My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Four

THE DOCTOR diagnosed my father with alcohol-induced cirrhosis and gave him six months to live. I arranged for a man to build a wheelchair ramp next to the driveway. I was proud of myself. I couldn’t help my father, but I could make it easy for him to get in and out of the house. He came home and returned to his chair. I went back to Mississippi.

The past decade had been difficult for me, beginning with the blow of divorce. Instead of writing, I’d devoted myself to my sons: shopping, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and driving them around. A few years later I married Melissa Ginsburg, a poet from Texas, and soon faced a fresh dilemma: My teenage sons wanted to go to college, and I was broke and unemployed. To finance their education, I taught myself screenwriting and worked on three television shows, True Blood, Weeds, and Treme. Hollywood was a world into which I never fully fit, beginning with my fear of driving in Los Angeles. Still, I blundered along, doing my best, living in hotels and furnished apartments for a few months at a time. I stayed focused on my plan — get the money and get out. After my sons went to college, I took a permanent position at the University of Mississippi and rented an old house seven miles from town.

The first summer in Mississippi, before Dad got sick, I drove home to see my parents, the only time in my life I visited them alone. Prior to that, other family members had been present, or my wife and sons had accompanied me. I stayed in Morehead at a motel on the interstate because Dad made it clear that I was welcome only after four o’clock in the afternoon. He implied that it was related to his work, since he was still writing, but the timing turned out to revolve around his schedule for drinking. Dad told me he was the happiest man in the world. The only complaint he had was the weekends, because Mom was in the house. They got along fine, that wasn’t the problem. Her presence interfered with his solitude, as did my visit.

Six months later he was dying, and I called regularly. He had already survived a massive heart attack, two minor strokes, and numerous lesser ailments. A smoker for forty years, he was permanently tethered to an oxygen tank for COPD. Dad always believed he’d die young, as his own father had. He was surprised to make it to age forty-five, then fifty, sixty, seventy, and seventy-five. Now his body was running down. In the last month of his illness, Dad knew death was near. He fell asleep on the phone, woke up, repeated what he’d just said, and was angry for doing so. An escalation of the pattern rankled him.

“I think, son, it’s the beginning of the end.”

“Might be,” I said.

“Probably is.”

“Probably so.”

“Maybe not,” he said.

The conversation contained a familiar tinge of conflict, and I resolved to go along with anything he said. In the end, death reduced every dispute to a draw.

He talked of his childhood, of the farm his father fought to save in the Depression, and how the land went to Uncle Johnny.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“My father’s brother.”

“You never talked about him.”

“Why would I? He got the farm. He never worked it. Dad and I did, but Uncle Johnny got it. I never saw him again.”

“What was he like?”

“Why do you care about him? I’m dying, not him.”

He had a point, a good one. But it was astonishing to hear about a relative I’d never met. Uncle Johnny’s grandsons would be close to my age. I wondered if they knew about our family, about me.

“I’m not afraid of this,” Dad said. “I don’t want you to think I’m trying to put on a fake front. I’m really not. If the pain gets bad, I’ve got a half a bottle of Percocet hidden. I’ll take them with whiskey. If the pain gets bad.”

“I understand.”

“Your mother knows. I told her.”

“It’s a backup plan,” I said. “Doesn’t mean you’ll do it.”

There was a long gap in our conversation. He spoke again.

“It surprises me that I’m not afraid. I had a pretty good run. Now I’ll find out if there really is an afterlife. Or if it’s just a long rest that I won’t know about. It’s hard to think of the world without me being in it.”

There are times in people’s lives when a significant event occurs and they’re not aware of it — the last time you pick up a son before he’s too heavy, the final kiss of a marriage gone bad, the view of a beloved landscape you’ll never see again. Weeks later, I realized those were Dad’s last words to me.

The day he died, I drove home a final time. The highway unfurled before me as if the car were a time capsule bent on depositing me in the past. I didn’t like how I felt because I didn’t feel anything. I hadn’t cried. I was aware solely of the burden of responsibility — firstborn, eldest son, head of the family.

Dad’s mother died in 1984. He was fifty years old, had outlived both his parents. The sense of feeling orphaned led him to address his own mortality by composing a legal will, which he sent to my siblings and me. The terms were simple — everything went to Mom. If they died together, the rest of us split the estate equally four ways.

Included with the will was a long meandering letter that referred to silver and gold hidden in the house. For two pages he discussed his relationship with the first Macintosh computer on the market, delighted at his own skill at modifying fonts and learning to program it on his own. He closed with instructions that he’d appointed me to deal with the contents of his office.

On you Chris, I decided, this task and onus must fall — and I’m telling the others this without the reason. The examination of the office and disposal of its contents is totally up to Christopher J. Offutt, and this is oh-fficial.

In a separate envelope with a return address of General Douglas MacArthur, Dad sent me a secret will that furthered the details of the public version. He included instructions about his porn, where it was hidden and what to do with it. An accompanying letter expressed his reasons for not involving my siblings — he evaluated each in a petty manner and found them all lacking. I immediately wrote to my brother and sisters, offering a copy of the secret will to alleviate any concern that I might be receiving special favor. They demurred, already bored by porn and weary of his secrecy.

The secret will explained Dad’s long interest in pornography. The major difference between his own books and current writers was attitude:

They obviously dislike women, or worse, and I’ve always been crazy about ’em. I am not a sadist: I have sadistic tendencies. That difference is enormous.

He expressed his preference for porn from the Victorian era and his reverence for the Marquis de Sade, who wrote detailed sexual fantasies while in prison. Dad lamented recent changes in the marketplace while firmly affixing his own status:

Pornography is not what it was in my day. Both bondage & torture pix and descriptions have become more violent & obscene. Publishers get what they pay for: garbage.

I was The Class Operator in that field, Christopher J.,& there will be no successor.

The letter ends with a fierce exhortation that I not cross him up by getting killed. If so, he’d have to come barrelling up to my Boston apartment and try to find this very letter.

I’d become accustomed to unusual letters from Dad. Often they carried the signature of “John Cleve.” The name began as a pseudonym for porn but developed into a full persona when I was a child. Cleve’s signature differed greatly from the others. It was less formal, with joyously looping letters that ended in a circle with an arrow — the symbol for being male, the planet Mars, and the chemical element of iron. Letters from John Cleve were filled with provocative comments about women, ebullient use of punctuation, and humorous wordplay.

In later years, I received an occasional missive signed by Turk Winter, the persona who eventually replaced John Cleve. Turk’s signature was equally stylized, with a horizontal line that crossed both T’s and flared upward. There was an intensity to the smallness of the signature, the individual letters legible and terse.

Though I searched the letters for clues, I could never quite discern a reason for the differing signatures. It didn’t seem related to content. I concluded that it was the personality he was embodying, or perhaps that embodied him. After I left home, the varying signatures were the first indication I had that explained my father’s drastic and sudden shifts in mood when I was a child. Arbitrary rules changed abruptly, with swift consequences for breaking them. It’s possible that each persona viewed his domain with different expectations and decrees. None of us knew whom we were dealing with at any given moment.

Of nearly two hundred letters I received from my father, only one was unsigned — the one that accompanied the secret will. The absence of authorial attribution lent greater credence to the document. I believed that it came from the core of my father’s personality, not a role or persona.

I’ve never been certain why he granted control of his legacy to me. I suspect he wanted someone to know of his prodigious output, the wide-ranging velocity of his mind. At the time he wrote the secret will, we had been at odds for over a decade. It bothered both of us, and we didn’t know how to overcome the distance, blaming each other, ensuring hostility through the steady maintenance of old wounds. Attack and counterattack, intimidate and ignore. We raised the art of veiled criticism to its finest sophistication and talked against the other within the family.

Because my father made it abundantly clear that he might die at any moment, I kept the secret will for twenty-eight years, through many moves about the country. Each new location meant discarding clothes, books, and furniture, but I always knew where the secret will was stored. I wrapped it in plastic for protection. Dad never mentioned the will, and I didn’t bring up the subject. His trust lay between us, unspoken and vital. When he died, it was the first item I packed before heading to Kentucky. As it turned out, I didn’t need it — my siblings still weren’t interested. I’d kept it safe for nothing. Nobody but me ever read the pages. No one cared but Dad.

On the long drive to Kentucky after his death, I watched for the Pottsville Escarpment, a geologic formation that indicated the edge of the Appalachians. Earlier I’d passed through Lexington, site of my birth, and wondered how my life might be if we’d stayed there, near my mother’s family. What if I’d gone away to college instead of attending the closest one? What if I’d married one of my first four girlfriends? What if I’d stuck with my dream of being an actor? What if I hadn’t hurt my knee so severely at age nineteen that I was forced back home in a plaster cast after leaving the hills forever, a pattern of departure and return that repeated many times until I realized the landscape would always hold me tight, that I could never escape, that in fact what I loved and felt most loyal to were the wooded hills, and not my father.