Portnoy's Complaint (19 page)

“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.”

Mistake, I think instantly. Mistake! What if he blabs to the
Daily News?
ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH FLOGS DUMMY,
Also Lives in Sin, Reports Old School Chum
.

The headlines. Always the headlines revealing my filthy secrets to a shocked and disapproving world.

“Hey,” said Ba-ba-lu, “remember Rita Girardi? Bubbles? Who used to suck us all off?”

“… What about her?” Lower your voice, Ba-ba-lu!

“What about her?”

“Didn’t you read in the
News?
”

“—What
News?
”

“The
Newark News
.”

“I don’t see the Newark papers any more. What happened to her?”

“She got murdered. In a bar on Hawthorne Avenue, right down from The Annex. She was with some boogey and then some other boogey came in and shot them both in the head. How do you like that? Fucking for boogies.”

“Wow,” I said, and meant it. Then suddenly—“Listen, Ba-ba-lu, whatever happened to Smolka?”

“Don’t know,” says Ba-ba-lu. “Ain’t he a professor? I think I heard he was a professor.”

“A professor?
Smolka?
”

“I think he is some kind of college teacher.”

“Oh, can’t be,” I say with my superior sneer.

“Yeah. That’s what somebody said. Down at Princeton.”

“
Princeton?
”

But can’t be! Without hot tomato soup for lunch on freezing afternoons? Who slept in those putrid pajamas? The owner of all those red rubber thimbles with the angry little spiky projections that he told us drove the girls up the walls of Paris? Smolka, who swam in the pool at Olympic Park, he’s alive
too?
And a professor at Princeton
noch?
In what department, classical languages or astrophysics? Ba-ba-lu, you sound like my mother. You must mean plumber, or electrician. Because I will not believe it! I mean down in my
kishkas
, in my deep emotions and my old beliefs, down beneath the me who knows very well that of course Smolka and Mandel continue to enjoy the ranch houses and the professional opportunities available to men on this planet, 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!

Smolka comes back into the kitchen and tells us she doesn’t want to do it.

“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—”

Mandel: “Who the fuck is she that she won’t even give a guy a hand-job? A measly hand-job. Is that the world to ask of her? I ain’t leaving till she either sucks it or pulls it—one or the other! It’s up to her, the fucking whore!”

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. 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? I’ll 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 grade-school 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! 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.

Mandel the next day tells me that within half an hour after my frenetic departure, Bubbles was down on her fucking dago knees 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.

Why do
I
worry then! Why do I alone spend hours testing Trojans in my basement? Why do I alone live in mortal terror of the syph? Why do I run home with my little bloodshot eye, imagining myself blinded forever, when half an hour later Bubbles will be down eating cock on her knees! Home—to my mommy! To my Tollhouse cookie and my glass of milk, home to my nice clean bed!
Oy
, civilization and its discontents! 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!