My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485)

by Offutt, Chris

  Most rural childhoods are very isolated, but due to Haldeman’s past as a company town, people lived in clusters along creeks and ridges. The culture of the hills had long maintained the vestiges of the eighteenth-century pioneer mentality: self-sufficiency, hunting game for food, and a disregard for conventional law. Ten boys near my age lived within walking distance through the woods. We roamed the hills on foot and later on bicycles, careening our battered bikes along game trails and footpaths, plunging down steep hills. We were reckless and ragtag, fearless and rough, perpetually cut and bruised. Cheap army-surplus shirts from the Vietnam War were ideal for the woods. The tightly woven fabric repelled water and thorns. A couple of us were always limping, our unprotected faces bruised and cut. Occasionally I had two black eyes, a source of pride, since anyone could have merely one.

  We found junked cars from the thirties with trees growing through the windows, foundations of houses filled with garbage, and dozens of empty holes in the ground. The woods were full of bricks, all stamped with the name of our community. We ate in one another’s homes, helped with chores, and shared gloves in winter. Our lives knew no boundaries save the distance we could travel on foot and still be home by dark. We loved one another in a pure way that none of us was loved at home.

  I grew up in the shadow of a complex history mythologized by the faded glory days of a lost town. The popular story is that L. P. Haldeman did everything in his power to take care of his workers. He made sure that even the most poverty-stricken children living in dilapidated company shacks received a Christmas gift of fruit. One story that demonstrated his compassion was about a man who died on the job, leaving a family with no means of support. The oldest boy was thirteen. Mr. Haldeman directed that a special stool be constructed for the boy to stand on so he could work in his father’s place all day.

  Employees received approximately ten dollars a week for working seventy hours. In 1934 they organized Local Union No. 510 and went on strike. The men wanted more money for shorter hours. Mr. Haldeman refused to meet with union representatives. Court documents quoted him as saying: “I will shut the damn thing down, and let it sit there, and possibly the rust will eat it up.”

  The Rowan County judge sent a detachment of the National Guard to the brickyard, along with seventy-five local “deputies.” Plant operations resumed. Thirty-six men were denied a return to work. All of their names had appeared on a secret list obtained by a private investigator working for the company. In 1938 Kentucky Fire Brick lost a lawsuit filed on behalf of those men. Incensed at being legally forced to reinstate his workers, Mr. Haldeman sold the company to U.S. Steel. Included in the sale were the elementary school, parts of the railroad, a blacktopped portion of the old Main Road, several houses, vast acres of mined-out land, and in a very real sense, the people who lived there. Able-bodied men with families moved elsewhere for jobs. Most of the people who stayed had a disability, owned their own land outright, or received a military pension.

  The surnames of the men named in the 1938 lawsuit were as follows: Adkins, Bailey, Christian, Davis, Eldridge, Evans, Glover, Hall, Hogge, Lewis, Messer, Oney, Parker, Pettit, Rakes, Sparks, Sturgell, Stinson, Sparkman, Stamper, Sammon, Stewart, Thomas, White, and Wilson. I recognize every name, having grown up with their descendants.

  My understanding of the town’s decline was simple—ungrateful workers were to blame. I didn’t realize until much later that all the profits from Kentucky Fire Brick went out of state and that families didn’t own the mineral rights to their property. Lunsford Pitt Haldeman was the scion of a wealthy Ohio family who inherited Kentucky land. Under pressure to become an entrepreneur, he hired a childhood friend to run the company while he stayed in Ohio.

  My hometown was nothing more than a business enterprise. When its profitability began to wane, L. P. Haldeman quickly rid himself of the responsibility. He never actually lived in the town that bore his name, and certainly not in our house. He left no spirit for my father to talk with. But like a ghost, his unseen presence was strongly felt. The remaining evidence of the despotic town founder is his last name on thousands of bricks, each one as chipped and battered as the people he abandoned.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE KITCHEN had an electric stove with an array of buttons for controlling heat—extra-low, low, medium, medium-high, high, extra-high. Pressing one button automatically popped free the others. The newfangled space-age system fascinated me, and I discerned a relationship between the letters on the buttons and the intensity of heat. My mother explained the alphabet. At age five I taught myself to read other kitchen items: sugar, flour, salt, Jif, Kraft, Velveeta, Frigidaire, and Osterizer.

  During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration built my elementary school from huge blocks of sandstone transported by rail from nearby Bluestone Quarry. As with all structures in Appalachia, geography dictated location. The school sat in a wide holler flanked by steep hills. Our playground was half an acre of rock and dirt with no basketball hoop, monkey bars, or swing set. Our only rules were to stay out of the creek and the road.

  We began each day by pledging allegiance to the flag, then reciting the Lord’s Prayer. For the next ten minutes we stood by our desks and sang patriotic songs and hymns. I took everything literally and was a serious though naive thinker. We often sang the spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” I believed this was actual truth, that God was a giant, big enough to hold the Earth in his palm. The darkness of night was a result of God putting the world in his pants pocket. Stars perplexed me. They appeared to be holes in the fabric of God’s pants, allowing the entrance of light. I believed God’s clothing would be better than mine. My mother washed our family’s clothes once a week, and it made sense that God’s mom did, too. Therefore, I concluded, stars were evidence of a tissue in God’s pocket that went through the wash. He was all-powerful and all-knowing, but his mother wasn’t. It was she who forgot to remove the tissue from God’s pants.

  I applied a similar logic to the existence of a water fountain in school. At age six, I’d never seen one before. A classmate explained that the schoolhouse had a big well under it to supply the water. His thick accent stretched the word “well” to sound like “whale.” My understanding was that living in the earth beneath the school was a whale the size of the one that swallowed Jonah. When its blowhole spewed, pipes captured the water and ran it to the drinking fountain. One day during lunch break, I tried to crawl under the school and look for the whale. The principal caught me and I dutifully explained my mission. He was amused, telling me I had a big imagination for such a little fellow. A few years later I understood why my classmate had been so excited by plumbing. His family had no water at their house. One of his chores was to draw water from a well and haul it home.

  After school I walked a creek, then climbed the dirt road to a shortcut path through the heavy woods. For the first few years I rushed home. Mom met me at the back door with a hug and a snack. My brother and sisters were overjoyed by my return, as if they’d feared I was gone for good.

  My memory of fourth grade is very strong, perhaps because I began writing and drawing in earnest then. From that year I have four short stories and two essays. It was also the first year I began keeping a daily journal, small, with a psychedelic design on the cover appropriate to the year 1968. Possibly the act of documenting my perceptions enabled my memory to retain greater clarity. Maybe my interest in the world increased, or my senses reached a new plateau, or the compulsion to observe was born. In any case, it was the earliest period from which I can remember long sections of my life, as if the act of recollection itself had become a narrative.

  On the first day of fourth grade, the teacher distributed textbooks to use throughout the year. I read them all in a week and spent the next nine months reading books, drawing pictures, and writing stories. Teachers often reprimanded me for “disturbing my neighbors,” which seemed an odd term, something people on the hill did with rifles and dogs.

  T
he school lacked specialized instruction for children with developmental disabilities. The principal put them in the classroom that was appropriate to their level. The term used for them was “retarded” and included autism, Downs syndrome, products of incest and poor prenatal diet. In fourth grade we had such a boy named Carson, who had been held back so often he was gripped by advanced puberty. Bigger and stronger than the rest of us, he spoke in a series of unintelligible lisping grunts. He couldn’t read or write. Due to his impulsive behavior, Carson’s desk sat in a corner at the front of the classroom. No one dared touch it. A favorite prank was to trip someone, forcing the victim to grab Carson’s desk for support, thereby receiving a quick transmission of cooties. Carson seldom attended school.

  When frustrated, angry, or merely irritated, teachers beat students with wooden paddles. Strangely, our fourth-grade teacher didn’t believe in hitting children. Her punishments included staying in the classroom during lunch recess or sitting in Carson’s seat for half an hour. One day I made three paper airplanes, each smaller than the other, and lodged them within the crease that formed the fuselage of the largest craft. My idea was to send them aloft together and re-create the three stages of a rocket launch. Instead, I was caught by the teacher at the very moment of throwing the planes. She banished me to Carson’s desk for the rest of the year.

  I placed a textbook on the seat as a sanitizing device, fearful that some aspect of Carson would be contagious. I sat with rigid posture. The desktop held a patina of hieroglyphs representing years of student boredom—names and initials gouged into the wood, blackened by grime and pencil, shellacked over, then cobwebbed again with another generation’s imprint. By the end of the following day, I appreciated the benefits of my new situation. The desk sat beside the door, allowing me to be last in the room and first out. I faced the blackboard with my back to the class, providing a personal space and privacy that was absent at home. For the first time I came to love school.

  During winter, icicles glittered on the cliffs. Low branches dumped snow on me as I walked to school. Warm weather finally arrived. Pink and white dogwoods dotted the hills. Forsythia bushes bloomed bright yellow. Carson came to school. The teacher ordered me back to my original spot. I locked my ankles around the wooden legs of Carson’s desk, gripped the seat, and reminded her that she’d ordered me to sit there until the end of the year. Exasperated by my defiance, she sent Carson to my seat. Within half an hour someone provoked him into an unruly act. The teacher made him stand. She pushed my former desk to the other corner in the front of the room and told Carson to sit there. Our class finished the spring semester with the smartest kid and the dumbest kid sitting in opposite corners, yin and yang, each of us in the other’s seats. Combined, we made a single average student.

  It would be easy to criticize the teacher’s method of discipline, but she was gentle with Carson, possibly the first person who was. Intimidated by his size, teachers often sent him to the principal’s office for a paddling. He calmly lay prone on the floor, frustrating the principal, who believed it was a trick to avoid punishment.

  Many years later, Carson’s cousin told me that he lived with his grandmother, who suffered from an unrepaired cleft palate, which rendered her articulations impossible to understand. Carson had copied her speech since birth. Before beating him, she made him lie on the floor because it was easier for her to hit him from a chair. After school Carson chopped wood and hauled water instead of doing homework. He was shy and illiterate, and never learned to talk plainly, but there was nothing at all wrong with his mind.

  By age ten I read a book a day, two if it rained. In summer I waited for the bookmobile to trundle up the dirt road in first gear, driven by a young female volunteer. She wore a headband and patched bell-bottom trousers, her neck draped with beads. My intense feelings for her were unnameable: I couldn’t look at her, could barely talk. I had a persistent fantasy of driving around the country with her, living in the bookmobile, and reading forever. One day the truck didn’t arrive and I never saw her again.

  I’d already read my father’s holdings of pre–World War II fare from his own childhood: The Bobbsey Twins, Billy Whiskers, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift. I then began his collection of adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Daniel Defoe. I spent an entire Saturday utilizing a short ladder and a long rope to climb a crabapple tree and nail a board to a fork of limbs. There I could sit and read, ensconced away from my siblings. Bees circled my head, but I understood that if I didn’t fear them, they left me alone.

  Reading wasn’t an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn’t provide what I needed—the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I’d been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. If there had been a movie theater or an art gallery, I’d have found solace there. In Appalachia, oddly enough, I had literature.

  A new library opened in Morehead. Every Saturday my mother drove to town for groceries, dropped me at the library, and picked me up later. The library had a four-book limit for each person. My solution was to acquire cards in the names of my siblings and the family dog, which allowed me twenty books per week. My first favorite novel was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. The primary circumstances of Harriet’s life could not be further removed from mine—she lived in New York City with a nanny and a cook. I’d always identified with protagonists whose adventures stemmed from external circumstances, fantasizing about being Tom Sawyer, Sherlock Holmes, or John Carter. With Harriet M. Welsch, I found someone who created her own internal drama through the recording of her observations. She was more real to me than Tarzan, her life grounded in ways similar to mine. Largely ignored by her parents, she was a loner who wore jeans and sneakers and carried a pocketknife—the same as me. She wandered her neighborhood, interacting with people at a slight remove—exactly as I did. She kept a notebook and spare pens with her at all times.

  After finishing the book, I used my allowance to buy a notebook and pens, my first purchase of anything other than comic books and model cars. I resolved to carry pen and paper for the rest of my life and write down my observations, a habit I’ve maintained for nearly fifty years.

  To prepare for high school, we began changing classes in the fifth grade. The math and spelling teacher had a homemade paddle, long and skinny, with a carved handle. She employed it more than anyone, always on boys. An odd tradition emerged of signing your name on the paddle after she beat you. I never understood this and refused to sign it, although she hit me often. She administered punishment in the hall, where the errant student leaned forward and placed his hands against the wall. She stood behind him and swung her paddle as if it were a baseball bat.

  In spelling class, our weekly assignment was to define twenty spelling words. I jotted down the answers rapidly and turned them in. The teacher discounted them, saying that I was supposed to copy definitions from the dictionary. I told her that was boring, since I already knew the words. She scoffed at that, telling me to prove it by writing a story in which I used all the words correctly. If I made a mistake, I’d get a paddling.

  The next week’s spelling list included “minute,” which I dutifully included in a story about medieval jousting. The two knights were Sir Christophoro and Sir Robbiano, sworn enemies seeking to please the king. A boy named Robbie lived near me, on the same ridge but across a narrow holler. His father bullied him and Robbie bullied me. He once held the low branch of a tree in such a fashion that when he released it, the branch sprang through the air and hit me in the face. It hurt badly and le
ft a mark for days. Robbie defeated me in real life, but in my story, Sir Christophoro slaughtered Sir Robbiano without mercy.

  My first story for spelling class included this line: “Sir Christophoro’s wound was minute.” The teacher was delighted by my apparent misuse of the word, suggesting to the class that I was trying to get attention. I protested, claiming that “minute” was correct. In an attempt to shame me before the class, she told me to fetch the Wordbook and look up “minute.” I read aloud the second definition, in which “minute” meant trivial or insignificant. She accused me of lying. When I showed her the dictionary, her expression revealed to me the enormous power of language. The short stories I subsequently wrote in spelling class forged a link between the act of writing and rebellion. Narrative was a weapon against the world, more effective than Sir Christophoro’s sword.

  By sixth grade, I’d depleted the school library, an area of the lunchroom cordoned off by a flimsy row of fabric-covered partitions, and turned to my father’s personal library. He owned the fifty-four-volume hardbound set of Great Books of the Western World, two sets of encyclopedias, and a collection of scholarly works on religion, psychology, ancient history, military campaigns, and sexuality. The shelves also held popular literature and science fiction. I read constantly with no oversight or guidance and a disregard for content. They were just books: Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Homer, George Bernard Shaw, Booth Tarkington, Euripides, Thorne Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Carl Jung, Charles Darwin, Damon Runyon, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and so forth.