Where to find it? The sex episode with Bubbles spans the pages 165 to 184 in the original print edition.
Portnoy recalls his first sexual experience which was humiliating “at the hands” of an Italian-American teenage prostitute named Bubbles. He starts at the moment her dead body was found floating in a swimming pool, at the age of eighteen. Then he flashes back to his invitation by two friends Smokla and Mandel to the house where Bubbles lives. Portnoy is disturbed to find out about the crime-connected family of the girl. Typically, Portnoy’s mind is overwhelmed by worries about a bunch of things: from her father who drives around gangsters at night, her brother who is a boxer, the possibility that she has syphilis, to the old condom in his pocket:
[T]he Trojan I have been carrying around so long in my wallet that inside its tinfoil wrapper it has probably been half eaten away by mold. One spurt and the whole thing will go flying in pieces all over the inside of Bubbles Girardi’s box—and then what do I do? 1Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 166.
He assures himself:
I have been using them to jerk off into, to see if they will stand up under simulated fucking conditions. So far so good. 2Ibid.
What if he already contacted syphilis without realizing it through his friend Smokla who had been sleeping with Bubbles and handling their drinks. Then his mind weaves an incident where his penis might just fall off right in front of his mother:
“Alex, what is that you’re hiding under your foot?” “Nothing.” “Alex, please, I heard a definite clink. What is that that fell out of your trousers that you’re stepping on it with your foot? Out of your good trousers!” “Nothing! My shoe! Leave me alone!” “Young man, what are you—oh my God! Jack! [his father] Come quick! Look – look on the floor by his shoe!” With his pants around his knees, and the Newark News turned back to the obituary page and clutched in his hand, he rushes into the kitchen from the bathroom—”Now what?” She screams (that’s her answer) and points beneath my chair. “What is that, Mister—some smart high-school joke?” demands my father, in a fury—”what is that black plastic thing doing on the kitchen floor?” “It’s not a plastic one,” I say, and break into sobs. “It’s my own. I caught the syph from an eighteen-year—old Italian girl in Hillside, and now, now, I have no more p-p-p-penis!” “His little thing,” screams my mother, “that I used to tickle it to make him go wee-wee—” “DON’T TOUCH IT NOBODY MOVE,” cries my father, for my mother seems about to leap forward onto the floor, like a woman into her husband’s grave—”call-the Humane Society—” “Like for a rabies dog?” she weeps. “Sophie, what else are you going to do? Save it in a drawer somewhere? To show his children? He ain’t going to have no children!” She begins to howl pathetically, a grieving animal, while my father… but the scene fades quickly, for in a matter of seconds I am blind, and within the hour my brain is the consistency of hot Farina. 3Ibid., 167-168
He comments on the characters of his two old friends. Smolka…
Sixteen and Jewish just like me, but there all resemblance ends: he wears his hair in a duck’s ass, has sideburns down to his jawbone, and sports one-button roll suits and pointy black shoes, and Billy Eckstine collars bigger than Billy Eckstine’s! But Jewish. Incredible! 4Ibid., 172
Mandel…
A moralistic teacher has leaked to us that Arnold Mandel has the I.Q. of a genius yet prefers instead to take rides in stolen cars, smoke cigarettes, and get sick on bottles of beer. Can you believe it? A Jewish boy? He is also a participant in the circle-jerks held with the shades pulled down in Smolka’s living room after school, while both elder Smolkas are slaving away in the tailor shop. I have heard the stories, but still (despite my own onanism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism—not to mention fetishism) I can’t and won’t believe it: four or five guys sit around in a circle on the floor, and at Smolka’s signal, each begins to pull off—and the first one to come gets the pot, a buck a head.
What pigs. 5Ibid.
Years later, Portnoy would run into Mandel, “the circle-jerker himself,” and to his surprise his friends are thriving, unlike dead Bubbles, or Portnoy himself who’s struggling with relationships and anxieties. Smolka is a professor at Princeton and Mandel is…
with a wife and two little children—and a “ranch” house in Maplewood, New Jersey. Mandel lives, owns a length of garden hose, he tells me, and a barbecue and briquets! Mandel, who, out of awe of Pupi Campo and Tito Valdez, went off to City Hall the day after quitting high school and had his first name officially changed from Arnold to Ba-ba-lu. Mandel, who drank “six-packs” of beer! Miraculous. Can’t be! How on earth did it happen that retribution passed him by?
[…]And now he is thirty-three, like me, and a salesman for his wife’s father, who has a surgical supply house on Market Street in Newark. And what about me, he asks, what do I do for a living? Really, doesn’t he know? Isn’t he on my parents’ mailing list? Doesn’t everyone know I am now the most moral man in all of New York, all pure motives and humane and compassionate ideals? Doesn’t he know that what I do for a living is I’m good? “Civil Service,” I answered, pointing across to Thirty Worth. Mister Modesty.
“You still see any of the guys?” Ba-ba-lu asked. “You married?”
“No, no.”
Inside the new jowls, the old furtive Latin-American greaser comes to life. “So, uh, what do you do for pussy?”
“I have affairs. Arn, and I beat my meat.” 6Ibid., 174-175
I simply cannot believe in the survival, let alone the middle-class success, of these two bad boys. Why, they’re supposed to be in jail—or the gutter. They didn’t do their homework, damn it! Smolka used to cheat off me in Spanish, and Mandel didn’t even give enough of a shit to bother to do that, and as for washing their hands before eating… Don’t you understand, these two boys are supposed to be dead! Like Bubbles. Now there at least is a career that makes some sense. There’s a case of cause and effect that confirms my ideas about human consequence! Bad enough, rotten enough, and you get your cock-sucking head blown off by boogies. Now that’s the way the world’s supposed to be run!7Ibid., 176
Alex returns to his story where Smolka comes into the kitchen where Alex and Mandel were waiting to announce that Bubbles is not cooperating any more.
“But you said we were going to get laid!” cries Mandel.
“You said we were going to get blowed! Reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned, that’s what you said!”
“Fuck it,” I say, “if she doesn’t want to do it, who needs her, let’s go—”
“But I’ve been pounding off over this for a week! I ain’t going anywhere! What kind of shit is this, Smolka? Won’t she even beat my meat?“
Me, with my refrain: “Ah, look, if she doesn’t want to do it, let’s go—”So Smolka goes back in for a second conference, and returns nearly half an hour later with the news that the girl has changed her mind: she will jerk off one guy, but only with his pants on, and that’s all. We flip a coin—and I win the right to get the syph! Mandel claims the coin grazed the ceiling, and is ready to murder me—he is still screaming foul play when I enter the living room to reap my reward.
She sits in her slip on the sofa at the other end of the linoleum floor, weighing a hundred and seventy pounds and growing a mustache. Anthony Peruta, that’s my name for when she asks. But she doesn’t. “Look,” says Bubbles, “let’s get it straight—you’re the only one I’m doing it to.
You, and that’s it.”
“It’s entirely up to you,” I say politely.
“All right, take it out of your pants, but don’t take them down. You hear me, because I told him. I’m not doing anything to anybody’s balls.”
“Fine, fine. Whatever you say.”
“And don’t try to touch me either.”
“Look, if you want me to, I’ll go.”
“Just take it out.”
“Sure, if that’s what you want, here… here,” I say, but prematurely, “I-just-have-to-get-it-” Where is that thing? In the classroom I sometimes set myself consciously to thinking about DEATH and HOSPITALS and HORRIBLE AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENTS in the hope that such grave thoughts will cause my “boner”‘ to recede before the bell rings and I have to stand. It seems that I can’t go up to the blackboard in school, or try to get off a bus, without its jumping up and saying, “Hi! Look at me!” to everyone in sight—and now it is nowhere to be found.
“Here!” I finally cry.
“Is that it?”
“Well,” I answer, turning colors, “it gets bigger when it gets harder…”
“Well, I ain’t got all night, you know.”Nicely: “Oh, I don’t think it’ll be all night—”
“Laydown!”
Bubbles, not wholly content, lowers herself into a straight chair, while I stretch out beside her on the sofa—and suddenly she has hold of it, and it’s as though my poor cock has got caught in some kind of machine. 8Ibid., 177-178
The next moment, after years of thinking otherwise, he realizes he is not able to masturbate except with his own hand:
Vigorously, to put it mildly, the ordeal begins. But it is like trying to jerk off a jellyfish.
“What’s a matter?” she finally says. “Can’t you come?”
“Usually, yes, I can.”
“Then stop holding it back on me.”
“I’m not. I am trying. Bubbles-—”
“Cause I’m going to count to fifty, and if you don’t do it by then, that ain’t my fault.”
Fifty? Ill be lucky if it is still attached to my body by fifty. Take it easy, I want to scream. Not so rough around the edges, please!—”eleven, twelve, thirteen”—and I think to myself. Thank God, soon it’ll be over-hang on, only another forty seconds to go—but simultaneous with the relief comes, of course, the disappointment, and it is keen: this only happens to be what I have been dreaming about night and day since I am thirteen. At long last, not a cored apple, not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt-and a mustache, but who am I to be picky? This is what I have been imagining for myself…
Which is how it occurs to me what to do. I will forget that the fist tearing away at me belongs to Bubbles—I’ll pretend it’s my own! So, fixedly I stare at the dark ceiling, and instead of making believe that I am getting laid, as I ordinarily do while jerking off, I make believe that I am jerking off.
And it begins instantly to take effect. Unfortunately, however, I get just about where I want to be when Bubbles’ workday comes to an end.
“Okay, that’s it,” she says, “fifty,” and stops!
“No!” I cry. “More!”
“Look, I already ironed two hours, you know, before you guys even got here—”
“JUST ONE MORE! I BEG OF YOU! TWO MORE! PLEASE!”
“N-O!”
Whereupon, unable (as always!) to stand the frustration-the deprivation and disappointment—I reach down, I grab it, and POW!
Only right in my eye. With a single whiplike stroke of the master’s own hand, the lather comes rising out of me. I ask you, who jerks me off as well as I do it myself? Only, reclining as I am, the jet leaves my joint on the horizontal, rides back the length of my torso, and lands with a thick wet burning splash right in my own eye.
“Son of a bitch kike!” Bubbles screams. “You got gissum all over the couch! And the walls! And the lamp!”
“I got it in my eye! And don’t you say kike to me, you!”
“You are a kike, Kike! You got it all over everything, you mocky son of a bitch! Look at the doilies!”
It’s just as my parents have warned me—comes the first disagreement, no matter how small, and the only thing a shikse knows to call you is a dirty Jew. What an awful discovery—my parents who are always wrong… are right! And my eye-it’s as though it’s been dropped in fire—and now I remember why. On Devil’s Island, Smolka has told us, the guards used to have fun with the prisoners by rubbing sperm in their eyes and making them blind. I’m going blind! A shikse has touched my dick with her bare hand, and now I’ll be blind forever! Doctor, my psyche, it’s about as difficult to understand as a gradeschool primer! Who needs dreams, I ask you? Who needs Freud? Rose Franzblau of the New York Post has enough on the ball to come up with an analysis of somebody like me!
“Sheeny!” she is screaming. “Hebe! [a Jewish slur] You can’t even come off unless you pull your own pudding, cheap bastard fairy Jew!”
Hey, enough is enough, where is her sympathy? “But my eye!” and rush for the kitchen, where Smolka and Mandel are rolling around the walls in ecstasy. “—right in the”—erupts Mandel, and folds in half onto the floor, beating at the linoleum with his fists—”right in the fucking—”
“Water, you shits. I’m going blind! I’m on fire!” and flying full-speed over Mandel’s body, stick my head beneath the faucet. Above the sink Jesus still ascends in his pink nightie. That useless son of a bitch! I thought he was supposed to make the Christians compassionate and kind. I thought other people’s suffering is what he told them to feel sorry for. What bullshit! If I go blind, it’s his fault! Yes, somehow he strikes me as the ultimate cause for all this pain and confusion. And oh God, as the cold water runs down my face, how am I going to explain my blindness to my parents! My mother virtually spends half her life up my ass as it is, checking on the manufacture of my stool—how am I possibly going to hide the fact that I no longer have my sight? “Tap, tap, tap, it’s just me, Mother – this nice big dog brought me home, with my cane.” “A dog? In my house? Get him out of here before he makes everything filthy! Jack, there’s a dog in the house and I just washed the kitchen floor!” “But, Momma, he’s here to stay, he has to stay—he’s a seeing-eye dog. I’m blind.” “Oh my God! Jack!” she calls into the bathroom. “Jack, Alex is home with a dog—he’s gone blind!” “Him, blind?” my father replies. “How could he be blind, he doesn’t even know what it means to turn off a light.” “How?” screams my mother. “How? Tell us how such a thing—”
Mother, how? How else? Consorting with Christian girls. 9Ibid., 178-182
His friend Mandel tells him the following day that he had much better luck after Portnoy left. Mandel tells him:
Bubbles was down on her fucking dago knees [dago is a racial slur for Italians and Spaniards] sucking his cock.
The top of my head comes off: “She was?”
“Right on her fucking dago knees,” says Mandel. “Schmuck, what’d you go home for?”
“She called me a kike!” I answer self-righteously. “I thought I was blind. Look, she’s anti-Semitic, Ba-ba-lu.”
“Yeah, what do I give a shit?” says Mandel. Actually I don’t think he knows what anti-Semitic means. “All I know is I got laid, twice.”
“You did? With a rubber?”
“Fuck, I didn’t use nothing.”
“But she’ll get pregnant!” I cry, and in anguish, as though it’s me who will be held accountable.
“What do I care?” replies Mandel. 10Ibid., 181-182
While in shock at his friend’s revelation, he was eager to know all details about their sexual experience:
Ba-ba-lu, speak to me, talk to me, tell me what it was like when she did it! I have to know, and with details—exact details! What about her tits? What about her nipples? What about her thighs? What does she do with her thighs, Ba-ba-lu, does she wrap them around your ass like in the hot books, or does she squeeze them tight around your cock till you want to scream, like in my dreams? And what about her hair down there? Tell me everything there is to tell about pubic hairs and the way they smell, I don’t care if I heard it all before. And did she really kneel, are you shitting me? Did she actually kneel on her knees? And what about her teeth, where do they go? And does she suck on it, or does she blow on it, or somehow is it that she does both? Oh God, Ba-ba-lu, did you shoot in her mouth? Oh my God! And did she swallow it right down, or spit it out, or get mad-tell me! what did she do with your hot come! Did you warn her you were going to shoot, or did you just come off and let her worry? And who put it in—did she put it in or did you put it in, or does it just get drawn in by itself? And where were all your clothes?—on the couch? on the floor? exactly where? I want details! Details! Actual details! Who took off her brassiere, who took off her panties—her panties—did you? did she? When she was down there blowing, Ba-ba-lu, did she have anything on at all? And how about the pillow under her ass, did you stick a pillow under her ass like it says to do in my parents’ marriage manual? What happened when you came inside her? Did she come too? Mandel, clarify something that I have to know—do they come? Stuff? Or do they just moan a lot – or what? How does she come! What is it like! Before I go out of my head. I have to know what it’s like! 11Ibid., 183-184
Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.
Endnotes
