My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485)

by Offutt, Chris

  She was still waiting for an answer. My roommate filled the silence.

  “He’s a writer,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “What does he write about?”

  “His dick.”

  She gave me a sharp look and said, “That sounds like pornography.”

  “No,” my roommate said. “If he writes about other people’s dicks, it’s porn. But if it’s his own, it’s art.”

  The two of them began a lively conversation, later leaving together, and that was as close as I ever got to picking up a woman in a bar.

  To get the details straight about the Salem anecdote, I needed access to my journals, which went back forty-five years. They were stacked floor-to-ceiling in a closet, cartons that contained everything I’d written since second grade. Boxes of my father’s work blocked the closet door. My own archives were carefully taped and labeled, but the journal I sought was out of place. I found it inside an unlabeled carton that held a short story I’d forgotten about. My literary archive wasn’t as organized as I thought—much like Dad’s.

  To find the Salem section, I read dozens of entries written at a frantic pace, accounts of beleaguered woe and complaint. No matter how far back I looked into my own life, the rapid scrawl covered the same subjects: I felt bad, I didn’t like what I wrote, I hated myself. I resolved to burn the journals. Then I decided not to.

  I’d grown up in the country, run from it for most of my life, and now wanted to live nowhere else. Between ages nineteen and fifty-three, I traveled relentlessly, living and working in New York City, Boston, Paris, Florida, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Kentucky, California, and Mississippi. In my free time I visited other places. I’d slept in every state except North Dakota and Delaware and still hoped to get there.

  What began as a desire to see the other side of the nearest hill at home had shifted to travel as a habitual way of life. If things didn’t work out, I moved on. I knew how to arrive in a new town, get a job, find a cheap room, and furnish it with junk from the street. I liked living without history, nothing held against me. My brother once asked what I was running from. I told him I wasn’t, I was running toward, only I didn’t know toward what. He nodded and said, “You’ll always be afraid of him, you know.”

  I didn’t believe my brother, didn’t want to, couldn’t bear to face the idea. It took courage to live my way—hitchhiking across the country, refusing to take a full-time job. I wasn’t afraid of anything except snakes, and I’d killed one and skinned it and hung the brittle hide on a nail where I could see it every day in order to overcome my phobia. But my brother was right all along. I didn’t know it until my fear ended with Dad’s death.

  I became concerned that examining the minutiae of his work was turning me into him. I wrote ten hours a day. At night I read. I avoided leaving the house. I got mad at small things, yelled at inanimate objects. If this were true—the steady evolution to becoming Dad—then my sons will suffer the same fate and become me, an absurd notion that destroys the logic of my premise. Therefore, I am not my father. I’m a middle-aged man contemplating my own mortality through the lens of a parent’s death.

  I went outside and watched two sparrows fight in my dusty gravel driveway. On a distant fence post, a hawk watched them. The air thickened suddenly and a quick shower pocked the dirt. The birds flew away and the hawk moved on. The rain stopped. I headed for the woods behind my house. I walked a quarter mile to a barbed wire fence that had been mended several times.

  Going through a barbed wire fence is a simple skill. Like swimming or riding a bicycle, once learned it’s never forgotten. I crouched, pressed the low wire down with one hand, stepped over it, and carefully eased my body through the gap. Twice I felt the barbs scrape my shirt, but I was moving slowly enough to stop, bend my knee a quarter inch lower, and pass through safely.

  I walked the length of a fallow cotton field to the edge of Berry Branch, a very old creek with a ten-foot bank running nearly straight down. Water moved slowly along the sandy bottom. Kudzu had killed several smaller trees. A large maple lay in the creek, its roots eroded from below. I headed west to a series of smaller gullies where I’d found feather and bone before.

  A shape that didn’t fit in caught my peripheral attention. I stopped moving, fearful of a snake, and saw a turtle as wide as my hand. It had been climbing a bank before I arrived. Now it had halted, blending in like a stone, its head protruding from the gray shell, back legs extended on the slight incline. As a boy I’d caught dozens of turtles, carried them home, and kept them in a cardboard box with grass and water until realizing they were the most boring pet of all. I painted the back of their shells with fingernail polish, then set them free, hoping to find one again.

  I wondered if this particular turtle had seen a human before. I squatted a few feet away and asked where he’d been and where he was going. I warned him about water moccasins and coyotes. I told him about my father. After twenty minutes my knee was cramped and the turtle hadn’t answered. He stayed immobile during our entire conversation. I told him goodbye and headed home, momentarily cheered.

  I walked across the field and passed through the fence without a scratch. Crawling along my arm was a Lone Star tick, with the distinctive yellow spot on its back. I cut it in half with my thumbnail. At home I removed my muddy boots and drank some water. Briefly I wondered what my neighbors would think if they’d come upon me while conversing with a turtle. They’d probably have watched silently, then slipped away. Everyone on the road would know, but nobody would mind. In Mississippi personal eccentricity didn’t matter any more than it did in Kentucky. I’d found a home, the same as Dad had in the hills.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  FOR THIRTY years my father anticipated his impending death—at any time!—and suggested that family members earmark objects in the house by taping our names on them. None of us did. For me it felt morbid, as if competing with my siblings for threadbare rugs might hasten his demise.

  In 1998 I relocated to Kentucky one last time, filled with optimism and hope. I bought a house high on a hill with a long balcony overlooking several acres and a pond, the nicest home I’d ever had. Prior to this, my wife and young sons had lived in a string of cheap dumps rented over the phone, moving our increasingly battered secondhand belongings. Although I didn’t know it yet, my marriage was deeply troubled by the itinerant lifestyle of a perpetually visiting writer at various universities. We made seven interstate moves in four years, saving the boxes each time. As the adventure wore off, so did the sheen of marital bliss.

  This was intended as the final move—back to Kentucky at age forty for a permanent job at my alma mater, Morehead State University. We needed furniture, and I decided to take my father up on his largess. He always said I could have anything, but I had never asked. This would be a first.

  Visiting my folks’ house was always fraught with tension from the onset. When was the best time? How much notice did Dad need? Not too early, not too late, no time was ever ideal. If I took my sons along, I left them in the car while I entered the house and put the guns away. Dad didn’t like that. He suggested I should’ve taught my sons not to touch guns.

  “They’re little kids,” I said. “They might accidentally run into the shotgun by the door.”

  “They won’t run in my house!”

  “I don’t meant run literally, but you know how boys play.”

  “Then they can play outside.”

  “Mom might want them to come in and eat.”

  Dad walked away without speaking. I knew that evoking my mother had won the initial skirmish, but he would resent it for the entire visit.

  Next came the production of pouring bourbon. It was best if Dad picked the glass, because any I chose was deemed inappropriate: too old, too new, reserved for special occasions, or a longtime favorite now retired. Preparing drinks gave my father the opportunity to talk nonstop while establishing dominion over the kitchen, the house, and the glassware�
�but mainly over me.

  Equipped with whiskey, we went to the living room, where I listened to his criticism of politics, my siblings, and TV programming. I gulped my drink, which Dad would comment on—chip off the old block, son—and at the slightest lull in his monologue, I hurried to the kitchen, tossed back a shot of liquor, filled my glass, and returned to the living room. Dad resumed talking at the precise point he’d stopped, often in midsentence, a trait I found impressive.

  Years back, Mom had replaced the dining room set and gotten rid of the old ladder-backed chairs with seats woven of rush. I’d grown up with five chairs at the table instead of six because Dad used one in his office. My parents had enclosed the side porch for storage, and suspended by a hook on the wall was the last dining room chair, dusty and laced with cobwebs. Dad raised the inevitable subject of what I’d like from the house. I suggested the chair, believing there’d be no conflict, since it was clearly not in use.

  “What chair?” he said.

  “On the wall out there.”

  “No. That one has to stay.”

  “Does Mom want it?”

  “No, I do! That was John Cleve’s chair. He retired and his chair did, too. Ol’ John’s gone. That chair deserves a rest.”

  After Dad died, I cleared the storage room but left the chair on the wall. Mom mentioned it and I reminded her it had been John Cleve’s and she dropped the subject. My sisters talked of burning it. I considered a formal pyre, but the outdoor fireplace had long since collapsed, and the living room contained a woodstove that hadn’t been used in so long, it contained the mummified corpses of eleven birds. My brother was surprised I wanted to keep the chair, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. It was less a case of loyalty to my father than to the chair itself and, in a circuitous way, to literature. The chair deserved more than flame. It had served. Two months later I moved it to Mississippi.

  I made space in my writing room for Dad’s executive desk, opposite my own desk, made of plywood over sawhorses. Mine contrasted starkly with his. A set of deep drawers flanked the knee hole, and a wide pencil drawer spanned the top. I oiled the metal slides, waxed the wooden runners, and polished the surface to a shiny gleam. I tucked John Cleve’s chair into the knee hole. The front legs were scraped and dented, but the chair was intact, the nails firm, the glue tight. His desk became a catch-all for papers, slowly collecting dust as if unable to get free of old behavior. I never sat in the chair. No one had but Dad until he hung it on the wall.

  When it came time to organize a file of Dad’s earliest artwork, I was reluctant to again take over the dining room table. The light was poor, and working there disrupted meals. My own desk was small, with notes and paper cluttering the surface. The best option was my father’s desk. I stared at Ol’ John’s chair for a long time, imagining my father hunched over the surface of the desk, working furiously.

  I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I emptied the trash. I washed my face and combed my hair. I picked up my father’s chair and readjusted it. I walked back and forth behind it like a dog. I ate a piece of chocolate. I considered another cigarette. Then I smoked one. I thought of all the things I’d done that were supposedly brave:

  Faced a man with a loaded gun.

  Entered numerous cars with strangers while hitchhiking.

  Camped alone in the woods.

  Killed a poisonous snake with a stick.

  Moved to cities where I didn’t know anyone.

  Slept in a cemetery at night.

  Hopped a train.

  Defended myself with my fists.

  Explored a house supposedly haunted.

  Talked my way out of being mugged.

  Ran a chainsaw.

  Lived in a foreign country.

  Crawled out of waist-deep quicksand.

  Rappelled headfirst down a cliff.

  I finished the cigarette, came inside, and wrote the preceding list. These were not acts of genuine courage, but were born of foolishness and despair. I was lucky to escape being maimed or killed. Nothing in my life came close to the courage my father displayed at the age of thirty-six when he quit a successful business career to write books. I was a grown man afraid of furniture. The shame of cowardice compelled me to approach the desk. I withdrew the chair, and I sat. Nothing untoward happened. It was just an old chair, not real comfortable.

  I began reading Marcus Severus in Ancient Rome, a black-and-white comic book Dad made at age seventeen. To avoid capture, Marcus becomes the first man to swim the English Channel. He evades opposing forces and heads for Rome, accompanied by an “amorous concubine” disguised as a man. The book stops, incomplete, corresponding with his second year of college. That same year his father died of a stroke.

  In 1949 Dad began another comic, Cade of the Galactic Patrol, and worked on it for nine years. The narrative is swiftly engaging. Richard Louis Cade, an officer in the Grand Army of the Galactic Republic, goes on a mission to rescue the president’s daughter. In a portent of contemporary times, people talk on “vizi-phones” and transmit instant “galactic telegrams” via desktop computers.

  A strange dreamlike quality pervades the crude art. Perspective and scale are off-kilter. Figures exist independently of the space they inhabit. Backgrounds are vaguely rendered in repeating patterns of crosshatching and tightly compressed vertical lines. Characters change clothes often. A fierce warrior woman goes about dressed as a boy, while Cade wears loose blouses and midthigh skirts because his “clothes are at the cleaners.”

  Dad finished the final installment of Cade a few months after I was born. On the last page, Cade looks in a mirror, experiencing his only self-reflective moment in 230 pages.

  He sees himself ten years ago entering the Space Academy and beginning his career, expecting to be either dead or married and settled . . . and where am I? Neither dead or settled. Or maybe I am dead—

  It is tempting to freight these words with retrospective meaning—is my father suggesting that marriage or paternity made him feel dead? The word “cade” means an animal abandoned by its mother and raised by humans, a kind of feral foundling. Perhaps Cade’s literal comment “maybe I am dead” is how Dad always felt. Then again, maybe it’s just a comic book made by a twenty-four-year-old late at night after a long day’s work, drinking Schlitz and smoking cigarettes while his new wife soothes his infant son. Regardless of interpretation, Dad never returned to Cade. In his notes, he wrote that he quit because it was veering toward the shameful.

  Dad often told me that a writer’s earliest work was his best because he put his entire life into it. All subsequent writing contained the accumulation of a few years at best. With that in mind I sat down to read “Population Implosion,” the 1967 short story that brought him attention in the science fiction field. Reflected on the pages was my father’s personality as I remembered it from my childhood—energetic, funny, concerned, serious, and original. At the end I began to cry. Each time my sobs faded, the emotion forced its way out again. I finally subsided, gasping for breath, drained and clearheaded. I’d kept my grief tightly stowed for months and now felt relieved. I understood that I was mourning my father but not his death. I wept for the talent he had as a young man, the great writer he might have become.

  My father’s best work was from 1966 to 1972, before the pace at which he wrote began to affect quality. On some level he knew this was true. Aside from Mongol!, two other early novels received his positive evaluation, both written in the late sixties. In his notes he wrote: “Captives in the Chateau de Sade is the one I assume will be a classic, to be reprinted in the next century and the next, over or under the counter depending upon the politics and mood of the time.” The book has many literary allusions, extremely rare in porn, including Stendhal, Freud, and de Sade. The protagonist instructs his followers in the treatment of their sexual prisoners:

  Remember this: it is caprice and lack of emotion that defeats them. When you show them emotion, of any kind, they feel a burst of accomplishment and pride
.

  Dad gave me his other favorite during my early twenties, saying Bruise was his concept of an intellectual look at S&M. The novel is set in my family home in the woods and features a protagonist who thinks and talks like my father. Bruise is a realistic depiction of two couples who kidnap five young people and sexually torture them to death. The pace is slow and deliberate, allowing a psychological depth missing from his other novels. The ending is an equally significant departure, never again seen in his work: regret for having murdered innocent people.

  Dad’s unpublished novels surpass twenty-five, more than most authors can claim for their life’s output. In the late 1960s, my father wrote his finest book, the never-published Autobiography of a Sex Criminal. It is Dad’s only novel that includes the point of view of a child—the narrator’s early years as he evolves into a sexual serial killer. The protagonist is smart, educated, and able to function in society. He plans ahead and preys on vulnerable hitchhikers. Sexual satisfaction is linked to homicide and postmortem mutilation. He often rearranges the victims’ clothes afterward. These are standard tropes of television and movies today, but at the time Dad wrote, the FBI hadn’t started its Behavioral Science Unit. The term “serial killer” hadn’t been invented yet. My father imagined his way into all of it—childhood deprivation and obsession, followed by initial bloodletting, a crime of opportunity, then more careful planning, stalking, and ritualized homicide.

  Dad’s papers held a brief note saying: “Unbought because it is ugly, and tries to Say Something.” The “something” was his belief that the penal system was too lenient and criminals were getting smarter. I think editors rejected it because it didn’t accomplish the essential task of fetish porn—sufficiently titillating the reader’s desire to masturbate. It is too well written and the sex scenes are too brutal.

  Another unpublished manuscript is my father’s earliest story and the sole work intended to be literary. It has two separate title pages. One says “The Other Side of the Story” by Andy Offutt. The second one, used on the final manuscript, is “Requite Me, Baby” by Morris Kenniston. Dad was twenty when he wrote it, just prior to graduating from the University of Louisville.