Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [69]
“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.
The top of my head comes off: “She was?”
“Right on her fucking dago knees,” says Mandel. “Schmuck, what’d you go home for?”
“She called me a kike!” I answer self-righteously. “I thought I was blind. Look, she’s anti-Semitic, Ba-ba-lu.”
“Yeah, what do I give a shit?” says Mandel. Actually I don’t think he knows what anti-Semitic means. “All I know is I got laid, twice.”
“You did? With a rubber?”
“Fuck, I didn’t use nothing.”
“But she’ll get pregnant!” I cry, and in anguish, as though it’s me who will be held accountable.
“What do I care?” replies Mandel.
Why do I worry then! Why do I alone spend hours testing Trojans in my basement? Why do I alone live in mortal terror of the syph? Why do I run home with my little bloodshot eye, imagining myself blinded forever, when half an hour later Bubbles will be down eating cock on her knees! Home—to my mommy! To my Tollhouse cookie and my glass of milk, home to my nice clean bed! Oy, civilization and its discontents! Ba-ba-lu, speak to me, talk to me, tell me what it was like when she did it! I have to know, and with details—exact details! What about her tits? What about her nipples? What about her thighs? What does she do with her thighs, Ba-ba-lu, does she wrap them around your ass like in the hot books, or does she squeeze them tight around your cock till you want to scream, like in my dreams? And what about her hair down there? Tell me everything there is to tell about pubic hairs and the way they smell, I don’t care if I heard it all before.