My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Twenty-nine

DURING THE heart of Mississippi winter, I missed the purity of fresh snow but not the northern cold. Still, the days were short, with gray skies and a barren tree line. My house lacked insulation. The pipes froze. Fetishized sex became a white noise that surrounded me, invading every aspect of my life. In order to interact objectively with porn, I had to deliberately repress any salacious response to the material, which was like going to a comedy club and trying not to laugh. Months of immersion in pornography had reversed its intended purpose. Instead of arousal, I became sexually numb. I didn’t even want to be touched. Marital relations waned, ebbed, and vanished. I felt guilty.

My life consisted of a house full of porn and a gorgeous wife — but the two were unconnected. I became afraid my wife would go elsewhere for sex, seek a man who’d inherited money and land instead of mountains of porn. She said that was crazy talk, suggesting my disinterest was a normal product of grief. But I didn’t feel grief. I’d developed an immunity to sex. I was sick of my involvement with porn. I’d become a useless steer. My wife wouldn’t have to leave. The young bulls would trample me into the mud and take her away.

In A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the protagonist is subjected to a form of aversion therapy. His eyelids are clipped open by specula, then he’s forced to watch brutally violent images until he is rendered incapable of harming others. My experience was similar. I’d forced myself to interact with so much pornography, I no longer regarded my wife in a sexual manner. Each time I tried, my mind filled with images of fetish porn. I could admire her dress, legs and hips, but the response was aesthetic and intellectual, as if studying art I couldn’t afford.

I got worried and saw a doctor. He inquired if I had erections at night or in the morning. I nodded, embarrassed. In a light, jocular tone, he said it wasn’t the equipment, so there was no need for Viagra. I tried to force a smile that fell apart before reaching my face. The doctor asked if my wife was undergoing menopause, and he seemed slightly surprised that she was younger, as if her age alone should keep me sexually engaged.

In a subtle fashion, he probed about my professional life. After hearing a brief explanation of my current project, the doctor quickly changed the subject to my deviated septum, which affected my breathing. He said the extreme degree of trauma was common in adults who’d had their nose broken in childhood and never repaired. He gently asked if I’d ever been hit in the face as a kid. For the first time in weeks, I started laughing. Of course, I told him, hasn’t everybody? He gave me a strange look and sent me home. Later it occurred to me that in its own way, porn had struck me as hard as the blow that shattered cartilage inside my head. I feared that my desire, like my ability to breathe normally, would never return.

People with eating disorders maintain distorted thinking that leads them to deny themselves food. The malady is cognitive, not organic, which means drugs don’t help; patients must reframe their thinking to make food palatable. I needed to do the same with sex but didn’t know how. I considered burning everything page by page, watching each piece of paper curl, igniting at the edges, flaring into quick yellow flame that would provide kindling for the next lurid depiction of sex. But I couldn’t light the match. Burning it would take hours. Most grandiose gestures are suspect — the couple who renew their vows just before divorce or the politician who publicly swears he’s clean, then enters rehab. Building a pyre of porn wouldn’t guarantee an automatic return of desire. I’d just regret it later.

The winter solstice clamped its lid on the earth. January’s chill led to weeks of short gray days with morning frost heavy enough to track a rabbit. Our home had high ceilings and a furnace designed for a smaller structure. At night I built a massive fire, effectively sucking warmth from the house but heating a small area before the hearth. My wife and I pushed the furniture near the fireplace and sat beneath wool blankets. During the day I shuffled about, shifting porn into ever-expanding heaps. Like my father, I’d transformed the entire house into a workstation devoted to the same material. In a lifetime of struggle not to feel bad about myself, I’d never felt worse. The future appeared bleak. I was a failure on all fronts.

Spring arrived in fits and starts. Each time I thought I’d built the last fire and resolved to cut my hair and shave my beard, cold weather declared its intentions. A woodpecker drilled a hole in the exterior wall. Two starlings used the hole for an entrance and built a nest inside. One morning I awoke early to the sound of young birds frantically calling from the walls of the house.

I stepped outside to watch ground fog lifting from the back field. Six deer browsed the yellow sedge grass. A flash of movement caught my eye — a fox pouncing on prey at the field’s edge. The deer froze in place. The fox turned with a vole dangling from its mouth and trotted into the herd, then halted. The deer were immobile, tails cocked, poised to flee. The fox slowly turned its head from one deer to another, then moved on, vanishing into the woods. The deer returned to their feeding. The animals had assessed each other, found a lack of danger, and continued their lives.

I continued to work, make fires at night, and write. The days warmed slowly, becoming longer, with more light. My libido returned like snow leaving a metal roof — the slight breaking of its icy surface, then the sudden cascade as the entire mass swept itself clean, the steep-pitched slope gleaming in the sun as if it had always been that way.