Portnoy's Complaint Read Online Free PDF

humidity, so alive with the mosquitoes that come dive-bombing in from the marshes, that at the end of his day's work he drives sixty-five miles, taking the old Cheesequake Highway- the Cheesequake! My God! the stuff you uncover here!- drives sixty-five miles to spend the night with us in our breezy room at Bradley Beach.
                He arrives after we have already eaten, but his own dinner waits while he unpeels the soggy city clothes in which he has been making the rounds of his debit all day, and changes into his swimsuit. I carry his towel for him as he clops down the street to the beach in his unlaced shoes.   I am dressed in clean short pants and a spotless polo shirt, the salt is showered off me, and my hair- still my little boy's pre-steel wool hair, soft and combable - is beautifully parted and slicked down. There is a weathered iron rail that runs the length of the boardwalk, and I seat myself upon it; below me, in his shoes, my father crosses the empty beach. I watch him neatly set down his towel near the shore. He places his watch in one shoe, his eyeglasses in the other, and then he is ready to make his entrance into the sea. To this day I go into the water as he advised: plunge the wrists in first, then splash the underarms, then a handful to the temples and the back of the neck . . . ah, but slowly, always slowly. This way you get to refresh yourself, while avoiding a shock to the system. Refreshed, unshocked, he turns to face me, comically waves farewell up to where he thinks I'm standing, and drops backward to float with his arms outstretched. Oh he floats so still- he works, he works so hard, and for whom if not for me?- and then at last, after turning on his belly and making with a few choppy strokes that carry him nowhere, he comes wading back to shore, his streaming compact torso glowing from the last pure spikes of light driving in, over my shoulder, out of stifling inland New Jersey, from which I am being spared.
                And there are more memories like this one. Doctor. A lot more.   This is my mother and father I'm talking about.

                But-but-but-let me pull myself together- there is also this vision of him emerging from the bathroom, savagely kneading the back of his neck and sourly swallowing a belch. All right, what is it that was so urgent you couldn't wait till I came out to tell me?
                Nothing, says my mother. It's settled.
                He looks at me, so disappointed. I'm what he lives for, and I know it. What did he do?
                What he did is over and done with, God willing. You, did you move your bowels? she asks him.
                Of course I didn't move my bowels.
                Jack, what is it going to be with you, with those bowels ?
                They're turning into concrete, that's what it's going to be.
                Because you eat too fast.
                I don't eat too fast.
                How then, slow?
                I eat regular.
                You eat like a pig, and somebody should tell you.
                Oh, you got a wonderful way of expressing yourself sometimes, do you know that?
                I'm only speaking the truth, she says. I stand on my feet all day in this kitchen, and you eat like there's a fire somewhere, and this one- this one has decided that the food I cook isn't good enough for him. He'd rather be sick and scare the living daylights out of me.
                What did he do?
                I don't want to upset you, she says. Let's just forget the whole thing. But she can't, so now she begins to cry. Look, she is probably not the happiest person in the world either. She was once a tall stringbean of a girl whom the boys called Red in high school. When I was nine and ten years old I had an absolute passion for her high school yearbook. For a while I