Portnoy's Complaint

Alex tells a story about how, at age nine, he felt one of his testicles retreat into his body. He spent months fretting that the disappeared testicle meant that he was turning into a girl. Eventually, the family doctor diagnosed Alex with an undescended testicle and fixed the issue with a series of hormone shots. When he was a teenager, Alex remembers fantasizing about hurting his father’s “ignorant, barbaric carcass” (23). He thinks about the times he saw his parents’ naked bodies and, on one occasion, his mother’s menstrual blood. He still resents being made to purchase sanitary products for her from the store. He describes being four years old and his mother “rolling on her stockings and chattering away” (25), as though she was doing so just for him. Now that Alex is grown up, his mother still puts on her stockings in front of him, but now he forces himself to look away out of respect for his father. Alex remembers taking weekly trips to the Turkish baths with his father. There, he was surrounded by the groaning, naked Jewish men in “a place without goyim or women” (27). He could not help but compare his father’s genitals to his own.