Dad was born in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression. The Offutt family owned a farm near Taylorsville, with a large main house and a log cabin for sharecroppers. To save the farm from repossession by the bank, my grandparents rented out the main house and moved into the cabin, where Dad spent his formative years. Only two artifacts survive from his life on the farm, the oldest being a certificate from the Louisville Courier-Journal proclaiming him the winner of the Spencer County Spelling Bee in 1944. The second is a 1946 photograph of Dad and his sister standing on rocky ground in summer. They wear overalls and straw hats. Visible in the background is their log home, the joints so heavily chinked with white cement that the structure appears to be horizontally striped. Dad faces the camera with an expression of dissatisfaction.
He returned to the farm once, forty years later, asking me to accompany him. Dad drove very fast, his wrists crossed at the top of the steering wheel, severely limiting his ability to maneuver the car. I tilted my seat back and breathed slowly for the first half hour before offering to drive. That way, I said, you can navigate and look around at the old familiar turf. As a former salesman, Dad was a malleable mark—he admired the calm logic of persuasion. I drove the rest of the way and he talked nonstop, a recounting of memory soaked in sorrow.
The log house was hot in summer and cold in winter. Dad was shy as a kid, sensitive and withdrawn, a bookworm and mama’s boy with no interest in sports. He despised the tedious labor of dairy farming. Dad didn’t like his father, who, in his early forties, began wearing shirts of a floral design and going to town at odd hours. A large bouquet of roses arrived anonymously at his funeral. When Dad told me this, I assumed my grandfather had a girlfriend in town. But Dad concluded that his father was a latent homosexual and the roses had come from a man. I nodded, thinking that Dad’s need to eliminate his father’s influence was so great that he chose the worst-case scenario for rural men of his generation. Nevertheless, Dad had two positive memories.
At age ten, he joined his father and a neighbor on a hunting venture, armed with a .22-caliber rifle. A scared rabbit began its unpredictable hopping flight. Dad snapped off a shot and killed it with an incredibly lucky bullet. His father was inordinately proud of him—less for having hit the rabbit and more for having done so in front of his neighbor. Dad never hunted again, preferring to end as he began, with utter perfection. The only other positive interaction occurred during the depths of a brutally cold winter. My grandfather took Dad outside to urinate against the barn wall with him, side by side. The twin streams slowed to slush as they ran down the oak boards, freezing to ice before reaching the ground.
After leaving the farm, Dad attended the University of Louisville on an academic scholarship from the Ford Foundation. The plan was for smart people from disadvantaged circumstances to skip their senior year in high school and enroll in college. Dad suited all the requirements and had just won a Kentucky-wide fiction-writing contest for a short story called “The Devil’s Soul.”
During Dad’s sophomore year, his father died suddenly at age forty-five. His mother sold the car and found work at a bank. Dad responded by embracing college life and constructing a new identity. He took up smoking, drinking, and playing cards. He became president of his fraternity. For two years he was in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, hoping to be a pilot, until his color-blindness prevented him from flying. He was editor and cartoonist for Static, the AFROTC campus periodical, and editor for The Cardinal, the student newspaper. In his senior year Dad won a national science fiction contest sponsored by If magazine, his first professional publication.
On the way to Taylorsville, Dad and I got lost several times on dirt roads that petered out to walls of forest. Late in the day, at the end of a freshly paved road, we discovered the farm’s main house. Past that was the log cabin. I parked and we approached on foot. The walls were fully intact, the corners still notched tightly together after 150 years. The windows were gone and poison oak covered the front. The roof was caved in. The floor had rotted away and trees grew within, their branches swaying above the walls. My father stared silently for a long time at the ruin. He didn’t move. I understood that he was looking at the cabin but seeing something else.
I left him alone and wandered the land, trying to imagine his early years. The terrain of western Kentucky is very different from the hills in the east. Spencer County is part of the Salt River Basin, a rolling landscape with a vast expanse of sky and wind rustling the hay fields. On all sides the land slowly rose to meet the horizon as if the farm sat inside a wide and shallow bowl. I could see why he left and never returned. He’d grown up in a crater.
The land surrounding the cabin was too overgrown to enter, the yard a tangle of brush and weeds. We walked to the old barn, which was in better shape, having been maintained for use. Six feet tall with long legs, Dad always walked at a fast pace. Now he moved slowly, as if in a fugue state, somnolent but highly alert, taking in everything. He stared at the hayloft for a long time and finally spoke: “I made my sister jump out of there once. Dad didn’t like it. Made me kneel on rocks all day.”
He walked the length of the barn, peering into each stall, then stepped outside. I followed him. He unzipped his pants. We stood side by side and urinated against the old oak boards, then got in the car and left. We made the drive home without talking, the longest period I ever saw him silent. He never mentioned the trip again.
The deprivation and indignity of growing up during the Depression imprinted my father with intense frugality. Dad salvaged narrow slivers of soap, the grimy remains of bars that he rescued before the water rinsed them down the sink. He dampened each piece and formed a new chunk of soap, lined with dirt and hair. He placed it by the sink, where it lay untouched, hardening as it dried, cracking into dark fissures.
My father didn’t trust banks and disliked large government. After his death I found small bundles of cash tucked away in various areas of the house, and enough canned food, liquor, and ammunition to survive a prolonged siege. In the early years of writing, he was often broke or nearly so and had legal trouble with the IRS. My aunt and grandmother had set up a college fund for my siblings and me, but Dad took the money for himself. He sold my comic book collection of fifteen hundred titles and kept the proceeds. My brother changed his mailing address after Dad cashed his college financial aid check.
My siblings and I grew up with the specter of the Depression and our father’s belief in its return. For our future benefit, he stockpiled gold, silver, and jewels. Each time I visited home, Dad took me aside to deliver private information about his hiding places, always with an attitude of utmost secrecy and the implication that he was telling me and only me. When the time comes, he said, his voice lowered for dramatic effect, and it will. He told me to search the furnace vents. He pointed to the top of a custom-designed bookshelf in his office, the molding of which concealed three secret compartments. Up there, he said. Gold for the family. I felt honored by his confidential tone, his trust.
Questions were seldom a good idea with Dad, as he tended to interpret them as criticism. Peace was maintained by agreeable nods and his preferred response of “Yes, sir.” As a result, I never asked which particular heating ducts held the bounty. Neither did my siblings, who’d also been repeatedly informed of secret caches about the house. He told each of us that he’d stored semi-precious stones outside the back door, strewn among a “rock garden” consisting of gravel and creek rock. It was a miniature shrine to a crumbling statue of Thulsa Doom, a powerful necromancer in the fictional world of Conan the Barbarian. Dad wrote nine novels set in Robert E. Howard’s imaginary Hyborian Age, using the profits to enclose a side porch. Etched into the cement floor was “Crom,” the name of Conan’s personal god. In a very real sense, the new room represented the booty of Conan, while the valuable gems in the yard turned out to be worthless rocks polished smooth in a geologist’s tumbler.
Many years ago a friend of mine from a wealthy family in Ne
w England told me that, upon hearing of an elder’s death, the survivors rushed to the bank to clean out the safe-deposit box. Cash, jewelry, and bearer bonds were up for grabs. After Dad died, my brother and I undertook our quest for plunder as a team to avoid the appearance of “rushing to the floor vents.”
We began with those nearest to Dad’s chair and expanded concentrically, room by room. The metal vent covers rested in slots above the ductwork, which ran like veins throughout the house. I got on my hands and knees and inserted a mirror into the openings while my brother bounced the beam of a flashlight along the horizontal passages. We found plastic soldiers, Tinker Toys, Barbie shoes, spiderwebs, mouse droppings, and finally a canvas bag layered with dust. We lifted it onto the floor and crouched before it. Inside was a velvet fabric wrapped around objects with very little weight. We slowly unfolded the cloth, rapt and solemn in the face of our father’s fabled treasure: a soup ladle, a salad fork, and two very small cups, all made of sterling silver.
My brother left, and a few days later my sister arrived to help. We embarked upon the difficult task of investigating the secret compartments in the bookshelves of Dad’s office. The windows had been shut for twenty years, and Dad hadn’t occupied the room in ten. Summer’s heavy heat had me sweating through my clothes, while the dust affected my sister’s asthma. Even the planning stage proved arduous. The three panels were located at the very top of the wall-to-wall bookcase, pressed against the high ceiling. I couldn’t reach them by standing on a chair. We moved stacks of porn to make space for a rickety wooden stepladder. My sister held it while I ascended. The middle panel was a long narrow trapdoor that had to be opened first, in order to allow access to the two flanking compartments. The entire bookcase had listed hard toward the corner, pinching the humidity-swollen wood. The middle panel wouldn’t open.
My sister handed me a hammer and screwdriver. Two light taps snapped the panel open to reveal a narrow compartment, just high enough to be out of my range of vision. I gingerly stood on the top step, which was split along the grain. I glanced at my sister to make sure she was holding the ladder. Her earnest expression sparked a flash of memory—I recalled standing on a wooden box placed on a chair while she handed me a new lightbulb for a ceiling fixture in her bedroom. Our parents had been out of town. We’d been on our own, same as now.
Using a flashlight, I peered at a massive mouse nest in the secret compartment. Beyond that were fifteen plastic pill bottles, which I removed. The ladder swayed as if windblown. Working together the same way we’d changed the lightbulb as children, we inspected the other two compartments. After gathering everything in a box, we carried it downstairs and laid out the final artifacts of our legendary inheritance.
SILVER
14 Liberty dollars
1 Kennedy half-dollar
1 Franklin half-dollar
2 Washington quarters
34 Mercury dimes
48 Roosevelt dimes
JEWELS
Black star of India
Garnet
Opal
Tigereye
Amethyst
Moonstone
Rutilated quartz (fleche d’amour)
Tourmalated quartz (Cupid dart)
GOLD
One Cross pen, tarnished and inoperable
One bird’s nest containing four robin eggs sprayed with gold paint
My sister was disappointed in our father’s treasure, citing its worthlessness as evidence of his distorted view of the world. Dad had filled us with his own delusions, which we dutifully believed, in the hope that items of genuine value might surface. Instead, we were heirs to hidden junk.
I carefully sorted the goods, trying to understand why he might have considered them worthy of preservation. The coins were old silver, remarkable for the bell-like peal they emitted when bounced off wood. Unfortunately, all were worn smooth from excessive handling. Despite their secure location and long-term storage capped in plastic tubes, they had no value beyond a coin dealer’s woeful term of “melt value.”
In the 1980s, Dad purchased many packets of semi-precious stones through the mail. Each came with an official Certificate of Authenticity signed by a representative of the International Gem Finders. The flimsy papers crumbled as I unfolded them to read:
This document certifies that the enclosed acquisition content has been professionally evaluated by our supplier and guaranteed authentic.
I admired the vagueness of the language as a marketing tool. “Enclosed acquisition content” could refer to any item whatsoever, thereby allowing the certificate to be slipped into a variety of packages. My father patronized two companies: North American Minerals and Gem Collectors International. Both were owned by Raffoler, a company bombarded by lawsuits for deceptive advertising, selling shoddy merchandise, misrepresenting products, running illegal lotteries disguised as sweepstakes, and violating mail order rules for timely shipment. The gemstones Dad so carefully hoarded had the same low value they’d had at the time of purchase, which is to say a few dollars.
My father loved ordering goods through the mail, which he began in childhood with Sears, Roebuck. He continued this practice during the 1950s and ’60s with his purchases of porn advertised in the classified pages of men’s magazines; in the 1970s with Frederick’s of Hollywood and Lew Magram; then videos in the ’80s and DVDs during the ’90s. In his final years he ordered tens of thousands of vitamins guaranteed to keep him alive longer than medically possible—which apparently worked.
Anyone who has ever purchased goods through the mail understands the daily tension that builds as the hour nears for the mail to arrive. Finally the long-awaited parcel arrives. The true connoisseur—as my father was—doesn’t tear into it immediately, but sets it aside to be savored after the rest of the mail has been opened. Then the package can be examined by weight and size, shaken slightly side to side, head cocked to listen for evidence of the tantalizing contents. Next is a penknife’s precise slit along the edge, allowing only the tip of the blade entry to prevent accidental cutting of the cargo. Last comes the slow withdrawal of a shirt, a book, a packet of gemstones, a triple-X videotape, a pair of slippers, a time-saving gadget, pamphlets of privately printed porn, a solar-powered calculator, a flashlight that never needs batteries, a German porn magazine, a complex hand tool that replaces every item you own, a cup that won’t tip over, a pack of fetish photographs, a lightbulb that will never burn out, French porn, a clock that keeps perfect time, a selection of porn paperbacks, a swatch of cloth that cleans anything but never needs cleaning itself, bondage comic books, a knife that always stays sharp, vintage nude pinups, rechargeable batteries, porn from Italy, a magnifying glass that reacts to individual eyesight, dozens of items guaranteed to be unbreakable or your money back. Countless such gadgets filled every closet and drawer in the house.
The golden bird’s nest with four eggs embarrassed my mother. She’d spray-painted it many years ago and was immediately admonished by Dad for doing so. Mom believed its presence in the hidden compartment was intended as a posthumous reprimand directed at her. Her guilt saddened me. I wanted to protect her from her own emotions.
I told her that, as a kid on the farm, Dad had placed fake eggs in poultry roosts, hoping to induce hens to lay more eggs. This farming custom gave rise to the term “nest egg” as a sum of money earmarked for future use. Maybe Dad intended the nest and four eggs as motivation for his kids to go off and earn their own money. This satisfied my mother, but ultimately I discarded the premise.
My father’s sense of humor was influenced by fraternity parties in the fifties and Johnny Carson in the sixties—clever, naughty, and knowing—aimed at the middle ground, distinctly sophomoric. He liked being the fellow who’d make an inappropriate comment for the sake of a laugh. Dad enjoyed visual pranks such as a rubber snake nestled in a windowsill, toy soldiers in the Christmas crèche, or a fake birthday gift consisting of an empty box. I believe the bird’s nest was intended as a joke, carefully hid
den before his health prevented him from climbing the steps. I imagined him chuckling as he stood on a chair, his long arms easily reaching the trapdoor overhead. He tucked the nest in the tiny cubbyhole, enjoying the thought of us finding a genuine golden nest and four eggs. I loved him for the diabolic arranging of a prank he’d never see to fruition. Every time I think of the nest, I grin. Up there, gold for the family.
Chapter Eight
THROUGHOUT THE summer I felt bad for compelling my mother to participate in the steady dismantling of her home, and I sought small ways to make her happy. She read mystery novels at a fierce pace and kept them in stacks on the floor of various rooms. After clearing the living room of my father’s books, I displayed Mom’s collection on the shelves. She admired them daily, saying, “My books. You put my books up.” Her joy moved me, as I understood that the house was at last becoming hers.
During meals I did what I’d always done—entertain Mom with jokes. She was a good audience, a skill developed from decades of living with a man who liked to talk. After I left home, it was hard for me to trust information I received from Mom. Due to the difficulties between my father and me, she always tried to present Dad in the best light—on the phone, in person, and by letter. After he died, she quit.
I took a break from clearing the house to finish a TV pilot for a network. The deadline was approaching. I set my laptop on Dad’s desk. Writing there felt strange, but I had little choice. Given the general disarray of the house, his office was the only private room. Over the years, I’d written in hotels, rooming houses, cars, a basement, a garage, and a shed. Once I began, the location no longer mattered. I lost track of time, forgot to eat or drink. The imaginary world became real enough that it didn’t feel like writing but more like observing actual people and transcribing their words and actions.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 4
