Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [67]
Which is how it occurs to me what to do. I will forget that the fist tearing away at me belongs to Bubbles—I’ll pretend it’s my own! So, fixedly I stare at the dark ceiling, and instead of making believe that I am getting laid, as I ordinarily do while jerking off, I make believe that I am jerking off.
And it begins instantly to take effect. Unfortunately, however, I get just about where I want to be when Bubbles’ workday comes to an end.
“Okay, that’s it,” she says, “fifty,” and stops!
“No!” I cry. “More!”
“Look, I already ironed two hours, you know, before you guys even got here—”
“JUST ONE MORE! I BEG OF YOU! TWO MORE! PLEASE!”
“N-O!”
Whereupon, unable (as always!) to stand the frustration—the deprivation and disappointment—I reach down, I grab it, and POW!
Only right in my eye. With a single whiplike stroke of the master’s own hand, the lather comes rising out of me. I ask you, who jerks me off as well as I do it myself? Only, reclining as I am, the jet leaves my joint on the horizontal, rides back the length of my torso, and lands with a thick wet burning splash right in my own eye.
“Son of a bitch kike!” Bubbles screams. “You got gissum all over the couch! And the walls! And the lamp!”
“I got it in my eye! And don’t you say kike to me, you!”
“You are a kike, Kike! You got it all over everything, you mocky son of a bitch! Look at the doilies!”
It’s just as my parents have warned me—comes the first disagreement, no matter how small, and the only thing a shikse knows to call you is a dirty Jew. What an awful discovery—my parents who are always wrong … are right! And my eye—it’s as though it’s been dropped in fire—and now I remember why. On Devil’s Island, Smolka has told us, the guards used to have fun with the prisoners by rubbing sperm in their eyes and making them blind. I’m going blind! A shikse has touched my dick with her bare hand, and now I’ll be blind forever! Doctor, my psyche, it’s about as difficult to understand as a grade-school primer! Who needs dreams, I ask you? Who needs Freud? Rose Franzblau of the New York Post has enough on the ball to come up with an analysis of somebody like me!
“Sheeny!” she is screaming. “Hebe! You can’t even come off unless you pull your own pudding, cheap bastard fairy Jew!”
Hey, enough is enough, where is her sympathy? “But my eye!” and rush for the kitchen, where Smolka and Mandel are rolling around the walls in ecstasy. “—right in the”—erupts Mandel, and folds in half onto the floor, beating at the linoleum with his fists—“right in the fucking—”
“Water, you shits, I’m going blind! I’m on fire!” and flying full-speed over Mandel’s body, stick my head beneath the faucet. Above the sink Jesus still ascends in his pink nightie. That useless son of a bitch! I thought he was supposed to make the Christians compassionate and kind. I thought other people’s suffering is what he told them to feel sorry for. What bullshit! If I go blind, it’s his fault! Yes, somehow he strikes me as the ultimate cause for all this pain and confusion. And oh God, as the cold water runs down my face, how am I going to explain my blindness to my parents! My mother virtually spends half her life up my ass as it is, checking on the manufacture of my stool—how am I possibly going to hide the fact that I no longer have my sight? “Tap, tap, tap, it’s just me, Mother—this nice big dog brought me home, with my cane.” “A dog? In my house? Get him out of here before he makes everything filthy! Jack, there’s a dog in the house and I just washed the kitchen floor!” “But, Momma, he’s here to stay, he has to stay—he’s a seeing-eye dog. I’m blind.” “Oh my God! Jack!” she calls into the bathroom. “Jack, Alex is home with a dog—he’s gone blind!” “Him, blind?” my father replies. “How could he be blind, he doesn’t even know what it means to turn off a light.” “How?” screams my mother. “How? Tell us how such a thing—”
Mother, how? How else? Consorting with Christian girls.
Mandel the next day tells me that within half an hour after my frenetic departure, Bubbles was down on her fucking dago knees sucking his cock.