Portnoy’s Complaint

Around a big conference table, at rigid attention, sit all the boys in West Virginia who are seeking admission to West Point. Underneath the table, crawling on her hands and knees, and nude, is our gawky teen-age illiterate, Mary Jane Reed. A West Point colonel with a swagger stick tap-tapping behind his back, circles and circles the perimeter of the table, scrutinizing the faces of the young men, as out of sight Mary Jane proceeds to undo their trousers and to blow each of the candidates in his turn. The boy selected for admission to the military academy will be he who is most able to maintain a stern and dignified soldierly bearing while shooting off into Mary Jane's savage and knowing little weapon of a mouth.

Ten months. Incredible. For in that time not a day- very likely, not an hour-passed that I did not ask myself, "Why continue with this person? This brutalized woman! This coarse, tormented, self-loathing, bewildered, lost, identityless-" and so on. The list was inexhaustible, I reviewed it interminably. And to remember the ease with which I had plucked her off the street (the sexual triumph of my life!), well, that made me groan with disgust. How can I go on and on with someone whose reason and judgment and behavior I can't possibly respect? Who sets off inside me daily explosions of disapproval, hourly thunderclaps of admonition! And the sermonizing! Oh, what a schoolmaster I became. When she bought me those Italian loafers for my birthday, for instance-such a lecture I gave in return!

"Look," I said, once we were out of the store, "a little shopping advice: when you go off to do something so very simple as exchanging money for goods, it isn't necessary to flash your snatch at everyone this side of the horizon. Okay?"

"Flash what? Who flashed anything?"

"You, Mary Jane! Your supposedly private parts!"

"I did not!"

"Please, every time you stood up, every time you sat down, I thought you were going to get yourself hooked by the pussy on the salesman's nose."

"Jee-zuz, I gotta sit, I gotta stand, don't I?"

"But not like you're climbing on and off a horse!"

"Well, I don't know what's bugging you-he was a faggot anyway."

"What's 'bugging' me is that the space between your legs has now been seen by more people than watch Huntley and Brinkley! So why not bow out while you're still champeen, all right?" Yet, even as I make my accusation, I am saying to myself, "Oh, lay off, Little Boy Blue-if you want a lady instead of a cunt, then get yourself one. Who's holding you here?" Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Miss Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women-healthy, in fact, as milkmaids. I know, because these were her predecessors-only they didn't satisfy, either. They were wrong, too. Spielvogel, believe me, I've been there, I've tried: I've eaten their casseroles and shaved in their johns, I've been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine chest, I have even befriended those cats of theirs-named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat-yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women-social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn't work out, either!

Kay Campbell, my girl friend at Antioch -could there have been a more exemplary person? Artless, sweet-tempered, without a trace of morbidity or egoism-a thoroughly commendable and worthy human being. And where is she now, that find! Hello, Pumpkin! Making some lucky shaygets a wonderful wife out there in middle America? How could she do otherwise? Edited the literary magazine, walked off with all the honors in English literature, picketed with me and my outraged friends outside of that barbershop in Yellow Springs where they wouldn't cut Negro hair-a robust, genial, large-hearted, large-assed girl with a sweet baby face, yellow hair, no tits, unfortunately (essentially titless women seem to be my destiny, by the way-now, why is that? is there an essay somewhere I can read on that? is it of import? or shall I go on?). Ah, and those peasant legs! And the blouse always hanging loose from her skirt at the back. How moved I was by that blithesome touch! And by the fact that on high heels she looked like a cat stuck up a tree, in trouble, out of her element, all wrong. Always the first of the Antioch nymphs to go barefoot to classes in spring. "The Pumpkin," is what I called her, in commemoration of her pigmentation and the size of her can. Also her solidity: hard as a gourd on matters of moral principle, beautifully stubborn in a way I couldn't but envy and adore.