sturdy children! Protecting some good woman! Dignity! Health! Love! Industry! Intelligence! Trust! Decency! High Spirits! Compassion! What the hell do I care about sensational sex? How can I be floundering like this over something so simple, so silly, as pussy! How absurd that I should have finally come down with VD! At my age! Because I'm sure of it: I have contracted something from that Lina! It is just a matter of waiting for the chancre to appear. But I won't wait, I can't: In Tel Aviv a doctor, first thing, before the chancre or the blindness sets in!
Only what about the dead girl back at the hotel? For she will have accomplished it by now. I'm sure. Thrown herself off the balcony in her underpants. Walked into the sea and drowned herself, wearing the world's tiniest bikini. No, she will take hemlock in the moonlit shadows of the Acropolis-in her Balenciaga evening gown! That empty-headed, exhibitionistic, suicidal twat! Don't worry, when she does it, it'll be photographable-it'll come out looking like an ad for ladies' lingerie! There she'll be, as usual, in the Sunday magazine section-only dead! I must turn back before I have this ridiculous suicide forever on my conscience! I should have telephoned Harpo! I didn't even think of it-just ran for my life. Gotten her to a phone to talk to her doctor. But would he have talked? I doubt it! That mute bastard, he has to, before she takes her unreversible revenge! MODEL SLITS THROAT IN AMPHITHEATRE; Medea Interrupted by Suicide … and they'll publish the note they find, more than likely in a bottle stuffed up her snatch. 'Alexander Portnoy is responsible. He forced me to sleep with a whore and then wouldn't make me an honest woman. Mary Jane Reed.' Thank God the moron can't spell! It'll all be Greek to those Greeks! Hopefully.
Running away! In flight, escaping again-and from what? From someone else who would have me a saint! Which I ain't! And do not want or intend to be! No, any guilt on my part is comical! I will not hear of it! If she kills herself-But that's not what she's about to do. No, it'll be more ghastly than that: she's going to telephone the Mayor! And that's why I'm running! But she wouldn't. But she would. She will! More than likely already has. Remember? I'll expose you, Alex. I'll call long-distance to John Lindsay. I'll telephone Jimmy Breslin. And she is crazy enough to do it! Breslin, that cop! That precinct station genius! Oh Jesus, let her be dead then! Jump, you ignorant destructive bitch-better you than me! Sure, all I need is she should start telephoning around to the wire services: I can see my father going out to the corner after dinner, picking up the Newark News-and at long last, the word SCANDAL printed in bold type above a picture of his darling son! Or turning on the seven o'clock news to watch the CBS correspondent in Athens interviewing The Monkey from her hospital bed. 'Portnoy, that's right. Capital P. Then 0. Then I think R. Oh, I can't remember he rest, but I swear on my wet pussy, Mr. Rudd, he made me sleep with a whore!' No, no, I am not exaggerating: think a moment about the character, or absence of same. Remember Las Vegas? Remember her desperation? Then you see that this wasn't just my conscience punishing me; no, whatever revenge I might imagine, she could imagine too. And will yet! Believe me, we have not heard the last of Mary Jane Reed. I was supposed to save her life- and didn't. Made her sleep with whores instead! So don't think we have heard the last word from her!
And there, to cause me to kick my ass even more, there all blue below me, the Aegean Sea. The Pumpkin's Aegean! My poetic American girl! Sophocles! Long ago! Oh, Pumpkin- baby, say it again, Why would I want to do a thing like that? Someone who knew who she was! Psychologically so intact as not to be in need of salvation or redemption by mel Not in need of conversion to my glorious faith! The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch, the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way… oh, why did I ever let her go! I can't believe it-because she wouldn't be Jewish? 'The eternal note of sadness-' 'The turbid ebb and flow of human misery-'
Only, is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering- something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that's Portnoy's slogan. That's the story of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words. A travesty! My politics, descended entirely to my putz! JERK-OFF ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS! The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving! And on the brink of becoming John Lindsay's Profurno!
So it seemed, an hour out of Athens.
Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Beer-She'va, the Dead Sea, Sedom, 'Ein Gedi, then north to Caesarea, Haifa, Akko, Tiberias, Safed, the upper Galilee… and always it is more dreamy than real. Not that I courted the sensation either. I'd had enough of the improbable with my companion in Greece and Rome. No, to make some sense out of the impulse that had sent me running aboard the El Al flight to begin with, to convert myself from this bewildered runaway into a man once again-in control of my will, conscious of my intentions, doing as I wished, not as I must-I set off traveling about the country as though the trip had been undertaken deliberately, with forethought, desire, and for praiseworthy, if conventional, reasons. Yes, I would have (now that I was unaccountably here) what is called an educational experience. I would improve myself, which is my way, after all. Or was, wasn't it? Isn't that why I still read with a pencil in my hand? To learn? To become better? (than whom?) So, I studied maps in my bed, bought historical and archeological texts and read them with my meals, hired guides, rented cars-doggedly in that sweltering heat, I searched out and saw everything I could: tombs, synagogues, fortresses, mosques, shrines, harbors, ruins, the new ones, the old. I visited the Carmel Caves, the Chagall windows (me and a hundred ladies from the Detroit Hadassah), the Hebrew University, the Bet She'an excavations- toured the green kibbutzirn, the baked wastelands, the rugged border outposts in the mountains; I even climbed a little ways up Masada under the full artillery fire of the sun. And everything I saw, I found I could assimilate and understand. It was history, it was nature, it was art. Even the Negev, that hallucination, I experienced as real and of this world. A desert. No, what was incredible and strange to me, more novel than the Dead Sea, or even the dramatic wilderness of Tsin, where for an eerie hour I wandered in the light of the bleaching sun, between white rocks where (I learn from my guidebook) the tribes of Israel wandered for so long (where I picked up as a souvenir-and have in fact right here in my pocket-such a stone as my guide informed me Zipporah used to circumcise the son of Moses-) what gave my entire sojourn the air of the preposterous was one simple but wholly (to me) implausible fact: lamina Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish.
My dream begins as soon as I disembark. I am in an airport where I have never been before and all the people I see-passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers-are Jews. Is that so unlike the dreams that your dreaming patients recount? Is that so unlike the kind of experience one has while asleep? But awake, who ever heard of such a thing? The writing on the walls is Jewish-Jewish graffiti! The flag is Jewish. The faces are the faces you see on Chancellor Avenue! The faces of my neighbors, my uncles, my teachers, the parents of my boyhood friends. Faces like my own face! only moving before a backdrop of white wall and blazing sun and spikey tropical foliage. And it ain't Miami Beach, either. No, the faces of Eastern Europe, but only a stone's throw from Africa! In their short pants the men remind me of the head counselors at the Jewish summer camps I worked at during college vacations-only this isn't summer camp, either. It's home! These aren't Newark high school teachers off for two months with a clipboard and a whistle in the Hopatcong mountains of New Jersey. These are (there's no other word!) the natives. Returned! This is where it all began! Just been away on a long vacation, that's all! Hey, here we’re the WASPs! My taxi passes through a big square surrounded by sidewalk cafes such as one might see in Paris or Rome. Only the cafes are crowded with Jews. The taxi overtakes a bus. I look inside its windows. More Jews. Including the driver. Including the policemen up ahead directing traffic! At the hotel I ask the clerk for a room. He has a thin mustache and speaks English as though he were Ronald Colman. Yet he is Jewish too.
And now the drama thickens:
It is after midnight. Earlier in the evening. the promenade beside the sea was a gay and lively crush of Jews- Jews eating ices, Jews drinking soda pop, Jews conversing, laughing, walking together arm-in-arm. But now as I start back to my hotel, I find myself virtually alone. At the end of the promenade, which I must pass
