My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Twenty-eight

MONTHS OF close proximity to my father’s pattern of thought influenced me to think like him, then behave like him — distant, preoccupied, and critical. I began to question myself, the validity of my undertaking. At times my mood veered into self-hatred. I wasn’t suicidal, but the notion flitted through my mind, an option hiding in the shadowy perimeter. It concerned me enough to take a break from Dad’s papers.

I thought of the poet John Berryman, whose father killed himself, an act from which no son could ever recover. In a poem called “Of Suicide,” he wrote:

Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me.

I drink too much.

I first read this poem in my early twenties with little knowledge about Berryman, having heard incorrectly that he had leaped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. The poem had an exotic appeal, a glamorization of suicide and liquor. The lines were meaningful to me, since I often felt possessed by thoughts of my father and his occasional talk of suicide.

A few years after reading the poem, I happened to be in Minneapolis. A friend took me to the bleak Washington Avenue Bridge and pointed out the spot — not where Berryman jumped but where he landed — on the bank of the Mississippi River. It was a shocking moment for me, destroying the romantic notion of the bearded genius soaring from the grand and misty Golden Gate into the sea. Instead, in the middle of a brutal midwestern winter, he jumped off an ugly narrow bridge and died from the impact with frozen dirt.

The last time I lived in Kentucky, my house sat on a hill overlooking a pond, and in the morning the birds declared their various overlapping territories while snatching insects near the surface of the water. I often rose early to listen to them, then returned to bed. Before moving away, I placed a cheap cassette recorder outside and recorded the birds. For many years I carried the tape as a last resort to homesickness. If despair overran me, the knowledge that I could listen to the birds provided strength. The cassette was similar to the Robert Arthur short story “Mr. Manning’s Money Tree,” in which the promise of cash buried beneath a tree sustains a man through difficult financial times. Knowledge of its existence allows him to take business risks he might have avoided. At the end he digs up the money, but it’s not there.

I decided to listen to the tape, surrounded by my father’s dusty archives. It seemed appropriate to hear Kentucky birdsong amid all this material made in Haldeman. The cassette emitted a series of clicks followed by a continual hum. There was no birdsong. Years before, I’d pressed the wrong buttons on the recording device. Like the buried money of Mr. Manning, the promise of hearing the birds when I needed them had gotten me through hard times. The absurdity of the situation cheered me.

Many years ago I purchased an original painting by Ronald Cooper, a Kentucky folk artist of some repute. The eleven-by-fourteen painting is acrylic on canvas. An unpainted section on the bottom right corner has the date 1994, a copyright sign, the artist’s signature, and the name of the painting: Suicide. The colors are straight from the tube, unmixed, and the drawing is quite crude. The composition is divided in half — the top is a blue background strung with clouds, while the bottom is a field of solid green. In the foreground stands a man wearing a black shirt and white pants. Spots of blood mar his clothes. Protruding from his shirt collar is the stump of a bleeding neck. He grips a bloody butcher knife in one hand, while the other holds aloft his own decapitated head. An arrow beside his mouth points to the words:

i WiSH i HADNT DONE THiS.

I kept the painting hidden, believing it was too gruesome for my young sons to see. When they got older, I hung it in my writing studio and imagined it as the cover for a book. The face of the bleeding head has an expression of startled dismay, as if he can’t quite accept his situation. I believe I’d feel the same way if I killed myself — stunned regret at the final millisecond, too late to turn back. It reminds me of the legends of the French guillotine: a freshly cut-off head blinking in a basket, the mouth struggling to speak, the body unwilling to accept its own death.

Like anyone, I suppose, I have known several people who killed themselves, including my best friend from childhood. Such a death leaves guilt in its wake. Every surviving friend and family member believes that he or she could have prevented it. Each person recalls a visit not made or a phone call cut short. We pore over our final interactions, seeking a retrospective portent of the future that came to be. We want a sign that it was not our fault.

I look at the painting now and wonder why it commanded my attention for so long. It’s an ugly thing made with brute force, the crude style echoing the figure’s dilemma. What began as a personal warning — don’t kill yourself — has evolved into a commentary about the nature of remorse. The man has a deep regret: I wish I hadn’t done this.

Twice in my life I experienced what I understood to be severe depression. Every action was unimaginable: getting the mail, rising from a chair, making the bed, taking a shower. The act of concocting my own extinction would be too much effort. Then there’d be the burden of the note left behind. Where to start and where to end? I tend to get depressed if I’m not engaged in a writing project, and it seemed supremely depressing that revising a suicide note might rescue me from the doldrums. Despite my fascination with the painting, I am not by nature suicidal. I have more of a gambler’s mentality — everything can change at any moment, so why make a move with such undeniable finality?

In 1985 I received a strange phone call from my parents, both on the line at once, expressing concern for my mental health and possible suicide. I was astonished and laughed it off until I understood that they were serious. There followed a flurry of calls over several days during which my parents retreated from their initial concerns and blamed my sister for putting the idea in their heads. My mother sent me a letter that said:

I don’t and didn’t think for one minute that you were in danger of contemplating suicide. You’re too curious about life, and are too afraid you might miss something to take your dying into your own hands. Therefore you would not take your own life. It was your father’s runaway imagination that produced the concern for you.

Not long ago I bought some new makeup, including rouge. Two weeks later Andy said he wanted to ask me something, very seriously. He was worried that something had happened to my face, one of my cheeks was discolored. No, it was the rouge and he waited two weeks before bringing it up.

Runaway imagination. Always looking for some complicated, dramatic reason instead of thinking of the simple. Surely you can understand that, since if anybody inherited the runaway imagination, you did.

I enjoy Mom’s positive spin on a grotesque situation, utilizing a certain cold logic to reach her conclusion. The succinctness of her anecdote, the blunt reasoning, reminds me that I am her son as well, half McCabe — pragmatic people who stare clear-eyed at obstacles and overcome them. My imagination is tempered by reason, grounded in harsh reality.

A few years later Dad began calling me late at night, maudlin from bourbon. He said he’d been thinking about suicide. He’d even picked out the place — the bathroom shower — so it’d be easy for Mom to clean the mess. He figured he’d use a shotgun but had run into a problem. His arms were too short to reach the trigger. My first thought was practical: use a forked stick. But I refrained from advice, and merely listened. He believed that putting the barrel against the roof of his mouth instead of his forehead would ensure success because the tissue was very soft. I said that made sense, thinking not about my father but about a buddy who’d shot himself in the temple with a small-caliber handgun. The bullet hit the skull and deflected, losing power from impact. Instead of ricocheting away, the bullet traveled around the front of his forehead below his skin. He lived, badly scarred and partially deaf. Another guy I knew deliberately rammed his car head-on into a coal truck at high speed, but only managed to blind himself. Three other friends had gotten the job done, so it was with a certain hardened ear that I listened to my father.

I wasn’t sure if he was serious or operating within delusion; for all I knew, I was talking to John Cleve. The last time he’d called drunk, he’d been in an exhilarated state, claiming he could fly. I told him that was great, he could come visit. “No,” he explained, “I mean really fly. I stand at the head of the steps and absolutely know if I jump, I will fly to the downstairs hall.” Presumably he never tried it.

At the end of that suicide call, the first of many, I asked if he’d talked to Mom about this and he got angry, saying of course not in a familiar tone of contempt. The following day I called Mom and told her to unload the shotgun. She didn’t ask why. For the last twenty-five years I lived with the understanding that at any moment I might receive the news that Dad had killed himself. I wondered where the family would bathe when we gathered for his death. As the oldest, I’d have to use the shower first. To prepare myself, I imagined the act in great detail, down to my own post-traumatic hallucination of seeing the soapsuds run pink from traces of blood embedded in the grout.

After he died, I found the old shotgun hanging on hooks above a door, the metal pitted, the action rusty, the barrel filled with grime. It was a break-action single-barrel.410, forty-two inches long. I placed the barrel against my face and could easily reach the trigger. Dad was taller, with much longer arms than mine. Either he’d lied to me on the phone or he’d traded in a twelve-gauge for one with a shorter barrel.

The.410 was ideal for snake, and I brought it back to Mississippi. A pack of coyotes travels a wide territory here, showing up every few weeks and disturbing my wife’s dogs with their chilling howls. Firing the old.410 makes enough noise to send the coyotes elsewhere. Every time I shoot, I think of my father’s dismal talk of suicide, and how he drank himself to death while the shotgun rusted on the wall.