One afternoon the six of us kids walked to the pond to swim. At fourteen, I was the oldest. The dark water was topped in places by a green scum. Occasionally a fish brushed my legs. With no hills to block my view, I could see farther than at home, the pond an oasis beneath a broad expanse of deep blue sky. I stood in the cool water, watching the surface ripple away from my body in fading rings of sunlight and shadow. I began moving my hands in the water to see what happened when the ripples overlapped. Someone threw a rock that struck me in the head. I immediately fell.
I regained consciousness beneath the surface of the pond and rose, disoriented and dazed, spitting water and choking. My sisters began screaming. My brother ran to the house. I stumbled out of the pond and staggered across the field. Adults found me wandering alone, a deep gash in the hairline above my left eye, limping from a thorn in my bare foot. Blood streamed down my torso and legs. Someone took me to the hospital in town, where a doctor shaved a patch of hair around the wound and stitched it shut. I returned to the con under sedation, embarrassed at the situation. For the next two days I overheard my father repeating the same words again and again: “The doctor was a square. Look how much hair he shaved off!” I realized that impressing the hippies with his use of slang mattered more to him than my health.
We got a ride to Indiana, where the Mercedes had been repaired, and drove to Peoria, Illinois, for PeCon. My head hurt constantly. The bandages weren’t changed often enough and the wound began seeping. Each morning I awoke with my head stuck to the pillow. I remained in the hotel room, watching television and taking aspirin. My siblings stayed with me, our family roles reversed as they took care of their older brother, preparing meals of cheese and crackers, peanut butter, and fruit. They gave me pillows and changed the channels on the TV. For those three days, despite my persistent headache and cloudy vision, I felt protected and cared for.
We returned to Haldeman, where I recovered amid the woods I loved, grateful for the familiar culture. One neighbor plowed by mule. Another man nailed dead squirrels upside down to a tree in front of his house and gutted them, allowing the entrails to fall to the ground. He peeled off the skin and carried the carcasses inside to cook. The furry hides remained on the tree, turning black with rot, flapping in the wind. The stew he made tasted better than anything at a con, especially with a glass of well water cold enough to numb my gums.
But I had seen another world, exotic and strange, and at times I missed it. I grew my hair long to be more like fans. If I looked like them, my parents might have more interest in me.
Chapter Seventeen
IN THE strict hierarchy of the hills, people from Morehead were at the top of the heap. Next came families who lived on the outskirts, then those with homes along the few blacktop roads that headed into town. Last were country people like myself. Social strata was based on geography and family name. Both of mine were suspect. These distinctions became clearly delineated when I attended Rowan County High School, ten miles away in Morehead.
I loved the boys and girls I’d grown up with. Fourteen of us had moved through the Haldeman grade school together, but now we were dispersed among the largest entering freshman class in the high school’s history. We lost our sense of belonging. One by one, many of my classmates abandoned the routine of attending school. Dropping out was not expected but was accepted and of minimal concern. At four feet, eleven inches tall, I was the shortest kid with the longest hair, allegedly the smartest. As my childhood friends left school, I became socially isolated.
My parents were friends with the head of the theater program at the local college, and when a play called for a child actor, I was added to the cast and performed in several productions. Teachers viewed this as a promising development and excused me from school to attend rehearsals. I swiftly took advantage of the circumstances. My daily pattern was to ride the bus to school, check in to morning homeroom for attendance, leave school under the guise of “play practice at the college,” and catch the bus home in the afternoon. I began keeping my bicycle in town and often arranged to sleep at various people’s homes—friends of my parents or college students to whom I had become a kind of theater mascot.
By the time I was fifteen, my family was accustomed to my absences—wandering the woods, eating elsewhere, sleeping in town. What mattered to my parents were academic grades. The night before an exam, I stayed home and read the textbook, then aced the test. Of equal importance were granting utter obedience to Dad and never causing my mother public embarrassment. With this patina of civility thus attended to, I was free, and Morehead was mine to explore.
I don’t remember how I met the fatman. I assume he approached me. He lived in town on the second floor of a small building, where he rented a single room with a bathroom in the hall. He was nice to me, buying me candy bars and bottles of pop, which my parents never allowed me to have. I told him about my life and the girls I liked. The fatman listened to me. He offered a form of sympathy and attentiveness that I needed. He accepted that I wanted to be an actor or a comic book artist, and he believed such aspirations weren’t ridiculous. He didn’t talk about himself but implied that he’d experienced life beyond the confines of Rowan County, and that I would like it out there when I finally left.
The fatman’s room was small, with no chair, and we both had to sit on the bed. He suggested I lie on my back, and the whole time I pretended it was happening to someone else. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like. I don’t recall the print on the wallpaper or the color of the bedspread. What I do remember is the overhead light fixture, a plain globe in a ceramic setting that emitted a dim yellowish light. Surrounding the globe and painted over many times were plaster rosettes with narrow leaves. I remember the light because I spent all my time staring at it and waiting until I could leave.
Afterward, the fatman said he liked me and gave me money. I left the room and walked to the drugstore, where my mother picked me up after shopping for groceries. I bought a lot of comics at the drugstore. Mom didn’t ask where I got the money.
When I returned to his room a week later, I climbed the steps very slowly, trying not to make any noise because I didn’t want to get the fatman in trouble. A clot of tension rose along my spine, vibrating like an embedded blade. I felt hollow—my heart pounding, sweat trickling down my sides, my mouth dry, my stomach congealed to stone. The fatman opened the door and ushered me in. The bed sagged when he sat on it. The money lay in sight on the bedside table. Time stopped as I slid away from my body, imagining a life beyond the hills. I would be a movie actor. Beautiful women would throw themselves at me. I was the mayor’s son, the governor’s nephew. I was secretly adopted. I was anyone but a lonely kid feeling the dampness of fat fingers in my pants.
Later I decided that my parents would be proud of my open-mindedness in such a small town. They considered themselves progressive. I believed that what I was doing with the fatman made me similar to them. They wrote porn and had affairs. If they knew about the fatman, they would respect me, maybe even like me.
The fatman took me to the movies. We stood in line but didn’t have to buy tickets. The fatman looked at the owner, put his hand on my shoulder, and nodded once. The owner stared at me without changing expression and let us in free. The fatman bought me a large buttered popcorn. Occasionally Mom made popcorn at home, but she never put butter on it. I felt special, eating buttered popcorn and watching The Godfather, which affected me in a very powerful way. I’d never seen a movie that long or that slow. The world it depicted was utterly foreign, but I understood its insular nature, the power dynamics, the violence and loyalties. After the movie, the fatman gave me a dime because I insisted on calling my father and telling him that if anything ever happened to him, I would avenge his death. I was crying into the phone. My father said little. I could hear the clatter of his typewriter keys as I spoke.
The fatman wanted me to touch him in his bed, but I refused. I explained that I liked girls, although I’d never been with one.
I’d kissed three and touched one’s bra strap. The fatman offered me two hundred dollars to help him make a movie. They’d shoot the whole thing in a hotel room nearby, but I’d have to touch a man, maybe another boy about my age. I told him that I really wanted to be with a girl and suggested we make that kind of movie instead. He said if I made a movie with a man, he would provide me with a girl afterward. I told him no. He told me to think about it, but I didn’t. I looked at the light fixture and went away in my mind.
I’d developed the ability to go rapidly, to vanish from circumstances and enter a trancelike state in which I was a prince with a personal garrison at my command, a lavish kingdom to rule, and a harem of lovely women. Abruptly I was back in the dim room. My legs were bare and cold, my body tense. The fatman was breathing hard. I took the money and left.
The last time I went to the room, I encountered another boy on the steps. He was a year older than I was, with long hair the same color as mine. New to school, he lived with his mother in a trailer. I’d seen him outside the building before, but we both pretended we hadn’t noticed the other. This time he was crouching on the steps. He motioned me to be quiet. I joined him, moving silently. We were midway up the staircase. The bathroom was at the top of the steps and the door was partly open. Through it we could see the fatman standing in the shower, his vast naked bulk exposed. He was vomiting and defecating simultaneously. It was a sickening sight, so repulsive that it was hard to stop staring. The fatman began crying, an uncontrollable sobbing that made his shoulders quake, his torso ripple. He leaned on the wall as if in surrender.
The other boy and I slipped down the stairs and laughed about what we’d seen. What else could we do? We laughed at the hideous sight. We never talked about it and he soon quit school. A few years passed before I wondered if he’d made a movie at the motel. By then he was already dead of an overdose. The fatman once suggested I bring my brother to visit, and I got very angry. The only good that I can find in all this now is that I protected my brother. At least I did that.
The fatman left town as suddenly as he’d appeared, and I didn’t speak to anyone about him. Instead, I began to shoplift. Every time I entered a store, I walked around as if browsing, while secretly examining lines of sight and avenues of getaway. I was a meticulous planner. The best technique was to set the object I intended to steal near the door, then buy something cheap that required a shopping bag. On my way out of the store, I’d surreptitiously slip the preset goods into the bag. I got very scared as I walked to the door, my body encased in the same adrenalized state as when climbing the steps to the fatman’s room. I breathed slowly through my mouth, sweating inside my clothes. On the sidewalk outside, I felt the euphoria of relief at having gotten away. Stealing made me feel bad about myself, but that didn’t matter, because feeling bad was my normal state. I never got caught. I never stole anything I really wanted.
In a college psychology class, I read an article that referred to people who’d been sexually abused as “victims.” This made me uneasy because I didn’t like the idea of being a victim. I knew the whole fatman business was my fault. Nobody had forced me to enter that building and climb those stairs and push open the dark wooden door. I’d gone there freely. I’d been there more than once. I felt special. I felt bad. I wondered if I was gay. I dropped the class and got stoned, then drunk, and stayed that way for a good while.
Twenty-five years later I began talking about the fatman. I thought I might feel relieved or unburdened, but I didn’t. I told my wife. I told my parents and siblings in a group letter, which I suppose was cowardly, perhaps even cruel. It was shocking enough that no one knew how to respond. My father, surprisingly, called. He wanted to know if the fatman still lived in the county. Coincidentally, Dad evoked The Godfather, saying that he would send Vito and Luigi to kill the man. I didn’t tell him how that particular movie had figured in to things so long ago.
After revealing my old secret, I mainly felt embarrassed. Worse things happened to other boys, and much worse things happened to women. I was never forced or hurt. It was a long time ago. I knew that I should find it in myself to forgive the fatman, an act that ultimately would benefit me. But I couldn’t do it. I’d spent too many years hoping he went to prison. I hoped every inmate spat on him in the corridors. I wanted them to fill his food with poison, smack him around in the yard, and ambush him in the shower. I wanted him to be scared and alone. I wanted his life to be so miserable that he spent every day wishing he were someone else. I wanted him to memorize the dim flat light fixture in his cell. I wanted him as dead as I felt, as dead as I still feel sometimes, as dead as the other boy I saw on the steps will always be.
Chapter Eighteen
WHEN I was fifteen, the most direct impact of my experience with the fatman was a deep fear that I was secretly gay. The answer to that was obvious—find a girl who’d let me have sex with her—but I couldn’t get dates, let alone sex. Before my father shut down his insurance agency, he’d accidentally given his secretary a porn manuscript to type. Rumor and gossip about my father’s writing spread through the county. Though tame by pornographic standards, his SF novels contained descriptions of sex that offended local people. As a result, concerned parents refused to let their daughters go out with me.
Dad never talked about his work overtly; the formal subject was forbidden, but I knew about it and sought the porn when my parents were away. I was as afraid of the material as I was intrigued. That it was secret made it “bad,” which increased its appeal. I wondered if my mother knew about it, then realized she had to—she did his typing.
Spanking figured prominently in most of the books. It was appealing in the abstract, since it seemed to induce sex, but being beaten by grade school teachers had left me with a disregard for pain and punishment.
The books were detailed and graphic but lacked warmth. Sex took place for its own sake, often part of a fierce power dynamic. Porn supplied me with an understanding of the mechanics of sex—anatomy, technique, timing, and aftermath—but no sense of intimacy. Women were fiercely resistant until forced into accepting their buried desire, whereupon they became compliant and willing. On the other hand, my experience with the fatman made me absolutely determined never to coerce another person into a vulnerable situation. These two attitudes conflicted. The result was extreme trepidation, beneath which lay the burning curiosity of all teenagers.
It never occurred to me that young women were just as interested in sex as I was. My assumption, based on porn and the conservative culture of the hills, was that females were essentially asexual. They had to be tricked into sex, or married. I didn’t want to participate in either scenario. Boys were prone to bragging about their sexual prowess, and I naively believed the lies I heard at school. It seemed as if everyone except me was having secret fun. Like most teenagers, I felt I had nowhere to turn, no one to trust.
I began spying on a hippie commune in a narrow holler, occasionally glimpsing a woman with no shirt. The hills offered free clay for potters, cheap rent in general, a gorgeous landscape, and soil that was highly suitable to the cultivation of marijuana. The current wave of visitors came from northern cities and spoke with heavy accents. Many were rich kids slumming, as if visiting Appalachia was a tour of duty necessary to acquire their countercultural bona fides back home. They arrived for brief periods and left. The old folks called them “hemorrhoids,” saying the good ones came down and went back up, but the bad ones came down and stayed. People left them alone.
After weeks of clandestinely watching the commune, I decided to steal their marijuana, then trade it back to them for sex. A buddy and I made a night mission, moving furtively along a ridge behind the hippie house and down through the woods. We used our pocketknives to cut the plant at the base and escaped into the shadows. The marijuana was more of a bush, and we didn’t know what to do with it.
In an abandoned smokehouse, we built a small fire and heated some leaves, which ignited. We began inhaling the acrid smoke and lay a
round pretending to be high, not really knowing the effects but making lofty claims—we could fly, see through walls, become invisible. Finally we admitted that the only results were seared throats and throbbing headaches. We concluded it had to be cured like tobacco, and I hatched a plan even more absurd than trading dope for sex.
We carefully stripped the leaves and packed them in four bread sacks, tied off the ends, and pressed them flat. We slid them under our clothes, hitchhiked to town, and went to a Laundromat. During a lull when it was empty, we dumped the marijuana into a dryer, cranked the heat to the highest setting, and stood guard. Within ten minutes the pungent scent of marijuana filled the Laundromat. We monitored the load, but the leaves hadn’t changed colors to indicate a quickened rate of curing. The next time we checked, half the leaves blew into the room and scattered across the floor. My buddy and I fled.
That summer our family attended MidwestCon, which turned out to be my last con. Dad said he’d driven the Mercedes into the Ohio River, to collect insurance money, and bought a VW squareback. My youngest sister rode in the back, tucked into a small space among the luggage. The minute we arrived at the hotel, Dad began operating in full John Cleve mode, refusing to acknowledge his children. The only other teenager at the con was the fourteen-year-old daughter of a minor SF writer who also wrote porn. We talked the first night. Tessa had run away to New Orleans for a while but now lived with her father, whom she hated. He ignored her and he drank and had too many rules. I told her I knew exactly what she meant. We agreed on everything—fans were the biggest weirdos in the world, cons were boring, and our parents didn’t care.
The next day I suggested we swim in the motel pool, mainly for an opportunity to see her in a bathing suit. She refused on the grounds that cons were full of old perverts, then crooked her finger in a “follow me” motion. We rode the elevator to the fifth floor, the walls of which were painted a deep shade of blue. She led me to a door with a sign that said “Housekeeping.” Inside was a wall of shelves that held sheets, towels, toilet paper, plastic cups, and tiny packages of soap. Tessa unfolded a roll-away bed. The only illumination came from a wide crack beneath the door.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 11
