okay—I’ll risk the syph! I’ll risk having my brain curdle and spending the rest of my days in an insane asylum playing handball with my own shit-only what about my picture in the Newark Evening News! When the cops throw on the lights and cry, ‘Okay, freaks, this is a raid!’—what if the flashbulbs go off! And get me—me, already president of the International Relations Club in my second year of high school! Me, who skipped two grades of grammar school! […] So what in God’s name am I doing in a side seat at the burlesque house jerking off into the pocket of my fielder’s glove? What if there’s violence! What if there’s germs!
Yes, only what if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if… In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is, too, under our bare bulb (HOTEL flashing just outside our window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil Cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little baby boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock while I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off-then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with poor) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh, Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark. Maybe.
The big thing at the Empire is hats. Down the aisle from me a fellow-addict fifty years my senior is dropping his load in his hat. His hat. Doctor! Oy, I’m sick. I want to cry. Not into your hat, you shvantz, you got to put that thing on your head! You’ve got to put it on now and go back outside and walk around downtown Newark dripping gissum down your forehead. How will you eat your lunch in that hat!
What misery descends upon me as the last drop dribbles into my mitt. The depression is overwhelming; even my cock is ashamed and doesn’t give me a single word of back talk as I start from the burlesque house, chastising myself ruthlessly, moaning aloud, “Oh, no, no,” not unlike a man who has just felt his sole skid through a pile of dog turds-sole of his shoe, but take the pun, who cares, who cares… Ach! Disgusting! Into his hat, for Christ’s sake. Ven der patz shteht! Ven der putz shteht! Into the hat that he wears on his head! 7Ibid., 128-132
Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.
Endnotes
