Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint

It was at the end of my freshman year of high school—and freshman year of masturbating—that I discovered on the underside of my penis, just where the shaft meets the head, a little discolored dot that has since been diagnosed as a freckle. Cancer. I had given myself cancer . All that pulling and tugging at my own flesh, all that friction, had given me an incurable disease. And not yet fourteen! In bed at night the tears rolled from my eyes. “No!” I sobbed. “I don’t want to die! Please—no!” But then, because I would very shortly be a corpse anyway, I went ahead as usual and jerked off into my sock. I had taken to carrying the dirty socks into bed with me at night so as to be able to use one as a receptacle upon retiring, and the other upon awakening.

If only I could cut down to one hand-job a day, or hold the line at two, or even three! But with the prospect of oblivion before me, I actually began to set new records for myself. Before meals. After meals. During meals. Jumping up from the dinner table, I tragically clutch at my belly—diarrhea! I cry, I have been stricken with diarrhea!—and once behind the locked bathroom door, slip over my head a pair of underpants that I have stolen from my sister’s dresser and carry rolled in a handkerchief in my pocket. So galvanic is the effect of cotton panties against my mouth—so galvanic is the word “panties”—that the trajectory of my ejaculation reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and horror, it hits and it hangs. Wildly in the first moment I cover my head, expecting an explosion of glass, a burst of flames—disaster, you see, is never far from my mind. Then quietly as I can I climb the radiator and remove the sizzling gob with a wad of toilet paper. I begin a scrupulous search of the shower curtain, the tub, the tile floor, the four toothbrushes—God forbid!—and just as I am about to unlock the door, imagining I have covered my tracks, my heart lurches at the sight of what is hanging like snot to the toe of my shoe. I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off—the sticky evidence is everywhere! Is it on my cuffs too? in my hair? my ear? All this I wonder even as I come back to the kitchen table, scowling and cranky, to grumble self-righteously at my father when he opens his mouth full of red jello and says, “I don’t understand what you have to lock the door about. That to me is beyond comprehension. What is this, a home or a Grand Central station?” . . . privacy . . . a human being . . . around here never ,” I reply, then push aside my dessert to scream, “I don’t feel well— will everybody leave me alone? ”

After dessert—which I finish because I happen to like jello, even if I detest them—after dessert I am back in the bathroom again. I burrow through the week’s laundry until I uncover one of my sister’s soiled brassieres. I string one shoulder strap over the knob of the bathroom door and the other on the knob of the linen closet: a scarecrow to bring on more dreams. “Oh beat it, Big Boy, beat it to a red-hot pulp—” so I am being urged by the little cups of Hannah’s brassiere, when a rolled-up newspaper smacks at the door. And sends me and my handful an inch off the toilet seat.”—Come on, give somebody else a crack at that bowl, will you?” my father says. “I haven’t moved my bowels in a week.”

I recover my equilibrium, as is my talent, with a burst of hurt feelings. “I have a terrible case of diarrhea! Doesn’t that mean anything to anyone in this house?”—in the meantime resuming the stroke, indeed quickening the tempo as my cancerous organ miraculously begins to quiver again from the inside out.

Then Hannah’s brassiere begins to move . To swing to and fro! I veil my eyes, and behold!—Lenore Lapidus! who has the biggest pair in my class, running for the bus after school, her great untouchable load shifting weightily inside her blouse, oh I urge them up from their cups, and over, LENORE LAPIDUS’S ACTUAL TITS, and realize in the same split second that my mother is vigorously shaking the doorknob. Of the door I have finally forgotten to lock! I knew it would happen one day! Caught! As good as dead!

“Open up, Alex. I want you to open up this instant.”

It’s locked, I’m not caught! And I see from what’s alive in my hand that I’m not quite dead yet either. Beat on then! beat on! “Lick me, Big Boy—lick me a good hot lick! I’m Lenore Lapidus’s big fat red-hot brassiere!”

“Alex, I want an answer from you. Did you eat French fries after school? Is that why you’re sick like this?”

“Nuhhh, nuhhh.”

“Alex, are you in pain? Do you want me to call the doctor? Are you in pain, or aren’t you? I want to know exactly where it hurts. Answer me .”

“Yuhh, yuhhh—”

“Alex, I don’t want you to flush the toilet,” says my mother sternly. “I want to see what you’ve done in there. I don’t like the sound of this at all.”

“And me,” says my father, touched as he always was by my accomplishments—as much awe as envy—“I haven’t moved my bowels in a week,” just as I lurch from my perch on the toilet seat, and with the whimper of a whipped animal, deliver three drops of something barely viscous into the tiny piece of cloth where my flat-chested eighteen-year-old sister has laid her nipples, such as they are. It is my fourth orgasm of the day. When will I begin to come blood?

“Get in here, please, you,” says my mother. “Why did you flush the toilet when I told you not to?”

“I forgot.”

“What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”

“Diarrhea.”

“Was it mostly liquid or was it mostly poopie?”

“I don’t look! I didn’t look! Stop saying poopie to me —I’m in high school!”

“Oh, don’t you shout at me, Alex. I’m not the one who gave you diarrhea, I assure you. If all you ate was what you were fed at home, you wouldn’t be running to the bathroom fifty times a day. Hannah tells me what you’re doing, so don’t think I don’t know.”

She’s missed the underpants! I’ve been caught! Oh, let me be dead! I’d just as soon!

“Yeah, what do I do . . . ?”

“You go to Harold’s Hot Dog and Chazerai Palace after school and you eat French fries with Melvin Weiner. Don’t you? Don’t lie to me either. Do you or do you not stuff yourself with French fries and ketchup on Hawthorne Avenue after school? Jack, come in here, I want you to hear this,” she calls to my father, now occupying the bathroom.

“Look, I’m trying to move my bowels,” he replies. “Don’t I have enough trouble as it is without people screaming at me when I’m trying to move my bowels?”

“You know what your son does after school, the A student, who his own mother can’t say poopie to anymore, he’s such a grown-up ? What do you think your grown-up son does when nobody is watching him?”

“Can I please be left alone, please?” cries my father. “Can I have a little peace, please, so I can get something accomplished in here?”

“Just wait till your father hears what you do, in defiance of every health habit there could possibly be. Alex, answer me something. You’re so smart, you know all the answers now, answer me this: how do you think Melvin Weiner gave himself colitis? Why has that child spent half his life in hospitals?”

“Because he eats chazerai ,”

“Don’t you dare make fun of me!”

“All right,” I scream, “how did he get colitis?”

“Because he eats chazerai! But it’s not a joke! Because to him a meal is an O Henry bar washed down by a bottle of Pepsi. Because his breakfast consists of, do you know what? The most important meal of the day—not according just to your mother, Alex, but according to the highest nutritionists—and do you know what that child eats?”