My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485)

by Offutt, Chris

  The relentless narrative has a grotesque quality, a chilling insight into the mind of a man with an unsavory attitude toward women. They undergo brain transplants and watch their former bodies die in an acid bath. Hermaphrodites fight warrior women wearing strap-on dildos with metal claws. Zombies, androids, and clones enter the narrative. A snake crawls into a woman’s vagina, swelling her stomach with pregnancy. She gives birth to a demon who promptly rapes her.

  In a book from the mid-1960s, Valkyria travels through time to the year 2931. Her clone becomes a media star when a TV network shows her torment on a live feed. Viewers respond to a contest with ideas. The lucky winner visits the studio and is allowed to personally torture Valkyria’s clone to death. In an off-camera dungeon, the true Valkyria experiences every sensation. The reader is thus able to observe the suffering of both clone and human.

  One volume of Valkyria centers around an alien scientist who performs gruesome medical experiments on humans, often depicting surgeries in process. The result is a planet populated by failed procedures: women with a single large breast centered on their chests. A mustached man has a woman’s backside, large breasts, and an enormous permanent erection. Women have two or three sets of breasts linked by metal rings. A green-skinned transsexual has three breasts and a large clitoris shaped like a penis. The scientist is presented as: “The most brilliant man on this planet. He has a short attention span and more ideas than he can handle; is essentially amoral (he is nigh a god!) and does believe in giving in to his whims. He looks upon the world as his.”

  Another comic, Prisma, is less a book and more of an illustrated manifesto. It is the only one narrated in the first person. The sadistic tinkerer Volk is the most brilliant scientist who ever existed. He explains his project with many detailed illustrations.

  I made 10 androids, perfect women-plus, all attributes vary, but with the taut-muscled bodies of age 18. Small breasts are 46DD. Then I duplicated each, & modified those. Next I merely made 50 copies of all 20. They are the population of Prisma.

  Nine hundred are Betas, sadomasochistic born servants. All of the other 100 are Alphas, all sadistic. Twenty of those are ravening beast-sadists. Ten of those are plus-Alphas, superbosses with medieval titles. As you will see, I have mingled technology & a medieval-barbaric culture.

  Clothing is manufactured underground by my computer system—randomly from every fabric & every era. My own creation of subcutaneous dye is used in a number of ways. For one thing, the legs of few Prismans match their skin!

  Because of my computer control—& my whimsical nature—reality changes on Prisma!—and IS reality.

  The series Jera takes its title from the name of a blue-skinned alien with vacant pink eyes and an elongated bald head. She combs through Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse, and Cosmopolitan, culling a list of women, then feeds their attributes into a “computrex.” The top twenty-seven are kidnapped and modified through serum and surgery. The 187 pages of Jera contain the most lavish and intricate use of color. The genius alien finds a planet whose inhabitants have reached the medieval level, and kills everyone with a plague. She then distributes her three thousand creations among the existing city-states, organizes a social hierarchy, and teaches them fetish bondage. Time continues to progress swiftly. The story leaps ahead fifty years, then a hundred, and lands in the three hundredth year. Every so often, all the male children are murdered. Matrilineal royal dynasties rule each city-state of warriors. A new term emerges, a “penoid,” or a penis on a female.

  The most original comic is entitled Null-A, a philosophical term meaning an absence of Aristotelean logic. The two-hundred-page series opens with a lab assistant hopping into an experimental matter transmitter to escape a rapist. She arrives on a foreign planet. By page ten, she’s dead of multiple stab wounds. The text says:

  Epitaph? Perhaps: she came a long, long way for no reason to die for no reason.

  Another comic is subtitled The Most Awful Tortures Ever Told . . . A bound woman is nailed to a block of wood and pierced by hundreds of pins, including in her face and eyes. Her left leg is sawed off to reveal a protruding bone. The female killer washes away the blood in order to gloat over the corpse as she masturbates herself to orgasm. A victim is staked spread-eagle in the desert, her bosom doused with honey. A team of “super ants” chews off her breasts, depicted in a series of dramatic panels. Four hours later only her skeleton remains. Another story ends with a very large-breasted woman bound in a hog-tied position, ankles and wrists locked behind her back. She is suspended on a chain. Her captors slowly lower her until only her bosom enters a cauldron of boiling fat. After her breasts fry, they are eaten in front of her.

  Throughout history, people have turned up their noses at pornography, dismissing it as disgusting and immoral. I tried very hard to resist such a response. These comics were Dad’s most personal work and therefore deserving of careful examination. Looking at them made my stomach hurt. I could peruse them for only short periods before turning away. Despite my revulsion, I felt a horrified sympathy for anyone who lived with such imagery on a daily basis. That it was my own father made it worse. He didn’t collect these books, he made them. Here was the world he carried inside himself at all times—filled with pain and suffering. I had no idea how miserable he had truly been.

  My initial abhorrence gave way to the reckless anger of a teenager. I wanted to lash out at the world, drink and take pills, nullify all that I thought and felt. I became mad at myself for deliberately studying the evidence of what had soiled my childhood. While the family tiptoed around the house to prevent disturbing him, he sat in his office and entertained himself in an appalling manner. I was angry at being raised by a maniacal father and a passive mother with no means of extrication except walking dirt roads until they turned to blacktop. Perhaps my siblings had been right all along—I should’ve destroyed everything, not out of embarrassment but for the sake of my own mental equilibrium.

  It’s extremely rare for anyone, let alone a son, to have access to another person’s private and unfiltered fantasies. I expected to gain insight through seeing maturity and growth, but the world of Valkyria didn’t change. My father never tired of the material and repeated it until he died. By the end—not of Valkyria’s saga but of my father’s life—plot vanished completely. The pages evolved to single-panel illustrations of garishly colored women enduring profound misery and pain. Text was scribbled haphazardly in available space, with occasional dialogue commenting on the agony of the victim.

  Unfettered by market, my father was free to explore all facets of his imagination in Valkyria. There was no evolution of character or story, just a steady move toward the greater defilement of women. The books are grisly and grim. Time travel and advanced technology allowed him to include any content without the stricture of logic, physics, or medical consequences.

  He made Valkyria solely for himself and never showed it to anyone—not even his wife. The secret will hadn’t specified it. The four-thousand-page chronicle of the multiverse represents the deepest core of my father’s identity, his life’s work. For over fifty years he worked on it, overlapping every other writing project. He tried to quit and he couldn’t.

  Valkyria has a nihilistic bleakness blended with a child’s freedom of expression. Perpetrators feel no guilt and prisoners lack all hope. There is no morality. Life is composed of suffering. Existence has no point. It baffled him in 1963 and it baffles me today.

  My father often said that if not for pornography, he’d have become a serial killer. On two occasions he told me the same story. One night in college he resolved to kill a woman, any woman. He carried a butcher knife beneath his coat and stalked the campus, seeking a target. It rained all night. No one else was out. He went home soaked and miserable and wrote a story about a man who invented an invisibility serum and killed women at a YWCA. Dad destroyed the manuscript and castigated himself for using invisibility in such an unimaginative way. For me, the crucial element of this story is a man’s
impulse to tell it to his son.

  Many years later he read a biography of a serial killer who owned bondage magazines at the time of his capture. According to Dad, the details of the killer’s childhood were “eerily similar” to his own, including three warning signs: bed-wetting, killing animals, and setting fires. When Dad was about twelve, a cat scratched his sister, and he put the cat on trial, dramatically acting out the roles of prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge. The cat was found guilty and condemned to death. Dad hanged it and watched it die.

  The three warning signs are known as the “MacDonald Triad,” but subsequent research refuted the theory that these propensities are indicators of future violent behavior. The traits are not a recipe for a killer. They are regarded as attributes of a distressed child with poor coping skills who might develop a narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder.

  If my father was correct that porn prevented him from killing women, then I should be grateful for its continuing presence in his life. Far better to be the son of a pornographer than a serial killer. But I don’t believe my father’s theory. The sight of blood, even his own, made him light-headed enough to faint. He was not athletic or strong and therefore was incapable of overpowering most people. He was also a physical coward, having never been in a fistfight. He never struck his children or his wife.

  The idea that porn prevented him from killing women was a self-serving delusion that justified his impulse to depict women in torment. Thinking of himself as a serial killer if not for making porn was another fantasy on his part, one that allowed him to surrender completely to his obsessions. He needed to believe in a greater purpose in order to continue his work. Admitting that he liked it was too much to bear.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  IN THE summer of 2015, two years after Dad died, I moved his entire eighteen-hundred-pound archive to a storage unit at the edge of town. His material had occupied a large area in my house, and I needed the space. I needed my mind back, too.

  In the weeks after his death, people often asked what I’d say to him if given the chance, what I wished I’d said before he died. Nothing ever came to mind. But in the past year a single private query has risen again and again: Why didn’t you visit me? It’s hard to predict his response. He’d get angry, using wrath to deflect a subject he didn’t like. No matter what answer he might have given, I already knew the reason. It wasn’t due to pressing deadlines, economic difficulties, or because he didn’t love me. It wasn’t personal. He never called on my siblings, went on vacations, or visited his mother in the hospital. The truth was glaringly simple—he wasn’t capable. He couldn’t leave a world he’d carefully constructed, over which he controlled every facet. Such a journey would have exposed the fragility of his omnipotence.

  It was left to me to visit him posthumously. I’m glad I did, although the effort took a toll on me. If I’d known the difficulty, I wouldn’t have embarked on the project, but once I began, I felt obligated to carry it through. At a certain point I realized that I was searching, but I didn’t know for what. The more I delved, the more I discovered similarities between my father and me, a result that left me dismayed.

  Buried in a letter from a porn customer in Europe was surprising information. The man thanked Dad for the gift of my first book, Kentucky Straight, and complimented my father on the obvious pride he took in my accomplishments. I reread the sentences several times. It was difficult to comprehend that Dad had considered my work good enough to mail to a stranger. He’d never said anything to me about the book. Perhaps learning of my father’s pride was what I’d been seeking all along.

  Examining Dad’s papers brought up hundreds of memories. Most were sad, and I tried to think of good ones. The year before Dad started working from home, he spent a Saturday afternoon with me. He transformed two empty cardboard boxes into castles, one for him and one for me. He cut drawbridges in the front and made a crenellated rampart on the top. We placed plastic soldiers in key positions to defend our kings. Shallow bowls of water served as moats. Using fingernail clippers for catapults, we launched cigarette butts at each other’s castle. The goal was to knock down enemy soldiers. Dad sat on the floor across from me, complimenting my good shots, giving me tips on how to load the catapult. His imagination made the game tremendous fun. I felt important in his company, the object of his intense focus and attention. We set up the soldiers and knocked them down again and again, laughing together.

  Dad began working at home and we didn’t play the game anymore. As the house became his castle, I spent more time outside. My finest hours were roaming the woods. I liked being alone, but I was happiest with the pack of boys from our hill, sets of brothers on foot and battered bicycles. I don’t recall particular events, only the sense of friendship and loyalty, laughter and acceptance. There were no boundaries. Everyone knew us. We could go anywhere. Nothing could hurt us but the land itself. We had each other. We were free. We were happy.

  Acknowledgments

  For financial assistance during the writing of this book I am grateful to the Lannan Foundation and the Mississippi Arts Commission.

  For other assistance, I thank Beth Ann Fennelly, Scott Temple, Allen Steele, Richard Perez, Earl Kemp, Piers Anthony, Joe and Gay Haldeman, Bob Guccione, Jr., Kathryn York, Nicole Aragi, Peter Borland, Duvall Osteen, Faron Henderson, Randy Henderson, Sonny Henderson, Jodie Offutt, Rita Offutt, Jane Offutt Burns, Jeff Offutt, Scotty Offutt Hyde, Melissa Offutt, Sam Offutt, James Offutt, and Melissa Allee Ginsburg.

  Andrew J. Offutt Timeline

  1934

  Born in Spencer County, Kentucky

  1944

  Wins Spencer County spelling bee

  1939–1950

  Lives on farm in log cabin

  Teaches self to type and writes two novels

  Begins drawing fetish comic serials

  1949

  Begins creating Cade of the Galactic Patrol, comic serial

  1950

  Moves to Taylorsville, Kentucky

  1951

  Wins Kentucky high school fiction contest with “The Devil’s Soul”

  Graduates Taylorsville High School one year early

  Enrolls at the University of Louisville on full academic scholarship from the Ford Foundation

  1952

  Creates Marcus Severus, comic book set in ancient Rome

  1953

  Death of father, Andrew J. Offutt IV

  Resigns from AFROTC; unable to fly due to color-blindness

  Uses “Uncle Andy” as byline for The Cardinal, school newspaper

  1954

  Wins If magazine college science fiction contest with “And Gone Tomorrow,” first professional publication

  Applies for job as fetish artist for Bizarre magazine, rejected

  Returns to drawing Cade

  Designs ad layouts for Logan Furniture in Louisville

  Uses “Morris Kenniston” as byline, referred to as “debut of alter ego”

  Writes The Messenger of Zhuvastou, published almost twenty years later

  1955

  Graduates University of Louisville with BA in English

  Works at Bonds Clothing for Men in Louisville, Kentucky

  Moves to Pikeville, Kentucky, as traveling salesman for Procter & Gamble

  Continues drawing fetish serials

  1956

  Drafted by U.S. Army, fails physical due to asthma

  Completes book seven of Cade

  1957

  Moves to Lexington, Kentucky, for promotion with Procter & Gamble

  Meets Mary Joe McCabe at a Catholic Youth Organization dance

  Destroys all drawn and written fetish material except Cade

  Marries Mary Joe McCabe

  1958

  Birth of first child, Christopher John Offutt

  1959

  Draws two serials for Irving Klaw, rejected

  Begins work on Valkyria, long-running comic serial

  1960

  President of th
e Lexington Toastmasters Club

  Contributing editor for Moonbeams, periodical for Procter & Gamble

  1961

  Birth of second child, Andrew J. Offutt VI

  1962

  Birth of third child, Mary Scott Offutt

  President of Big Brothers of Lexington, Inc.

  Moves to Morehead, Kentucky, as salesman for Coastal States Life Insurance

  Joins Kiwanis Club

  1963–1965

  Creates Nellie, the Farmer’s Daughter, ninety-page fetish serial

  1964

  Moves to Haldeman, Kentucky

  Birth of fourth child, Melissa Jane (Joe) Offutt

  Starts insurance agency, andrew j. offutt associates

  1967

  Letter to Pope Paul VI, resignation from Catholic Church

  Writes personal credo

  1968

  Publishes first novel, Bondage Babes, under the name Alan Marshall

  Expands insurance agency to Winchester and Lexington, Kentucky

  “Population Implosion” included in World’s Best Science Fiction

  Buys a Mercedes-Benz, the only one in Rowan County

  Writes more than a quarter million words in five months