I don’t miss my father, but without his shackles to strain against, the world is terrifying and vast. I have lost a kind of purpose, a reason to prove myself.
In an article written for Trumpet, a science fiction fanzine from the early sixties, my father declared his credentials as a suitable columnist—he’d read every word of Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and the Marquis de Sade. A subsequent letter to the editor criticized Dad for bragging, and implied that he had lied. I located the books in question. They spanned fourteen inches of shelf space, tall books with hundreds of thin pages. Dad had annotated them heavily, writing comments in response like a form of Midrash. He argued with Freud but not Ellis. The books by de Sade held fewer comments but had more sections marked by brackets and exclamation points. Passages that validated sexual domination were consistently marked. Though he may have begun in an earnest quest for knowledge, his marginalia indicated that he wound up finding confirmation of his own ideas, like a zealot with a sacred text. My father sought formal evidence that his sexual fascism was normal and everyone else had it wrong.
Dad’s sense of cruelty and judgment came from an antiquated mode of Catholicism. He constructed a cross of porn and kept himself tightly affixed to it, suffering for his own obsessions. He exchanged heaven and hell for reincarnation, but the abyss of his shame was pure Roman Catholic. Sex was filthy. Expiation was necessary. The outlet of writing porn was a relief from the guilt brought on by writing porn, a kind of Mobius strip—never-ending and self-perpetuating.
Growing up in a house with sexuality simmering beneath the surface—books, pamphlets, art on the walls, and Dad’s regular comments—instilled in me a yearning to be a ladies’ man. In high school I never had a girlfriend, and I’d had only one during college. My experience with the fatman left me passive, unwilling to try to seduce women. I didn’t want to place a female in a similar situation—uncertain and scared, unable to halt the proceedings, utterly disengaged emotionally. If I liked a woman, which was rare, since most people bored me, I spent enough time with her until she finally made the first move.
Many years later in Salem, Massachusetts, my roommate tried to teach me how to pick up women in bars, an effort I never adequately mastered. It appeared to be a complex and false rigmarole, as if those involved were seeking sexual partners while trying to pretend they weren’t. My roommate offered many tips but was aghast at my inability to read basic signals. I never knew if a woman found me attractive, and simply assumed she didn’t.
In the manner of Cyrano, my roommate attempted assistance. At a local corner tavern called In a Pig’s Eye, a woman asked me what I did. It was a straightforward question, common in banal conversation, but I had no idea how to answer. The truth was I did nothing but read books, ride my bicycle, and try to write. At the time I wasn’t even sure what she meant—what does anyone do? We mark time until we die.
She was still waiting for an answer. My roommate filled the silence.
“He’s a writer,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “What does he write about?”
“His dick.”
She gave me a sharp look and said, “That sounds like pornography.”
“No,” my roommate said. “If he writes about other people’s dicks, it’s porn. But if it’s his own, it’s art.”
The two of them began a lively conversation, later leaving together, and that was as close as I ever got to picking up a woman in a bar.
To get the details straight about the Salem anecdote, I needed access to my journals, which went back forty-five years. They were stacked floor-to-ceiling in a closet, cartons that contained everything I’d written since second grade. Boxes of my father’s work blocked the closet door. My own archives were carefully taped and labeled, but the journal I sought was out of place. I found it inside an unlabeled carton that held a short story I’d forgotten about. My literary archive wasn’t as organized as I thought—much like Dad’s.
To find the Salem section, I read dozens of entries written at a frantic pace, accounts of beleaguered woe and complaint. No matter how far back I looked into my own life, the rapid scrawl covered the same subjects: I felt bad, I didn’t like what I wrote, I hated myself. I resolved to burn the journals. Then I decided not to.