Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

Meanwhile, all the way from the outfield comes the badinage of one who in appearance is more cement-mixer than Homo sapiens, the prince of the produce market, Allie Sokolow. The pisk he opens on him! (as my mother would put it). For half an inning the invective flows in toward home plate from his position in deep center field, and then when his team comes to bat, he stations himself in the first-base coaching box and the invective flows uninterruptedly out in the opposite direction—and none of it has anything to do with any contretemps that may actually be taking place on the field. Quite the opposite. My father, when he is not out working on Sunday mornings, comes by to sit and watch a few innings with me; he knows Allie Sokolow (as he knows many of the players), since they were all boys together in the Central Ward, before he met my mother and moved to Jersey City. He says that Allie has always been like this, “a real showman.” When Allie charges in toward second base, screaming his gibberish and double-talk in the direction of home plate (where there isn’t even a batter as yet—where Dr. Wolfenberg is merely dusting the plate with the whisk broom he brings to the game), the people in the stands couldn’t be more delighted: they laugh, they clap, they call out, “You tell him, Allie! You give it to him, Sokolow!” And invariably Dr. Wolfenberg, who takes himself a little more seriously than your ordinary nonprofessional person (and is a German Jew to boot), holds up his palm, halting an already Sokolow-stopped game, and says to Biderman, “Will you please get that meshuggener back in the outfield?”

I tell you, they are an endearing lot! I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling that sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of rsy fielder’s mitt—sweat, leather, vaseline—and laughing my head off. I cannot imagine myself living out my life any other place but here. Why leave, why go, when there is everything here that I will ever want? The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending—anything for a laugh! I love it! And yet underneath it all, they mean it, they are in dead earnest. You should see them at the end of the seven innings when that dollar has to change hands. Don’t tell me they don’t mean it! Losing and winning is not a joke . . . and yet it is! And that’s what charms me most of all. Fierce as the competition is, they cannot resist clowning and kibbitzing around. Putting on a show! How I am going to love growing up to be a Jewish man! Living forever in the Weequahic section, and playing softball on Chancellor Avenue from nine to one on Sundays, a perfect joining of clown and competitor, kibbitzing wiseguy and dangerous long-ball bitter.

I remember all this where? when? While Captain Meyerson is making his last slow turn over the Tel Aviv airport. My face is against the window. Yes, I could disappear, I think, change my mime and never be heard from again —then Meyerson banks the wing on my side, and I look down for the first time upon the continent of Asia, I look down from two thousand feet in the air upon the Land of Israel, where the Jewish people first came into being, and am impaled upon a memory of Sunday morning softball games in Newark.

The elderly couple seated beside me (the Solomons, Edna and Felix), who have told me in an hour’s flight time all about their children and grandchildren in Cincinnati (with, of course, a walletful of visual aids), now nudge each other and nod together in silent satisfaction; they even poke some friends across the aisle, a couple from Mount Vernon they’ve just met (the Peris, Sylvia and Bernie), and these two kvell also to see a tall, good-looking, young Jewish lawyer (and single! a match for somebody’s daughter!) suddenly begin to weep upon making contact with a Jewish airstrip. However, what has produced these tears is not, as the Solomons and Peris would have it, a first glimpse of the national homeland, the in gathering of an exile, but the sound in my ear of my own nine-year-old little boy’s voice— my voice, I mean, at nine. Nine-year-old me! Sure a sourpuss, a face-maker, a little back-talker and kvetch , sure my piping is never without its nice infuriating whiny edge of permanent disgruntlement and grievance (“as though,” my mother says, “the world owes him a living—at nine years old”), but a laugher and kidder too, don’t forget that, an enthusiast! a romantic! a mimic! a nine-year-old lover of life! fiery with such simple, neighborhoody dreams!—“I’m going up the field,” I call into the kitchen, fibers of pink lox lodged like sour dental floss in the gaps between my teeth, “I’m going up the field, Ma,” pounding my mitt with my carpy-smelling little fist, “I’ll be back around one—” “ Wait a minute. What time? Where?” “ Up the field ,” I holler—I’m very high on hollering to be heard, it’s like being angry, except without the consequences, “— to watch the men !”

And that’s the phrase that does me in as we touch down upon Eretz Yisroel : to watch the men.

Because I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men! To be going home to Sunday dinner at one o’clock, sweat socks pungent from twenty-one innings of softball, underwear athletically gamy, and in the muscle of my throwing arm, a faint throbbing from the low and beautiful pegs I have been unleashing all morning long to hold down the opposition on the base paths; yes, hair disheveled, teeth gritty, feet beat and kishkas sore from laughing, in other words, feeling great, a robust Jewish man now gloriously pooped—yes, home I head for resuscitation . . . and to whom? To my wife and my children, to a family of my own, and right there in the Weequahic section! I shave and shower—rivulets of water stream off my scalp a filthy brown, ah, it’s good, ah yes, it’s a regular pleasure standing there nearly scalding myself to death with hot water. It strikes me as so manly , converting pain to pleasure. Then into a pair of snappy slacks and a freshly dry-cleaned “gaucho” shirt—perfecto! I whistle a popular song, I admire my biceps, I shoot a rag across my shoes, making it pop , and meanwhile my kids are riffling through the Sunday papers ( reading with eyes the exact color of my own), giggling away on the living-room rug; and my wife, Mrs. Alexander Portnoy, is setting the table in the dining room—we will be having my mother and father as guests, they will be walking over any minute, as they do every Sunday. A future, see! A simple and satisfying future! Exhausting, exhilarating softball in which to spend my body’s force—that for the morning—then in the afternoon, the brimming, hearty stew of family life, and at night three solid hours of the best line-up of radio entertainment in the world: yes, as I delighted in Jack Benny’s trips down to his vault in the company of my father, and Fred Alien’s conversations with Mrs. Nussbaum, and Phil Harris’ with Frankie Remley, also shall my children delight in them with me, and so unto the hundredth generation. And then after Kenny Baker, I double-lock the front and back doors, turn off all the lights (check and—as my father does—double-check the pilot on the gas range so that our lives will not be stolen from us in the night). I kiss good night my pretty sleepy daughter and my clever sleepy son, and in the arms of Mrs. A. Portnoy, that kind and gentle (and in my sugary but modest fantasy, faceless) woman, I bank the fires of my abounding pleasure. In the morning I am off to downtown Newark, to the Essex County Court House, where I spend my workdays seeking justice for the poor and the oppressed.

Our eighth-grade class visits the courthouse to observe the architecture. Home and in my room that night, I write in my fresh new graduation autograph album, under YOUR FAVORITE MOTTO, “Don’t Step on the Underdog.” MY FAVORITE PROFESSION? “Lawyer.” MY FAVORITE HERO? “Tom Paine and Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln sits outside the courthouse (in Gutzon Borglum’s bronze), looking tragic and fatherly: you just know how much he cares. A statue of Washington, standing erect and authoritarian in front of his horse, overlooks Broad Street; it is the work of J. Massey Rhind (we write this second unname-like name of a sculptor in our notebooks ); our art teacher says that the two statues are “the city’s pride,” and we head off in pairs for the paintings at the Newark Museum. Washington, I must confess, leaves me cold. Maybe it’s the horse, that he’s leaning on a horse. At any rate, he is so obviously a goy . But Lincoln! I could cry. Look at him sitting there, so oysgemitchet . How he labored for the downtrodden—as will I!