[signed] Chris Offutt, 11/93
I told her it was still true. I hugged her and said goodbye. She waved from the doorway as I backed out into the street. I drove home thinking about two different books, two different mothers, and two different sons. Giving Mom her own copy of Kentucky Straight was an effort to seek approval. I also wanted her to read about the world in which she’d raised me, an environment she didn’t understand, harsher than she knew. Maybe my father had a similar impulse. He wanted his mother to know she’d raised a son who wrote dirty books.
Chapter Twenty-one
DESPITE LIFELONG difficulties with my father, I lived for his attention. The only behavior that earned it was writing, which I began at age seven, eventually completing forty short stories before leaving home a decade later. I gave all the manuscripts to Dad, and he returned them with corrections. The lessons were mainly grammatical, but notes on structure and characterization were often embedded within his comments. Very occasionally I found lines of praise, which thrilled me for days. I transformed these slim kudos into proof that my father loved me as much as I loved him.
In 1985 Dad was under severe pressure from his publisher to produce books in his Spaceways series, a blend of pornography and science fiction. Despite his ability to write fast, he was falling behind on a deadline of a book per month. His solution was to find collaborators who’d write a novel to be published under Dad’s pseudonym of John Cleve. He would pay a few thousand dollars, edit their manuscripts, and take full copyright. He sent me a letter asking if I’d write one. His offer pleased me with its implied recognition of my skills as a writer, and I spent a lot of time composing my response. I couldn’t tell him the truth—I absolutely did not want to begin my career ghostwriting my father’s porn.
From Dad’s perspective, he was offering to help his son, the struggling writer who could use the money. He and Mom had expressed concern about my choice of employment. I was a twenty-five-year-old dishwasher in Salem, Massachusetts, working fifteen hours a week for minimum wage, supplemented by all the food I could eat. I had no phone or car, rode my bicycle in all weather, and lived in an extremely cheap apartment. On the wall of my room I fastened a mirror directly above my typewriter. Surrounding the mirror were photographs of writers whose work I admired. My only hope of joining their company was sitting at the typewriter. If I didn’t write, the mirror was empty. It was a powerful inducement to work.
My roommates were a visual artist and a physicist. We were good friends and got along well. The physicist spent fifteen hours a week commuting to and from work—the same amount of time I worked—but at the end of the month he always ran out of money. I took great pleasure in lending him cash. We were young men in our twenties, prone to elaborate pranks and an occasional drunken food fight. At times we got on one another’s nerves.
I wrote to Dad, referring in a casual way to this dynamic. The bulk of the letter was a polite refusal of his offer to write under his pseudonym. As diplomatically as I could, I explained that I was working on a book of my own and wanted to concentrate on finishing it. Dad quickly responded with a letter that didn’t mention the Spaceways series but focused on my shortcomings as a person who shared living quarters.
It seems to me that it’s up to me, after all these years, to tell you this. Two words will do it, Chris: You lurch.
Maybe “You lunge” is closer. It is both a physical and emotional trait, often known as response to a tap on the knee, shortened to kneejerk. I would not care to try to read in a room with you; hell, even to live in a house with you without a soundproof retreat.
I touch my cat nicely & see her kneejerk mind: “Touch/love/stroke/warm/belly/food” & she lunges to rush to her bowl. Single-minded & inconsiderate (“I’m being nice to you, asshole; what makes you think I wish to inspect your rapidly receding anus?!”)
You are upstairs, & wish to be down. You start but tarry because something catches your attention. You inspect/peruse it. Och! I wished to be downstairs, you suddenly think. You lurch, lunge, race. Your shoes are angry hammers, attacking each step as an enemy. All others within the house are disrupted: that neither occurs to nor concerns you. Got-To-Get-Downstairs.
Food. The thought hits. You lurch, lunge to the refrigerator with considerable noise. You lurch-jerk open the door. In lunges a hand to thrust things around. A vocal sound. Another. Ah. You jerk it out. Bang it down. That which you have jerked out & banged down has a lid. With a vocal sound you wrench it off, drop it. Lurch, feet slapping, legs churning in an un-ignorable palpable breeze & corner-of -the-eye-visible blur of lurching movement, to the [stove/sink/counter/table].
You “decide” abruptly (the knee does) to sing or whistle. At volume. Single-minded & inconsiderate.