Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [86]
I will! I will! So down I go—and it is warm! Yi, seventeen years old and I am rubbing asses with the enemy! How far I have traveled since September! By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion! And yea is right! On the can I am besieged by doubt and regret, I am suddenly languishing with all my heart for home … When my father drives out to buy “real apple cider” at the roadside farmer’s market off in Union, I won’t be with him! And how can Hannah and Morty go to the Weequahic-Hillside game Thanksgiving morning without me along to make them laugh? Jesus, I hope we win (which is to say, lose by less than 21 points). Beat Hillside, you bastards! Double U, Double E, Q U A, H I C! Bernie, Sidney, Leon, “Ushie,” come on, backfield, FIGHT!
Aye-aye ki-ike-us,
Nobody likes us,
We are the boys of Weequahic High—
Aye-aye ki-ucch-us,
Kish mir in tuchis,
We are the boys of Weequahic High!
Come on—hold that line, make that point, kick ‘em in the kishkas, go team go!
See, I’m missing my chance to be clever and quick-witted in the stands! To show off my sarcastic and mocking tongue! And after the game, missing the historical Thanksgiving meal prepared by my mother, that freckled and red-headed descendant of Polish Jews! Oh, how the blood will flow out of their faces, what a deathly silence will prevail, when she holds up the huge drumstick, and cries, “Here! For guess who!” and Guess-who is found to be AWOL! Why have I deserted my family? Maybe around the table we don’t look like a painting by Norman Rockwell, but we have a good time, too, don’t you worry! We don’t go back to the Plymouth Rock, no Indian ever brought maize to any member of our family as far as we know—but just smell that stuffing! And look, cylinders of cranberry sauce at either end of the table! And the turkey’s name, “Tom”! Why then can’t I believe I am eating my dinner in America, that America is where I am, instead of some other place to which I will one day travel, as my father and I must travel every November out to that hayseed and his wife in Union, New Jersey (the two of them in overalls), for real Thanksgiving apple cider.
“I’m going to Iowa,” I tell them from the phone booth on my floor. “To where?” “To Davenport, Iowa.” “On your first college vacation?!” “—I know, but it’s a great opportunity, and I can’t turn it down—” “Opportunity? To do what?” “Yes, to spend Thanksgiving with this boy named Bill Campbell’s family—” “Who?” “Campbell. Like the soup. He lives in my dorm—” But they are expecting me.
Everybody is expecting me. Morty has the tickets to the game. What am I talking opportunity? “And who is this boy all of a sudden, Campbell?” “My friend! Bill!” “But,” says my father, “the cider.” Oh my God, it’s happened, what I swore I wouldn’t permit!—I am in tears, and “cider” is the little word that does it. The man is a natural—he could go on Groucho Marx and win a fortune guessing the secret-woid. He guesses mine, every single time! And wins my jackpot of contrition! “I can’t back out, I’m sorry, I’ve accepted—we’re going!” “Going? And how, Alex—I don’t understand this plan at all,” interrupts my mother—“how are you going, if I may be so bold, and where? and in a convertible too, that too—” “NO!” “And if the highways are icy, Alex—” “We’re going, Mother, in a Sherman tank! Okay? Okay?” “Alex,” she says sternly, “I hear it in your voice, I know you’re not telling me the whole truth, you’re going to hitchhike in a convertible or some other crazy thing—two months away from home, seventeen years old, and he’s going wild!”
Sixteen years ago I made that phone call. A little more than half the age I am now. November 1950—here, it’s tattooed on my wrist, the