The language of sex in American English is relegated to medical terminology or the gutter. It’s a kind of dialect that everyone knows. Today it is stereotypical, but in 1970 my father was at the vanguard of creating an idiom destined to become comical cliché. Each noun and verb received the gift of a modifier. A penis was always an anxious shaft, a turgid member, a throbbing rod, or an aching lance. A vagina was a welcoming sheath, a swollen cleft, a humid channel. The verbs shifted by gender. Men’s actions were variations of thrust, lunge, plunge, or impale, whereas women tended to writhe, moan, quiver, shiver, and quake.
Dad often told me that he was the top in his field, the most prolific, the classiest operator, the highest-paid. I’ve since learned that other people wrote more, and some were better. His actual legacy may be the rare exclamatory title, a device he used far more than any other pornographer. Mongol! was his first, followed by:
Asking for It!
Begging for It!
Brother, Darling!
Disciplined!
Jonuta Rising!
MANLIB!
Peggy Wants It!
Pleasure Us!
Snatch Me!
The 8-Way Orgy!
Initially I considered it a standard trope of marketing; however, most of these books came from different publishers. A random sampling was necessary, and Dad’s personal collection of six hundred porn novels served my purpose. Not a single one offered an exclamation point.
I reread Mongol!, skipping the sex scenes to focus on the story. What emerged was a detailed and dramatic narrative of military conquest, related by a lonely man. Chepi often sits in his tent, drinking liquor and ruminating about the past. He is perpetually at war with the world, living in self-imposed solitude. His only sources of comfort are alcohol, cruelty, and sex—as if predicting my father’s future life.
Chepi cannot make a woman pregnant, a source of personal anguish. He repeatedly laments his “empty quiver.” Without sex, the book becomes a tragic portrait of a warrior bereaved by the absence of what he most wants—a son to ride after him, to carry on—in a very real sense, to do what I did with my own work.
My second reading of Mongol! furthered the deterioration of the brittle yellow pages. The cover tore away from the dried glue of the spine, and I discovered the following inscription on the title page:
For Helen Offutt, perennial fan.
[signed] John 9/1970
Astonished, I mentally traced the book’s provenance—this was the very copy Dad had given his mother. He’d recovered it after her death and kept it until he died, whereupon it came to me. Like the DNA of Genghis Khan, Dad’s novel had passed through generations. I tried to imagine my grandmother sitting on her veranda with a glass of sweet tea, reading Mongol! Perhaps she heeded his warning and remained cloistered behind the barricade of index cards blocking the sex scenes. But I doubt it. How could she, or anyone, not be tempted to peek?
Later that day I visited Mom and asked why Dad had sent Mongol! to his mother. Mom speculated that he’d spoken with her about his research: “Like you talk to me,” she said, “for the book about your father.”
I told her I was worried she might not like what I was writing, that she loved Dad in a certain way, was in love with him, but my relationship was different. I was interested in him as a writer and father, not as a husband. She asked if I wanted her to read it. I shook my head and she seemed disappointed. I realized she was simply offering to do what she’d always done for Dad—read the material before publication. Mom wanted to be useful.
“You know,” I said, “Dad was the most interesting character I’ve ever met.”
“Yes, he was. A mass of contradictions.”
“Do you think he was lonely?”
“Funny you mention that,” she said. “I asked him the same thing once. He got very intense. You know how he did that with his eyes and his voice. And he said, ‘Not anymore.’ It was about the nicest compliment he ever gave me.”
We looked at each other silently; our conversations often contain quiet periods of private thought followed by jokes and laughter. My mother and I share a sense of humor. She is a good companion in any situation, flexible and adaptive, always cheerful.
A car trundled by outside. A dog barked. I was tired. I stood to go and my mother stood, as well. She approached the bookshelf where she kept a few of Dad’s novels, my books, my wife’s poetry, and the textbooks my aunt and brother wrote. Mom pulled my first published book off the shelf, then put it back.
“No,” she said, “that one was for your father and me.”
She found another copy of Kentucky Straight.
“This one’s mine,” she said. “You gave it to me when I taught at the prison. Do you remember doing that?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And you worry about my memory,” she said. “Maybe yours isn’t as good as you think.”
“Maybe not.”
She opened the book to the flyleaf and read it silently. “Every time I look at it,” she said, “it makes me smile.”
She showed me the inscription.
To Mom,
There’s nobody I’d rather see than you.