Portnoy’s Complaint

Anyway, anyway-off to work in the radio-less whitewall-less Kaiser, there to be let into the office by the cleaning lady. Now, I ask you, why must he be the one to raise the shades in that office in the morning? Why must he work the longest day of any insurance agent in history? For whom? Me? Oh, if so, if so, if that is his reason, then it is all really too fucking tragic to bear. The misunderstanding is too great! For me? Do me a favor and don't do it for me! Don't please look around for a reason for your life being what it is and come up with Alex! Because I am not the be-all and end-all of everybody's existence! I refuse to shlep those bags around for the rest of my life! Do you hear me? I refuse! Stop Bnding it incomprehensible that I should be flying to Europe, thousands and thousands of miles away, just when you have turned sixty-six and are all ready to keel over at any minute, like you read about first thing every morning in the Times. Men his age and younger, they die- one minute they're alive, and the next dead, and apparently what he thinks is that if I am only across the Hudson instead of the Atlantic… Listen, what does he think? That with me around it simply won't happen? That I’ll race to his side, take hold of his hand, and thereby restore him to life? Does he actually believe that I somehow have the power to destroy death? That I am the resurrection and the life? My dad, a real believing Christer! And doesn't even know it!

His death. His death and his bowels: the truth is I am hardly less preoccupied with either than he is himself. I never get a telegram, never get a phone call after midnight, that I do not feel my own stomach empty out like a washbasin, and say aloud- aloud!- "He's dead." Because apparently I believe it too, believe that I can somehow save him from annihilation- can, and must! But where did we all get this ridiculous and absurd idea that I am so- powerful, so precious, so necessary to everybody's survival! What was it with these Jewish parents- because I am not in this boat alone, oh no, I am on the biggest troop ship afloat… only look in through the portholes and see us there, stacked to the bulkheads in our bunks, moaning and groaning with such pity for ourselves, the sad and watery-eyed sons of Jewish parents, sick to the gills from rolling through these heavy seas of guilt- so I sometimes envision us, me and my fellow wailers, melancholics, and wise guys, still in steerage, like our forebears – and oh sick, sick as dogs, we cry out intermittently, one of us or another, "Poppa, how could you?" "Momma, why did you?" and the stories we tell, as the big ship pitches and rolls, the vying we do- who had the most castrating mother, who the most benighted father, I can match you, you bastard, humiliation for humiliation, shame for shame… the retching in the toilets after meals, the hysterical deathbed laughter from the bunks, and the tears-here a puddle wept in contrition, here a puddle from indignation – in the blinking of an eye, the body of a man (with the brain of a boy) rises in impotent rage to flail at the mattress above, only to fall instantly back, lashing itself with reproaches. Oh, my Jewish men friends! My dirty-mouthed guilt-ridden brethren! My sweethearts! My mates! Will this fucking ship ever stop pitching? When? When, so that we can leave off complaining how sick we are-and go out into the air, and live!

Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame – blaming is still ailing, of course, of course-but nonetheless, what was it with these Jewish parents, what, that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood-saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little shits, little ingrates, on the other!

"But in Europe where-?" he calls after me, as the taxi pulls away from the curb.

"I don't know where," I call after him, gleefully waving farewell. I am thirty-three, and free at last of my mother and father! For a month.

"But how will we know your address?"

Joy! Sheer joy! "You won't!"

"But what if in the meantime-?"

"What if what?" I laugh. "What if what are you worried about now?"

"What if-?" And my God, does he really actually shout it out the taxi window? Is his fear, his greed, his need and belief in me so great that he actually shouts these words out into the streets of New York? "What if I die?"

Because that is what I hear, Doctor. The last words I hear before flying off to Europe -and with The Monkey, somebody whom I have kept a total secret from them. "What if I die?" and then off I go for my orgiastic holiday abroad.