Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

So there.

. . .

What a pantomime I had to perform to get my zylon windbreaker off my back and into my lap so as to cover my joint that night I bared it to the elements. All for the benefit of the driver, within whose Polack power it lay merely to flip on the overhead lights and thus destroy in a single moment fifteen years of neat notebooks and good grades and teeth-cleaning twice a day and never eating a piece of fruit without thoroughly washing it beforehand . . . Is it hot in here! Whew, is it hot! Boy oh boy, I guess I just better get this jacket off and put it right down here in a neat little pile in my lap . . . Only what am I doing? A Polack’s day, my father has suggested to me, isn’t complete until he has dragged his big dumb feet across the bones of a Jew. Why am I taking this chance in front of my worst enemy? What will become of me if I’m caught!

Half the length of the tunnel it takes me to unzip my zipper silently—and there it is again, up it pops again, as always swollen, bursting with demands, like some idiot macrocephalic making his parents’ life a misery with his simpleton’s insatiable needs.

“Jerk me off,” I am told by the silky monster. “ Here? Now? ” “Of course here and now. When would you expect an opportunity like this to present itself a second time? Don’t you know what that girl is who is asleep beside you? Just look at that nose.” “What nose?” “That’s the point—it’s hardly even there. Look at that hair, like off a spinning wheel. Remember ‘flax’ that you studied in school? That’s human flax! Schmuck, this is the real McCoy. A shikse ! And asleep! Or maybe she’s just faking it is a strong possibility too. Faking it, but saying under her breath, “Cmon, Big Boy, do all the different dirty things to me you ever wanted to do.” “Could that be so? ” “Darling,” croons my cock, “let me just begin to list the many different dirty things she would like you to start off with: she wants you to take her hard little shikse titties in your hands, for one.” “She does?” “She wants you to finger-fuck her shikse cunt till she faints.” “Oh God. Till she faints!” “This is an opportunity such as may never occur again. So long as you live.” “Ah, but that’s the point, how long is that likely to be? The driver’s name is all X’s and Y’s—if my father is right, these Polish people are direct descendants from the ox!”

But who wins an argument with a hard-on? Ven der putz shteht, Ugt der sechel in drerd. Know that famous proverb? When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground! When the prick stands up, the brains are as good as dead! And ’tis so! Up it jumps, a dog through a hoop, right into the bracelet of middle finger, index finger, and thumb that I have provided for the occasion. A three-finger hand-job with staccato half-inch strokes up from the base—this will be best for a bus, this will (hopefully) cause my zylon jacket to do a minimal amount of hopping and jumping around. To be sure, such a technique means forgoing the sensitive tip, but that much of life is sacrifice and self-control is a fact that even a sex fiend cannot afford to be blind to.

The three-finger hand-job is what I have devised for jerking off in public places—already I have employed it at the Empire Burlesque house in downtown Newark. One Sunday morning—following the example of Smolka, my Tom Sawyer—I leave the house for the schoolyard, whistling and carrying a baseball glove, and when no one is looking (obviously a state of affairs I hardly believe in) I jump aboard an empty 14 bus, and crouch in my seat the length of the journey. You can just imagine the crowd outside the burlesque house on a Sunday morning. Downtown Newark is as empty of life and movement as the Sahara, except for those outside the Empire, who look like the crew off a ship stricken with scurvy. Am I crazy to be going in there? God only knows what kind of disease I am going to pick up off those seats! “Go in anyway, fuck the disease,” says the maniac who speaks into the microphone of my jockey shorts, “don’t you understand what you’re going to see inside there? A woman’s snatch.” “A snatch? ” “The whole thing, right, all hot and dripping and ready to go.” “But I’ll come down with the syph from just touching the ticket. I’ll pick it up on the bottom of my sneaks and track it into my own house. Some nut will go berserk and stab me to death for the Trojan in my wallet. What if the cops come? Waving pistols—and somebody runs—and they shoot me by mistake! Because I’m underage. What if I get killed—or even worse, arrested! What about my parents!” “Look, do you want to see a cunt or don’t you want to see a cunt?” “I want to! I want to!” “They have a whore in there, kid, who fucks the curtain with her bare twat.” “Okay—I’ll risk the syph! I’ll risk having my brain curdle and spending the rest of my days in an insane asylum playing handball with my own shit—only what about my picture in the Newark Evening News! When the cops throw on the lights and cry, ‘Okay, freaks, this is a raid!’—what if the flashbulbs go off! And get me— me , already president of the International Relations Club in my second year of high school! Me, who skipped two grades of grammar school! Why, in 1946, because they wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing in Convention Hall, I led my entire eighth-grade class in refusing to participate in the annual patriotic-essay contest sponsored by the D.A.R. I was and still am the twelve-year-old boy who, in honor of his courageous stand against bigotry and hatred, was invited to the Essex House in Newark to attend the convention of the C.I.O. Political Action Committee—to mount the platform and to shake the hand of Dr. Frank Kingdon, the renowned columnist whom I read every day in PM . How can I be contemplating going into a burlesque house with all these degenerates to see some sixty-year-old lady pretend to make love to a hunk of asbestos, when on the stage of the Essex House ballroom. Dr. Frank Kingdon himself took my hand, and while the whole P.A.C. rose to applaud my opposition to the D.A.R., Dr. Kingdon said to me, “Young man, you are going to see democracy in action here this morning.” And with my brother-in-law-to-be, Morty Feibish, I have already attended meetings of the American Veterans Committee, I have helped Morty, who is Membership chairman, set up the bridge chairs for a chapter meeting. I have read Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast, I have read Bellamy’s Looking Backward , and Finnley Wren by Philip Wylie. With my sister and Morty, I have listened to the record of marching songs by the gallant Red Army Chorus. Rankin and Bilbo and Martin Dies, Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Coughlin, all those Fascist sons of bitches are my mortal enemies. So what in God’s name am I doing in a side seat at the burlesque house jerking off into the pocket of my fielder’s glove? What if there’s violence! What if there’s germs!

Yes, only what if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if . . . In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is, too, under our bare bulb ( HOTEL flashing just outside our window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil Cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little baby boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock while I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off—then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with poor ) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh, Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark. Maybe.