Portnoy’s Complaint

Whew! Have I got grievances! Do I harbor hatreds I didn't even know were there! Is it the process. Doctor, or is it what we call "the material"? All I do is complain, the repugnance seems bottomless, and I'm beginning to wonder if maybe enough isn't enough. I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public. Could I really have detested this childhood and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now, looking backward upon what I was from the vantage point of what I am-and am not? Is this truth I'm delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching? Or is kvetching for people like me a form of truth? Regardless, my conscience wishes to make it known, before the beefing begins anew, that at the time my boyhood was not this thing I feel so estranged from and resentful of now. Vast as my confusion was, deep as my inner turmoil seems to appear in retrospect, I don't remember that I was one of those kids who went around wishing he lived in another house with other people, whatever my unconscious yearnings may have been in that direction. After all, where else would I find an audience like those two for my imitations? I used to leave them in the aisles at mealtime -my mother once actually wet her pants, Doctor, and had to go running in hysterical laughter to the bathroom from my impression of Mister Kitzel on "The Jack Benny Show." What else? Walks, walks with my father in Weequahic Park on Sundays that I still haven't forgotten. You know, I can't go off to the country and find an acorn on the ground without thinking of him and those walks. And that's not nothing, nearly thirty years later.

And have I mentioned, vis-a-vis my mother, the running conversation we two had in those years before I was even old enough to go off by myself to a school? During those five years when we had each other alone all day long, I do believe we covered just about every subject known to man. "Talking to Alex," she used to tell my father when he walked in exhausted at night, "I can do a whole afternoon of ironing, and never even notice the time go by." And mind you, I am only four.

And as for the hollering, the cowering, the crying, even that had vividness and excitement to recommend it; moreover, that nothing was ever simply nothing but always SOMETHING, that the most ordinary kind of occurrence could explode without warning into A TERRIBLE CRISIS, this was to me the way life is. The novelist, what's his name, Markfield, has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed "aggravation" to be a Jewish word. Well, this was what I thought about "tumult" and "bedlam," two favorite nouns of my mother's. Also "spatula." I was already the darling of the first grade, and in every schoolroom competition, expected to win hands down, when I was asked by the teacher one day to identify a picture of what I knew perfectly well my mother referred to as a "spatula." But for the life of me I could not think of the word in English. Stammering and flushing, I sank defeated into my seat, not nearly so stunned as my teacher but badly shaken up just the same… and that's how far back my fate goes, how early in the game it was "normal" for me to be in a state resembling torment-in this particular instance over something as monumental as a kitchen utensil.

Oh, all that conflict over a spatula, Momma,

Imagine how I feel about you!

I am reminded at this joyous little juncture of when we lived in Jersey City, back when I was still very much my mother's papoose, still very much a sniffer of her body perfumes and a total slave to her kugel and grieben and ruggelech-there was a suicide in our building. A fifteen-year-old boy named Ronald Nimkin, who had been crowned by women in the building “José Iturbi the Second," hanged himself from the shower head in his bathroom. "With those golden hands!" the women wailed, referring of course to his piano playing-"With that talent!" Followed by, "You couldn't look for a boy more in love with his mother than Ronald!"

I swear to you, this is not bullshit or a screen memory, these are the very words these women use. The great dark operatic themes of human suffering and passion come rolling out of those mouths like the prices of Oxydol and Del Monte canned corn! My own mother, let me remind you, when I returned this past summer from my adventure in Europe, greets me over the phone with the following salutation: "Well, how's my lover?" Her lover she calls me, while her husband is listening on the other extension! And it never occurs to her, if I'm her lover, who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with? No, you don't have to go digging where these people are concerned-they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!