Portnoy’s Complaint

What I'm saying. Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds-as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America -maybe that's more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington-now Portnoy. As though my manifest destiny is to seduce a girl from each of the forty-eight states. As for Alaskan and Hawaiian women, I really have no feelings either way, no scores to settle, no coupons to cash in, no dreams to put to rest-who are they to me, a bunch of Eskimos and Orientals? No, I am a child of the forties, of network radio and World War Two, of eight teams to a league and forty-eight states to a country. I know all the words to "The Marine Hymn," and to "The Caissons Go Rolling Along"-and to "The Song of the Army Air Corps." I know the song of the Navy Air Corps: "Sky anchors aweigh/ We're sailors of the air/ We're sailing everywhere-" I can even sing you the song of the Seabees. Go ahead, name your branch of service, Spielvogel, I'll sing you your song! Please, allow me-it's my money. We used to sit on our coats, I remember, on the concrete floor, our backs against the sturdy walls of the basement corridors of my grade school, singing in unison to keep up our morale until the all-clear signal sounded-"Johnny Zero." "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." "The sky-pilot said it/ You've got to give him credit/ For a son of a gun of a gunner was he-e-e-e!" You name it, and if it was in praise of the Stars and Stripes, I know it word for word! Yes, I am a child of air raid drills, Doctor, I remember Corregidor and "The Cavalcade of America," and that flag, fluttering on its pole, being raised at that heartbreaking angle over bloody Iwo Jima. Colin Kelly went down in flames when I was eight, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up in a puff, one week when I was twelve, and that was the heart of my boyhood, four years of hating Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini, and loving this brave determined republic! Rooting my little Jewish heart out for our American democracy! Well, we won, the enemy is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse, and dead because I prayed him dead-and now I want what's coming to me. My G.I. bill-real American ass! The cunt in country-'tis-of-thee! I pledge allegiance to the twat of the United States of America -and to the republic for which it stands: Davenport, Iowa! Dayton, Ohio! Schenectady, New York, and neighboring Troy! Fort Myers, Florida! New Canaan, Connecticut! Chicago, Illinois! Albert Lea, Minnesota! Portland, Maine! Moundsville, West Virginia! Sweet land of skikse-tail, of thee I sing!

From the mountains,

To the prairies,

To he oceans, white-with-my-fooaahhh-mmm!

God bless A-me-ri-cuuuuhhhh!

My home, SWEET HOOOOOHHHH-M!

Imagine what it meant to me to know that generations of Maulsbys were buried in the graveyard at Newburyport, Massachusetts, and generations of Abbotts in Salem. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims pride … Exactly. Oh, and more. Here was a girl whose mother's flesh crawled at the sound of the words "Eleanor Roosevelt." Who herself had been dandled on the knee of Wendell Wilikie at Hobe Sound, Florida, in 1042 (while my father was saying prayers for F.D.R. on the High Holidays, and my mother blessing him over the Friday night candles). The Senator from Connecticut had been a roommate of her Daddy's at Harvard, and her brother, "Paunch," a graduate of Yale, held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and (how lucky could I be?) played polo (yes, games from on top of a horse!) on Sunday afternoons someplace in Westchester County, as he had throughout college. She could have been a Lindabury, don't you see? A daughter of my father's boss! Here was a girl who knew how to sail a boat, knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could ick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon-like a Chinese with his chopsticks! What skills she had learned in far-off Connecticut!). Activities that partook of the exotic and even the taboo she performed so simply, as a matter of course: and I was as wowed (though that's not the whole story) as Desdemona, hearing of the Anthropapagi. I came across a newspaper clipping in her scrapbook, a column entitled "A Deb A Day," which began, "SARAH ABBOTT MAULSBY-'Ducks and quails and pheasants better scurry' around New Canaan this fall because Sally, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Maulsby of Greenley Road, is getting in practice for small game season. Shooting-" with a gun. Doctor-"shooting is just one of Sally's outdoor hobbies. She loves riding too, and this summer hopes to try a rod d reel-" and get this; I think this tale would win my son too-"hopes to try a rod and reel on some of those trout that swim by 'Wind-view' her family's summer home."