Portnoy’s Complaint

A story of The Monkey's which made a strong impression on me (not that all her stories didn't compel this particular neurotic's attention, with their themes of cruelty, ignorance, and exploitation): Once when she was eleven, and against her father's will had sneaked off on a Saturday to a ballet class given by the local "artiste" (called Mr. Maurice), the old man came after her with a belt, beat her with it around the ankles all the way home, and then locked her in the closet for the rest of the day- and with her feet tied together for good measure. "Ketch you down by that queer again, you, and won't just tie ' em up. I ’ll do more'n that, don't you worry!"

When she first arrived in New York, she was eighteen and hadn't any back teeth to speak of, either. They had all been extracted (for a reason she still can't fathom) by the local Moundsville practitioner, as gifted a dentist as she remembers Mr. Maurice to have been a dancer. When we two met, nearly a year ago now. The Monkey had already been through her marriage and her divorce. Her husband had been a fifty-year-old French industrialist, who had courted and married her one week in Florence, where she was modeling in a show at the Pitti Palace. Subsequent to the marriage, his sex life consisted of getting into bed with his young and beautiful bride and jerking off into a copy of a magazine called Garter Belt, which he had flown over to him from Forty-second Street. The Monkey has at her disposal a kind of dumb, mean, rural twang which she sometimes likes to use, and would invariably drop down into it when describing the excesses to which she was expected to be a witness as the tycoon's wife. She could be very funny about the fourteen months she had spent with him, despite the fact that it was probably a grim if not terrifying experience. But he had flown her to London after the marriage for five thousand dollars' worth of dental work, and then back in Paris, hung around her neck several hundred thousand dollars more in jewelry, and for the longest while, says The Monkey, this caused her to feel loyal to him. As she put it (before I forbade her ever again to say like, and man, and swinger, and crazy, and a groove): "It was, like ethics."

What caused her finally to run for her life were the little orgies he began to arrange after jerking off into Garter Belt (or was it Spiked Heels?) became a bore to both of them. A woman, preferably black, would be engaged for a very high sum to squat naked upon a glass coffee table and take a crap while the tycoon lay flat on his back, directly beneath the table, and jerked his dong off. And as the shit splattered on the glass six inches above her beloved's nose, The Monkey, our poor Monkey, was expected to sit on the red damask sofa, fully clothed, sipping cognac and watching.

It was a couple of years after her return to New York- I suppose she's about twenty-four or twenty-five by this time- that The Monkey tried to kill herself a little by making a pass at her wrists with a razor, all on account of the way she had been treated at Le Club, or El Morocco, or maybe L’Interdit, by her current boyfriend, one or another of the hundred best-dressed men in the world. Thus she found her way to the illustrious Dr. Morris Frankel, henceforth to be known in these confessions as Harpo. Off and on during these past five years The Monkey has thrashed around on Harpo's couch, waiting for him to tell her what she must do to become somebody's wife and somebody's mother. Why, cries The Monkey to Harpo, why must she always be involved with such hideous and cold-hearted shits, instead of with men? Why? Harpo, speak! Say something to me! Anything! "Oh, I know he's alive," The Monkey used to say, her little features scrunched up in anguish, "I just know it. I mean, who ever heard of a dead man with an answering service?" So, in and out of therapy (if that's what it is) The Monkey goes -in whenever some new shit has broken her heart, out whenever the next likely knight has made his appearance.

I was "a breakthrough." Harpo of course didn't say yes, but then he didn't say no, either, when she suggested that this was who I might be. He did cough, however, and this The Monkey takes as her confirmation. Sometimes he coughs, sometimes he grunts, sometimes he belches, once in a while he farts, whether voluntarily or not who knows, though I hold that a fart has to be interpreted as a negative transference reaction on his part. "Breakie, you're so brilliant!" "Breakie" when she is being my sex kitten and cat-and when she is fighting for her life: "You big son of a bitch Jew? I want to be married and human!"