Portnoy's Complaint (3 page)

“What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”

“Diarrhea.”

“Was it mostly liquid or was it mostly poopie?”

“I don’t look! I didn’t look! Stop saying poopie to me—I’m in high school!”

“Oh, don’t you shout at
me
, Alex. I’m not the one who gave you diarrhea, I assure you. If all you ate was what you were fed at home, you wouldn’t be running to the bathroom fifty times a day. Hannah tells me what you’re doing, so don’t think I don’t know.”

She’s missed the underpants!
I’ve been caught!
Oh,
let
me be dead! I’d just as soon!

“Yeah, what do I do …?”

“You go to Harold’s Hot Dog and
Chazerai
Palace after school and you eat French fries with Melvin Weiner. Don’t you? Don’t lie to me either. Do you or do you not stuff yourself with French fries and ketchup on Hawthorne Avenue after school? Jack, come in here, I want you to hear this,” she calls to my father, now occupying the bathroom.

“Look, I’m trying to move my bowels,” he replies. “Don’t I have enough trouble as it is without people screaming at me when I’m trying to move my bowels?”

“You know what your son does after school, the A student, who his own mother can’t say poopie to any more, he’s such a
grown-up?
What do you think your grown-up son does when nobody is watching him?”

“Can I please be left alone, please?” cries my father. “Can I have a little peace, please, so I can get something accomplished in here?”

“Just wait till your father hears what you do, in defiance of every health habit there could possibly be. Alex, answer me something. You’re so smart, you know all the answers now, answer me this: how do you think Melvin Weiner gave himself colitis? Why has that child spent half his life in hospitals?”

“Because he eats
chazerai
.”

“Don’t you dare make fun of me!”

“All right,” I scream, “how
did
he get colitis?”

“Because he eats
chazerai!
But it’s not a joke! Because to him a meal is an O Henry bar washed down by a bottle of Pepsi. Because his breakfast consists of, do you know what? The most important meal of the day—not according just to your mother, Alex, but according to the highest nutritionists—and do you know what that child eats?”

“A doughnut.”

“A doughnut is right, Mr. Smart Guy, Mr. Adult. And
coffee
. Coffee and a doughnut, and on this a thirteen-year-old
pisher
with half a stomach is supposed to start a day. But you, thank God, have been brought up differently. You don’t have a mother who gallavants all over town like some names I could name, from Barn’s to Hahne’s to Kresge’s all day long. Alex, tell me, so it’s not a mystery, or maybe I’m just stupid—only tell me, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to prove, that you should stuff yourself with such junk when you could come home to a poppyseed cookie and a nice glass of milk? I want the truth from you. I wouldn’t tell your father,” she says, her voice dropping significantly, “but I
must
have the truth from you.” Pause. Also significant. “Is it just French fries, darling, or is it more? … Tell me, please, what other kind of garbage you’re putting into your mouth so we can get to the bottom of this diarrhea! I want a straight answer from you, Alex. Are you eating hamburgers out? Answer me, please, is that why you flushed the toilet—was there hamburger in it?”

“I told you—I don’t look in the bowl when I flush it! I’m not interested like you are in other people’s poopie!”

“Oh, oh, oh—thirteen years old and the mouth on him! To someone who is asking a question about
his
health,
his
welfare!” The utter incomprehensibility of the situation causes her eyes to become heavy with tears. “Alex, why are you getting like this, give me some clue? Tell me please what horrible things we have done to you all our lives that this should be our reward?” I believe the question strikes her as original. I believe she considers the question unanswerable. And worst of all, so do I. What
have
they done for me all their lives, but sacrifice? Yet that this is precisely the horrible thing is beyond my understanding—and still, Doctor! To this day!

I brace myself now for the whispering. I can spot the whispering coming a mile away. We are about to discuss my father’s headaches.

“Alex, he didn’t have a headache on him today that he could hardly see straight from it?” She checks, is he out of earshot? God forbid he should hear how critical his condition is, he might claim exaggeration. “He’s not going next week for a test for a tumor?”

“He is?”

“‘Bring him in,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m going to give him a test for a tumor.’”

Success. I am crying. There is no good reason for me to be crying, but in this household everybody tries to get a good cry in at least once a day. My father, you must understand—as doubtless you do: blackmailers account for a substantial part of the human community, and, I would imagine, of your clientele—my father has been “going” for this tumor test for nearly as long as I can remember. Why his head aches him all the time is, of course, because he is constipated all the time—why he is constipated is because ownership of his intestinal tract is in the hands of the firm of Worry, Fear & Frustration. It is true that a doctor once said to my mother that he would give her husband a test for a tumor—if that would make her happy, is I believe the way that he worded it; he suggested that it would be cheaper, however, and probably more effective for the man to invest in an enema bag. Yet, that I know all this to be so, does not make it any less heartbreaking to imagine my father’s skull splitting open from a malignancy.

Yes, she has me where she wants me, and she knows it. I clean forget my own cancer in the grief that comes—comes now as it came then—when I think how much of life has always been (as he himself very accurately puts it) beyond his comprehension. And his grasp. No money, no schooling, no language, no learning, curiosity without culture, drive without opportunity, experience without wisdom … How easily his inadequacies can move me to tears. As easily as they move me to anger!

A person my father often held up to me as someone to emulate in life was the theatrical producer Billy Rose. Walter Winchell said that Billy Rose’s knowledge of shorthand had led Bernard Baruch to hire him as a secretary—consequently my father plagued me throughout high school to enroll in the shorthand course. “Alex, where would Billy Rose be today without his shorthand? Nowhere! So why do you
fight
me?” Earlier it was the piano we battled over. For a man whose house was without a phonograph or a record, he was passionate on the subject of a musical instrument. “I don’t understand why you won’t take a musical instrument, this is beyond comprehension. Your little cousin Toby can sit down at the piano and play whatever song you can name. All she has to do is sit at the piano and play ‘Tea for Two’ and everybody in the room is her friend. She’ll never lack for companionship, Alex, she’ll never lack for popularity. Only tell me you’ll take up the piano, and I’ll have one in here tomorrow morning. Alex, are you listening to me? I am offering you something that could change the rest of your life!”

But what he had to offer I didn’t want—and what I wanted he didn’t have to offer. Yet how unusual is that? Why must it continue to cause such pain? At this late date! Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred … or the love? Because I haven’t even begun to mention everything I remember with pleasure—I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss! All those memories that seem somehow to be bound up with the weather and the time of day, and that flash into mind with such poignancy, that momentarily I am not down in the subway, or at my office, or at dinner with a pretty girl, but back in my childhood,
with them
. Memories of practically nothing—and yet they seem moments of history as crucial to my being as the moment of my conception; I might be remembering his sperm nosing into her ovum, so piercing is my gratitude—yes,
my
gratitude!—so sweeping and unqualified is my love. Yes, me, with sweeping and unqualified love! I am standing in the kitchen (standing maybe for the first time in my life), my mother points, “Look outside, baby,” and I look; she says, “See? how purple? a real fall sky.” The first line of poetry I ever hear! And I remember it!
A real fall sky …
It is an iron-cold January day, dusk—oh, these memories of dusk are going to kill me yet, of chicken fat on rye bread to tide me over to dinner, and the moon already outside the kitchen window—I have just come in with hot red cheeks and a dollar I have earned shoveling snow: “You know what you’re going to have for dinner,” my mother coos so lovingly to me, “for being such a hard-working boy? Your favorite winter meal. Lamb stew.” It is night: after a Sunday in New York City, at Radio City and Chinatown, we are driving home across the George Washington Bridge—the Holland Tunnel is the direct route between Pell Street and Jersey City, but I beg for the bridge, and because my mother says it’s “educational,” my father drives some ten miles out of his way to get us home. Up front my sister counts aloud the number of supports upon which the marvelous educational cables rest, while in the back I fall asleep with my face against my mother’s black sealskin coat. At Lakewood, where we go one winter for a weekend vacation with my parents’ Sunday night Gin Rummy Club, I sleep in one twin bed with my father, and my mother and Hannah curl up together in the other. At dawn my father awakens me and like convicts escaping, we noiselessly dress and slip out of the room. “Come,” he whispers, motioning for me to don my earmuffs and coat, “I want to show you something. Did you know I was a waiter in Lakewood when I was sixteen years old?” Outside the hotel he points across to the beautiful silent woods. “How’s that?” he says. We walk together—“at a brisk pace”—around a silver lake. “Take good deep breaths. Take in the piney air all the way. This is the best air in the world, good winter piney air.”
Good winter piney air
—another poet for a parent! I couldn’t be more thrilled if I were Wordsworth’s kid! … In summer he remains in the city while the three of us go off to live in a furnished room at the seashore for a month. He will join us for the last two weeks, when he gets his vacation … there are times, however, when Jersey City is so thick with humidity, so alive with the mosquitoes that come dive-bombing in from the marshes, that at the end of his day’s work he drives sixty-five miles, taking the old Cheesequake Highway—the Cheesequake! My God! the stuff you uncover here!—drives sixty-five miles to spend the night with us in our breezy room at Bradley Beach.

He arrives after we have already eaten, but his own dinner waits while he unpeels the soggy city clothes in which he has been making the rounds of his debit all day, and changes into his swimsuit. I carry his towel for him as he clops down the street to the beach in his unlaced shoes. I am dressed in clean short pants and a spotless polo shirt, the salt is showered off me, and my hair—still my little boy’s pre-steel wool hair, soft and combable—is beautifully parted and slicked down. There is a weathered iron rail that runs the length of the boardwalk, and I seat myself upon it; below me, in his shoes, my father crosses the empty beach. I watch him neatly set down his towel near the shore. He places his watch in one shoe, his eyeglasses in the other, and then he is ready to make his entrance into the sea. To this day I go into the water as he advised: plunge the wrists in first, then splash the underarms, then a handful to the temples and the back of the neck … ah, but slowly, always slowly. This way you get to refresh yourself, while avoiding a shock to the system. Refreshed, unshocked, he turns to face me, comically waves farewell up to where he thinks I’m standing, and drops backward to float with his arms outstretched. Oh he floats so still—he works, he works so hard, and for whom if not for me?—and then at last, after turning on his belly and making with a few choppy strokes that carry him nowhere, he comes wading back to shore, his streaming compact torso glowing from the last pure spikes of light driving in, over my shoulder, out of stifling inland New Jersey, from which I am being spared.

And there are more memories like this one, Doctor. A lot more. This is my mother and father I’m talking about.

But—but—but—let me pull myself together—there is also this vision of him emerging from the bathroom, savagely kneading the back of his neck and sourly swallowing a belch. “All right, what is it that was so urgent you couldn’t wait till I came out to tell me?”

“Nothing,” says my mother. “It’s settled.”

He looks at me, so disappointed. I’m what he lives for, and I know it. “What did he do?”

“What he did is over and done with, God willing. You, did you move your bowels?” she asks him.

“Of course I didn’t move my bowels.”

“Jack, what is it going to be with you, with those bowels?”

“They’re turning into concrete, that’s what it’s going to be.”

“Because you eat too fast.”

“I don’t eat too fast.”

“How then, slow?”

“I eat regular.”

“You eat like a pig, and somebody should tell you.”

“Oh, you got a wonderful way of expressing yourself sometimes, do you know that?”

“I’m only speaking the truth,” she says. “I stand on my feet all day in this kitchen, and you eat like there’s a fire somewhere, and this one—this one has decided that the food I cook isn’t good enough for him. He’d rather be sick and scare the living daylights out of me.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t want to upset you,” she says. “Let’s just forget the whole thing.” But she can’t, so now
she
begins to cry. Look, she is probably not the happiest person in the world either. She was once a tall stringbean of a girl whom the boys called “Red” in high school. When I was nine and ten years old I had an absolute passion for her high school yearbook. For a while I kept it in the same drawer with that other volume of exotica, my stamp collection.