. . . her fine big broad plush snowy buttocks standing well out above her sturdy snowy legs, with her also large and snowy breasts out of her bodice.
Literature has a strong precedent for repetition of words, but I’m not convinced that using “snowy” three times in a single sentence gains sufficient reward. As I read the manuscript, I began to wonder what metaphoric chair it could have landed on to ensure publication.
John Cleve retired in 1985. Dad insisted that he himself hadn’t quit, but John Cleve had. It was more retreat than retirement, a slipping back into the shadows, fading away like an old soldier. Cleve had done his duty—the house was paid off, the kids were gone, and the bank held a little savings. Dad was fifty-two. As Cleve, he’d published 130 novels in eighteen years.
Dad continued to write and publish short fiction under his own name, totalling thirty-eight stories between 1954 and 2004. A span of this length is unusual—most writers don’t stick with the form for fifty years. On the strength of these publications and his former service as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, he continued to attend cons, limited to small regional events within driving distance. Ostensibly the reason was practical—Dad couldn’t fly due to mysterious pains in his leg—but the truth was far more personal.
In 1972 Harlan Ellison had asked my father to contribute a short story to the influential anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. Dad supplied “For Value Received,” about a girl who grows up in a hospital because her family can’t afford to pay the bill for her birth. Ellison wrote a respectful introduction to the story, complimenting not only the work but my father’s mind, and mentioning that he, Ellison, had entered the same 1954 college science fiction contest that Dad had won. The two men had much in common: They were the same age, from backwaters of Ohio and Kentucky, brilliant, opinionated, articulate, and angry.
In Dad’s own introduction to the story, he proclaimed:
I love to talk first and write second, and I do both because I have to.
Many working writers are quite talkative—myself included—eager for social engagement after prolonged solitude. Nevertheless, my father is the only writer I’ve known who placed talking ahead of writing in importance. Every thought he had was worthy of expression and therefore deserving of a rapt and respectful audience. His family dutifully gave him that, as did fans at small cons.
Inclusion in Ellison’s anthology increased my father’s profile, and he was asked to serve as Toastmaster for the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention, the most prestigious event in the field. His duties included opening remarks, introducing the guest of honor, and presiding over the Hugo Awards ceremony. Twenty years after his first professional sale and five years after his first con, he’d reached a significant crest in his career. The personal stakes were high. He prepared index cards on which he had bullet points to trigger extemporaneous oration and reduce the chance of sounding canned—replete with dramatic pauses, laugh lines, and grand pronouncements.
At the hotel he dressed in a new leisure suit made of denim with a faux-patch design and flared legs. He wore a white shirt with a broad collar splayed over his suit coat. In the bathroom he trimmed his beard carefully. He double-checked his cuffs, the break of his trousers, and his socks. Accompanied by my mother, who wore a gorgeous white gown, he headed for the banquet.
Worldcon was held in Washington, D.C., at the Sheraton Park Hotel. It had the largest ballroom in the world and had hosted one of the inaugural galas for President Kennedy. By 1974 the infrastructure was disintegrating, and it would soon be torn down. The banquet hall was filled to capacity, with standing room only in the balcony. The air-conditioning failed. The audience was miserably hot, and the hotel staff was unable to resupply pitchers of water at a sufficient rate.
After the meal, Dad commenced his opening remarks about Roger Zelazny, the guest of honor. All went well initially. Perhaps the heat got to my father, or his own anxiety, or he succumbed to the self-destructive pressure he often fought. It could simply have been a case of Dad finally having the floor—the big floor—and he gave over to his love of talking. Whatever the reason, his opening comments began to meander, focusing on himself, and going on too long. Some fans left the room. Others perceived his extended oration as discourteous to Zelazny. People became cranky from the heat and made nasty comments. Open dissent had begun in the audience.
When it became clear that Dad was not moving toward his closing comments, Harlan Ellison decided to intervene. He rose from his spot and began a slow walk toward the head table. Dad ignored him and continued to talk about himself. Ellison reached the podium, motioned to my father and whispered in his ear. The audience erupted with laughter. Dad cut his speech short and Zelazny spoke briefly.
Dad came home incensed at Ellison for interrupting him, the most vile of transgressions against a man who placed talking ahead of every other endeavor. He told me that Ellison had ordered him to pick up the pace. He believed that Ellison was impatient to learn the results of the Hugo Award, for which he had been nominated. Around the house, Dad continually berated Ellison. He made fun of his voice, his height, and his massive ego. Harlan likes to hurt people. He takes everything personally. He sees everything as a direct challenge. Even as a teenager, I realized that Dad could be talking about himself.
According to him, the two writers were deeply engaged in a blood feud that would last until one of them died. Diplomatic reconciliation was impossible. Dad’s sense of himself was enormous but fragile, as if constructed of bamboo and paper, like a box kite. A slender string tethered it to Earth, and the slightest breeze could knock it astray. His experience at the 1974 Worldcon was a strong enough gust that he never attended another. For the next twenty years, Dad attended only regional cons where fans adored him and were willing to listen without interruption. Upon entering a room, Dad often said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Is Harlan here? No? Good. Then I’m among friends.”
In 2002 Michael Chabon solicited a story from me for a special edition of an anthology entitled McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Stories. Chabon wanted to reinvigorate contemporary literature by bringing his beloved genre tales to the attention of readers. I agreed to contribute and wrote “Chuck’s Bucket,” a time-travel story based on string theory that explained the existence of ghosts while exploring the possibility of parallel realities. One alternate reality recounted Dad’s feud with Ellison.
When the magazine came out, I was in Colorado, preparing to present my work at a writers’ conference. I carefully planned my remarks and was attending to my appearance in the mirror when the phone rang in my hotel room. The caller was Harlan Ellison. He’d just read my story and wanted me to know that he had nothing against my father. Stunned, I told him that Dad didn’t get along with a lot of people, me included, and Ellison didn’t need to sugarcoat things. Ellison said he never sugarcoated anything, you can ask around, but insisted that no feud ever existed. He told me he had the utmost respect for my father, whom he considered an excellent writer. He asked me to visit when I was in California, and hung up.
The conversation shocked me, and I thought about it for a long time. Ellison had put forth a degree of effort to track me down at a hotel and make the call. He was known to be rude and irascible, a street fighter in his youth, litigious, a provocateur, and short-tempered. I couldn’t summon a reason for him to lie about the feud or about his sincere regard for my father. In short, I believed him. That meant the decades-long conflict was one-sided on my father’s part.
I wondered how many other altercations were products of Dad’s immense imagination bundled with rage. I’d grown up hearing tales of his disputes, the firing of agents, editors, and collaborators. He had discord with everyone—his mother, his sister, and me. Perhaps he needed foes as much as he needed to talk.
As Dad aged, he outlived the older writers he admired. He had alienated most of his contemporaries, and neglected to befriend the newcomers. All his books were out of print. Invit
ations to cons dwindled, but Dad told me that he quit fandom due to vanity. He didn’t want to be remembered as old and infirm. He was afraid that younger fans wouldn’t know who he was, a prospect he couldn’t bear.
My brother blamed cons for the erosion of our home life. His reasoning made sense, but I recognized that our parents needed a countermeasure to life in Haldeman. The majority of fans used cons as a replacement for an absent family, and my parents did the same. They preferred cons to their children’s high school and college graduations, or my sister’s appearance on the homecoming court. On one occasion Dad returned from a con proud of having cried in public because he felt comfortable among his “family.” I believe that telling his children this was an attempt to communicate that he was capable of weeping, despite never doing so in front of us. But what came across was the notion that fans were more deserving of his emotional vulnerability than we were.
Dad seldom left the house over which he held utter dominion. When he did leave, he went to cons, an environment that assuaged his ego in every way. He grew accustomed to these two extremes and became resentful when his family failed to treat him like fans did. We disappointed him with our need for a father.
Chapter Twenty-six
WITH JOHN Cleve in official retirement, Turk Winter surged forth as my father’s last persona, publishing more than 250 titles. Dad referred to him as “a perverse, kinky devil born for one book; reinpsychelated in 1975.” Before his final trip to New York, Dad had written a fan letter to Eric Stanton, an underground fetish artist who drew On a Kinky Hook. Dad thought he’d recognized the artistic influence of Steve Ditko, the mysterious genius who created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Stanton responded with an appreciative phone call. Impressed by Dad’s visual sense, he explained that Ditko had been his studio mate for several years. They talked for an hour, and Stanton invited Dad to visit on his business trip to Manhattan.
Expecting the worst sort of rudeness from a native New Yorker, Dad was shocked by Stanton’s hospitality: private sleeping quarters stocked with whiskey and porn. Though they were from drastically different backgrounds—Stanton was a Brooklyn native who’d served in the navy—they had much in common. Dad used pseudonyms and Stanton had legally changed his name from Ernest Stanzoni. As boys, they’d both copied pages from Kaanga, a comic book that featured light bondage. They loved the 1940s matinee serial Perils of Nyoka. Their initial meeting was similar to a pair of immigrants from the Old Country discovering each other, assuaging loneliness by speaking the same language: corset and heels, rope and strap, whip and cane.
Stanton’s art and Dad’s prose were heavily influenced by a particular type of comic called a “bondage serial,” consisting of a narrative with words and art, sold through the mail a single page at a time. According to Dad’s papers, in 1952 he encountered an ad in the back of a men’s magazine for Princess Elaine’s Terrible Fate, drawn by Gene Bilbrew. Dad bought a full set, his first exposure to bondage art. He then contracted with Bizarre Inc. to create his own serial, corresponding with an editor who signed letters as “Sado Mazie.” Dad wrote and drew ten chapters. It was rejected for amateurish art, but the writing was good enough that Sado Mazie offered to swap merchandise for scripts. Insulted, Dad refused. Seven years later he tried again, submitting work to publisher Irving Klaw, and again he was rejected.
My father was astounded that Stanton knew Bilbrew and Klaw personally. Stanton was equally amazed by Dad’s encyclopedic knowledge of the fetish field. They decided to collaborate. There was no business arrangement, no legal contract, no formal division of profits and labor. They operated under an old-fashioned gentlemen’s agreement. This was partly to avoid prosecution but was also a product of their generation—they simply decided to trust each other. Stanton paid for printing and distribution in exchange for retaining all copyrights. Dad’s payment came in the form of free porn. They collaborated for twenty-five years, the longest time either man had a business partner.
There existed a sense of play in their collaboration, that of teenagers engaged in naughty behavior, delighting in the other’s contributions. Their methodology was simple. Stanton mailed Dad a sheaf of drawings photocopied from his sketchbook. After shuffling the sequence of art, Dad inserted dialogue, blocks of text, and ideas for trimming or lengthening the story. He mailed the pages back to Stanton, who called Dad to discuss. They talked as often as twice a week, both men drinking and laughing, telling stories and planning their future work.
The concept of warrior women appealed to them, which led to the creation of their popular series Blunder Broad, a parody of Wonder Woman. She battled aliens and supervillains such as Count Dastardly, Pussygirl, and Doktor Weerde. Every story ended with her capture, often bound by her own lasso. They also created a series about “princkazons,” Amazonian women with penises—essentially large-breasted transsexuals who dominated males and females alike. Dad used the name Turk Winter for all their collaborative work.
Their few nonprofessional letters had a jocular tone, filled with juvenile sex jokes and humorous comments. They made fun of each other’s accents, where they lived, and fetish preferences. If one didn’t respond in a timely manner, he was accused of “cock-teasing” the other. Reading these letters made me glad that my father had someone with whom he could loosen up and relinquish his martinet qualities. Despite having spent very little time with Stanton, Dad always referred to Eric as his best friend. I wondered if it was true until I found a note from one of Stanton’s adult children referring to Dad as Eric’s best friend.
Dad wrote faster than Stanton drew, and began his own self-publishing imprint called Winterbooks. Stanton promoted the material to his mail-order clients. Customers initially went through Stanton, which delayed fulfillment of the orders. As the volume increased, Dad began dealing directly with repeat clients. He developed a list of offerings and charged sixty dollars per book, payable in advance. In this way, both men made money by selling the same material to different customers.
By 1999 Stanton had endured a series of strokes that rendered him unable to work. He gave Dad an extensive list of American and international clients. Eric Stanton died on April 17, 1999. That same day, Dad suffered a massive heart attack, requiring emergency bypass surgery. The death of his only friend left him alone with his obsessions.
Two years after heart surgery, my father expanded Winterbooks, referring to it as “Turk’s cottage industry.” Dad sent personal letters to big spenders, alluding to porn he custom-wrote for special clients. A slow-going epistolary relationship developed in which Dad gave them gifts, confided personal details, and hinted at his actual name. Like a clandestine agent operating under a cloak of secrecy, he revealed himself to men he could exploit financially. Over time several customers specified their sadomasochistic interests and ordered their own private pornography. The price was three thousand dollars, but each customer was offered a “special discount” that dropped the rate to $2,600. If a customer paid cash in advance, Dad wrote the tailor-made porn.
He fed the prose into a computer template he’d invented for a seventy-page book—two vertical columns of text. The final product was a manuscript with a special cover page personally inscribed, dated, and signed by Turk Winter. Dad later changed the cover page and added the commissioned work to his catalog, reselling each one for seventy dollars, unsigned. This had the unexpected effect of pleasing the original clients, who enjoyed the notion of like-minded strangers reading a professional depiction of their personal fantasies. Within ten years Dad had a large catalog of books for sale, eking out a living while proudly continuing the underground tradition of mail-order bondage begun in the 1940s.
Customers in the UK, Germany, and Italy routinely requested swifter ordering, suggesting fax or email, and a method of payment other than cash. One went so far as providing his credit card number. Dad refused, trusting nobody, especially the Internet. Obscenity laws were relegated to local standards, and he lived deep in the Bible Belt. Using the postal system to def
raud the IRS was a felony, and Dad received bundles of cash in the mail on a regular basis. As protection, he mailed Winterbooks from the post office in Morehead, which sent packages to Lexington for a postmark, placing a hundred-mile layer of discretion between him and their official source. He used false return addresses, including mine. While living in Montana, I received a tattered envelope from Italy that contained a manuscript the customer didn’t want, along with a letter in stilted English explaining its return.
Dad maintained steady correspondence with repeat customers. He saved their letters but not his own. This resulted in files going back over a decade that contained one side of a continuous conversation. I read hundreds, slowly seeing a pattern emerge of characteristics shared by most of the men: over forty, middle-class to wealthy, many with a Catholic childhood. They worked as civil servants, lawyers, and middle managers in corporate offices. American clients often had backgrounds in the military or engineering. All were incredibly lonely, having carried around their secret obsession without a chance to share it. The letters reminded me of film buffs or musicologists who established credentials by displaying the depth of their knowledge. Most hobbyists have meeting places such as a record store, a gun show, or a philatelist’s event. There they are free to bask in a shared interest. But a bird-watcher doesn’t have to hide his binoculars the way bondage enthusiasts conceal everything related to their hobby.
Clients treated Turk Winter with great respect. The more money they spent, the longer Turk’s letters were. With men of his own generation, Dad discussed health issues between paragraphs concerned with bondage and discipline. They exchanged VHS tapes, magazines, and photocopies of underground art.
Long-term pen pals included information about new cars, broken appliances, the weather, and popular movies. At least two thanked my father for photographs of his children and grandchildren. Instead of communicating with his family, Dad preferred an ongoing correspondence with people he never met. The mutual interest in bondage material was a powerful link, ingrained with sympathy and understanding. After carrying his secret throughout his life, he could be himself with strangers.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 16
