Philip Roth
WHACKING OFF
Then came the years when half my waking life was spent
locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet, or
into the soiled clothes of the laundry hamper, or with a thick splat,
up against the medicine chest mirror, before which I stood in my
dropped drawers to see how it looked coming out. Or else I was
doubled up over my flying fist, eyes closed but mouth wide open,
to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue
and teeth-though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I
got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.
Through a world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled Kleenex
and stained pajamas, I moved my raw and swollen penis, perpetually
in dread of my loathsomeness being discovered by someone coming
upon me just as I was dropping my load. Nonetheless, I was wholly
incapable of keeping my paws from my dong once it started the
climb up my belly. In the middle of a class I would raise my hand
to be excused, rush to the lavatory, and with ten or fifteen savage
strokes, beat off standing up into a urinal. At the Saturday afternoon
movie I would leave my friends to go off to the candy
machine~and
wind up hiding in a distant balcony seat, where with muffled groans
I would squirt my seed into the empty wrapper from a Mounds bar.
On an outing of our family association, I once cored an apple, saw
what it looked like, and ran into the woods to fall upon the orifice
of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually
between the legs of that mythical
girl
who always called me Big
Boy when she begged and wept and pleaded for a bit of what I had.
"Oh, shove it in me, Big Boy," cried the cored apple that I banged
