from Portnoy’s Complaint

PHILIP ROTH

If there’s a place where Catholics and Jews are in complete accord, it’s in their sovereign deployment of guilt. My childhood home was ostensibly atheist, but the mere fact that Irish Catholic blood flows in half of my veins seems to have consigned me, phylogenetically, to the full complement of nookie neuroses. Had I been Jewish it seems I would have gone through the same issues, at least if one believes Philip Roth. The protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint’s agonized confrontations with his sexuality are meant to be a case study in the effects of Jewish Mother Syndrome on a randy adolescent, but they remind me strongly of my own agnostic fits. As such, Portnoy stands as a larger allegory on the pain and humor of a potently sexual individual scraping against a culture of repression. It’s an old tune, certainly, but few sing it as well as Roth.

So what do frustrated teenagers do to release all their pent-up urges? They masturbate, of course, and Portnoy is a pro. He starts by doing it in hiding, though he gets more and more public as the years pass. He does it in the family bathroom, pretending to have the runs; he does it on the bus sitting next to a sleeping archetypal shiksa; he does it in movie theaters; he does it in the woods; he does it in the beef liver his family had reserved for dinner; and he does it in his baseball mitt, having snuck into the burlesque. It’s this last that I’ve selected to excerpt, for here, more than anywhere else in the novel, Roth spells out the material stuff of Portnoy’s fantasy. And it’s a scream. Earlier in the novel Portnoy’s dream women (and milk bottles and cored apples and his sister’s brassieres) called him “Big Boy” and asked him to give them all he’s got; here he adopts the quaint moniker “Fuckface” and gets it on with a chorus girl. In the best book on masturbation, this might well be the finest scene.

What if later, after the show, that one over there with the enormous boobies, what if . . . In sixty seconds I have imagined a full and wonderful life of utter degradation that we lead together on a chenille spread in a shabby hotel room, me (the enemy of America First) and Thereal McCoy, which is the name I attach to the sluttiest-looking slut in the chorus line. And what a life it is too, under our bare bulb (HOTEL flashing just outside our window). She pushes Drake’s Daredevil cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they’re clean again as a little boy’s. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles. She sits on my cock as I take a shit, plunging into my mouth a nipple the size of a tollhouse cookie, and all the while whispering every filthy word she knows viciously in my ear. She puts ice cubes in her mouth until her tongue and lips are freezing, then sucks me off—then switches to hot tea! Everything, everything I have ever thought of, she has thought of too, and will do. The biggest whore (rhymes in Newark with “poor”) there ever was. And she’s mine! “Oh Thereal, I’m coming, I’m coming, you fucking whore,” and so become the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark.