Portnoy's Complaint Read Online Free PDF Page B

kept it in the same drawer with that other volume of exotica, my stamp collection.

                Sophie Ginsky the boys call Red,
                She'll go far with her big brown eyes and her clever head.

                And that was my mother!
                Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but   apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during   the First World War. So I thought, at any rate, when I turned the pages of her yearbook, and she pointed out to me her dark-haired beau, who had been captain of the team, and today, to quote Sophie, the biggest manufacturer of mustard in New York. And I could have married him instead of your father, she confided in me, and more than once. I used to wonder sometimes what that would have been like for my momma and me, invariably on the occasions when my father took us to dine out at the corner delicatessen. I look around the place and think, We would have manufactured all this mustard. I suppose she must have had thoughts like that herself.
                He eats French fries, she says, and sinks into a kitchen chair to Weep Her Heart Out once and for all. He goes after school with Melvin Weiner and stuffs himself with French-fried potatoes. Jack, you tell him, I'm only his mother. Tell him what the end is going to be. Alex, she says passionately, looking to where I am edging out of the room, tateleh , it begins with diarrhea, but do you know how it ends? With a sensitive stomach like yours, do you know how it finally ends ? Wearing a plastic bag to do your business in!                                                                                   
                Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with a woman's tears? My father. I am second. He says to me, You heard your mother. Don't eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school.
                Or ever, she pleads.
                Or ever, my father says.
                Or hamburgers out, she pleads.
                Hamburgers , she says bitterly, just as she might say Hitler , where they can put anything in the world in that they want-and he eats them. Jack, make him promise before he gives himself a terrible tsura , and it's too late.
                I promise ! I scream. I promise! and race from the kitchen- to where? Where else.
                I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. Now this time don't flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what's in that bowl!
                Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own. You should have watched her at work during polio season! She should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes! Open your mouth. Why is your throat red? Do you have a headache you're not telling me about? You're not going to any baseball game, Alex, until I see you move   your neck. Is your neck stiff? Then why are you moving it that way? You ate like you were nauseous, are you nauseous? Well, you   ate like you were nauseous. I don't want you drinking from the drinking fountain in that playground. If you're thirsty wait until you're home. Your throat is sore, isn't it? I can tell how you're swallowing. I think maybe what you are going to do, Mr. Joe Di   Maggie, is put that glove away and lie down. I am not going to allow you to go outside in this heat and run around, not with that sore throat, I'm not. I want to take your temperature. I don't like the sound of this throat business one bit. To be very frank, I am actually beside myself that you have been walking around all day with a sore throat and not