Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

What happened finally at Irvington Park: late on a Saturday afternoon I found myself virtually alone on the frozen lake with a darling fourteen-year-old shikseleh whom I had been watching practicing her figure eights since after lunch, a girl who seemed to me to possess the middle-class charms of Margaret O’Brien-that quickness and cuteness around the sparkling eyes and the freckled nose— and the simplicity and plainness, the lower-class availability, the lank blond hair of Peggy Ann Garner. You see, what looked like movie stars to everyone else were just different kinds of shikses to me. Often I came out of the movies trying to figure out what high school in Newark Jeanne Grain (and her cleavage) or Kathryn Grayson (and her cleavage) would be going to if they were my age. And where would I find a shikse like Gene Tiemey, who I used to think might even be a Jew, if she wasn’t actually part Chinese. Meanwhile Peggy Ann O’Brien has made her last figure eight and is coasting lazily off for the boathouse, and I have done nothing about her, or about any of them, nothing all winter long, and now March is almost upon us-the red skating flag will come down over the park and once again we will be into polio season. I may not even live into the following winter, so what am I waiting for? “Now! Or never!” So after her—when she is safely out of sight—I madly begin to skate. “Excuse me,” I will say, “but would you mind if I walk you home?” If I walked , or if I walk —which is more correct? Because I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it. “Would you care perhaps to have a hot chocolate? May I have your phone number and come to call some evening? My name? I am Alton Peterson”—a name I had picked for myself out of the Montclair section of the Essex County phone book—totally goy I was sure, and sounds like Hans Christian Andersen into the bargain. What a coup! Secretly I have been practicing writing “Alton Peterson” all winter long, practicing on sheets of paper that I subsequently tear from my notebook after school and burn so that they won’t have to be explained to anybody in my house. I am Alton Peterson, I am Alton Peterson—Alton Christian Peterson? Or is that going a little too far? Alton C. Peterson? And so preoccupied am I with not forgetting whom I would now like to be, so anxious to make it to the boathouse while she is still changing out of her skates—and wondering, too, what I’ll say when she asks about the middle of my face and what happened to it (old hockey injury? Fell off my horse while playing polo after church one Sunday morning—too many sausages for breakfast, ha ha ha!)—I reach the edge of the lake with the tip of one skate a little sooner than I had planned—and so go hurtling forward onto the frostbitten ground, chipping one front tooth and smashing the bony protrusion at the top of my tibia.

My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer’s Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury—while my father cries, “Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!”

For skating after shikses , under an alias, I would be a cripple for the rest of my days.

With a life like mine. Doctor, who needs dreams?

Bubbles Girardi, an eighteen-year-old girl who had been thrown out of Hillside High School and was subsequently found floating in the swimming pool at Olympic Park by my lascivious classmate, Smolka, the tailor’s son . . .

For myself, I wouldn’t go near that pool if you paid me—it is a breeding ground for polio and spinal meningitis, not to mention diseases of the skin, the scalp, and the asshole-it is even rumored that some kid from Weequahic once stepped into the footbath between the locker room and the pool and actually came out at the other end without his toenails. And yet that is where you find the girls who fuck. Wouldn’t you know it? That is the place to find the kinds of shikses Who Will Do Anything! If only a person is willing to risk polio from the pool, gangrene from the footbath, ptomaine from the hot dogs, and elephantiasis from the soap and the towels, he might possibly get laid.

We sit in the kitchen, where Bubbles was working over the ironing board when we arrived—in her slip) Mandel and I leaf through back numbers of Ring magazine, while in the living room Smolka tries to talk Bubbles into taking on his two friends as a special favor to him. Bubbles’ brother, who in a former life was a paratrooper, is nobody we have to worry about, Smolka assures us, because he is off in Hoboken boxing in a feature event under the name Johnny “Geronimo” Girardi. Her father drives a taxi during the day, and a car for The Mob at night—he is out somewhere chauffeuring gangsters around and doesn’t get home until the early hours, and the mother we don’t have to worry about because she’s dead. Perfect, Smolka, perfect, I couldn’t feel more secure. Now I have absolutely nothing to worry about except the Trojan I have been carrying around so long in my wallet that inside its tinfoil wrapper it has probably been half eaten away by mold. One spurt and the whole thing will go flying in pieces all over the inside of Bubbles Girardi’s box—and then what do I do?

To be sure that these Trojans really hold up under pressure, I have been down in my cellar all week filling them with quart after quart of water—expensive as it is, I have been using them to jerk off into, to see if they will stand up under simulated fucking conditions. So far so good. Only what about the sacred one that has by now left an indelible imprint of its shape upon my wallet, the very special one I have been saving to get laid with, with the lubricated tip? How can I possibly expect no damage to have been done after sitting on it in school—crushing it in that wallet—for nearly six months? And who says Geronimo is going to be all night in Hoboken? And what if the person the gangsters are supposed to murder has already dropped dead from fright by the time they arrive, and Mr. Girardi is sent home early for a good night’s rest? What if the girl has the syph! But then Smolka must have it too!—Smolka, who is always dragging drinks out of everybody else’s bottle of cream soda, and grabbing with his hand at your putz! That’s all I need, with my mother! I’d never hear the end of it! “Alex, what is that you’re hiding under your foot?” “Nothing.” “Alex, please, I heard a definite clink. What is that that fell out of your trousers that you’re stepping on it with your foot? Out of your good trousers!” “Nothing! My shoe! Leave me alone!” “Young man, what are you—oh my God! Jack! Come quick! Look—look on the floor by his shoe!” With his pants around his knees, and the Newark News turned back to the obituary page and clutched in his hand, he rushes into the kitchen from the bathroom— Now what?” She screams (that’s her answer) and points beneath my chair. “What is that, Mister—some smart high-school joke?” demands my father, in a fury—“What is that black plastic thing doing on the kitchen floor?” “It’s not a plastic one,” I say, and break into sobs. “It’s my own. I caught the syph from an eighteen-year—old Italian girl in Hillside, and now, now, I have no more p-p-p-penis!” “His little thing,” screams my mother, “that I used to tickle it to make him go wee-wee—” “DON’T TOUCH IT NOBODY MOVE,” cries my father, for my mother seems about to leap forward onto the floor, like a woman into her husband’s grave—“call the Humane Society—” “Like for a rabies dog? ” she weeps. “Sophie, what else are you going to do? Save it in a drawer somewhere? To show his children? He ain’t going to have no children!” She begins to howl pathetically, a grieving animal, while my father . . . but the scene fades quickly, for in a matter of seconds I am blind, and within the hour my brain is the consistency of hot Farina.