supposed to make the Christians compassionate and kind. I thought other people's suffering is what he told them to feel sorry for. What bullshit! If I go blind, it's his fault! Yes, somehow he strikes me as the ultimate cause for all this pain and confusion. And oh God, as the cold water runs down my face, how am I going to explain my blindness to my parents! My mother virtually spends half her life up my ass as it is, checking on the manufacture of my stool- how am I possibly going to hide the fact that I no longer have my sight? 'Tap, tap, tap, it's just me, Mother – this nice big dog brought me home, with my cane.' 'A dog? In my house? Get him out of here before he makes everything filthy! Jack, there's a dog in the house and I just washed the kitchen floor!' 'But, Momma, he's here to stay, he has to stay- he's a seeing-eye dog. I'm blind.' 'Oh my God! Jack!' she calls into the bathroom. 'Jack,
Alex is home with a dog- he's gone blind!' 'Him, blind?' my father replies. 'How could he be blind, he doesn't even know what it means to turn off a light.' 'How?' screams my mother. 'How? Tell us how such a thing- '
Mother, how? How else? Consorting with Christian girls.
Mandel the next day tells me that within half an hour after my frenetic departure. Bubbles was down on her fucking dago knees sucking his cock.
The top of my head comes off: 'She was?'
'Right on her fucking dago knees,' says Mandel. 'Schmuck, what'd you go home for?'
'She called me a kike!' I answer self-righteously. 'I thought I was blind. Look, she's anti-Semitic, Ba-ba- lu.'
'Yeah, what do I give a shit?' says Mandel. Actually I don't think he knows what anti-Semitic means. 'All I know is I got laid, twice.'
'You did? With a rubber?”
'Fuck, I didn't use nothing.'
'But shell get pregnant!' I cry, and in anguish, as though it's me who will be held accountable.
'What do I care?' replies Mandel.
Why do I worry then! Why do I alone spend hours testing Trojans in my basement? Why do I alone live in mortal terror of the syph? Why do I run home with my little bloodshot eye, imagining myself blinded forever, when half an hour later Bubbles will be down eating cock on her knees! Home-to my mommy! To my Tollhouse cookie and my glass of milk, home to my nice clean bed! Oy, civilization and its discontents! Ba-ba-lu, speak to me, talk to me, tell me what it was like when she did it! I have to know, and with details- exact details! What about her tits? What about her nipples? What about her thighs? What does she do with her thighs, Ba-ba-lu, does she wrap them around your ass like in the hot books, or does she squeeze them tight around your cock till you want to scream, like in my dreams? And what about her hair down there? Tell me everything there is to tell about pubic hairs and the way they smell, I don't care if I heard it all before. And did she really kneel, are you shitting me? Did she actually kneel on her knees? And what about her teeth, where do they go? And does she suck on it, or does she blow on it, or somehow is it that she does both? Oh God, Ba-ba-lu, did you shoot in her mouth? Oh my God! And did she swallow it right down, or spit it out, or get mad-tell me! what did she do with your hot come! Did you warn her you were going to shoot, or did you just come off and let her worry? And who put it in- did she put it in or did you put it in, or does it just get drawn in by itself? And where were all your clothes?- on the couch? on the floor? exactly where? I want details! Details! Actual details! Who took off her brassiere, who took off her panties- her panties- did you? did she? When she was down there blowing, Ba-ba-lu, did she have anything on at all? And how about the pillow under her ass, did you stick a pillow under her ass like it says to do in my parents' marriage manual? What happened when you came inside her? Did she come too? Mandel, clarify something that I have to know- do they come? Stuff? Or do they just moan a lot – or what? How does she come! What is it like! Before I go out of my head. I have to know what it's like!
THE MOST PREVALENT FORM OF DEGRADATION IN EROTIC LIFE
I don't think I've spoken of the disproportionate effect The Monkey's handwriting used to have upon my psychic equilibrium. What hopeless calligraphy! It looked like the work of an eight-year-old-it nearly drove me crazy! Nothing capitalized, nothing punctuated- only those oversized irregular letters of hers slanting downward along the page, then dribbling off. And printed, as on the drawings the rest of us used to carry home in our little hands from first grade! And that spelling. A little word like 'clean' comes out three different ways on the same sheet of paper. You know, as in 'Mr. Clean'?- two out of three times it begins with the letter k. K! As in 'Joseph K.' Not to mention 'dear' as in the salutation of a letter: d-e-r-e. Or d-e-i-r. And that very first time (this I love) d-i-r. On the evening we are scheduled for dinner at Gracie Mansion-
D! I! R! I mean, I just have to ask myself- what am I doing having an affair with a woman nearly thirty years of age who thinks you spell 'dear' with three letters!
Already two months had passed since the pickup on. Lexington Avenue, and still, you see, the same currents of feeling carrying me along: desire, on the one hand, delirious desire (I'd never known such abandon in a woman in my life!), and something close to contempt on the other. Correction. Only a few days earlier there had been our trip to Vermont, that weekend when it had seemed that my wariness of her- the apprehension aroused by the model-y glamour, the brutish origins, above everything, the sexual recklessness- that all this fear and distrust had been displaced by a wild upward surge of tenderness and affection.
Now, I am under the influence at the moment of an essay entitled 'The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life'; as you may have guessed, I have bought a set of the Collected Papers, and since my return from Europe, have been putting myself to sleep each night in the solitary confinement of my womanless bed with a volume of Freud in my hand. Sometimes Freud in hand, sometimes Alex in hand, frequently both. Yes, there in my unbuttoned pajamas, all alone, I lie, fiddling with it like a little boy-child in a dopey reverie, tugging on it, twisting it, rubbing and kneading it, and meanwhile reading spellbound through 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love,' ever heedful of the sentence, the phrase, the word that will liberate me from what I understand are called my fantasies and fixations.
In the 'Degradation' essay there is that phrase, 'currents of feeling.' For 'a fully normal attitude in love' (deserving of semantic scrutiny, that 'fully normal,' but to go on-) for a fully normal attitude in love, says he, it is necessary that two currents of feeling be united: the tender, affectionate feelings, and the sensuous feelings. And in many instances this just doesn't happen, sad to say. 'Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.'
Question: Am I to consider myself one of the fragmented multitude? In language plain and simple, are Alexander Portnoy's sensual feelings fixated to his incestuous fantasies? What do you think, Doc? Has a restriction so pathetic been laid upon my object choice? Is it true that only if the sexual object fulfills for me the condition of being degraded, that sensual feeling can have free play? Listen, does that explain the preoccupation with shikses?
Yes, but if so, if so, how then explain that weekend in Vermont? Because down went the dam of the incest- barrier, or so it seemed. And swoosh, there was sensual feeling mingling with the purest, deepest streams of tenderness I've ever known! I'm telling you, the confluence of the two currents was terrific! And in her as well! She even said as much!
Or was it only the colorful leaves, do you think, the fire burning in the dining room of the inn at Woodstock, that softened up the two of us? Was it tenderness for one another that we experienced, or just the fall doing its work, swelling the gourd (John Keats) and lathering the tourist trade into ecstasies of nostalgia for the good and simple life? Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creaming in their pre-faded jeans over Historical dreaming the old agararian dream in their rent-a-car convertible-or is a fully normal attitude in love the possibility that it seemed for me during those few sunny days I spent with The Monkey in Vermont?
What exactly transpired? Well, we drove mostly. And looked: the valleys, the mountains, the light on the
