Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [77]
he’s finished they don’t pick me up and carry me around the synagogue like the Torah itself, bear me gravely up and down the aisles while the congregants struggle to touch their lips to some part of my new blue Ohrbach’s suit, while the old men press forward to touch their tallises to my sparkling London Character shoes. “Let me through! Let me touch!” and when I am world-renowned, they will say to their grandchildren, “Yes, I was there, I was in attendance at the bar mitzvah of Chief Justice Portnoy—“an ambassador,” says Rabbi Warshaw, “now our ambassador extraordinary—” Only the tune has changed! And how! “Now,” he says to me, “with the mentality of a pimp! With the human values of a race-horse jockey! What is to him the heights of human experience? Walking into a restaurant with a long-legged kurveh on his arm! An easy lay in a body stocking!” “Oh, please, Re-ver-ed, I’m a big boy now—so you can knock off the rabbinical righteousness. It turns out to be a little laughable at this stage of the game. I happened to prefer beautiful and sexy to ugly and icy, so what’s the tragedy? Why dress me up like a Las Vegas hood? Why chain me to a toilet bowl for eternity? For loving a saucy girl?” “Loving? You? Too-ey on you! Self-loving, boychick, that’s how I spell it! With a capital self! Your heart is an empty refrigerator! Your blood flows in cubes! I’m surprised you don’t clink when you walk! The saucy girl, so-called—I’ll bet saucy!—was a big fat feather in your prick, and that alone is her total meaning, Alexander Portnoy! What you did with your promise! Disgusting! Love? Spelled l-u-s-t! Spelled s-e-l-f!” “But I felt stirrings, in Howard Johnson’s—” “In the prick! Sure!” “No!” “Yes! That’s the only part you ever felt a stirring in your life! You whiner! You big bundle full of resentments! Why, you have been stuck on yourself since the first grade, for Christ’s sake!” “Have not! “Have! Have! This is the bottom truth, friend! Suffering mankind don’t mean shit to you! That’s a blind, buddy, and don’t you kid yourself otherwise! Look, you call out to your brethren, look what I’m sticking my dicky into—look who I’m fucking: a fifty-foot fashion model! I get free what others pay upwards of three hundred dollars for! Oh boy, ain’t that a human triumph, huh? Don’t think that three hundred bucks don’t titillate you plenty—cause it does! Only how about look what I’m loving, Portnoy!” “Please, don’t you read the New York Times? I have spent my whole adult life protecting the rights of the defenseless! Five years I was with the ACLU, fighting the good fight for practically nothing. And before that a Congressional committee! I could make twice, three times the money in a practice of my own, but I don’t! I don’t! Now I have been appointed—don’t you read the papers!—I am now Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity! Preparing a special report on bias in the building trades—” “Bullshit. Commissioner of Cunt, that’s who you are! Commissioner of Human Opportunists! Oh, you jerk-off artist! You case of arrested development! All is vanity, Portnoy, but you really take the cake! A hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q. and all of it right down the drain! A lot of good it did to skip those two grades of grammar school, you dummy!” “What?” “And spending-money your father sent yet to Antioch College—that the man could hardly afford! All the faults come from the parents, right, Alex? What’s wrong, they did—what’s good, you accomplished all on your own! You ignoramus! You icebox heart! Why are you chained to a toilet? I’ll tell you why: poetic justice! So you can pull your peter till the end of time! Jerk your precious little dum-dum ad infinitum! Go ahead, pull off, Commissioner, that’s all you ever really gave your heart to anyway—your stinking putz!”
I arrive in my tuxedo while she is still in the shower. The door has been left unlocked, apparently so that I can come right in without disturbing her. She lives on the top floor of a big modern building in the East Eighties, and it irritates me to think that anybody who happened through the corridor