Portnoy’s Complaint

I mean here's a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me. It's this past summer, just before I am to leave on my vacation. We have had our dinner ("You got a piece of fish?" my father asks the waiter in the fancy French restaurant I take them to, to show I am grown-up- "Oui, monsieur, we have- " "All right, give me a piece of fish," says my father, "and make sure it's hot"), we have had our dinner, and afterward, chewing on my Titralac (for relief of gastric hyperacidity), I walk a ways with them before putting them in a taxi for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Immediately my father starts in about how I haven't come to visit in five weeks (ground I thought we two had already covered in the restaurant, while my mother was whispering to the waiter to make sure her "big boy's" piece of fish-that's me, folks!-was well-done), and now I am going away for a whole month, and all in all when do they ever see their own son? They see their daughter, and their daughter's children, and not infrequently, but that is not successful either. "With that son-in-law," my father says, "if you don't say the right psychological thing to his kids, if I don't talk straight psychology to my own granddaughters, he wants to put me in jail! I don't care what he calls himself, he still thinks like a Communist to me. My own grandchildren, and everything I say has to pass by him,

Mr. Censor!" No, their daughter is now Mrs. Feibish, and her little daughters are Feibishes too. Where are the Portnoys he dreamed of? In my nuts. "Look," I cry in my strangulated way, "you're seeing me now! You're with me right this minute!" But he is off and running, and now that he hasn't fishbones to worry about choking on, there is no reining him in- Mr. and Mrs. Schmuck have Seymour and his beautiful wife and their seven thousand brilliant and beautiful children who come to them every single Friday night- "Look, I am a very busy person! I have a briefcase full of important things to do-!" "Come on," he replies, "you gotta eat, you can come for a meal once a week, because you gotta eat anyway comes six o'clock-well, don't you?" Whereupon who pipes up but Sophie, informing him that when she was a little girl her family was always telling her to do this and do that, and how unhappy and resentful it sometimes would cause her to feel, and how my father shouldn't insist with me because, she concludes, "Alexander is a big boy. Jack, he has a right to make his own decisions, that's something I always told him." You always what? What did she say?

Oh, why go on? Why be so obsessed like this? Why be so petty? Why not be a sport like Sam Levenson and laugh it all off- right?

Only let me finish. So they get into the taxi. "Kiss him," my mother whispers, "you're going all the way to Europe."

Of course my father overhears-that's why she lowers her voice, so we'll all listen-and panic sweeps over him. Every year, from September on, he is perpetually asking me what my plans are for the following August-now he realizes that he has been outfoxed: bad enough I am leaving on a midnight plane for another continent, but worse, he hasn't the slightest idea of my itinerary. I did it! I made it!

"- But where in Europe? Europe is half the whole globe- " he cries, as I begin to close the taxi door from the outside.

"I told you, I don't know."

"What do you mean? You gotta know! How will you get there yourself, if you 'don't know'- "

“Sorry, sorry- “