My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Seventeen

IN THE strict hierarchy of the hills, people from Morehead were at the top of the heap. Next came families who lived on the outskirts, then those with homes along the few blacktop roads that headed into town. Last were country people like myself. Social strata was based on geography and family name. Both of mine were suspect. These distinctions became clearly delineated when I attended Rowan County High School, ten miles away in Morehead.

I loved the boys and girls I’d grown up with. Fourteen of us had moved through the Haldeman grade school together, but now we were dispersed among the largest entering freshman class in the high school’s history. We lost our sense of belonging. One by one, many of my classmates abandoned the routine of attending school. Dropping out was not expected but was accepted and of minimal concern. At four feet, eleven inches tall, I was the shortest kid with the longest hair, allegedly the smartest. As my childhood friends left school, I became socially isolated.

My parents were friends with the head of the theater program at the local college, and when a play called for a child actor, I was added to the cast and performed in several productions. Teachers viewed this as a promising development and excused me from school to attend rehearsals. I swiftly took advantage of the circumstances. My daily pattern was to ride the bus to school, check in to morning homeroom for attendance, leave school under the guise of “play practice at the college,” and catch the bus home in the afternoon. I began keeping my bicycle in town and often arranged to sleep at various people’s homes — friends of my parents or college students to whom I had become a kind of theater mascot.

By the time I was fifteen, my family was accustomed to my absences — wandering the woods, eating elsewhere, sleeping in town. What mattered to my parents were academic grades. The night before an exam, I stayed home and read the textbook, then aced the test. Of equal importance were granting utter obedience to Dad and never causing my mother public embarrassment. With this patina of civility thus attended to, I was free, and Morehead was mine to explore.

I don’t remember how I met the fatman. I assume he approached me. He lived in town on the second floor of a small building, where he rented a single room with a bathroom in the hall. He was nice to me, buying me candy bars and bottles of pop, which my parents never allowed me to have. I told him about my life and the girls I liked. The fatman listened to me. He offered a form of sympathy and attentiveness that I needed. He accepted that I wanted to be an actor or a comic book artist, and he believed such aspirations weren’t ridiculous. He didn’t talk about himself but implied that he’d experienced life beyond the confines of Rowan County, and that I would like it out there when I finally left.

The fatman’s room was small, with no chair, and we both had to sit on the bed. He suggested I lie on my back, and the whole time I pretended it was happening to someone else. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like. I don’t recall the print on the wallpaper or the color of the bedspread. What I do remember is the overhead light fixture, a plain globe in a ceramic setting that emitted a dim yellowish light. Surrounding the globe and painted over many times were plaster rosettes with narrow leaves. I remember the light because I spent all my time staring at it and waiting until I could leave.

Afterward, the fatman said he liked me and gave me money. I left the room and walked to the drugstore, where my mother picked me up after shopping for groceries. I bought a lot of comics at the drugstore. Mom didn’t ask where I got the money.

When I returned to his room a week later, I climbed the steps very slowly, trying not to make any noise because I didn’t want to get the fatman in trouble. A clot of tension rose along my spine, vibrating like an embedded blade. I felt hollow — my heart pounding, sweat trickling down my sides, my mouth dry, my stomach congealed to stone. The fatman opened the door and ushered me in. The bed sagged when he sat on it. The money lay in sight on the bedside table. Time stopped as I slid away from my body, imagining a life beyond the hills. I would be a movie actor. Beautiful women would throw themselves at me. I was the mayor’s son, the governor’s nephew. I was secretly adopted. I was anyone but a lonely kid feeling the dampness of fat fingers in my pants.

Later I decided that my parents would be proud of my open-mindedness in such a small town. They considered themselves progressive. I believed that what I was doing with the fatman made me similar to them. They wrote porn and had affairs. If they knew about the fatman, they would respect me, maybe even like me.

The fatman took me to the movies. We stood in line but didn’t have to buy tickets. The fatman looked at the owner, put his hand on my shoulder, and nodded once. The owner stared at me without changing expression and let us in free. The fatman bought me a large buttered popcorn. Occasionally Mom made popcorn at home, but she never put butter on it. I felt special, eating buttered popcorn and watching The Godfather, which affected me in a very powerful way. I’d never seen a movie that long or that slow. The world it depicted was utterly foreign, but I understood its insular nature, the power dynamics, the violence and loyalties. After the movie, the fatman gave me a dime because I insisted on calling my father and telling him that if anything ever happened to him, I would avenge his death. I was crying into the phone. My father said little. I could hear the clatter of his typewriter keys as I spoke.

The fatman wanted me to touch him in his bed, but I refused. I explained that I liked girls, although I’d never been with one. I’d kissed three and touched one’s bra strap. The fatman offered me two hundred dollars to help him make a movie. They’d shoot the whole thing in a hotel room nearby, but I’d have to touch a man, maybe another boy about my age. I told him that I really wanted to be with a girl and suggested we make that kind of movie instead. He said if I made a movie with a man, he would provide me with a girl afterward. I told him no. He told me to think about it, but I didn’t. I looked at the light fixture and went away in my mind.

I’d developed the ability to go rapidly, to vanish from circumstances and enter a trancelike state in which I was a prince with a personal garrison at my command, a lavish kingdom to rule, and a harem of lovely women. Abruptly I was back in the dim room. My legs were bare and cold, my body tense. The fatman was breathing hard. I took the money and left.

The last time I went to the room, I encountered another boy on the steps. He was a year older than I was, with long hair the same color as mine. New to school, he lived with his mother in a trailer. I’d seen him outside the building before, but we both pretended we hadn’t noticed the other. This time he was crouching on the steps. He motioned me to be quiet. I joined him, moving silently. We were midway up the staircase. The bathroom was at the top of the steps and the door was partly open. Through it we could see the fatman standing in the shower, his vast naked bulk exposed. He was vomiting and defecating simultaneously. It was a sickening sight, so repulsive that it was hard to stop staring. The fatman began crying, an uncontrollable sobbing that made his shoulders quake, his torso ripple. He leaned on the wall as if in surrender.

The other boy and I slipped down the stairs and laughed about what we’d seen. What else could we do? We laughed at the hideous sight. We never talked about it and he soon quit school. A few years passed before I wondered if he’d made a movie at the motel. By then he was already dead of an overdose. The fatman once suggested I bring my brother to visit, and I got very angry. The only good that I can find in all this now is that I protected my brother. At least I did that.

The fatman left town as suddenly as he’d appeared, and I didn’t speak to anyone about him. Instead, I began to shoplift. Every time I entered a store, I walked around as if browsing, while secretly examining lines of sight and avenues of getaway. I was a meticulous planner. The best technique was to set the object I intended to steal near the door, then buy something cheap that required a shopping bag. On my way out of the store, I’d surreptitiously slip the preset goods into the bag. I got very scared as I walked to the door, my body encased in the same adrenalized state as when climbing the steps to the fatman’s room. I breathed slowly through my mouth, sweating inside my clothes. On the sidewalk outside, I felt the euphoria of relief at having gotten away. Stealing made me feel bad about myself, but that didn’t matter, because feeling bad was my normal state. I never got caught. I never stole anything I really wanted.

In a college psychology class, I read an article that referred to people who’d been sexually abused as “victims.” This made me uneasy because I didn’t like the idea of being a victim. I knew the whole fatman business was my fault. Nobody had forced me to enter that building and climb those stairs and push open the dark wooden door. I’d gone there freely. I’d been there more than once. I felt special. I felt bad. I wondered if I was gay. I dropped the class and got stoned, then drunk, and stayed that way for a good while.

Twenty-five years later I began talking about the fatman. I thought I might feel relieved or unburdened, but I didn’t. I told my wife. I told my parents and siblings in a group letter, which I suppose was cowardly, perhaps even cruel. It was shocking enough that no one knew how to respond. My father, surprisingly, called. He wanted to know if the fatman still lived in the county. Coincidentally, Dad evoked The Godfather, saying that he would send Vito and Luigi to kill the man. I didn’t tell him how that particular movie had figured in to things so long ago.

After revealing my old secret, I mainly felt embarrassed. Worse things happened to other boys, and much worse things happened to women. I was never forced or hurt. It was a long time ago. I knew that I should find it in myself to forgive the fatman, an act that ultimately would benefit me. But I couldn’t do it. I’d spent too many years hoping he went to prison. I hoped every inmate spat on him in the corridors. I wanted them to fill his food with poison, smack him around in the yard, and ambush him in the shower. I wanted him to be scared and alone. I wanted his life to be so miserable that he spent every day wishing he were someone else. I wanted him to memorize the dim flat light fixture in his cell. I wanted him as dead as I felt, as dead as I still feel sometimes, as dead as the other boy I saw on the steps will always be.