Portnoy's Complaint (12 page)

Now, can you beat that for a serpent’s tooth? All they have sacrificed for me and done for me and how they boast about me and are the best public relations firm (they tell me) any child could have, and it turns out that I still won’t be perfect. Did you ever hear of such a thing in your life? I just refuse to be perfect. What a pricky kid.

They come to visit: “Where did you get a rug like this?” my father asks, making a face. “Did you get this thing in a junk shop or did somebody give it to you?”

“I like this rug.”

“What are you talking,” my father says, “it’s a worn-out rug.”

Light-hearted. “It’s worn, but not out. Okay? Enough?”

“Alex, please,” my mother says, “it is a very worn rug.”

“You’ll trip on that thing,” my father says, “and throw your knee out of whack, and then you’ll really be in trouble.”

“And with your knee,” says my mother meaningfully, “that wouldn’t be a picnic.”

At this rate they are going to roll the thing up any minute now, the two of them, and push it out the window.
And then take me home!

“The rug is fine. My
knee
is fine.”

“It wasn’t so fine,” my mother is quick to remind me, “when you had the cast on, darling, up to your hip. How he
shlepped
that thing around! How miserable he was!”

“I was fourteen years old then, Mother.”

“Yeah, and you came out of that thing,” my father says, “you couldn’t bend your leg, I thought you were going to be a cripple for the rest of your life. I told him, ‘Bend it! Bend it!’ I practically begged him morning, noon, and night, ‘Do you want to be a cripple forever? Bend that leg!’ ”

“You scared the
daylights
out of us with that knee.”

“But that was in nineteen hundred and forty-seven. And this is nineteen sixty-six. The cast has been off nearly twenty years!”

My mother’s cogent reply? “You’ll see, someday you’ll be a parent, and you’ll know what it’s like. And then maybe you won’t sneer at your family any more.”

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the body of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU’LL BE A PARENT AND YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE.

“You think,” my father the ironist asks, “it’ll be in our lifetime, Alex? You think it’ll happen before I go down into the grave? No—he’d rather take chances with a worn-out rug!” The ironist—and logician! “—And crack his head open! And let me ask you something else, my independent son—who would even know you were here if you were lying bleeding to death on the floor? Half the time you don’t answer the phone, I see you lying here with God only knows what’s wrong—and who is there to take care of you? Who is there even to bring you a bowl of soup, if God forbid something terrible should happen?”

“I can take care of myself! I don’t go around like some people“—boy, still pretty tough with the old man, eh, Al?—“some people I know in continual anticipation of total catastrophe!”

“You’ll see,” he says, nodding miserably, “you’ll get sick”—and suddenly a squeal of anger, a whine out of nowhere of absolute hatred
of me!—“you’ll get old, and you won’t be such an independent big shot then!
”

“Alex, Alex,” begins my mother, as my father walks to my window to recover himself, and in passing, to comment contemptuously about “the neighborhood he lives in.” I work
for
New York, and he still wants me to live in beautiful Newark!

“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 Subcommittee—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!

I mean here’s a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me. It’s this past summer, just before I am to leave on my vacation. We have had our dinner (“You got a piece of fish?” my father asks the waiter in the fancy French restaurant I take them to,
to show I am grown-up
—“
Oui
,
monsieur
, we have—” “All right, give me a piece of fish,” says my father, “
and make sure it’s hot
”), we have had our dinner, and afterward, chewing on my Titralac (for relief of gastric hyperacidity), I walk a ways with them before putting them in a taxi for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Immediately my father starts in about how I haven’t come to visit in five weeks (ground I thought we two had already covered in the restaurant, while my mother was whispering to the waiter to make sure her “big boy’s” piece of fish—that’s me, folks!—was well-done), and now I am going away for a whole month, and all in all when do they ever see their own son? They see their daughter, and their daughter’s children, and not infrequently, but that is not successful either. “With that son-in-law,” my father says, “if you don’t say the right psychological thing to his kids, if I don’t talk straight psychology to my own granddaughters, he wants to put me in jail! I don’t care what he calls himself, he still thinks like a Communist to me. My own grandchildren, and everything I say has to pass by him, Mr. Censor!” No, their daughter is now Mrs. Feibish, and her little daughters are Feibishes too. Where are the Portnoys he dreamed of? In my nuts. “Look,” I cry in my strangulated way, “you’re seeing me
now!
You’re with me
right this minute!
” But he is off and running, and now that he hasn’t fishbones to worry about choking on, there is no reining him in—Mr. and Mrs. Schmuck have Seymour and his beautiful wife and their seven thousand brilliant and beautiful children who come to them
every single Friday night
—“Look, I am a very busy person! I have a briefcase full of important things to do—!” “Come on,” he replies, “you gotta eat, you can come for a meal once a week, because you gotta eat anyway comes six o’clock—well, don’t you?” Whereupon who pipes up but Sophie, informing him that when she was a little girl her family was always telling her to do this and do that, and how unhappy and resentful it sometimes would cause her to feel, and how my father shouldn’t insist with me because, she concludes, “Alexander is a big boy, Jack, he has a right to make his own decisions, that’s something I always told him.” You always
what? What
did she say?

Oh, why go on? Why be so obsessed like this? Why be so petty? Why not be a sport like Sam Levenson and laugh it all off—right?

Only let me finish. So they get into the taxi. “Kiss him,” my mother whispers, “you’re going all the way to Europe.”

Of course my father overhears—that’s why she lowers her voice, so we’ll all listen—and panic sweeps over him. Every year, from September on, he is perpetually asking me what my plans are for the following August—now he realizes that he has been outfoxed: bad enough I am leaving on a midnight plane for another continent, but worse, he hasn’t the slightest idea of my itinerary. I did it! I made it!

“—But where in Europe? Europe is half the whole globe—” he cries, as I begin to close the taxi door from the outside.

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean? You
gotta
know! How will you get there yourself, if you ‘don’t know’—”

“Sorry, sorry—”

Desperately now his body comes lurching across my mother’s—just as I slam shut the door—
oy
, not on his fingers, please! Jesus, this father! Whom I have had forever! Whom I used to find in the morning fast asleep on the toilet bowl, his pajamas around his knees and his chin hanging onto his chest. Up at quarter to six in the morning, so as to give himself a full uninterrupted hour on the can, in the fervent hope that if he is so kind and thoughtful as this to his bowels, they will relent, they will give in, they will say finally, “Okay, Jack, you win,” and make a present to the poor bastard of five or six measly lumps of shit. “Jesus Christ!” he groans, when I awaken him so as to wash up for school, and he realizes that it is nearly seven-thirty and down in the bowl over which he has been sleeping for an hour, there is, if he’s lucky, one brown angry little pellet such as you expect from the rectum of a rabbit maybe—but not from the rear-end of a man who now has to go out all clogged up to put in a twelve-hour day. “Seven-
thirty?
Why didn’t you say something!” Zoom, he’s dressed, and in his hat and coat, and with his big black collection book in one hand he bolts his stewed prunes and his bran flakes standing up, and fills a pocket with a handful of dried fruits that would bring on in an ordinary human being something resembling dysentery. “I ought to stick a hand grenade up my ass, if you want the truth,” he whispers privately to me, while my mother occupies the bathroom and my sister dresses for school in her “room,” the sun parlor—“I got enough All-Bran in me to launch a battleship. It’s backed up to my throat, for Christ’s sake.” Here, because he has got me snickering, and is amusing himself too in his own mordant way, he opens his mouth and points downward inside himself with a thumb. “Take a look. See where it starts to get dark? That ain’t just dark—that’s all those prunes rising up where my tonsils used to be. Thank God I had those things out, otherwise there wouldn’t be room.”

“Very nice talk,” my mother calls from the bathroom. “Very nice talk to a child.”

“Talk?” he cries. “It’s the
truth
” and in the very next instant is thomping angrily around the house hollering, “My hat, I’m late, where’s my hat? who saw my hat?” and my mother comes into the kitchen and gives me her patient, eternal, all-knowing sphinx-look … and waits … and soon he is back in the hallway, apoplectic and moaning, practically in grief, “Where is my hat?
Where is that hat!
” until softly, from the depths of her omniscient soul, she answers him, “Dummy, it’s on your head.” Momentarily his eyes seem to empty of all signs of human experience and understanding; he stands there, a blank, a thing, a body full of shit and no more. Then consciousness returns—yes, he will have to go out into the world after all, for his hat has been found, on his head of all places. “Oh yeah,” he says, reaching up in wonderment—and then out of the house and into the Kaiser, and Superman is gone until dark.

The Kaiser, time for my story about the Kaiser: how he proudly took me with him when he went after the war to trade in the ’39 Dodge for a new automobile, new make, new model, new everything—what a perfect way for an American dad to impress his American son!—and how the fast-talking salesman acted as though he just couldn’t believe his ears, was simply incredulous, each time my father said “No” to one after another of the thousand little accessories the cock-sucker wanted to sell us to hang on the car. “Well, I’ll tell you my opinion for whatever it’s worth,” says that worthless son of a bitch, “she’d look two hun-erd percent better with the whitewalls—don’t you think so, young fella? Wouldn’t you like your dad to get the whitewalls, at least?” At least. Ah, you slimy prick, you! Turning to me like that, to stick it into my old man—you miserable lowlife thieving son of a bitch! Just who the fuck are you, I wonder, to lord it over us—a God damn Kaiser-Fraser salesman! Where are you
now
, you intimidating bastard? “No, no whitewalls,” mumbles my humbled father, and I simply shrug my shoulders in embarrassment over his inability to provide me and my family with the beautiful things in life.