While working on the screenplay, I occasionally stopped to raise my head from the computer. Only then did the realization of my whereabouts crash into me. I saw the same images my father had when he paused in his work: a poster for the movie Barbarian Queen, depicting five women armed with swords, dressed like strippers. Above his desk hung a laminated Sunday cartoon of Snoopy with a typewriter and the caption “Good writing is hard work.” Another wall held Samuel Johnson’s famous line: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Like my father, I was trying to live up to both Snoopy and Johnson.
The brick walls insulated external sound but kept noise in the house, and I began to understand Dad’s resentment of interruption. I could hear my mother in the kitchen, my wife walking overhead. With four children and two dogs, the sound of cars at the foot of the hill, and the consistent echo of rural gunfire, my father had sat here and written hundreds of books. I should be able to finish a screenplay.
In a sense, my father died the moment I learned he was going to die. On the phone, it was like talking to a ghost. Now I began to wonder if he was there, overseeing my progress with his critical judgment. Though I often glanced about, I saw nothing. As a child I’d been afraid of his office, and now I was interacting with the imprint of my former fear. I saw things that weren’t there. I heard voices that didn’t exist. Part of me wanted to assign those nebulous sensations to something palpable and real. I ignored the impulse and completed the screenplay on time. Mom said it was what my father would have wanted.
At night I watched the Reds on TV with the volume down, listening to the play-by-play on the radio, as I’d done with Dad. I drank his whiskey and read his books. His library included numerous volumes on the supernatural, and at night I read about ghosts and anticipated my father’s appearance. With a sudden clarity, I understood that Dad had haunted this house while he was alive, and I was haunting it now.
Each of my siblings privately urged me to destroy everything in his office. I understood their shared view. Porn had little appeal to any of us, and we all knew the office contained an enormous amount. An overt sexuality pervaded the house in the form of books not adequately concealed or art depicting nude women on the walls. It was embarrassing when guests visited. We all left home at age seventeen, having been taught secrecy, particularly about his career. As a result we rarely talked about Dad with other people. His death released us from the necessity of silence. Destroying his papers would be a means of retaliation, of destroying the silence itself. But I couldn’t do it.
As a son, I wanted an opportunity to understand him further through his work. In the following weeks each of my siblings privately thanked me for taking on the job of the office. They expressed concern that I’d be overwhelmed by the effort or emotionally done in. I explained that with Dad dead, I was able to separate the writer from the man, and the man from our father. They only partially believed me. As it turned out, it was only partially true.
Chapter Nine
AS A child, I explored Dad’s office the first time while my parents attended a party in town. I waited until my siblings were in bed. The fewer who knew of my secret activities, the better, a way of thinking I’d certainly inherited from Dad. Before entering, I used a ruler to measure the distance between the edge of the door and the jamb, writing the number of inches on my wrist, reasoning that if the space was too large or small, Dad would know and I’d face his wrath.
Those early attempts at discerning insight into my father were little more than spelunking an unknown cave. I moved in quietly, able to see only what was illuminated by flashlight, my fear increased by the darkness and shadows. I found a stack of Playboy magazines. A surprising item was an embroidered patch, the kind people sewed on a dungaree jacket. Encased in a small frame, it sat on a shelf so as to be visible to Dad at his typewriter. It said: “You’re a fuckin’ genius.” The frame gave it an official quality. I thought it was an award from an unknown entity that recognized my father as a genius, and for many years I believed he was.
After his death, I began a more careful examination of his office. My general understanding was that Dad had occasionally written porn to supplement his income, a pattern followed by many writers. Now, I realized that wasn’t the case. For half his life my father passed as a science fiction writer while actually functioning as a professional pornographer. Dad’s first eleven books were porn. The extent of his output surprised me, since the secret will had implied a fraction of what I discovered.
Throughout his writing life, Dad remained staunchly emphatic that he himself did not use multiple pen names. His persona, John Cleve, had sixteen pseudonyms. John Cleve had his own wardrobe, stationery, and signature. Most important, my father liked being John Cleve. John Cleve wrote sex books, was a 1970s swinger, and had no kids. John Cleve was free.
By the time Dad died, he hadn’t worked in his office in a decade. Before that it was seldom cleaned beyond an occasional vacuuming and a light dusting as high as my mother could reach, which wasn’t far. A narrow path wound between precarious stacks of porn, an outmoded printer, a broken copy machine, and three computers. Dad steadfastly refused an online connection, saying he feared the government would be able to peek inside his computer and learn about his porn. I considered this evidence of his paranoia and lack of technological understanding. Two months after his death, the NSA admitted they’d spied on hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens via the Internet.
My father was more hoarder than collector, and I began by throwing away the obvious junk: rusted pocketknives, corroded flashlights, broken office equipment, a hockey puck, empty bottles of expensive beer, and dozens of tin boxes that once held fancy Scotch. The office decor reminded me of a college fraternity house with its implied pride in drinking and manliness. There was nothing personal or sentimental. His possessions consisted of gifts from fans at science fiction conventions, books, manuscripts, and thousands of letters. I learned to operate in a very specific way: examine each item, evaluate its importance, keep it or throw it away. The pressure of constant decision was relentless. I’d grown up terrified of this room and now I was in charge of it, like an inmate becoming a warden. I felt as if I were trespassing.
As a kid, I’d left his office quickly, giving a swift and nervous glance at the closet, which was always shut. Never seeing its contents gave the closet enormous clout; it was Pandora’s box with a doorknob. The wood casing had expanded from humidity and I had to jerk the door open. The loud sound alarmed me, as if Dad would hear it and I’d get in trouble. I glanced furtively about. Nothing was there but the dusty, smoke-smelling room. The closet contained a wall of deep shelves that were a wreck of papers, books, magazines, computer manuals, and manila envelopes containing manuscripts. Wadded into a musty ball was a John Cleve shirt, now mildewed and rotting. A trail of dried mouse droppings led to a large nest composed of tattered manuscript pages. Twined within the rodent’s home was the shed skin of a snake. I jumped back and slammed the door shut.
Throughout my childhood, the most familiar adult refrain was: “Watch for snakes.” Standard practice in the hills was to kill any snake without wasting time trying to figure out what it was. My seventh-grade teacher taught us that poisonous snakes had a vertical pupil, but getting close enough to see the eyes put you at risk. Everyone I knew feared snakes: tough men, brave boys, women who could slaughter livestock without qualm. After discovering the snakeskin in the closet, I went downstairs and drank a glass of water. No doubt the snake was a harmless constrictor that had traveled to the second floor, discovered the mouse nest, eaten its fill, rested, and sought the next meal. The snake was long gone, its shed skin the ghost of its passage.
I returned to Dad’s office and stood alert as a bandit, sweating and nervous. It ran through my mind that a case could be made for an adult facing childhood fears, both metaphoric and real, but none of that claptrap really applied. I was genuinely afraid of snakes. Under my father’s orders, I had to clear out the closet. I did so quickl
y.
Two tall columns of paperback porn occupied the top shelf. Mixed in was a copy of A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter, published in 1967. The cover proclaimed it a celebrated new underground classic, a feast for the sexual gourmet, and compared the writing to that of Henry Miller, one of my father’s early heroes. Dad’s insurance agency calling card marked page fifty. I held the book gingerly, astounded by its discovery, stashed away for forty-five years.
James Salter had been a guest teacher at Iowa during my years as a graduate student. So many people wanted to work with him that he screened us, reading sample work first, followed by a personal meeting. He was over sixty, charming and urbane on the surface, with a fierce steeliness lurking below. My interview didn’t go well. He demanded to know what I could learn from him, since my subject matter of Kentucky was unfathomably different from his—wealthy people on the East Coast. I became angry. Here was one more older man presenting himself as an obstacle. Outraged and irate, I told Salter that content didn’t matter, people were people, and I wanted to study with him because I admired his prose. I cut our meeting short and left, convinced that Iowa was a mistake. I’d never be a writer, and I only wanted to be one because of my father. The next day Salter posted a class list, with my name being one of the lucky twelve.
Many young writers believe in the myth of mentorship, but I’d never sought a role model. I’d known one writer in my life—Dad—and naively surmised they’d all be like him: controlling, pretentious, cruel, and overbearing. My attitude at Iowa was one of belligerence. Established writers were the enemy, and my job was to overthrow their stranglehold on the fortress of literature. Despite my resistance, Salter helped me learn to improve my work. He’d gone to college at West Point and behaved as if students were enlisted soldiers and he was an officer, one who’d roll up his sleeves and mingle with his young charges. We went hiking together, leaving the trail for the local woods I knew well. He was unflagging in his energy, both physical and mental. He remarked that seeing me in the woods was like watching me write stories.
I never saw my father in the woods. He didn’t walk them and remained oddly incurious about the landscape he’d chosen. It was enough for him to be surrounded by the heavy forest. The seclusion of the house matched the solitude within him, the immense isolation of his mind and its constant, rapid machinations.
After filling fifty garbage bags from his office, I could not see any difference other than a haze of disturbed dust hanging in the air. The room seemed more cluttered, with no space for organizing and packing. My eyes stung and I was developing a cough. Essentially I’d redistributed the contents into new piles. Based on approximately three hundred feet of bookshelf, I anticipated two days to pack the books. The allotted time period doubled immediately, then tripled. Every shelf held another row of books directly behind it—all pornography. I found several bottles of bourbon and dozens of recent manuscripts by Turk Winter, the persona who’d replaced John Cleve as my father’s primary persona in the mid-eighties.
For the next several days I ate little. I guzzled water and sweated through my clothes until they were stiff with salt. I moved in a somnolent daze. Twice I noticed my mother staring at me from the hall. She said she’d been startled, that I looked so much like Dad, she thought I was him. I hugged her silently and went back to work. Later she began referring to me as “John Cleve, Jr.,” a sobriquet that made me uncomfortable.
The project felt less like clearing a room and more like prospecting within his mind. The top layer was disorganized and heavy with porn. As I sorted like an archaeologist backward through time, I saw a remarkable mind at work, the gradual shifting from intellectual interest in literature, history, and psychology to an obsession with the darker elements of sex.
For decades he subscribed to magazines and kept them in stacks: Ramparts. Intellectual Digest. Psychology Today. New Times. Galaxy. If. Playboy. Omni. Geo. National Geographic. Smithsonian. He studied robotics, genetics, medicine, physics, and war before gunpowder. Two dozen books covered the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Mixed throughout was pornography in every form: magazines, photographs, drawings, pamphlets, a deck of cards, cartoons, books of erotic art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, calendars, pinups, postcards, collections of naughty jokes. A pile of dusty catalogs from Frederick’s of Hollywood ran back fifty years.
After a week I no longer considered the undertaking in terms of my father and me, or even as a writer going through another writer’s papers. My thinking shifted to a more formal role, that of an archivist faced with an enormous holding of raw material. I organized and collated and distributed. I stopped looking at pictures or reading, and simply made decisions in my head—this goes here, that goes over there, here’s a new one for a fresh pile. I could have been sorting marbles or Tupperware.
I packed everything in liquor boxes and taped them shut. The stacked cartons made a double-rowed wall that blocked four windows in the hall outside his office. A few weeks later I arranged for a moving company to transport my father’s papers to Mississippi. The movers charged by weight. Their estimate of Dad’s archive was eighteen hundred pounds. My inheritance.
Chapter Ten
AN INCREASING concern was my father’s ashes. They still sat on the bookshelf where we’d put them after the memorial. The family hadn’t settled on a plan, then we procrastinated as other priorities arose. One morning I awoke to thunder, followed by the pounding of rain against the windows. I was momentarily disoriented. I thought I was a kid and glanced about for my brother, undergoing a surge of anxiety that we were late for school. The remnants of a bad dream fled in fragmentary images, followed by the awareness of reality. I was in my childhood room, my father was dead, and I had a twelve-hour workday ahead of me.
The house was silent, my wife still asleep, my mother in the living room. I took coffee outside, where the shadows in the tree line glistened black. Every surface was a prism displaying the softened green of June. It was rainbow weather, but they were hard to spot among the hills. The air was a pane of lead—as my young son once said, not a sky in the cloud.
I finished my coffee and entered the house. Mom came into the kitchen, moving in a determined way, with an expression I recognized as secret satisfaction. I enjoyed seeing her this way. It was familiar, the way she’d always been: purposeful and private. The past few weeks had been hard, and she’d behaved with emotional distance, an armor to grief. She looked at me and spoke quietly. “I took care of your father’s ashes.”
Mom had decided the backyard was appropriate but worried the heavy ash might kill the grass. Equally bothersome was the prospect of wind blowing them onto the neighbor’s land or into the gravel driveway, where she might inadvertently roll over them in the car. Mom had been waiting for a morning such as this. The chill air had been very still when she woke up. She could feel weather coming. Her plan was to scatter the remains just before the rain dampened the ashes and held them in place.
Earlier she’d sat on an outdoor swing beneath a canopy, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, alert to the barometric shifts in the atmosphere. At the first slight sprinkling of rain, she emptied the plastic box. It took longer than she’d expected, and the ashes didn’t really scatter. Just as she finished, there was a bellow of thunder, and hard rain fell. She hurried back inside, her timing impeccable.
I nodded and refilled my coffee, wondering if the clap of thunder had been the same one that woke me. Was it coincidence or metaphysics? Or maybe all metaphysics is nothing but coincidence to which we assign meaning after the fact. It didn’t matter. I asked her where the ashes were.
“Want to see?”
I nodded and followed her outside and across the narrow strip of land, scraped flat a hundred years before to form a yard I’d mowed as a child. Erosion had brought the steep slope six feet closer to the house. The hill itself was going over the hill. Mom led me to the edge of the yard. A few feet past the grass, she pointed to several clumps of ash, solidified by the
rain into dark gray mounds.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not going to blow around the yard.”
“No, it won’t.”
“How’d you pick this spot?”
“It’s where your father always peed.”
We stood there gazing at the rain-pocked hummocks of ash. I put my arm around my mother, unsure what to do or say. My siblings weren’t coming back to the house. Nobody else would ever know where the ashes were. In time they’d make their way down the hill to the rain gully, merge with Triplett Creek, flow into the Licking River, drain to the Ohio River, join the Mississippi River, and progress south to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. It was a long trip. Part of him would make it.
Rain began falling again. Mom went back in the house. After a few minutes I did, too. Mom handed me a paper sack. Inside was the last of Dad’s ashes, sealed in a rolled-up plastic sandwich bag. She made a joke that it resembled a nickel bag of pot, and I told her it had been a long time since she bought pot. She tipped her head and said, “I don’t think I ever bought any. People just gave it to me. I thought it was so cool.”
I looked at the bag in my palm. My father kept getting reduced, subdivided into packets. I was reminded of a battle scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. King Arthur cuts off the arms and legs of the Black Knight, leaving him a limbless trunk, still trying to fight. Though I didn’t want the leftover scraps of my father in a snack bag, I had to safeguard them. I was tired of it all—the house, the decisions, the porn, and now a nickel bag of ash. Standing in the kitchen and holding the remains of my father’s remains, I had nowhere to take my irritation. My wife was exhausted, my mother slightly lost. At night they drank and tried to laugh.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 5
