386
PHILIP ROTH
silly on that picnic. "Big Boy, Big Boy, oh give me all you've got,"
cried the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our storage bin in
the basement, to drive wild after school with my vaselined upright.
"Come, Big Boy, come," 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.
It was at the end of the first year of high school-my first full
year of masturbating-that I discovered on the underside of my
penis, just where the shaft meets the head, a little discolored dot that
has since been diagnosed as a freckle. Cancer. I had given myself
cancer.
All that pulling and pawing and tugging at my own flesh,
all that friction, had given me an incurable disease! At fourteen!
In bed at night the tears rolled down my cheeks: "No!" I sobbed,
"I don't want to die! Please-no!" But then, because I would very
shortly be a corpse anyway, I went ahead as usual and jerked off
into my sock. I had taken to carrying my dirty socks into bed with me
at night, so as to be able to use one as a receptable upon retiring
and the other upon awakening.
Oh, if only I could cut down to one hand-job a day, or hold
the line at two, or even three! But with the horror of oblivion before
me, I actually began to set new records for myself. Before meals.
After meals.
During
meals. Jumping up from the dinner table, I
tragically clutch my belly-diarrhea! I cry, I have been stricken
with diarrhea I-and once behind the locked bathroom door, slip
over my head a pair of my sister's underwear that I have stolen from
her dresser and carry rolled in a handkerchief in my pocket. So
galvanic is the effect of those cotton panties against my tongue-so
galvanic is the very
word
"panties"-not to mention all that pink
against my undie-crazy eyeballs, that the trajectory of my ejaculation
reaches startling new heights: leaving my joint like a rocket it makes
right for the light bulb overhead, where to my wonderment and
horror, it hits and it hangs. Wildly in the first moment I cover my
eyes, expecting an explosion of glass, a burst of flames. Disaster, you
see, disintegration, are continually on my mind. Then quietly as I
can I climb the radiator and remove the sizzling gob with a wad of
toilet paper. I begin a scrupulous search of the shower curtain, the
