Portnoy's Complaint (6 page)

           
But here in a Turkish bath, why am I dancing around? There are no women here. No women- and no
goyim.
Can it be? There is nothing to worry about!

           
Following the folds at the base of his white buttocks, I proceed out of the dormitory and down the metal stairs to that purgatory wherein the agonies that come of being an insurance agent, a family man, and a Jew will be steamed and beaten from my father's body. At the bottom landing we sidestep a pile of white sheets and a mound of sopping towels, my father pushes a shoulder against a heavy windowless door, and we enter a dark quiet region redolent of wintergreen. The sounds are of a tiny, unenthusiastic audience applauding the death scene in some tragedy: it is the two masseurs walloping and potching at the flesh of their victims, men half-clad in sheets and stretched out across marble slabs. They smack them and knead them and push them around, they slowly twist their limbs as though to remove them in a piece from their sockets- I am hypnotized, but continue to follow after my father as we pass alongside the pool, a small green cube of heart-stopping ice water, and come at last to the steam room.

           
The moment he pushes open the door the place speaks to me of prehistoric times, earlier even than the era of the cavemen and lake dwellers that I have studied in school, a time when above the oozing bog that was the earth, swirling white gasses choked out the sunlight, and aeons passed while the planet was drained for Man. I lose touch instantaneously with that ass-licking little boy who runs home after school with his A's in his hand, the little over-earnest innocent endlessly in search of the key to that unfathomable mystery, his mother's approbation, and am back in some sloppy watery time, before there were families such as we know them, before there were toilets and tragedies such as we know them, a time of amphibious creatures, plunging brainless hulking things, with wet meaty flanks and steaming torsos. It is as though all the Jewish men ducking beneath the cold dribble of shower off in the corner of the steam room, then lumbering back for more of the thick dense suffocating vapors, it is as though they have ridden the time-machine back to an age when they existed as some herd of Jewish animals, whose only utterance is
oy,
oy
. . . for this is the sound they make as they drag themselves from the shower into the heavy gush of fumes. They appear, at long last, my father and his fellow sufferers, to have returned to the habitat in which they can be natural. A place without
goyim
and women.

           
I stand at attention between his legs as he coats me from head to toe with a thick lather of soap- and eye with admiration the baggy substantiality of what overhangs the marble bench upon which he is seated. His scrotum is like the long wrinkled face of some old man with an egg tucked into each of his sagging jowls- while mine might hang from the wrist of some little girl's dolly like a teeny pink purse. And as for hi
s shlong,
to me, with that fingertip of a prick that my mother likes to refer to in public (once, okay, but that once will last a lifetime) as my little thing, his
shlong
brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school.
Shlong:
the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the
meatishness,
that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty, and unseltconscious dangle of that living piece of hose through which he passes streams of water as thick and strong as rope-while I deliver forth slender yellow threads that my euphemistic mother calls a sis. A sis, I think, is undoubtedly what my sister makes, little yellow threads that you can sew with . . . Do you want to make a nice sis? she asks me-when I want to make a torrent, I want to make a flood: I want like he does to shift the tides of the toilet bowl! Jack, my mother calls to him, would you close that door, please? Some example you're setting for you know who. But if only that had been so, Mother! If only you-know-who could have found some inspiration in what's-his-name's coarseness! If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame-every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.

           
We are in my Uncle Nate's clothing store on Springfield Avenue in Newark. I want a bathing suit with a
 
built-in athletic support. I am eleven years old and that is my secret: I want a jock. I know not to say anything, I just know to keep my mouth shut, but then how do you get it if you don't ask for it? Uncle Nate, a spiffy dresser with a
 
mustache, removes from his showcase a pair of little boy’s trunks, the exact style I have always worn. He indicates that this is the best suit for me, fast-drying and won't chafe. What's your favorite color? Uncle Nate asks- maybe you want it in your school color, huh? I turn scarlet, though that is not my answer. I don't want that kind of suit any more, and oh, I can smell humiliation in the wind, hear it rumbling in the distance-any minute now it is going to crash upon my prepubescent head. Why not? my father asks. Didn't you hear your uncle, this is the best- I want one with a jockstrap in it! Yes, sir, this just breaks my mother up. For
your
little thing? she asks, with an amused smile.

           
Yes, Mother, imagine: for my little thing.

           
The potent man in the family-successful in business, tyrannical at home-was my father's oldest brother, Hymie, the only one of my aunts and uncles to have been born on the other side and to talk with an accent. Uncle Hymie was in the soda-vater business, bottler and distributor of a sweet carbonated drink called Squeeze, the
vin ordinaire
of our dinner table. With his neurasthenic wife Clara, his son Harold, and his daughter Marcia, my uncle lived in a densely Jewish section of Newark, on the second floor of a two-family house that he owned, and into whose bottom floor we moved in 1941
,
when my father transferred to the Essex County office of Boston Northeastern.

           
We moved from Jersey City because of the anti-Semitism. Just before the war, when the Bund was feeling its oats, the Nazis used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house. When we drove by in the car on Sundays, my father would curse them, loud enough for me to hear, not quite loud enough for them to hear. Then one night a swastika was painted on the front of our building. Then a swastika was found carved into the desk of one of the Jewish children in Hannah's class. And Hannah herself was chased home from school one afternoon by a gang of boys, who it was assumed were anti-Semites on a rampage. My parents were beside themselves. But when Uncle Hymie heard the stories, he had to laugh: This surprises you? Living surrounded on four sides by
goyim,
and this surprises you? The only place for a Jew to live is among Jews,
especially,
he said with an emphasis whose significance did not entirely escape me, especially when children are growing up with people from the other sex. Uncle Hymie liked to lord it over my father, and took a certain pleasure in pointing out that in Jersey City only the building we lived in was exclusively Jewish, whereas in Newark, where
he
still lived, that was the case with the entire Weequahic neighborhood. In my cousin Marcias graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven
goyim
and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie . . . So my father, after much deliberation, put in for a transfer back to his native village, and although his immediate boss was reluctant to lose such a dedicated worker (and naturally shelved the request), my mother eventually made a long-distance phone call on her own, to the Home Office up in Boston, and following a mix-up that I don't even want to begin to go into, the request was granted: in 1941 we moved to Newark.

           
Harold, my cousin, was short and bullish in build-like all the men in our family, except me-and bore a strong resemblance to the actor John Garfield. My mother adored him and was always making him blush (a talent the lady possesses) by saying in his presence, If a girl had Heshele's dark lashes, believe me, she'd be in Hollywood with a million-dollar contract. In a corner of the cellar,
 
across from where Uncle Hymie had cases of Squeeze piled to the ceiling, Heshie kept a set of York weights with which he worked out every afternoon before the opening of the track season. He was one of the stars of the team, and held a city record in the javelin throw; his events were discus, shot, and javelin, though once during a meet at School Stadium, he was put in by the coach to run the low hurdles, as a substitute for a sick teammate, and in a spill at the last jump, fell and broke his wrist. My Aunt Clara at that time-or was it all the time?-was going through one of her nervous seizures -in comparison to Aunt Clara, my own vivid momma is a Gary Cooper -and when Heshie came home at the end of the day with his arm in a cast, she dropped in a faint to the ktchen floor. Heshie's cast was later referred to as the straw that broke the camel's back, whatever that meant.

To me, Heshie was everything-that is, for the little time I knew him. I used to dream that I too would someday be a member of the track team and wear scant white shorts with a slit cut up either side to accommodate the taut and bulging muscles of my thighs.

 
Just before he was drafted into the Army in 1943? Heshie decided to become engaged to a girl named Alice Dembosky, the head drum majorette of the high school band. It was Alice's genius to be able to twirl not just one but two silver batons simultaneously-to pass them over her shoulders, glide them snakily between her legs, and then toss them fifteen and twenty feet into the air, catching one, then the other, behind her back. Only rarely did she drop a baton to the turf, and then she had a habit of shaking her head petulantly and crying out in a little voice, Oh, Alice! that only could have made Heshie love her the more; it surely had that effect upon me. Oh-Alice, with that long blond hair leaping up her back and about her face! cavorting with such exuberance half the length of the playing field! Oh-Alice, in her tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers, and the white boots that come midway up the muscle of her lean, strong calves! Oh Jesus, Legs Dembosky, in all her dumb, blond
goyische
beauty! Another icon!

 
That Alice was so blatantly a
shikse
caused no end of grief in Heshies household, and even in my own; as for the community at large, I believe there was actually a kind of civic pride taken in the fact that a gentile could have assumed a position of such high visibility in our high school, whose faculty and student body were about ninety-five percent Jewish. On the other hand, when Alice performed what the loudspeaker described as her “piece de resistance”-
 
twirling a baton that had been wrapped at either end in oil-soaked rags and then set afire-despite all the solemn applause delivered by the Weequahic fans in tribute to the girl's daring and concentration, despite the grave
boom
boom
boom
of our bass drum and the gasps and shrieks that went up when she seemed about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts-despite this genuine display of admiration and concern, I think there was still a certain comic detachment experienced on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a
goy
would think to develop in the first place.

Which was more or less the prevailing attitude toward athletics in general, and football in particular, among the parents in the neighborhood: it was for the
goyim.
 
Let them knock their heads together for glory, for victory in a ball game! As my Aunt Clara put it, in that taut, violin-string voice of hers, “Heshie! Please! I do not need
goyische
naches!
Didn't need, didn't want such ridiculous pleasures and satisfactions as made the gentiles happy . . . At football our Jewish high school was notoriously hopeless (though the band, may I say, was always winning prizes and commendations ); our pathetic record was of course a disappointment to the young, no matter what the parents might feel, and yet even as a child one was able to understand that for us to lose at football was not exactly the ultimate catastrophe. Here, in fact, was a cheer that my cousin and his buddies used to send up from the stands at the end of a game in which Weequahic had once again met with seeming disaster. I used to chant it with them.

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,

Were the boys who eat no ham,

We play football, we play soccer-

And we keep matzohs in our locker!

Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!

So what if we had lost? It turned out we had other things to be proud of. We ate no ham. We kept matzohs in our lockers. Not really, of course, but if we wanted to
we could,
and
we
weren't
ashamed
to
say
that
u)e
actually
did!
We were Jews-and we weren't ashamed to say it! We were Jews-and not only were we not inferior to the
goyim
who beat us at football, but the chances were that because we could not commit our hearts to victory in such a thuggish game, we were superior! We were Jews-
and we
were
superior!

White bread, rye bread

Pumpernickel, challah,

All those for Weequahic,

Stand up and hollah!

Another cheer I learned from Cousin Hesh, four more lines
 
of poetry
 
to
 
deepen
 
my
 
understanding
 
of
 
the injustices we suffered . . . The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the
goyim
pretended to be something special, while
we
were actually
their
moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us!