My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Twenty-two

IN OXFORD, Mom fainted a couple of times and began wearing a heart monitor. I called more often, feeling a twinge of anxiety if she didn’t answer. One day I called twice in an hour and it went to voicemail. I was driving to her house when she called me back and apologized.

“I was on the phone,” she said. “I’m ordering something from Victoria’s Secret.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“What do you think of that?”

“Uh, no comment.”

She laughed. “I have to go now,” she said. “I’m watching the Reds. It’s tied in the ninth.”

“Would you like me to come watch with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “No. It’s over. That rat bastard got a hit. Goodbye.”

I returned home and began sifting through my father’s work once more. At the time of his careful filing, he wouldn’t have known that a son would search it for clues and information. The essential DNA of my father lay arrayed on pages before me. This undertaking hasn’t brought me closer to him. If anything, it’s a constant reminder that no matter who I think I am, I will always be my father’s son. I don’t know if I’m a writer because of him or in spite of him. If my life has been motivated by rebellion against my father, what have I gained through the liberty of his demise? A newfound sense of life? No. The intrinsic joy in little things? No.

I don’t miss my father, but without his shackles to strain against, the world is terrifying and vast. I have lost a kind of purpose, a reason to prove myself.

In an article written for Trumpet, a science fiction fanzine from the early sixties, my father declared his credentials as a suitable columnist — he’d read every word of Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and the Marquis de Sade. A subsequent letter to the editor criticized Dad for bragging, and implied that he had lied. I located the books in question. They spanned fourteen inches of shelf space, tall books with hundreds of thin pages. Dad had annotated them heavily, writing comments in response like a form of Midrash. He argued with Freud but not Ellis. The books by de Sade held fewer comments but had more sections marked by brackets and exclamation points. Passages that validated sexual domination were consistently marked. Though he may have begun in an earnest quest for knowledge, his marginalia indicated that he wound up finding confirmation of his own ideas, like a zealot with a sacred text. My father sought formal evidence that his sexual fascism was normal and everyone else had it wrong.

Dad’s sense of cruelty and judgment came from an antiquated mode of Catholicism. He constructed a cross of porn and kept himself tightly affixed to it, suffering for his own obsessions. He exchanged heaven and hell for reincarnation, but the abyss of his shame was pure Roman Catholic. Sex was filthy. Expiation was necessary. The outlet of writing porn was a relief from the guilt brought on by writing porn, a kind of Mobius strip — never-ending and self-perpetuating.

Growing up in a house with sexuality simmering beneath the surface — books, pamphlets, art on the walls, and Dad’s regular comments — instilled in me a yearning to be a ladies’ man. In high school I never had a girlfriend, and I’d had only one during college. My experience with the fatman left me passive, unwilling to try to seduce women. I didn’t want to place a female in a similar situation — uncertain and scared, unable to halt the proceedings, utterly disengaged emotionally. If I liked a woman, which was rare, since most people bored me, I spent enough time with her until she finally made the first move.

Many years later in Salem, Massachusetts, my roommate tried to teach me how to pick up women in bars, an effort I never adequately mastered. It appeared to be a complex and false rigmarole, as if those involved were seeking sexual partners while trying to pretend they weren’t. My roommate offered many tips but was aghast at my inability to read basic signals. I never knew if a woman found me attractive, and simply assumed she didn’t.

In the manner of Cyrano, my roommate attempted assistance. At a local corner tavern called In a Pig’s Eye, a woman asked me what I did. It was a straightforward question, common in banal conversation, but I had no idea how to answer. The truth was I did nothing but read books, ride my bicycle, and try to write. At the time I wasn’t even sure what she meant — what does anyone do? We mark time until we die.

She was still waiting for an answer. My roommate filled the silence.

“He’s a writer,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “What does he write about?”

“His dick.”

She gave me a sharp look and said, “That sounds like pornography.”

“No,” my roommate said. “If he writes about other people’s dicks, it’s porn. But if it’s his own, it’s art.”

The two of them began a lively conversation, later leaving together, and that was as close as I ever got to picking up a woman in a bar.

To get the details straight about the Salem anecdote, I needed access to my journals, which went back forty-five years. They were stacked floor-to-ceiling in a closet, cartons that contained everything I’d written since second grade. Boxes of my father’s work blocked the closet door. My own archives were carefully taped and labeled, but the journal I sought was out of place. I found it inside an unlabeled carton that held a short story I’d forgotten about. My literary archive wasn’t as organized as I thought — much like Dad’s.

To find the Salem section, I read dozens of entries written at a frantic pace, accounts of beleaguered woe and complaint. No matter how far back I looked into my own life, the rapid scrawl covered the same subjects: I felt bad, I didn’t like what I wrote, I hated myself. I resolved to burn the journals. Then I decided not to.

I’d grown up in the country, run from it for most of my life, and now wanted to live nowhere else. Between ages nineteen and fifty-three, I traveled relentlessly, living and working in New York City, Boston, Paris, Florida, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Kentucky, California, and Mississippi. In my free time I visited other places. I’d slept in every state except North Dakota and Delaware and still hoped to get there.

What began as a desire to see the other side of the nearest hill at home had shifted to travel as a habitual way of life. If things didn’t work out, I moved on. I knew how to arrive in a new town, get a job, find a cheap room, and furnish it with junk from the street. I liked living without history, nothing held against me. My brother once asked what I was running from. I told him I wasn’t, I was running toward, only I didn’t know toward what. He nodded and said, “You’ll always be afraid of him, you know.”

I didn’t believe my brother, didn’t want to, couldn’t bear to face the idea. It took courage to live my way — hitchhiking across the country, refusing to take a full-time job. I wasn’t afraid of anything except snakes, and I’d killed one and skinned it and hung the brittle hide on a nail where I could see it every day in order to overcome my phobia. But my brother was right all along. I didn’t know it until my fear ended with Dad’s death.

I became concerned that examining the minutiae of his work was turning me into him. I wrote ten hours a day. At night I read. I avoided leaving the house. I got mad at small things, yelled at inanimate objects. If this were true — the steady evolution to becoming Dad — then my sons will suffer the same fate and become me, an absurd notion that destroys the logic of my premise. Therefore, I am not my father. I’m a middle-aged man contemplating my own mortality through the lens of a parent’s death.

I went outside and watched two sparrows fight in my dusty gravel driveway. On a distant fence post, a hawk watched them. The air thickened suddenly and a quick shower pocked the dirt. The birds flew away and the hawk moved on. The rain stopped. I headed for the woods behind my house. I walked a quarter mile to a barbed wire fence that had been mended several times.

Going through a barbed wire fence is a simple skill. Like swimming or riding a bicycle, once learned it’s never forgotten. I crouched, pressed the low wire down with one hand, stepped over it, and carefully eased my body through the gap. Twice I felt the barbs scrape my shirt, but I was moving slowly enough to stop, bend my knee a quarter inch lower, and pass through safely.

I walked the length of a fallow cotton field to the edge of Berry Branch, a very old creek with a ten-foot bank running nearly straight down. Water moved slowly along the sandy bottom. Kudzu had killed several smaller trees. A large maple lay in the creek, its roots eroded from below. I headed west to a series of smaller gullies where I’d found feather and bone before.

A shape that didn’t fit in caught my peripheral attention. I stopped moving, fearful of a snake, and saw a turtle as wide as my hand. It had been climbing a bank before I arrived. Now it had halted, blending in like a stone, its head protruding from the gray shell, back legs extended on the slight incline. As a boy I’d caught dozens of turtles, carried them home, and kept them in a cardboard box with grass and water until realizing they were the most boring pet of all. I painted the back of their shells with fingernail polish, then set them free, hoping to find one again.

I wondered if this particular turtle had seen a human before. I squatted a few feet away and asked where he’d been and where he was going. I warned him about water moccasins and coyotes. I told him about my father. After twenty minutes my knee was cramped and the turtle hadn’t answered. He stayed immobile during our entire conversation. I told him goodbye and headed home, momentarily cheered.

I walked across the field and passed through the fence without a scratch. Crawling along my arm was a Lone Star tick, with the distinctive yellow spot on its back. I cut it in half with my thumbnail. At home I removed my muddy boots and drank some water. Briefly I wondered what my neighbors would think if they’d come upon me while conversing with a turtle. They’d probably have watched silently, then slipped away. Everyone on the road would know, but nobody would mind. In Mississippi personal eccentricity didn’t matter any more than it did in Kentucky. I’d found a home, the same as Dad had in the hills.