holiday porn: Santa Claus’s wife and the elves fake case histories written by psychiatrists The constant barrage of odd sexual content left me flailing with the knowledge of my father’s dedication. This was him—what he enjoyed, what he collected, what he wrote. I was thankful for the utter absence of kiddie porn. My father’s proclivities were not the worst. He only liked adult women. It was a cold comfort, like an executioner offering a condemned man an old rope so the bristles wouldn’t hurt his neck.
Months passed during which I continued to work all day and into the evening seven days a week. When guests visited, I draped bedsheets over the tables to prevent accidental offense. What had begun as an attempt to assemble a bibliography of Dad’s work had transformed into a compulsion to organize his entire library, hoping for insight. His holdings of porn were incredibly vast and inclusive. Something had governed the accumulation and I sought the mind behind it, the curating principles. It occurred to me that I’d transformed to a version of my father—obsessed not with porn but with his preferences for porn.
There is a part of me, one I despise, that insists upon comparing myself to my father. Perhaps my poor self-regard is an unwelcome gift of his legacy, a fragment transferred to me. Dad wrote more books. He stayed married to one wife. He maintained a single, unflinching focus on his rebellious obsessions despite the odds against him. He wanted me to be my own man, and I suppose I am. But we are similar in many ways, chillingly similar. We work hard. We never give up. We don’t suffer fools gladly. We prefer our time alone, away from people. We write and write and write.
My son called, seeking advice about how to handle a situation at his job. We talked for nearly an hour, longer than I ever talked with my father on the phone. Dad never gave advice. He didn’t know how to offer counsel, only staunch opinions. The ones I remember are as follows: Picasso was a lousy artist and a put-on who conned the world.
Elvis stinks.
European movies stink.
Marlon Brando stinks.
Hemingway was a coward for his suicide.
Jesus was a rabble-rouser who engineered his own destruction.
Henry Miller changed the world.
Artists and writers who become successful do so by fooling the world.
Inferior people shouldn’t breed.
Genetics is far more important than environment.
B. F. Skinner was a genius.
Hugh Hefner was a genius.
So was Ayn Rand.
Reincarnation is real.
Respect is more important than love.
Showing respect means offering fealty.
Capital punishment is not painful enough for killers.
Bad writers: Melville, Faulkner, Poe, Hawthorne, James, Lovecraft, Tolkien.
Good writers: Vardis Fisher, Stendhal, Freud, Shaw, Ellis.
De Sade’s poor reputation is undeserved.
Eating fried chicken with one hand makes you look like a barbarian.
Men should not wear T-shirts beneath their clothes.
Women are inherently inferior to men.
Caucasians are superior to the other races.
Dad is superior to all Caucasian men.
Asians possess wisdom.
Sports are for physical freaks.
Religion is for intellectual weaklings.
Cleaning and cooking are women’s work.
Women with large bosoms are attracted to powerful men.
The principles of feminism are not in conflict with pornography.
Women who were nursed as babies are bisexual.
Cheating at board games is fine.
Perverted is good.
For years I shared many of these beliefs, a boy copying his father. When I began questioning his authority, I reversed each of these precepts and believed in its opposite. Over time I formed my own opinions. Mainly I stopped believing in absolutes. They were necessary to Dad, a way of shoring up drastic decisions and rationalizing his obsessions. Leaving the Catholic Church created a space inside him previously filled by its dogma. Dad invented his own harsh evaluations of the world, decreeing everything either good or bad. Such binary thinking is a means of social control preferred by politicians, preachers, bigots, and tyrants. In an individual case, as with my father, it allowed him to live his life without regard for others.
Chapter Sixteen
MY FATHER published all his science fiction under his own name. The early stories placed him in the new wave of young writers changing the field by exploring social concerns such as sexuality, psychology, politics, and environmentalism. They focused on “soft” as opposed to “hard” science and often wrote from a more literary sensibility than their predecessors. This group included Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and J. G. Ballard. In 1967, If magazine published Dad’s story “Population Implosion.” Its inclusion in the anthology World’s Best Science Fiction led to an invitation to attend the World Science Fiction Convention of 1969.