Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

Conversely, how would I like Bubbles Girardi to come to my own house in the afternoon and blow me, as she did Smolka, on his own bed?

. . .

Of some ironic interest. Last spring, whom do I run in to down on Worth Street, but the old circle-jerker himself, Mr. Mandel, carrying a sample case full of trusses, braces, and supports. And do you know? That he was still living and breathing absolutely astonished me. I couldn’t get over it—I haven’t yet. And married too, domesticated, with a wife and two little children—and a “ranch” house in Maplewood, New Jersey. Mandel lives, owns a length of garden hose, he tells me, and a barbecue and briquets! Mandel, who, out of awe of Pupi Campo and Tito Valdez, went off to City Hall the day after quitting high school and had his first name officially changed from Arnold to Ba-ba-lu. Mandel, who drank “six-packs” of beer! Miraculous. Can’t be! How on earth did it happen that retribution passed him by? There he was, year in and year out, standing in idleness and ignorance on the corner of Chancellor and Leslie, perched like some greaser over his bongo drums, his duck’s ass bare to the heavens—and nothing and nobody struck him down! And now he is thirty-three, like me, and a salesman for his wife’s father, who has a surgical supply house on Market Street in Newark. And what about me, he asks, what do I do for a living? Really, doesn’t he know? Isn’t he on my parents’ mailing list? Doesn’t everyone know I am now the most moral man in all of New York, all pure motives and humane and compassionate ideals? Doesn’t he know that what I do for a living is I’m good? “Civil Service,” I answered, pointing across to Thirty Worth. Mister Modesty.

“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. And, 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.