Portnoy’s Complaint

swinging back up into the cab of the truck in my Levis and lumber)'acket and moccasins (which out on the highway no longer seem the costume that they do in the halls of the high school)-plus the sun just beginning to shine over the hilly farmlands of New Jersey, my state!- I am reborn! Free, I find, of shameful secrets! So clean- feeling, so strong and virtuous-feeling-so American! Morty pulls back onto the highway, and right then and there I take my vow, I swear that I will dedicate my life to the righting of wrongs, to the elevation of the downtrodden and the underprivileged, to the liberation of the unjustly imprisoned. With Morty as my witness- my manly left-wing new- found older brother, the living proof that it is possible to love mankind and baseball both (and who loves my older sister, whom I am ready to love now, too, for the escape hatch with which she has provided the two of us), who is my link through the A.V.C. to Bill Mauldin, as much my hero as Corwin or Howard Fast- to Morty, with tears of love (for him, for me) in my eyes, I vow to use 'the power of the pen' to liberate from injustice and exploitation, from humiliation and poverty and ignorance, the people I now think of (giving myself gooseflesh) as The People.

I am icy with fear. Of the girl and her syph! of the father and his friends! of the brother and his fists! (even though Smolka has tried to get me to believe what strikes me as wholly incredible, even for goyim: that both brother and father know, and neither cares, that Bubbles is a 'hoor'). And fear, too, that beneath the kitchen window, which I plan to leap out of if I should hear so much as a footstep on the stairway, is an iron picket fence upon which I will be impaled. Of course, the fence I am thinking of surrounds the Catholic orphanage on Lyons Avenue, but I am by now halfway between hallucination and coma, and somewhat woozy, as though I've gone too long without food. I see the photograph in the Newark News, of the fence and the dark puddle of my blood on the sidewalk, and the caption from which my family will never recover: INSURANCE MAN'S SON LEAPS TO DEATH.

While I sit freezing in my igloo, Mandel is basting in his own perspiration- and smells it. The body odor of Negroes fills me with compassion, with 'prose-poetry' – Mandel I am less indulgent of: 'he nauseates me' (as my mother says of him), which isn't to suggest that he is any less hypnotic a creature to me than Smolka is. Sixteen and Jewish just like me, but there all resemblance ends: he wears his hair in a duck's ass, has sideburns down to his jawbone, and sports one-button roll suits and pointy black shoes, and Billy Eckstine collars bigger than Billy Eckstine's! But Jewish. Incredible! A moralistic teacher has leaked to us that Arnold Mandel has the I.Q. of a genius yet prefers instead to take rides in stolen cars, smoke cigarettes, and get sick on bottles of beer. Can you believe it? A Jewish boy? He is also a participant in the circle-jerks held with the shades pulled down in Smolka's living room after school, while both elder Smolkas are slaving away in the tailor shop. I have heard the stories, but still (despite my own onanism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism- not to mention fetishism) I can't and won't believe it: four or five guys sit around in a circle on the floor, and at Smolka's signal, each begins to pull off- and the first one to come gets the pot, a buck a head.

What pigs.

The only explanation I have for Mandel's behavior is that his father died when Mandel was only ten. And this of course is what mesmerizes me most of all: a boy without a father.

How do I account for Smolka and his daring? He has a mother who works. Mine, remember, patrols the six rooms of our apartment the way a guerilla army moves across its own countryside- there's not a single closet or drawer of mine whose contents she hasn't a photographic sense of. Smolka's mother, on the other hand, sits all day by a little light in a little chair in the corner of his father's store, taking seams in and out, and by the time she gets home at night, hasn't the strength to get out her Geiger counter and start in hunting for her child's hair-raising collection of French ticklers. The Smolkas, you must understand, are not so rich as we- and therein lies the final difference. A mother who works and no Venetian blinds… yes, this sufficiently explains everything to me- how come he swims at Olympic Park as well as why he is always grabbing at everybody else's putz. He lives on Hostess cupcakes and his own wits. I get a hot lunch and all the inhibitions thereof. But don't get me wrong (as though that were possible): during a winter snowstorm what is more thrilling, while stamping off the slush on the back landing at lunchtime, than to hear 'Aunt Jenny' coming over the kitchen radio, and to smell cream of tomato soup heating up on the stove? What beats freshly laundered and ironed pajamas any season of the year, and a bedroom fragrant with furniture polish? How would I like my underwear all gray and jumbled up in my drawer, as Smolka's always is? I wouldn't. How would I like socks without toes and nobody to bring me hot lemonade and honey when my throat is sore?

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 wite 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. Am, 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 bel 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?