Portnoy’s Complaint

I stand at attention between his legs as he coats me from head to toe with a thick lather of soap- and eye with admiration the baggy substantiality of what overhangs the marble bench upon which he is seated. His scrotum is like the long wrinkled face of some old man with an egg tucked into each of his sagging jowls- while mine might hang from the wrist of some little girl's dolly like a teeny pink purse. And as for his shlong, to me, with that fingertip of a prick that my mother likes to refer to in public (once, okay, but that once will last a lifetime) as my "little thing," his shlong brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Shlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty, and unseltconscious dangle of that living piece of hose through which he passes streams of water as thick and strong as rope-while I deliver forth slender yellow threads that my euphemistic mother calls "a sis." A sis, I think, is undoubtedly what my sister makes, little yellow threads that you can sew with… "Do you want to make a nice sis?" she asks me-when I want to make a torrent, I want to make a flood: I want like he does to shift the tides of the toilet bowl! "Jack," my mother calls to him, "would you close that door, please? Some example you're setting for you know who." But if only that had been so, Mother! If only you-know-who could have found some inspiration in what's-his-name's coarseness! If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame-every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.

We are in my Uncle Nate's clothing store on Springfield Avenue in Newark. I want a bathing suit with a built-in athletic support. I am eleven years old and that is my secret: I want a jock. I know not to say anything, I just know to keep my mouth shut, but then how do you get it if you don't ask for it? Uncle Nate, a spiffy dresser with a mustache, removes from his showcase a pair of little boy’s trunks, the exact style I have always worn. He indicates that this is the best suit for me, fast-drying and won't chafe. "What's your favorite color?" Uncle Nate asks- "maybe you want it in your school color, huh?" I turn scarlet, though that is not my answer. "I don't want that kind of suit any more," and oh, I can smell humiliation in the wind, hear it rumbling in the distance-any minute now it is going to crash upon my prepubescent head. "Why not?" my father asks. "Didn't you hear your uncle, this is the best-" "I want one with a jockstrap in it!" Yes, sir, this just breaks my mother up. "For your little thing?" she asks, with an amused smile.

Yes, Mother, imagine: for my little thing.

The potent man in the family-successful in business, tyrannical at home-was my father's oldest brother, Hymie, the only one of my aunts and uncles to have been born on the other side and to talk with an accent. Uncle Hymie was in the "soda-vater" business, bottler and distributor of a sweet carbonated drink called Squeeze, the vin ordinaire of our dinner table. With his neurasthenic wife Clara, his son Harold, and his daughter Marcia, my uncle lived in a densely Jewish section of Newark, on the second floor of a two-family house that he owned, and into whose bottom floor we moved in 1941, when my father transferred to the Essex County office of Boston amp; Northeastern.