I was reading over my head but didn’t know it because no one told me so. I didn’t discriminate or evaluate. Each book carried the same weight, equal in its value. The more I read, the more I wanted to learn. As I gained information about the world, I realized I’d never be able to read everything and would eventually be compelled to pick and choose. Until then, I merely absorbed narrative and idea, finishing Shakespeare and picking up Heinlein, dipping into Machiavelli and then Tolkein. I was like a blind man trying to stay warm in winter, grabbing the nearest piece of wood, unable to discern hardwood or soft, concerned only with maintaining the hot steady fire that consumed everything in reach.
Reading and writing helped me defeat the tedium of school, but I continued to be a discipline problem. I can’t recall what led to my final paddling in eighth grade. Escorted by my teacher into the hall, I expected the usual punishment of three licks. She placed me against the wall and hit me six times very hard and very fast. The first three I was able to withstand, but after six, I knew I was going to cry. The prospect of public mortification when I returned to the classroom was overwhelming. Instead of crying, I began to laugh, which served as a release much the same as tears. The teacher interpreted my mirth as being directed at her. She hit me six more times. I began moving away prior to her last two strikes, and she got them in quicker, the last one hitting my upper thigh. I spun to her, pain fueling my anger. Her face was red, and tears streamed from her eyes. Utterly discombobulated, I left school. I stayed in the woods until everyone had gone home, then went back for my homework and lunch sack. The next day I learned that I’d set a school record with twelve licks, the most for a single paddling. The teacher never looked me in the eye again.
A month later I graduated from Haldeman Grade School as the 1972 valedictorian, the apex of my academic career. The lesson I’d learned best was the value of concealing my intelligence.
Chapter Fourteen
MY PARENTS were rock-solid members of the so-called Silent Generation, born into the Great Depression and coming of age during World War II. They married in 1957, determined to maintain a facade of proper behavior, grooming, and appearance. Mom had learned to touch-type with the goal of being a secretary but really wanted to be a mother and a homemaker. My father had taken the appropriate steps of a proper citizen—active in church, president of his college fraternity and the Newman Club, an officer in Big Brothers of America. He joined the Toastmasters Club to improve his public speaking and became a member of the Kiwanis Club for business connections.
Throughout the 1960s, Dad wrote at night and on weekends, producing eighteen short stories and nine novels. He worked in the unfinished basement, facing a tiny black-and-white television set that received one channel. The walls leaked with every rain. Tangled tree roots caused the septic tank to periodically reverse its flow into the basement. On Saturday and Sunday he sat at the dining room table with an old manual typewriter. He worked with astonishing speed, slamming the carriage return several times per minute. The machine vibrated the table, which made his ashtray and water glass travel randomly about the surface. At least once a day, he knocked the carriage into his glass and sent water flying across fresh manuscript pages. Dad would curse mightily, aiming his rage at anyone nearby. By age eight, I began devoting my weekends to the outdoors. I needed solitude as much as my father did.
Dad began using lowercase letters for his formal name in every instance. His books were by “andrew j. offutt,” and his letters were signed “andy.” The insurance company he formed was “andrew j. offutt associates.” He told me the reason—he wanted to stand out from the crowd. “They’ll remember me that way,” he said. And he was right. By 1968 Dad operated insurance agencies in three towns, winning awards for his salesmanship and supervisory ability. He later told me that the movers and shakers in Kentucky politics, the big boys in Frankfort, were looking him over. He drove a four-door Mercedes-Benz, the only one in the county, and assembled an impeccable wardrobe of tailored suits and conservative ties. As he put it: “When you leave a place, you want people to remember that you were very well dressed, but not what you were wearing.”
At age thirty-five he’d achieved his goals—social status, big house, nice car, his own business. He also felt snared by his values. He didn’t like children. He made it clear to the family that he’d fathered kids due to Catholicism and resented the Church for the burden. The only planned birth was my brother. He wished he’d stopped at two. I spoke to my younger sisters privately, reassuring them that Dad loved them, he just didn’t like religion.
Though highly successful as a businessman, Dad was frustrated and miserable. He slept poorly and never enough. He skipped breakfast and drank a viscous liquid called Metrecal for lunch. As soon as he came home, he dropped two tablets of Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water, then switched to beer. Since childhood, all he’d ever wanted to do was write. Now he had more ideas and less time, and he hated the life he’d dutifully built. He wanted a way out but wouldn’t leave my mother. Instead, he spread his misery to the family. Because my father’s abuse was verbal, I developed a kind of emotional telepathy. My role was to deflect and defuse with quick-witted comments that would lighten the prevailing mood. No one strained against Dad more than I did, but no one could make him laugh as readily. He needed me in that capacity. I learned to be funny.
In the mid-sixties two significant events influenced the future of our family. My mother recalls Dad sitting in the living room reading a pornographic novel he’d bought through the mail. Dad hurled it across the room and said, “I can write better than this!” She suggested he do so. By 1969 he’d published five and had contracts for two more.
By then the full emergence of my permanent teeth had made a mess of my mouth, forming three rows of front teeth. The canines occupied first position. My incisors were directly behind them, followed by the lateral incisors. My smile led with fangs, then two rows of bigger teeth, producing the appearance of a miniature shark.
According to my mother, the condition of my mouth didn’t matter to Dad, because his family were country people who let their teeth go. Since his early twenties, he’d worn a full set of dentures, upper and lower. For the first time in twelve years of marriage, Mom took a stand, insisting that she go to work and finance my orthodontic needs. With all the kids in school, she had the bulk of her days free. Dad spent most of his time unhappily driving between multiple offices for his insurance agency. He believed he could double his writing output with a full-time typist. If he quit his job to write, and Mom typed his manuscripts for submission, they’d make enough money to fix my teeth.
My parents were not brave people. Nor were they particularly bold in any way. Economic deprivation in childhood had taught them thrift and caution. They worked hard and played it safe. After a great deal of planning, my father made the most courageous decision of his life, the only risk he ever took—but it was enormous. At age thirty-six, with four kids, an uneducated wife, and a big mortgage, he decided to pursue his lifelong dream of being a professional writer.
My father’s sudden presence in the house jarred the family in many ways. He went from being gone fifty hours a week to being in the house all the time. Home was now a place of business. He was working, which meant the house had to be quiet—no loud talking, laughing, or walking. We learned to move silently up and down the steps. Doors had to be eased shut or left open. The slightest sound startled Dad, who would yell. The steady clatter of his typewriter filled the house.
My mother changed her schedule, as well. She and Dad stayed in their closed bedroom until we left for school. Prior to this we’d had her to ourselves: Mom bathed us, fed us, kissed our scrapes, and soothed our feelings. Now she devoted herself to the needs of our father. She no longer met us after school with snacks and a hug. We didn’t gain a father, we lost our mother.
Beginning at age twelve, my job was to get my siblings up and dressed, prepare their breakfast, then herd them to school along a path through the woods. Th
is way, our parents could sleep undisturbed. Often my sister’s asthma was very severe and I had to make a decision whether she’d attend school or not. Waking my parents was against the rules. My sister had a specific posture for breathing, a kind of leaning-forward crouch in bed, her head turned slightly to one side. I’d ask my sister to sit up and take a deep breath. If it seemed like too much of a struggle, I told her to stay home. I went to school and she lay in bed, striving to breathe, scared of Dad’s reaction when he awoke. With each painful inhalation, she hoped the asthma attack would last long enough for him to wake up and understand it was serious.
My father’s new home office, formerly my sisters’ bedroom, had two windows and a closet. Bookshelves covered three walls from floor to ceiling. A massive walnut desk stood in the middle of the room. Manufactured in 1960, it was executive furniture intended to impress clients, a gift from Dad’s boss during his insurance career. It served as an island, four feet wide and seven feet long, with narrow passageways on three sides. Beyond it, farthest from the door, ran a tight alley with a ladder-backed chair facing a tiny alcove that held a typewriter. No one was welcome.
My mother stood outside the door and waited for permission to enter, even after he had shouted a demand for coffee. I avoided communicating with Dad in his office. It was a multi-step process that began with tiptoeing to the door so as not to startle him. I tapped softly and waited for his acknowledgment, an interval that could run a few minutes. I wondered if he heard me, but I knew better than to knock again and risk arousing his ire. Dad regarded any intrusion as not merely a distraction but a form of disrespect and attack.
His response was always the same, a command: “Come.” After being granted admittance, I eased the door open and approached the gigantic desk covered with books and papers. A rifle leaned in a corner. The smell of menthol cigarettes layered the room. Beyond the desk, filling the small space, was my glaring father. I anxiously stated my business. He responded curtly, then dismissed me by beginning to type. I was glad to be away, but sad that he didn’t want me there.
On one occasion Dad summoned me to his fortlike office and motioned me to sit in a chair tucked into a corner and stacked with books. I hesitated until he told me to put the books on his desk. This felt like a high honor—allowed to touch his goods and sit in a chair. I basked in the temporary attention of my father within the confines of his office. It’s beyond my memory what was so important that he treated me this way, but I recall hoping that it signaled a shift in the nature of our relationship. As time passed, I understood that the incident had been an anomaly, that it meant the world to me but nothing to him.
Dad often joked that he was mentally ill, dismissing it as symptomatic of being a writer, the same as drinking. At the supper table, he’d loosen his upper and lower dentures with his tongue, shake his head back and forth to make the plastic scrape together, and tell the family that the sound was his brains rattling. In my late thirties, I understood that something was wrong with him, that he did suffer a genuine psychological malady. I didn’t know what it was, but my response was to stop going home. I couldn’t fix him.
The only correct perception of any situation was his. Disagreement sparked emotional combat and verbal abuse. It was incumbent upon his family to listen to him, agree with him, admire him, and give him attention bordering on awe. If Dad was enthralled by something—a movie, reincarnation, a book on UFOs, ancient Rome—we needed to be, too. Any disagreement was perceived as a terrible threat, and his response was swift and powerful: massive retaliation of a verbal nature. He never struck us or our mother, but we feared his anger, his belittling comments and inflictions of guilt.
My brother-in-law once remarked that it was amazing Dad lived as long as he did without getting punched out. I hadn’t considered it before, but he was right. The reason was Dad’s careful structuring of his life—he resisted entering any situation that he couldn’t control. No one ever hit him because he avoided conflict with anyone who could fight back.
Dad’s work isolated him by necessity, and as the years passed, he left the house on fewer and fewer occasions, often staying indoors for weeks at a time. During these times his volatility was at its greatest. The presence of another person interfered with the imaginary realities he constructed twelve hours a day. He ate supper with the family, then returned to his office, venturing downstairs when we went to bed. In the morning he rose after we left for school. He created a solitary existence through avoidance.
The nearest bathroom to my attic bedroom was across the hall from his office. One afternoon I quietly descended the steps to the bathroom and left the door slightly ajar, wary of banging it and disturbing Dad’s work. I lifted the commode lid and leaned it quietly against the tank. My goal was to maintain a stream of urine in the middle of the toilet, following Mom’s instructions to prevent it from spraying the floor. The door slammed open and bounced against the sink. Dad yelled from the doorway, his face red with anger, “Are you deliberately aiming in the center of the toilet to maximize sound and irritate me?”
I didn’t say anything, recognizing a familiar verbal trap. Yes, I was deliberately aiming in the middle of the water. But no, it was not to irritate him. If I told the truth, it might get my mother in trouble. My silence infuriated Dad. He accused me of being deaf, stupid, or disrespectful, then asked which one it was. His voice reverberated around the small bathroom. I still didn’t answer. I refused to look at him, because meeting his eye would only draw further wrath. Finally Dad turned away. “Don’t flush it!” he yelled. After that, I began going to the woods to take care of my personal business.
The majority of Americans grow up in cities and suburbs and are afraid of the woods. Horror movies exploit this fear: the person alone in the forest, the sounds of unknown nocturnal animals, the sheer panic of being lost at night. My childhood was the opposite. The house scared me, but the woods were a source of solace and peace. Traipsing the woods alone, I learned to see and listen. I began to understand the overlapping cycles of nature, seasons clearly delineated by the gradual activity of bud and flower, falling leaves, rain and snow, mud and sun, the eager optimism of spring, and the dense heat of summer. I discovered the location of lady slipper and the silky jack-in-the-pulpit. I learned where trilliums grew, mayapples, ginseng, and wild blackberries. I taught myself to identify animal tracks. Upturned leaves, darker from proximity to the earth, indicated how recently an animal had traveled by. I knew where snakes and bobcats lived, that cardinals nested low to the ground and hawks quite high. I found the dens of fox and rabbit. Groundhog homes had a main entrance and two or three smaller back doors for escape. I envied their ability to come and go as they pleased through their clandestine exits.
I reserved my greatest admiration for rocks. Nothing could hurt them. They were hard and tough, capable of repelling all but the most fierce attack—a hammer or dynamite. I believed that rocks were sentient and alive. Rocks lay in place, slowly forming sockets in the earth, waiting patiently for the disruption of travel. Where there was one rock, there were more, and I concluded that they lived in families. When I found a lone rock, I transported it to a group. My strongest interest lay in the misfits: rocks with an embedded fossil, a tint of yellow, red, or black. I was particularly drawn to rocks with a hole that fully perforated the body. Such a violation was contrary to the essence of being a rock. I believed these would be shunned by others, and I carried them home, keeping them on a shelf with their brethren. At times I sensed their gratitude. The trees knew me, the animals accepted my presence, but the rocks genuinely liked me.
I needed to believe in the friendship of rocks because Dad often threatened to kill me in the basement. He mentioned several methods, but his favorite was hanging me by my thumbs, a fate that perplexed me. I didn’t understand how anyone could die from it. To validate his threat, Dad said he’d killed our older brother, whose name was John. This made me particularly nervous, since my middle name is John. Maybe Dad had killed him before I was
born, then named me for him. Or maybe it meant that I was next, since he’d killed a son already. After supper one night Dad elaborated on the murder of John, explaining that he’d cut up the body and flushed it down the toilet, which was why the commode never worked properly. To prove his point, he wrote “Hi John” on a scrap of paper, led my siblings and me to the bathroom, and flushed the note.
In retrospect, it’s clear that my father was trying to be funny with the kind of joke that gets carried away until the humor is leached out and the audience is confused. I can forgive my father for a failed joke. I have made many myself. But as a young boy, I fully believed my father had killed my brother and therefore might kill me. Dad’s office contained guns in plain sight. The available wall space held a broadsword, a battle-ax, several knives, a dagger, and a dirk. I often wondered which implement he’d used to dismember John.
The intensity of my multiple fears embarrassed me, but what really scared me was the concept of being a coward. As the oldest, I had the responsibility of courage, the same as taking care of my siblings or loving my father. Being afraid of my own murder taught me to live with impending mortality. I accepted fear and set it aside. I believe my father was governed by his fears, and in taking them out on those people closest to him, he taught me the folly of making my own important.
Chapter Fifteen
DAD WAS seventeen when his father died, their conflicts forever unresolved. Lacking an adult relationship with his own father, he didn’t know how to proceed as his children aged. Before he began his career as a writer, he was gone many evenings, closing sales with clients who worked during the day. On the few nights he was home, we begged him to play cards and board games. He taught us poker. He invented a game in which we knocked marbles around the supper table with spoons. On poster board he drew a complicated route for a game based on race cars, dice, and cards. Dad had a vast capacity to make us laugh. We adored our father. He made our evenings fun.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 8
