My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485)

by Offutt, Chris

  I wasn’t sure if he was serious or operating within delusion; for all I knew, I was talking to John Cleve. The last time he’d called drunk, he’d been in an exhilarated state, claiming he could fly. I told him that was great, he could come visit. “No,” he explained, “I mean really fly. I stand at the head of the steps and absolutely know if I jump, I will fly to the downstairs hall.” Presumably he never tried it.

  At the end of that suicide call, the first of many, I asked if he’d talked to Mom about this and he got angry, saying of course not in a familiar tone of contempt. The following day I called Mom and told her to unload the shotgun. She didn’t ask why. For the last twenty-five years I lived with the understanding that at any moment I might receive the news that Dad had killed himself. I wondered where the family would bathe when we gathered for his death. As the oldest, I’d have to use the shower first. To prepare myself, I imagined the act in great detail, down to my own post-traumatic hallucination of seeing the soapsuds run pink from traces of blood embedded in the grout.

  After he died, I found the old shotgun hanging on hooks above a door, the metal pitted, the action rusty, the barrel filled with grime. It was a break-action single-barrel .410, forty-two inches long. I placed the barrel against my face and could easily reach the trigger. Dad was taller, with much longer arms than mine. Either he’d lied to me on the phone or he’d traded in a twelve-gauge for one with a shorter barrel.

  The .410 was ideal for snake, and I brought it back to Mississippi. A pack of coyotes travels a wide territory here, showing up every few weeks and disturbing my wife’s dogs with their chilling howls. Firing the old .410 makes enough noise to send the coyotes elsewhere. Every time I shoot, I think of my father’s dismal talk of suicide, and how he drank himself to death while the shotgun rusted on the wall.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  DURING THE heart of Mississippi winter, I missed the purity of fresh snow but not the northern cold. Still, the days were short, with gray skies and a barren tree line. My house lacked insulation. The pipes froze. Fetishized sex became a white noise that surrounded me, invading every aspect of my life. In order to interact objectively with porn, I had to deliberately repress any salacious response to the material, which was like going to a comedy club and trying not to laugh. Months of immersion in pornography had reversed its intended purpose. Instead of arousal, I became sexually numb. I didn’t even want to be touched. Marital relations waned, ebbed, and vanished. I felt guilty.

  My life consisted of a house full of porn and a gorgeous wife—but the two were unconnected. I became afraid my wife would go elsewhere for sex, seek a man who’d inherited money and land instead of mountains of porn. She said that was crazy talk, suggesting my disinterest was a normal product of grief. But I didn’t feel grief. I’d developed an immunity to sex. I was sick of my involvement with porn. I’d become a useless steer. My wife wouldn’t have to leave. The young bulls would trample me into the mud and take her away.

  In A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the protagonist is subjected to a form of aversion therapy. His eyelids are clipped open by specula, then he’s forced to watch brutally violent images until he is rendered incapable of harming others. My experience was similar. I’d forced myself to interact with so much pornography, I no longer regarded my wife in a sexual manner. Each time I tried, my mind filled with images of fetish porn. I could admire her dress, legs and hips, but the response was aesthetic and intellectual, as if studying art I couldn’t afford.

  I got worried and saw a doctor. He inquired if I had erections at night or in the morning. I nodded, embarrassed. In a light, jocular tone, he said it wasn’t the equipment, so there was no need for Viagra. I tried to force a smile that fell apart before reaching my face. The doctor asked if my wife was undergoing menopause, and he seemed slightly surprised that she was younger, as if her age alone should keep me sexually engaged.

  In a subtle fashion, he probed about my professional life. After hearing a brief explanation of my current project, the doctor quickly changed the subject to my deviated septum, which affected my breathing. He said the extreme degree of trauma was common in adults who’d had their nose broken in childhood and never repaired. He gently asked if I’d ever been hit in the face as a kid. For the first time in weeks, I started laughing. Of course, I told him, hasn’t everybody? He gave me a strange look and sent me home. Later it occurred to me that in its own way, porn had struck me as hard as the blow that shattered cartilage inside my head. I feared that my desire, like my ability to breathe normally, would never return.

  People with eating disorders maintain distorted thinking that leads them to deny themselves food. The malady is cognitive, not organic, which means drugs don’t help; patients must reframe their thinking to make food palatable. I needed to do the same with sex but didn’t know how. I considered burning everything page by page, watching each piece of paper curl, igniting at the edges, flaring into quick yellow flame that would provide kindling for the next lurid depiction of sex. But I couldn’t light the match. Burning it would take hours. Most grandiose gestures are suspect—the couple who renew their vows just before divorce or the politician who publicly swears he’s clean, then enters rehab. Building a pyre of porn wouldn’t guarantee an automatic return of desire. I’d just regret it later.

  The winter solstice clamped its lid on the earth. January’s chill led to weeks of short gray days with morning frost heavy enough to track a rabbit. Our home had high ceilings and a furnace designed for a smaller structure. At night I built a massive fire, effectively sucking warmth from the house but heating a small area before the hearth. My wife and I pushed the furniture near the fireplace and sat beneath wool blankets. During the day I shuffled about, shifting porn into ever-expanding heaps. Like my father, I’d transformed the entire house into a workstation devoted to the same material. In a lifetime of struggle not to feel bad about myself, I’d never felt worse. The future appeared bleak. I was a failure on all fronts.

  Spring arrived in fits and starts. Each time I thought I’d built the last fire and resolved to cut my hair and shave my beard, cold weather declared its intentions. A woodpecker drilled a hole in the exterior wall. Two starlings used the hole for an entrance and built a nest inside. One morning I awoke early to the sound of young birds frantically calling from the walls of the house.

  I stepped outside to watch ground fog lifting from the back field. Six deer browsed the yellow sedge grass. A flash of movement caught my eye—a fox pouncing on prey at the field’s edge. The deer froze in place. The fox turned with a vole dangling from its mouth and trotted into the herd, then halted. The deer were immobile, tails cocked, poised to flee. The fox slowly turned its head from one deer to another, then moved on, vanishing into the woods. The deer returned to their feeding. The animals had assessed each other, found a lack of danger, and continued their lives.

  I continued to work, make fires at night, and write. The days warmed slowly, becoming longer, with more light. My libido returned like snow leaving a metal roof—the slight breaking of its icy surface, then the sudden cascade as the entire mass swept itself clean, the steep-pitched slope gleaming in the sun as if it had always been that way.

  Chapter Thirty

  AS CHILDREN, my siblings and I each had a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. They were special crayons, a gift from our father, along with high-quality coloring books he ordered by mail. Dad had his own set. After supper the family often sat at the table and colored together. Dad carefully read the name of each crayon before using it, explaining that he was partially color-blind. Soon we stepped up to sophisticated coloring books with more intricate designs, using felt-tip pens that we stored in cigar boxes. As we got older, we colored less often, until at some point we stopped altogether. Those evenings remain my best memories of family life.

  After Dad’s death, I found hundreds of dried and useless felt-tip pens from various drawers of his desk. Each pen held a slip of paper taped to the shaft that identifie
d the color, similar to the label on a crayon. I filled a box with eighty folders of original art. In Mississippi I opened that box and made my final significant discovery. Behind my father’s public identity as a science fiction writer and his covert life as a pornographer was yet another private enterprise. For over fifty years, he secretly made comic books of a sexual nature and neatly filed them away.

  The first item in each file was something innocuous—a Reds schedule or an old bill—as if concealing the true contents. No one entered his office except by invitation, and even then, none dared go behind his desk. His children had been out of the house more than twenty-five years. Concealment was part of his creative process, born of shame and guilt, which he maintained long after there was anyone to hide it from. He needed the fetish of secrecy in order to draw.

  My father never took an art class. He didn’t visit museums or draw from a model. He’d taught himself from studying comic books, illustrations in pulp magazines, and bondage serials from the forties and fifties. Scenes lacked perspective, and the anatomy was crude. His earliest work is reminiscent of Henry Darger’s drawings, based on imagination rather than observation. When Dad began drawing as a child, he didn’t comprehend female anatomy, and for a long time he believed the vagina was in the middle of the stomach because babies came from there. He didn’t know women had pubic hair.

  Frustrated by his lack of skill, he developed a complicated and time-consuming way of making comics. First he wrote a script that described the action. On separate pages he made loose pencil layouts of panels. He fed the layouts into his typewriter and carefully typed segments of narrative into the allotted areas. After removing the paper, he used the typed sections as guides for what to draw.

  Dad called his method of drawing “the steal technique.” He traced images from other works, transferred the tracing to a second page via carbon paper, and modified them by enlarging sexual characteristics. Then he inked and colored the pages. Dad believed that he enhanced any picture he stole due to an innate ability to improve everyone else’s work. A dozen thick notebooks held thousands of pages of source material, images torn from magazines and catalogs, divided by category: standing, sitting, sex, breasts, legs, and so forth. He dismantled hundreds of porn magazines to accumulate a reservoir of pictures to steal. Mixed in were images from lingerie catalogs, Heavy Metal magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.

  As a very young child, I had a Superman coloring book my father had given me. I colored every page that featured Superman, which left the scenes of Clark Kent interacting with other characters. These were very boring, since everyone wore office attire, and I began coloring the suits brightly with different hues for the lapels and pockets. While concentrating, I realized that my father stood behind me, watching with an intense frown. He asked why I colored that way. Instantly I understood it was wrong. “I got tired of blue,” I said, and wished I hadn’t, since he was wearing a blue suit. He didn’t answer, just looked away, thinking for a long time. Many years later Dad asked if I remembered the incident and I told him yes.

  “Me, too,” he said. “You taught me something then. There are no rules for coloring.”

  He’d inherited deuteranopia, a form of color-blindness that affected his perception of the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum. This genetic flaw bothered him throughout his life. To avoid clashing colors, he wore dark clothes. The lack of rules for coloring freed him from the pressure of making a mistake. Blending color for subtlety was impossible with felt-tip pens. Most of the figures in his comics were unclothed, their skin blue or green. The hues were bright and flat. His lack of facility with color produced lurid and shocking, unusual combinations matching the intensity of the scenes.

  Along with the comics was a personal document dated 1963, with the caveat that it be read after his death. He was twenty-nine when he wrote it. I was five. It was his only sustained example of personal writing. He referred to the comics as his “Great Secret” and revealed a deep concern about his zeal for the material. He worried that he hated women. He wondered if there were other people like him and, if so, how they dealt with their urges.

  At age fourteen, he’d begun drawing comics that portrayed women in torment, before he’d had any exposure to fetish material or knowledge of sadism. The impulse was simply inside him; he’d always been that way. He called his comics an atrocity. The locked box in which he kept them was “full of my shame and my wickedness and my weakness.”

  The document has a sincere quality absent in everything else he wrote. Without his usual grandiosity, the intent probing of his own psyche makes him vulnerable enough for sympathy.

  I have wasted hundreds of hours at this, always fearful of discovery, always secretive, always aware of the sickness and hating myself for it. I well know the utter dream-fiction stupidity of it, even while continuing through page after gory, naked page after blood-splashed page, after ordeal-filled page. I know it’s silly, tom-foolery. And I’m ashamed: I know it’s sick.

  I’m sorry, sorry. Who is to blame? It can only be my childhood . . . because these things took place in it, after certain patterns were formed, after certain circuitry was already branded on my mental relays. Mother, Dad, Judeo-Christianity, and my childhood friends.

  It is the repressions, not the manifestations of unrepressed thoughts, that give us trouble. Apparently I am giving them vent, egress, by drawing page after page.

  But what if I stop?

  In 1957, just before getting married, he packed a decade’s worth of his art in a sack with rocks and threw it into the Cumberland River. He wrote that no one knew what it had taken for him to do that. He swore never to make such material again. Eighteen months later, he began The Saga of Valkyria Barbosa and worked on it for the rest of his life. It ran one hundred and twenty separate books that totaled four thousand pages.

  As a lonely teenager in a log cabin, he’d invented the premise: a barbarian culture crossed with the highly advanced science of Atlantis. Aging was medically quickened to bypass childhood. Breasts were enlarged with special serums and could lactate and grow upon command. Subcutaneous skin dye replaced clothing. The healing process was hastened, with no infection or scars. The dead could be resurrected. Hymens were restored. The only permanent disfigurement came from branding and amputation.

  The protagonist, Valkyria, was a barbarian princess secretly raised as a boy, later trained as a warrior. She was kidnapped by desert raiders, sold to slavers, purchased by a wealthy merchant, and kidnapped again by pirates. At age nineteen, she became queen of Veltria. Nearly all the characters were female, with the exception of an occasional hermaphrodite. According to Dad’s notes, the pictorial domination of women by women was a practical decision—he preferred to draw them.

  The concept of a universe was too limiting for his imagination, and he created a complex multiverse in which all the comics took place. The multiple worlds of Valkyria were staggeringly complicated, with Dad’s trademark maps, glossary, and religions. The entire series was a never-ending narrative set on many planets, spanning thousands of years. It blended fairy tales, ancient legends, science fiction, and space opera into one sprawling story.

  The books had no audience, but the first and last pages were composed as if a preexisting readership eagerly awaited the next installment. Every comic ended with the phrase “to be continued.” The first page featured a single-panel illustration and a quick synopsis:

  This is the fabulous myth-history of the pre-recorded history heroine, Valkyria. A girl with a face and figure envied by temptresses . . . The cunning, the speed, the agility of a jungle cat . . . The muscles, the stamina, the fighting prowess of a professional soldier.

  Val’s wounds heal themselves, scarlessly, even monstrously serious ones. Unfortunately this form of indestructible immortality makes her the perfect victim!

  In order to combine all the worlds and time frames into a single overlapping narrative, Dad gave Valkyria several daughters, each born of rape. The infants received serum
s from Atlantean science that sped their growth. Within three months they reached puberty and were again injected. Their final growth spurt enhanced their sexual characteristics and halted their aging at eighteen. By age twenty-two, Valkyria had become a grandmother. “Real time” was thus collapsed, enabling each of these women to travel across the multiverse until captured, tortured, and rescued.

  The plot is similar from book to book: a highborn woman is brought down through systematic psychological humiliation and physical degradation. The motivation for torture is always vengeance—the victim deserves her fate. Melodramatic dialogue offsets the grim imagery. Each comic ends with a cliff-hanger of inescapable bondage in a secret dungeon. The next book prolongs the torture until the victim is rescued or escapes, whereupon she often turns the tables on the captor. Of necessity, the punishment must surpass the one endured by the previous victim. In this fashion the techniques of sexual suffering steadily increase in intensity and horror. The bondage becomes more complex—victims are fully immobilized, with every orifice plugged, while enduring elaborate sexual torture. At times Valkyria is compelled to watch her daughters undergo vicious assault.