Portnoy's Complaint (1972)

Richard Benjamin: Alexander Portnoy

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Quotes 

• Alexander Portnoy : Ah! Yeah, yeah. I'm wasting time. I know, I know. Okay!

• Alexander Portnoy : Look, I just want you to know that I still think all of this is gonna be a complete waste of time. Not a goddamn thing is gonna come of it. I mean, ever since I got back from Europe, I've been lying in that womanless bed of mine every night with a volume of Sigmund Freud in my hand learning all there is to know about impedance and infantile fixations. Sometimes Freud in hand, sometimes Portnoy in hand. Sometimes both. Which reminds me, my mother called me today right in the middle...

  [chuckles] 

  Alexander Portnoy : Nah, to hell with that. It's the Monkey.

• Alexander Portnoy : Here he is, ladies and gentlemen direct from a long record-breaking engagement with his own family. That bad little, good little, Jewish boy torn by desires repugnant to his conscience and by a conscience repugnant to his desires brought to you by the makers of Two Cents Plain. "The Alexander Portnoy Show!"

• Alexander Portnoy : I'll get into you, uh, into it, right away.

• Alexander Portnoy : I used to spend half my life, locked in the bathroom firing my wad down the toilet bowl or into the dirty clothes in the laundry hamper or up against the medicine chest mirror so I could see how it looked coming out.

• The Monkey : Who's Thereal?

  Alexander Portnoy : Thereal?

  The Monkey : I think that's what you said.

  Alexander Portnoy : When?

  The Monkey : When you were cumming. You cried out, "Thereal!" Come on, who the hell is she?

  Alexander Portnoy : Do you really wanna know?

  The Monkey : Better be good.

  Alexander Portnoy : She was a mythical, marvelous whore I invented when I was a kid in high school. A girl of my erotic dreams: Thereal McCoy.

  The Monkey : Oh, and I'm your erotic dream come true.

• Jack Portnoy : One, two, three, you were Bar Mitzvahed and that was that? What do you know about the history of the Jewish people that you could call all that suffering and heartache a lie?

  Alexander Portnoy : I know enough!

• Alexander Portnoy : I suddenly remember how my mother taught me to take a leak, standing up. This may well be the piece of information we've been waiting for. No? The key to what determined my character - or the lack of it. You wanna hear how I learned to pee into the bowl, like a big man? Just listen to this. I stand over the circle of water while with one hand my momma makes a trickle from the faucet. And with the other hand she tickles the underside of my cute little weenie. I guess she thinks that's how you get stuff to come out of the front of that thing. And let me tell you, doctor, the lady is right.

• Alexander Portnoy : Do you get what I'm trying to say? All I really had that I could call my own was my wang. In fact it was the only thing that really understood me.

• Alexander Portnoy : I was totally incapable of keeping my paws from my dong once it started to climb.

  The Monkey : Me too.

  Alexander Portnoy : Nay. In the middle of a class I would rush to the boys' room and beat off into urinal. At the movies, I'd leave my friends, go to the candy machine and wind up in a distant balcony seat squirting my seed into the empty wrapper from a Mounds Bar.

  The Monkey : God, I love this.

  Alexander Portnoy : Once at a picnic, my mother cored an apple for me. And when I saw what it looked like, I ran off with it into the woods. And pretended that the cool and mealy hole of the fruit was between the legs of that wonderful girl who always called me "big boy" and pleaded for more. "Oh, shove it in me, big boy", cried the cored apple as I banged it silly, on that picnic. "Big boy, big boy. Oh, give me all you've got!" begged the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our basement to drive wild after school with my vaselined upright. "Cum, big boy, cum!" screamed the maddened piece of liver that in my insanity I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a Bar Mitzvah lesson.

  The Monkey : Liver. That's really creative.

• Bubbles Girardi : Is that it?

  Alexander Portnoy : Well, it gets bigger when it gets harder.

  Bubbles Girardi : I ain't got all night, you know.

  Alexander Portnoy : Oh, I don't think it'll be all night.

• Bubbles Girardi : Son of a bitch! You got jizzum all over the couch!

  Alexander Portnoy : I got it in my eye! I'll go blind!

  Bubbles Girardi : You got it all over everything. Look at the doilies.

• The Monkey : What do you want?

  Alexander Portnoy : Buy you a drink.

  The Monkey : Real swinger.

  Alexander Portnoy : To eat your pussy baby, how's that?

  The Monkey : That's more like it.

• Alexander Portnoy : Oh, Mama! Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentlemen. Huh! For all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires.

• Alexander Portnoy : Fruit cake, mother! A little fruit cake is what you were trying to make me. The mystery is how come I didn't turn out like all the nice young men I see strolling hand-in-hand in Bloomingdales, on Saturday mornings. How come I didn't wind up sharing a house in Fire Island with someone in eye makeup named Sheldon? The real mystery, if you wanna know the truth, doctor is how I ever made it into the world of pussy at all. That's the miracle.

• Alexander Portnoy : This is my life. My only life. And I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke. I am the son in the Jewish joke. Only it ain't no joke.

• Alexander Portnoy : What was it with these Jewish parents? Always hawking us to be good sons. Good boys. Always hawking us to be nice. To be bad, doctor. To be bad and enjoy it. That's the real struggle. That's what makes men of us boys!

• The Monkey : This married couple I know, pretty close friends, came by to make dinner for me. Well, they could hardly wait to finish the meal. Right in the middle of the jello, they said they wanted me to watch them screw.

  Alexander Portnoy : In the middle of the jello?

• The Monkey : I'm Mary Jane Reid. They call me The Monkey.

  Alexander Portnoy : The Monkey?

  The Monkey : New position I once invented made a guy I knew, become a monkey.

  Alexander Portnoy : Mm-hmm. Am I gonna get a crack at that zoo sometime?

  The Monkey : I'll give it some thought.

• Alexander Portnoy : Get out while there's still time. Who and what can this crazy broad be?

• The Monkey : Why should it be that I earn as much in one hour posing in a girdle as my illiterate old man used to make in a week in the mines?

  Alexander Portnoy : Because Monkey dear, the output of one West Virginia coal miner has far less influence on the national economy than your delicious body in Vogue or Harpers Bazaar.

• Alexander Portnoy : You gotta understand, she was the star of every pornographic film I had ever made in my head since I first laid a hand on my joint. Just as I was the figure who'd dwelled at the heart of her dreams, so it turned out. The kind of man who would be good to a wife and children, who would feast on her body and then come slithering up to talk a lot and explain things. Advise her what books to read and how to vote. Make judgments on just about *everything*.

• The Monkey : Now me, you.

  Alexander Portnoy : Really?

  The Monkey : Yeah. One good turn deserves another.

• Alexander Portnoy : Being in public life, I have to be discreet.

  The Monkey : Just as long as you make up for it in private.

• Alexander Portnoy : I know a poem and I'm going to recite it.

  The Monkey : Oh! Not now. I don't understand poems.

  Alexander Portnoy : You'll understand this one. It's about fucking. A swan fucks a beautiful girl.

  The Monkey : Oh! Goody!

  Alexander Portnoy : But it's a serious poem!

  The Monkey : Recite the dirty poem, Portnoy.

  Alexander Portnoy : "A sudden blow: the great wings beating still, Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed, By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast."

  The Monkey : Hmm, where did you learn something like that?

  Alexander Portnoy : Shh-shh-shh. There's more." How can those terrified vague fingers push, The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?"

  The Monkey : Hey, thighs.

  Alexander Portnoy : "And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there..."

  The Monkey : Yeah, shuddering loins.

  Alexander Portnoy : "The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power. Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"

  The Monkey : Oh!

  Alexander Portnoy : That's it.

• The Monkey : You know something? My little Virginia is so sore, it can hardly breathe.

  Alexander Portnoy : Poor little Virginia.

• The Monkey : I was a guest at Ali Khan's for dinner when you were still back in Newark, New Jersey, finger fucking your little Jewish girlfriends.

  Alexander Portnoy : They weren't Jewish.

• Alexander Portnoy : Can I ask you a very personal question?

  The Monkey : If you hold my hand or my leg.

• Alexander Portnoy : For Christ's sake, don't say "cunt" to the Mayor's wife.

  The Monkey : What?

  Alexander Portnoy : You heard me. When we get there don't start talking about your favorite positions, to whoever opens the door. Don't make a grab for big John's schlong until we've been there at least an hour. Okay?

  The Monkey : I'll say and do, and wear anything I want. This is a free country, you up up-uptight Jewish prick!

• Alexander Portnoy : I've said nothing.

  The Monkey : You got those black heeb eyes. Man, they say it for you.

• Alexander Portnoy : You gotta be kidding.

  The Monkey : If I'm kidding, what's that bulge in your trousers? A chocolate eclair?

• Naomi, Girl in Israel : I'm most interested in finding out how the Jewish male exists in the United States, today.

  Alexander Portnoy : I'll be happy to give you all the gory details. Then you'll have to reward me.

  Naomi, Girl in Israel : I do?

• The Monkey : No good bastard.

  Alexander Portnoy : Me?

  The Monkey : Making me do a thing like that.

  Alexander Portnoy : Me?

  The Monkey : Yes, you.

  Alexander Portnoy : You're the one who stuck your hand between her legs and got the ball rolling. You kissed her on the goddamn lips.

  The Monkey : Because if I'm gonna do something, then like I do it.

• Alexander Portnoy : Do you like girls?

  The Monkey : Is that the question? Do you dig men?

  Alexander Portnoy : Never. Notice I answered. You didn't.

• Alexander Portnoy : Why sleep on a clammy beach somewhere when I have this big comfortable bed for the two of us to share?

  Naomi, Girl in Israel : Me, in that bed?

  Alexander Portnoy : I'm not trying to to turn you into a bourgeoisie. If the bed is too luxurious, we'll do it on the floor.

  Naomi, Girl in Israel : Sexual intercourse with you?

  Alexander Portnoy : Yes, yes, with me.

• Naomi, Girl in Israel : You are the most unhappy man I've ever known. Childish and without respect for yourself or anyone.

  Alexander Portnoy : Tell me more.

  Naomi, Girl in Israel : And you're obviously a person of intelligence. Which makes your infantile attitude even more distasteful.

  Alexander Portnoy : Beautifully stated. Now, let's fuck.

  Naomi, Girl in Israel : You are disgusting.

  Alexander Portnoy : And I can prove it.

• Naomi, Girl in Israel : Sexual intercourse with you?

  Alexander Portnoy : Yes, yes! With me. Fresh from my inherently injust system.

• Alexander Portnoy : It's coming out of my ears already, the Goyim and the Jews. Do me a favor, my people, and stick your narrow-minded categories up your narrow-minded ass.

• Sophie Portnoy : So, you like this girl?

  Alexander Portnoy : I like a lot of girls.

  Sophie Portnoy : And she likes the Jews?

  Alexander Portnoy : One. Me.

• Alexander Portnoy : I don't know! I don't know! Maybe it's because I'm a fucked up neurotic Jew!

• Hannah Portnoy : You are nothing but a self-hating Jew.

  Alexander Portnoy : They're the best kind in bed.