Portnoy's Complaint (8 page)

And it was. A copy of
Dragon Seed
by Pearl S. Buck is open on the table beside the bed, where there is also a half-empty glass of flat ginger ale. It's hot and I'm thirsty and my mother, my mind reader, says I should go ahead and drink what's left in her glass, I need it more than she does. But dry as I am, I don't want to drink from any glass to which she has put her lips-for the first time in my life the idea fills me with revulsion! Take. I'm not thirsty. Look how you're perspiring. I'm not thirsty. Don't be polite all of a sudden. But I don't like ginger ale. You? Don't like ginger ale?
No
Since when? Oh, God! She's alive, and so we are at it again-she's alive, and right off the bat we're starting in!

She tells me how Rabbi Warshaw came and sat and talked with her for a whole half hour before-as she now so graphically puts it-she went under the knife. Wasn't hat nice? Wasn't that thoughtful? (Only twenty-four hours out of the anesthetic, and she knows, you see, that I refused to change out of my Levis for the holiday! ) The woman who is sharing the room with her, whose loving, devouring gaze I am trying to edge out of, and whose opinion, as I remember it, nobody had asked for, takes it upon herself to announce that Rabbi Warshaw is one of the most revered men in all of Newark. Re-ver-ed. Three syllables, as the rabbi himself would enunciate it, in his mighty Anglo-oracular style. I begin to lightly pound at the pocket of my baseball mitt, a signal that I am about ready to go, if only someone will let me. He loves baseball, he could play baseball twelve months a year, my mother tells Mrs. Re-ver-ed. I mumble that I have a league game. It's the finals. For the championship. Okay, says my mother, and lovingly, you came, you did your duty, now run-run to your league
 
game. I can hear in her voice how happy and relieved she is to find herself alive on this beautiful September afternoon . . . And isn't it a relief for me, too? Isn't this what I prayed for, to a God I do not even believe is there? Wasn't the unthinkable thing life without her to cook for us, to clean for us, to . . . to
everything
for us! This is what I prayed and wept for: that she should come out at the other end of her operation, and be alive. And then come home, to be once again our one and only mother. Run, my baby-boy, my mother croons to me, and sweetly-oh, she can be so sweet and good to me, so motherly! she will spend hour after hour playing canasta with me, when I am sick and in bed as she is now: imagine, the ginger ale the nurse has brought for her because she has had a serious operation, she offers to
me
, because I'm overheated! Yes, she
will
give me the food out of her mouth, that's a proven fact! And still I will not stay five full minutes at her bedside. Run, says my mother, while Mrs. Re-ver-ed, who in no time at all has managed to make herself my enemy, and for the rest of my life, Mrs. Re-ver-ed says, Soon Mother will be home, soon everything will be just like ordinary . . . Sure, run, run, they all run these days, says the kind and understanding lady-oh, they are all so kind and understanding, I want to strangle them!- walking they never heard of, God bless them.

So I run. Do I run! Having spent maybe two fretful minutes with her-two minutes of my precious time, even though just the day before, the doctors stuck right up her dress ( so I imagined it, before my mother reminded me of the knife, our knife ) some kind of horrible shovel with which to scoop out what had gone rotten inside her body. They reached up and pulled down out of her just what she used to reach up and pull down out of the dead chicken. And threw it in the garbage can. Where I was conceived and carried, there now is
nothing
. A void! Poor Mother! How can I rush to leave her like this, after what she has just gone through? After all she has given me-my very life!-how can I be so cruel? Will you leave me, my baby-boy, will you ever leave Mommy? Never, I would answer, never, never, never . . . And yet now that she is hollowed out, I cannot even look her in the eye! And have avoided doing so ever since! Oh, there is her pale red hair, spread across the pillow in long strands of springy ringlets
that I might never have seen again
. There are the faint moons of freckles that she says used to cover her entire face when she was a small child, and
that I would never have seen again
. And there are those eyes of reddish brown, eyes the color of the crust of honey cake,
and still open, still loving me
! There was her ginger ale-and thirsty as I was, I could not have
forced
myself to drink it!

So I ran all right, out of the hospital and up to the playground and right out 'to center field, the position I play for a softball team that wears silky blue-and-gold jackets with the name of the club scrawled in big white felt letters from one shoulder to the other: S E A B E E S, A.C. Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can't imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space . . . Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what's happening the instant it happens, not only by the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, It's mine, you call, it's mine, and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it
is
yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is
mine!

Unfortunately, I was too anxious a hitter to make the high school team-I swung and missed at bad pitches so often during the tryouts for the freshman squad that eventually the ironical coach took me aside and said, Sonny, are you sure you don't wear glasses? and then sent me on my way. But did I have form! did I have style! And in my playground softball league, where the ball came in just a little slower and a little bigger, I am the star I dreamed I might become for the whole school. Of course, still in my ardent desire to excel I too frequently swing and miss, but when I connect, it goes great distances. Doctor, it flies over fences and is called a home run. Oh, and there is really nothing in life, nothing at all, that quite compares with that pleasure of rounding second base at a nice slow clip, because there's just no hurry any more, because that ball you've hit has just gone sailing out of sight . . . And I could field, too, and the farther I had to run, the better. I got it! I got it! I got it! and tear in toward second, to trap in the webbing of my glove-and barely an inch off the ground-a ball driven hard and low and right down the middle, a base hit, someone thought . . . Or back I go, “
I
got it,
I
got it- back easily and gracefully toward that wire fence, moving practically in slow motion, and then that delicious Di Maggio sensation of grabbing it like something heaven-sent over one shoulder . . . Or running! turning! leaping! like little Al Gionfriddo-a baseball player. Doctor, who once did a very great thing . . . Or just standing nice and calm-nothing trembling, everything serene-standing there in the sunshine (as though in the middle of an empty field, or passing the time on the street corner), standing without a care in the world in the sunshine, like my king of kings, the Lord my God, The Duke Himself (Snider, Doctor, the name may come up again), standing there as loose and as easy, as happy as I will ever be, just waiting by myself under a high fly ball (
a towering fly ball
, I hear Red Barber say, as he watches from behind his microphone-hit out toward Portnoy;
Alex under it, under it
), just waiting there for the ball to fall into the glove I raise to it, and yup, there it is,
plock
, the third out of the inning (
and Alex gathers it in for out number three, and, folks, here's old C.D. for P. Lorillard and Company
), and then in one motion, while old Connie brings us a message from Old Golds, I start in toward the bench, holding the ball now with the five fingers of my bare left hand, and when I get to the infield-having come down hard with one foot on the bag at second base-I shoot it gently, with just a flick of the wrist, at the opposing team's shortstop as he comes trotting out onto the field, and still without breaking stride, go loping in all the way, shoulders shifting, head hanging, a touch pigeon-toed, my knees coming slowly up and down in an altogether brilliant imitation of The Duke. Oh, the unruffled nonchalance of that game! There's not a movement that I don't know still down in the tissue of my muscles and the joints between my bones. How to bend over to pick up my glove and how to toss it away, how to test the weight of the bat, how to hold it and carry it and swing it around in the on-deck circle, how to raise that bat above my head and flex and loosen my shoulders and my neck before stepping in and planting my two feet exactly where my two feet belong in the batter's box-and how, when I take a called strike (which I have a tendency to do, it balances off nicely swinging at bad pitches), to step out and express, if only through a
 
slight poking with the bat at the ground, just the right amount of exasperation with the powers that be . . . yes, every little detail so thoroughly studied and mastered, that it is simply beyond the realm of possibility for any situation to arise in which I do not know how to move, or where to move, or what to say or leave unsaid . . . And it's true, is it not?-incredible, but apparently true-there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn't, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A.? I ask you, why can't I be one! Why can't I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder-and nothing more!

But I am something more, or so they tell me. A Jew. No! No! An
atheist
, I cry. I am a nothing where religion is concerned, and I will not pretend to be anything that I am not! I don't care how lonely and needy my father is, the truth about me is the truth about me, and I’m sorry but he'll just have to swallow my apostasy whole! And I don't care how close we came to sitting
shiva
for my mother either-actually, I wonder now if maybe the whole hysterectomy has not been dramatized into C-A and out of it again solely for the sake of scaring the S-H out of me! Solely for the sake of humbling and frightening me into being once again an obedient and helpless little boy! And I find no argument for the existence of God, or for the benevolence and virtue of the Jews, in the fact that the most re-ver-ed man in all of Newark came to sit for a whole half hour beside my mother's bed. If he emptied her bedpan, if he fed her her meals, that might be the beginning of something, but to come for half an hour and sit beside a bed? What else has he got to do, Mother? To him, uttering beautiful banalities to people scared out of their wits-that is to him what playing baseball is to me! He loves it! And who wouldn't? Mother, Rabbi Warshaw is a fat, pompous, impatient fraud, with an absolutely grotesque superiority complex, a character out of Dickens is what he is, someone who if you stood next to him on the bus and didn't know he was so revered, you would say, That man stinks to high heaven of cigarettes, and that is all you would say. This is a man who somewhere along the line got the idea that the basic unit of meaning in the English language is the syllable. So no word he pronounces has less than three of them, not even the word
God
. You should hear the song and dance he makes out of
Israel
. For him it's as long as refrigerator! And do you remember him at my bar mitzvah, what a field day he had with Alexander Portnoy? Why, Mother, did he keep calling me by my whole name? Why, except to impress all you idiots in the audience with all those syllables! And it worked! It actually worked! Don't you understand, the synagogue is how he earns his living,
and that's all there is to it.
Coming to the hospital to be brilliant about life (syllable by syllable) to people who are shaking in their pajamas about death is his business, just as it is my father's business to sell life insurance! It is what they each do to earn a living, and if you want to feel pious about somebody, feel pious about my father, God damn it, and bow down to him the way you bow down to that big fat comical son of a bitch, because my father
really
works his balls off and doesn't happen to think that he is God's special assistant into the bargain. And doesn't speak in those fucking
syllables!
I-a wan-tt to-a wel-come-a you-ew tooo thee sy-no-gawg-a. Oh God, oh Guh-ah-duh, if you're up there shining down your countenance, why not spare us from here on out the enunciation of the rabbis! Why not spare us the rabbis themselves! Look, why not spare us religion, if only in the name of our human dignity! Good Christ, Mother, the whole world knows already,
so why don't you? Religion is the opiate of the people!
And if believing that makes me a fourteen-year-old Communist, then that's what I am, and I'm proud of
 
it! I would rather be a Communist in Russia than a Jew in a synagogue any day-so I tell my father right to his face, too. Another grenade to the gut is what it turns out to be (I suspected as much), but I'm sorry, I happen to believe in the rights of man, rights such as are extended in the Soviet Union to
all
people, regardless of race, religion, or color. My communism, in fact, is why I now insist on eating with the cleaning lady when I come home for my lunch on Mondays and see that she is there-I will eat with her. Mother, at the same table,
and the same food
. Is that clear? If I get leftover pot roast warmed-up, then she gets leftover pot roast warmed-up, and not creamy Muenster or tuna either, served on a special glass plate that doesn't absorb her germs! But no, no. Mother doesn't get the idea, apparently. Too bizarre, apparently. Eat with the
shvartze?
What could I be talking about? She whispers to me in the hallway, the instant I come in from school, Wait, the girl will be finished in a few minutes . . . But
I will not treat any human being
(outside my family)
as inferior!
Can't you grasp something of the principle of equality, God damn it! And I tell you, if he ever uses the word nigger in my presence again, I will drive a real dagger into his fucking bigoted heart!
Is that clear to everyone?
I don't care that his clothes stink so bad after he comes home from collecting the colored debit that they have to be hung in the cellar to air out. I don't care that they drive him nearly crazy letting their insurance lapse. That is only another reason to be compassionate, God damn it, to be sympathetic and understanding and to stop treating the cleaning lady as though she were some kind of mule, without the same passion for dignity that other people have! And that goes for the
goyim
, too! We all haven't been lucky enough to have been born Jews, you know. So a little
rachmones
on the less fortunate, okay? Because I am sick and tired of
goyische
this and
goyische
that! If it's bad it's the
goyim
, if it's good it's the Jews! Can't you see, my dear parents, from whose loins I somehow leaped, that such thinking is a trifle barbaric? That all you are expressing is your
fear?
The very first distinction I learned from you. I'm sure, was not night and day, or hot and cold, but
goyische
and Jewish! But now it turns out, my dear parents, relatives, and assembled friends who have gathered here to celebrate the occasion of my bar mitzvah, it turns out, you schmucks! you narrow-minded schmucks!- oh, how I hate you for your Jewish narrow-minded minds! including you. Rabbi Syllable, who have for the last time in your life sent me out to the corner for another pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, from which you reek in case nobody has ever told you- it turns out that there is just a little bit more to existence than what can be contained in those disgusting and useless categories! And instead of crying over he-who refuses at the age of fourteen ever to set foot inside a synagogue again, instead of wailing for he-who has turned his back on the saga of
his people
, weep for your own pathetic selves, why don't you, sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass-
I happen also to be a human being!