You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear. See, I am too good too, Mother, I too am moral to the bursting point- just like you! Did you ever see me try to smoke a cigarette? I look like Bette Davis. Today boys and girls not even old enough to be bar-mitzvahed are sucking on marijuana like it's peppermint candy, and I'm still all thumbs with a Lucky Strike. Yes, that's how good I am, Momma. Can't smoke, hardly drink, no drugs, don't borrow money or play cards, can't tell a lie without beginning to sweat as though I'm passing over the equator. Sure, I say fuck a lot, but I assure you, that's about the sum of my success with transgressing. Look what I have done with The Monkey-given her up, run from her in fear, the girl whose cunt I have been dreaming about lapping all my life. Why is a little turbulence so beyond my means? Why must the least deviation from respectable conventions cause me such inner hell? When I hate those fucking conventions! When I know better than the taboos! Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET'S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID! Liberate this nice Jewish boy's libido, will you please? Raise the prices if you have to- I'll pay anything! Only enough cowering in the face of the deep, dark pleasures! Ma, Ma, what was it you wanted to turn me into anyway, a walking zombie like Ronald Nimkin? Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires! 'Alex,' you say, as we leave the Weequahic Diner-and don't get me wrong, I eat it up: praise is praise, and I take it however it comes- 'Alex,' you say to me all dressed up in my clip-on tie and my two-tone 'loafer' jacket, 'the way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never saw such a little gentleman with his little napkin in his lap like that!' Fruitcake, Mother. Little fruitcake is what you saw- and exactly what the training program was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I'm not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I'm not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand in Bloomingdale's on Saturday mornings. Mother, the beach at Fire Island is strewn with the bodies of nice Jewish boys, in bikinis and Bain de Soleil, also little gentlemen in restaurants, I'm sure, also who helped mommies set up mah-jongg tiles when the ladies came on Monday night to play. Christ Almighty! After all those years of setting up those tiles- one barn! two crack! mah-jongg!- how I made it into the world of pussy at all, that's the mystery. I close my eyes, and it's not so awfully hard- I see myself sharing a house at Ocean Beach with somebody in eye make-up named Sheldon. 'Oh, fuck you, Shelly, they're your friends, you make the garlic bread.' Mother, your little gentlemen are all grown up now, and there on lavender beach towels they lie, in all their furious narcissism. And oy Gut, one is calling out-to me! 'Alex? Alexander the King? Baby, did you see where I put my tarragon?' There he is, Ma, your little gentleman, kissing someone named Sheldon on the lips! Because of his herb dressing! 'Do you know what I read in Cosmopolitan?' says my mother to my father.
'That there are women who are homosexual persons.' 'Come on,' grumbles Poppa Bear, 'what kind of garbage is that, what kind of crap is that-?' 'Jack, please. I'm not making it up. I read it in Cosmo! I'll show you the article!' 'Come on, they print that stuff for the circulation- ' Momma! Poppa! There is worse even than that- there are people who fuck chickens! There are men who screw stiffs! You simply cannot imagine how some people will respond to having served fifteen- and twenty-year sentences as some crazy bastard's idea of 'good'! So if I kicked you in the shins, Ma-ma, if I sunk my teeth into your wrist clear through to the bone, count your blessings! For had I kept it all inside me, believe me, you too might have arrived home to find a pimply adolescent corpse swinging over the bathtub by his father's belt. Worse yet, this last summer, instead of sitting shiva over a son running off to faraway Europe, you might have found yourself dining out on my 'deck' on Fire Island-the two of you, me, and Sheldon. And if you remember what that goyische lobster did to your kishkas, imagine what it would have been like trying to keep down Shelly's sauce bearnaise.
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
