Since childhood, Dad had felt ashamed of his sexual proclivities. He knew they were unusual, possible evidence of something fundamentally flawed with his mind. This sense of difference resulted in an extreme degree of loneliness that was reduced by writing letters. One fan letter closed with a few lines that echoed a long-held belief of Dad’s: “Your stories allow our minds to be satiated without committing unspeakable acts. They keep us ‘civilized’ and sane. Maybe you have not heard it from others but it’s true.”
In the course of his fifty-year career as a writer, my father explored every sexual permutation except pedophilia. At the end of his life, still seeking a frontier, he wrote an intricate portrayal of cannibalism. His sole foray into bestiality was combined with the medical cloning of goats. In 2011 Turk Winter completed his final two serials. Gurlz encompassed nine installments for a total of 675 pages. Barbi’s World was over a thousand pages long. Stacked beside his chair were sheets of paper that contained his last writings: a list of real and invented nouns, and a succinct summary for a new book. My father was a workhorse in the field of written pornography. After five decades he died in harness.
Chapter Twenty-seven
MY FATHER’S writing process was simple—he got an idea, brainstormed a few notes, then wrote the first chapter. Next he developed an outline from one to ten pages long. He followed the outline carefully, relying on it to dictate the narrative. He composed his first drafts longhand, wearing rubber thimbles on finger and thumb. Writing with a felt-tip pen, he produced thirty or forty pages in a sitting. Upon completion of a full draft, he transcribed the material with his typewriter, revising as he went. Most writers get more words per page as they go from longhand to a typed manuscript, but not Dad. His handwriting was small and he used abbreviations. His first drafts were often the same length as the final ones.
Manuscripts of science fiction and heroic fantasy received multiple revisions, but he had to work much faster on porn. After a handwritten first chapter, he typed the rest swiftly, made editorial changes, and passed that draft to my mother. She retyped it for final submission. Under financial pressure, Mom would be typing the beginning of the book while Dad was writing the end. His goal was a minimum of a book a month. To achieve that, he refined his methods further.
Industrial mass production is based on efficiency and speed. Faced with increasing demand, Dad invented a method that enabled him to maintain supply with a minimum of effort. He created batches of raw material in advance—phrases, sentences, descriptions, and entire scenes on hundreds of pages organized in three-ring binders. Tabbed index dividers separated the sections into topics.
Dad was like Henry Ford applying principles of assembly-line production with premade parts. The methodical technique proved highly efficient. Surrounded by his tabulated notebooks, he could quickly find the appropriate section and transcribe lines directly into his manuscript. Afterward, he blacked them out to prevent plagiarizing himself. Ford hired a team of workers to manufacture a Model T in six hours. Working alone, Dad could write a book in three days.
Eighty percent of the notebooks described aspects of women’s bodies. The longest section focused on their bosom. Here is a brief compendium.
BREASTS:
love-swollen little buds
nascent curves
quivering mound
gentle hillox of her acorn-shaped brsts
tight hard mounds w/pointed crests
tender curve of her half-ripe breasts
firm and tight-skinned as new pears dangling unpicked from sun-warmed trees
gleamed w/the bloom of ripe peaches—w/same firmness
thrusting artillery shells
cannister jutted
opulently jutting projections
slick-skinned titty curves
meaty pendants
cantilevered coneshapes
unnatural thrust of those conoid mounds
bulging sides of her shapely creamballs
loosely attached knockers swayed from her chest
unbelieveable pulchritude of her overripe balls
big hard bullets of brazenly firm flesh
Another binder listed descriptions of individual actions, separated by labeling tabs that included: Mouth. Tongue. Face. Legs. Kiss. The heading of Orgasm had subdivisions of before, during, and after. The section called entry received the most precision, with subheadings of Virginal, Anal, Vaginal, Standing, Oral, and Kneeling. The thickest notebook, designed strictly for BDSM novels, listed of 150 synonyms for “pain.” Sections included spanking, whipping, degradation, pre-degradation, distress, screams, restraints, and tortures. These were further subdivided into specific categories followed by brief descriptions of each.
One long section gave me serious concern—a twenty page document titled Notes for a Book on Cruelty: Man’s Oldest Pleasure—a succinct list of tortures used throughout history in twelve countries. Examples included the partial flaying of people, insertion of bugs and rodents into fresh stomach wounds, nailing objects through flesh into bones, legs masoned into walls, the dislocation of arms, and cutting away various body parts. All were legal punishments mandated by the courts or society. The majority ended in slow, painful death. One source was a long diary recorded by a professional torturer of suspected witches in 1621.
1) Woman bound on rack,
2) Poured oil over head and burned,
3) Placed sulphur in armpits, burned it,
4) Hands tied behind, hauled up to ceiling, dropped,
5) Torturer went to lunch,
6) Placed spiked board on her back, pulled to ceiling, dropped,
7) Toes pressed in thumbscrews until blood squirted,
8) Pinched with red-hot irons,
9) Whipped and put in vise, gradually closed for six hours,
10) Hung by thumbs and flogged.
“This was all that was done on the first day.”
The final sentence chilled me. My impulse was to skip over the material completely, but I couldn’t shy away due to my own distaste. Instead, I tried to understand. My father had read dozens of books, copied sections in longhand, then organized his notes into a chronicle of terrible human activity. It was not scholarship on his part; he didn’t seek the information in order to place it in a larger context to further human knowledge. At first I suspected Dad sought inspiration, but none of his own books included the specific techniques he’d compiled. It occurred to me that he was using history to justify his own obsessive interest, seeking precedent to indulge his fantasies. For thousands of years people have treated other people in a horrible manner. Humans systematically tortured one another for political, social, and religious reasons. Someone performed all these acts, and someone else made a record for posterity. My father’s imagined worlds were nothing compared to historic reality.
Later my mother called and invited me to watch her beloved Reds play the Cardinals. I went to her house, grateful for the respite. It was a short drive through the lovely landscape of northern Mississippi, the thick foliage heavy with green. The sky was violet at dusk. The road to Oxford dipped and a church came into view. Briefly I had the sensation I was in Kentucky, driving to Haldeman to visit my mother.
At Mom’s house we spent twenty minutes fiddling with the television remote control and discovered that the Reds game was blacked out locally. Mom found a cop show she liked, then muted the volume and asked how work was going on the book.
I laughed and said, “Porn, porn, porn.”
She told me about taking a box of pornography to science fiction conventions and selling the books to fans.
“They bought them,” she said. “They bought everything. I don’t know why. The books were pretty much all the same. Different settings and people’s names, but the same. People just like them, I guess.”
“It’s like Agatha Christie novels. Or TV shows. A satisfying formula.”
“With sex,” she said, and laughed.
I told her I’d found a notebook with scads of no
tes about torture. The extensiveness of the material surprised me.
“It shouldn’t,” she said. “Your father was interested in that, you know.”
“What did you think of that?”
“It was historical.” She shrugged slightly. “He had a lot of interests. Like you do. Remember when you did that magic show at the library? You had a lot of hobbies.”
She was right, I had many hobbies as a child, and at one time wanted to be a stage magician. Maybe Dad’s study of torture was similar, a short-term enthusiasm.
“Whenever I talk about Dad’s career,” I said, “people always ask about your sex life.”
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
“Why would they want to know that?”
“I guess because of the porn,” I said.
“What do you tell them?” she said.
“I say it’s not something we discuss.”
She thought for a moment, then spoke. “Tell them it’s none of their damn business.”
“Okay, Mom.”
We turned our attention to the silent flickering on the television. The lead actor presided over a team, and Mom explained each of the specialist roles: fighter, tech, rookie, weaponry. The sound was unnecessary. I could see the characters surrounding a floor plan and planning an assault. They walked through a house with guns and flashlights, then chased a shirtless man in a car. I knew the car would wreck and they’d arrest the driver, and I knew the team would later capture the real bad guy, the boss of the shirtless man. A predictable formula satisfied the viewers, the same as it did for readers of Dad’s porn.
Mom told me she was content, that she liked living alone, and wondered if she should feel guilty about that.
“Do you?” I said.
“No, but I think I should.”
“You’re eighty, Mom. You deserve a break. No need to feel guilty about having a life you like.”
“You know,” she said, “you’re right.”
“Do you ever miss him?”
“Not really. Sometimes watching TV at night. Somebody to talk to.”
“Well, I’m here.” I pointed to the silent television set. “Good show, huh?” I said.
We both laughed. Later I hugged her, setting off the high-pitched keening of her hearing aid, and said goodbye.
I drove home and watched thousands of lightning bugs float in a field against the dark tree line. Cicadas roared steadily. The sound of frogs rose and fell. A whip-poor-will called, then a barred owl. Despite the beauty of the night, I could not rid myself of the tortures my father had compiled.
Chapter Twenty-eight
MONTHS OF close proximity to my father’s pattern of thought influenced me to think like him, then behave like him—distant, preoccupied, and critical. I began to question myself, the validity of my undertaking. At times my mood veered into self-hatred. I wasn’t suicidal, but the notion flitted through my mind, an option hiding in the shadowy perimeter. It concerned me enough to take a break from Dad’s papers.
I thought of the poet John Berryman, whose father killed himself, an act from which no son could ever recover. In a poem called “Of Suicide,” he wrote:
Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me.
I drink too much.
I first read this poem in my early twenties with little knowledge about Berryman, having heard incorrectly that he had leaped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. The poem had an exotic appeal, a glamorization of suicide and liquor. The lines were meaningful to me, since I often felt possessed by thoughts of my father and his occasional talk of suicide.
A few years after reading the poem, I happened to be in Minneapolis. A friend took me to the bleak Washington Avenue Bridge and pointed out the spot—not where Berryman jumped but where he landed—on the bank of the Mississippi River. It was a shocking moment for me, destroying the romantic notion of the bearded genius soaring from the grand and misty Golden Gate into the sea. Instead, in the middle of a brutal midwestern winter, he jumped off an ugly narrow bridge and died from the impact with frozen dirt.
The last time I lived in Kentucky, my house sat on a hill overlooking a pond, and in the morning the birds declared their various overlapping territories while snatching insects near the surface of the water. I often rose early to listen to them, then returned to bed. Before moving away, I placed a cheap cassette recorder outside and recorded the birds. For many years I carried the tape as a last resort to homesickness. If despair overran me, the knowledge that I could listen to the birds provided strength. The cassette was similar to the Robert Arthur short story “Mr. Manning’s Money Tree,” in which the promise of cash buried beneath a tree sustains a man through difficult financial times. Knowledge of its existence allows him to take business risks he might have avoided. At the end he digs up the money, but it’s not there.
I decided to listen to the tape, surrounded by my father’s dusty archives. It seemed appropriate to hear Kentucky birdsong amid all this material made in Haldeman. The cassette emitted a series of clicks followed by a continual hum. There was no birdsong. Years before, I’d pressed the wrong buttons on the recording device. Like the buried money of Mr. Manning, the promise of hearing the birds when I needed them had gotten me through hard times. The absurdity of the situation cheered me.
Many years ago I purchased an original painting by Ronald Cooper, a Kentucky folk artist of some repute. The eleven-by-fourteen painting is acrylic on canvas. An unpainted section on the bottom right corner has the date 1994, a copyright sign, the artist’s signature, and the name of the painting: Suicide. The colors are straight from the tube, unmixed, and the drawing is quite crude. The composition is divided in half—the top is a blue background strung with clouds, while the bottom is a field of solid green. In the foreground stands a man wearing a black shirt and white pants. Spots of blood mar his clothes. Protruding from his shirt collar is the stump of a bleeding neck. He grips a bloody butcher knife in one hand, while the other holds aloft his own decapitated head. An arrow beside his mouth points to the words:
i WiSH i HADNT DONE THiS.
I kept the painting hidden, believing it was too gruesome for my young sons to see. When they got older, I hung it in my writing studio and imagined it as the cover for a book. The face of the bleeding head has an expression of startled dismay, as if he can’t quite accept his situation. I believe I’d feel the same way if I killed myself—stunned regret at the final millisecond, too late to turn back. It reminds me of the legends of the French guillotine: a freshly cut-off head blinking in a basket, the mouth struggling to speak, the body unwilling to accept its own death.
Like anyone, I suppose, I have known several people who killed themselves, including my best friend from childhood. Such a death leaves guilt in its wake. Every surviving friend and family member believes that he or she could have prevented it. Each person recalls a visit not made or a phone call cut short. We pore over our final interactions, seeking a retrospective portent of the future that came to be. We want a sign that it was not our fault.
I look at the painting now and wonder why it commanded my attention for so long. It’s an ugly thing made with brute force, the crude style echoing the figure’s dilemma. What began as a personal warning—don’t kill yourself—has evolved into a commentary about the nature of remorse. The man has a deep regret: I wish I hadn’t done this.
Twice in my life I experienced what I understood to be severe depression. Every action was unimaginable: getting the mail, rising from a chair, making the bed, taking a shower. The act of concocting my own extinction would be too much effort. Then there’d be the burden of the note left behind. Where to start and where to end? I tend to get depressed if I’m not engaged in a writing project, and it seemed supremely depressing that revising a suicide note might rescue me from the doldrums. Despite my fascination with the painting, I am not by nature suicidal. I have more of a gambler’s mentality—everything can change at any moment, so why make a move with such unde
niable finality?
In 1985 I received a strange phone call from my parents, both on the line at once, expressing concern for my mental health and possible suicide. I was astonished and laughed it off until I understood that they were serious. There followed a flurry of calls over several days during which my parents retreated from their initial concerns and blamed my sister for putting the idea in their heads. My mother sent me a letter that said:
I don’t and didn’t think for one minute that you were in danger of contemplating suicide. You’re too curious about life, and are too afraid you might miss something to take your dying into your own hands. Therefore you would not take your own life. It was your father’s runaway imagination that produced the concern for you.
Not long ago I bought some new makeup, including rouge. Two weeks later Andy said he wanted to ask me something, very seriously. He was worried that something had happened to my face, one of my cheeks was discolored. No, it was the rouge and he waited two weeks before bringing it up.
Runaway imagination. Always looking for some complicated, dramatic reason instead of thinking of the simple. Surely you can understand that, since if anybody inherited the runaway imagination, you did.
I enjoy Mom’s positive spin on a grotesque situation, utilizing a certain cold logic to reach her conclusion. The succinctness of her anecdote, the blunt reasoning, reminds me that I am her son as well, half McCabe—pragmatic people who stare clear-eyed at obstacles and overcome them. My imagination is tempered by reason, grounded in harsh reality.
A few years later Dad began calling me late at night, maudlin from bourbon. He said he’d been thinking about suicide. He’d even picked out the place—the bathroom shower—so it’d be easy for Mom to clean the mess. He figured he’d use a shotgun but had run into a problem. His arms were too short to reach the trigger. My first thought was practical: use a forked stick. But I refrained from advice, and merely listened. He believed that putting the barrel against the roof of his mouth instead of his forehead would ensure success because the tissue was very soft. I said that made sense, thinking not about my father but about a buddy who’d shot himself in the temple with a small-caliber handgun. The bullet hit the skull and deflected, losing power from impact. Instead of ricocheting away, the bullet traveled around the front of his forehead below his skin. He lived, badly scarred and partially deaf. Another guy I knew deliberately rammed his car head-on into a coal truck at high speed, but only managed to blind himself. Three other friends had gotten the job done, so it was with a certain hardened ear that I listened to my father.
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 17
