Portnoy's Complaint (13 page)

Anyway, anyway—off to work in the radio-less white-wall-less Kaiser, there to be let into the office by the cleaning lady. Now, I ask you, why must he be the one to raise the shades in that office in the morning? Why must he work the longest day of any insurance agent in history? For whom?
Me?
Oh, if so, if so, if that is his reason, then it is all really too fucking tragic to bear. The misunderstanding is too great! For
me?
Do me a favor
and don’t do it for me!
Don’t please look around for a reason for your life being what it is and come up with Alex! Because I am not the be-all and end-all of everybody’s existence! I refuse to
shlep those
bags around for the rest of
my
life! Do you hear me? I refuse! Stop finding it incomprehensible that I should be flying to Europe, thousands and thousands of miles away, just when you have turned sixty-six and are all ready to keel over at any minute, like you read about first thing every morning in the
Times
. Men his age and younger,
they die—
one minute they’re alive, and the next dead, and apparently what he thinks is that if I am only across the Hudson instead of the Atlantic … Listen, what
does
he think? That with me around it simply won’t happen? That I’ll race to his side, take hold of his hand, and thereby restore him to life? Does he actually believe that I somehow have the power to destroy death? That I am the resurrection and the life? My dad, a real believing Christer! And doesn’t even know it!

His death. His death and his bowels: the truth is I am hardly less preoccupied with either than he is himself. I never get a telegram, never get a phone call after midnight, that I do not feel my own stomach empty out like a washbasin, and say aloud—aloud!—“He’s dead.” Because apparently I believe it too, believe that I can somehow save him from annihilation—can, and must! But where did we all get this ridiculous and absurd idea that I am so—powerful, so precious, so necessary to everybody’s survival! What was it with these Jewish parents—because I am not in this boat alone, oh no, I am on the biggest troop ship afloat … only look in through the portholes and see us there, stacked to the bulkheads in our bunks, moaning and groaning with such pity for ourselves, the sad and watery-eyed sons of Jewish parents, sick to the gills from rolling through these heavy seas of guilt—so I sometimes envision us, me and my fellow wailers, melancholies, and wise guys, still in steerage, like our forebears—and oh sick, sick as dogs, we cry out intermittently, one of us or another, “Poppa, how could you?” “Momma, why did you?” and the stories we tell, as the big ship pitches and rolls, the vying we do—who had the most castrating mother, who the most benighted father, I can match you, you bastard, humiliation for humiliation, shame for shame … the retching in the toilets after meals, the hysterical deathbed laughter from the bunks, and the tears—here a puddle wept in contrition, here a puddle from indignation—in the blinking of an eye, the body of a man (with the brain of a boy) rises in impotent rage to flail at the mattress above, only to fall instantly back, lashing itself with reproaches. Oh, my Jewish men friends! My dirty-mouthed guilt-ridden brethren! My sweethearts! My mates! Will this fucking ship ever stop pitching? When?
When
, so that we can leave off complaining how sick we are—and go out into the air, and live!

Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame—blaming is still ailing, of course, of course—but nonetheless, what
was
it with these Jewish parents,
what
, that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood—saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little shits, little
ingrates
, on the other!

“But in Europe
where
—?” he calls after me, as the taxi pulls away from the curb.

“I don’t
know
where,” I call after him, gleefully waving farewell. I am thirty-three, and free at last of my mother and father! For a month.

“But how will we know your address?”

Joy! Sheer joy! “You won’t!”

“But what if in the meantime—?”

“What if what?” I laugh. “What if what are you worried about now?”

“What if—?” And my God, does he really actually shout it out the taxi window? Is his fear, his greed, his need and belief in me so great that he actually shouts these words out into the streets of New York? “What if I die?”

Because that is what I hear, Doctor. The last words I hear before flying off to Europe—and with The Monkey, somebody whom I have kept a total secret from them. “What if I die?” and then off I go for my orgiastic holiday abroad.

… Now, whether the words I hear are the words spoken is something else again. And whether what I hear I hear out of compassion for him, out of my agony over the inevitability of this horrific occurrence, his death, or out of my eager anticipation of that event, is also something else again. But this of course you understand, this of course is your bread and your butter.

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.

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!

“—a little boy you want to be who kicks his own mother in the shins—?” My father speaking … and look at his arms, will you? I have never really noticed before the size of the forearms the man has got on him. He may not have whitewall tires or a high school education, but he has arms on him that are no joke. And, Jesus, is he angry. But why? In part, you schmuck, I kicked her for
you!

“—a human bite is worse than a dog bite, do you know that, you? Get out from under that bed! Do you hear me, what you did to your mother is worse than a dog could do!” And so loud is his roar, and so convincing, that my normally placid sister runs to the kitchen, great gruntfuls of fear erupting from her mouth, and in what we now call the fetal position crouches down between the refrigerator and the wall. Or so I seem to remember it—though it would make sense, I think, to ask how I know what is going on in the kitchen if I am still hiding beneath my bed.

“The bite I can live with, the shins I can live with”—her broom still relentlessly trying to poke me out from my cave—“but what am I going to do with a child who won’t even say he’s sorry? Who won’t tell his own mother that he’s sorry and will never never do such a thing again,
ever!
What are we going to do, Daddy, with such a little boy in our house!”

Is she
kidding?
Is she
serious?
Why doesn’t she call the cops and get me shipped off to children’s prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? “Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother.” You’d think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America. When actually what we are playing in that house is some farce version of
King Lear
, with me in the role of Cordelia! On the phone she is perpetually telling whosoever isn’t listening on the other end about her biggest fault being that she’s too good. Because
surely
they’re not listening—
surely
they’re not sitting there nodding and taking down on their telephone pads this kind of transparent, self-serving, insane horse-shit that even a pre-school-age child can see through. “You know what my biggest fault is, Rose? I hate to say it about myself, but I’m too good.” These are actual words, Doctor, tape-recorded these many years in my brain. And killing me still! These are the actual messages that these Roses and Sophies and Goldies and Pearls transmit to one another
daily!
“I give my everything to other people,” she admits, sighing, “and I get kicked in the teeth in return—and my fault is that as many times as I get slapped in the face, I can’t stop being good.”

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 bam! 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-má, 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
.