Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [49]
The big thing at the Empire is hats. Down the aisle from me a fellow-addict fifty years my senior is dropping his load in his hat. His hat, Doctor! Oy, I’m sick. I want to cry. Not into your hat, you shvantz, you got to put that thing on your head! You’ve got to put it on now and go back outside and walk around downtown Newark dripping gissum down your forehead. How will you eat your lunch in that hat!
What misery descends upon me as the last drop dribbles into my mitt. The depression is overwhelming; even my cock is ashamed and doesn’t give me a single word of back talk as I start from the burlesque house, chastising myself ruthlessly, moaning aloud, “Oh, no, no,” not unlike a man who has just felt his sole skid through a pile of dog turds—sole of his shoe, but take the pun, who cares, who cares … Ach! Disgusting! Into his hat, for Christ’s sake. Ven der putz shteht! Ven der putz shteht! Into the hat that he wears on his head!
I suddenly remember how my mother taught me to piss standing up! Listen, this may well be the piece of information we’ve been waiting for, the key to what determined my character, what causes me to be living in this predicament, torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires. Here is how I learned to pee into the bowl like a big man. Just listen to this!
I stand over the circle of water, my baby’s weeny jutting cutely forth, while my momma sits beside the toilet on the rim of the bathtub, one hand controlling the tap of the tub (from which a trickle runs that I am supposed to imitate) and her other hand tickling the underside of my prick. I repeat: tickling my prickling! I guess she thinks that’s how to get stuff to come out of the front of that thing, and let me tell you, the lady is right. “Make a nice sis, bubala, make a nice little sissy for Mommy,” sings Mommy to me, while in actuality what I am standing there making with her hand on my prong is in all probability my future! Imagine! The ludicrousness! A man’s character is being forged, a destiny is being shaped … oh, maybe not … At any rate, for what the information is worth, in the presence of another man I simply cannot draw my water. To this very day. My bladder may be distended to watermelon proportions, but interrupted by another presence before the stream has begun (you want to hear everything, okay, I’m telling everything) which is that in Rome, Doctor, The Monkey and I picked up a common whore in the street and took her back to bed with us. Well, now that’s out. It seems to have taken me some time.
The bus, the bus, what intervened on the bus to prevent me from coming all over the sleeping shikse’s arm—I don’t know. Common sense, you think? Common decency? My right mind, as they say, coming to the fore? Well, where is this right mind on that afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty—and then had again on the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.
So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner.
Unless you share with The Monkey her contention that the most heinous crime of my career was abandoning her in Greece. Second most heinous: leading her into that triumvirate in Rome. In her estimation