Two years after heart surgery, my father expanded Winterbooks, referring to it as “Turk’s cottage industry.” Dad sent personal letters to big spenders, alluding to porn he custom-wrote for special clients. A slow-going epistolary relationship developed in which Dad gave them gifts, confided personal details, and hinted at his actual name. Like a clandestine agent operating under a cloak of secrecy, he revealed himself to men he could exploit financially. Over time several customers specified their sadomasochistic interests and ordered their own private pornography. The price was three thousand dollars, but each customer was offered a “special discount” that dropped the rate to $2,600. If a customer paid cash in advance, Dad wrote the tailor-made porn.
He fed the prose into a computer template he’d invented for a seventy-page book—two vertical columns of text. The final product was a manuscript with a special cover page personally inscribed, dated, and signed by Turk Winter. Dad later changed the cover page and added the commissioned work to his catalog, reselling each one for seventy dollars, unsigned. This had the unexpected effect of pleasing the original clients, who enjoyed the notion of like-minded strangers reading a professional depiction of their personal fantasies. Within ten years Dad had a large catalog of books for sale, eking out a living while proudly continuing the underground tradition of mail-order bondage begun in the 1940s.
Customers in the UK, Germany, and Italy routinely requested swifter ordering, suggesting fax or email, and a method of payment other than cash. One went so far as providing his credit card number. Dad refused, trusting nobody, especially the Internet. Obscenity laws were relegated to local standards, and he lived deep in the Bible Belt. Using the postal system to defraud the IRS was a felony, and Dad received bundles of cash in the mail on a regular basis. As protection, he mailed Winterbooks from the post office in Morehead, which sent packages to Lexington for a postmark, placing a hundred-mile layer of discretion between him and their official source. He used false return addresses, including mine. While living in Montana, I received a tattered envelope from Italy that contained a manuscript the customer didn’t want, along with a letter in stilted English explaining its return.
Dad maintained steady correspondence with repeat customers. He saved their letters but not his own. This resulted in files going back over a decade that contained one side of a continuous conversation. I read hundreds, slowly seeing a pattern emerge of characteristics shared by most of the men: over forty, middle-class to wealthy, many with a Catholic childhood. They worked as civil servants, lawyers, and middle managers in corporate offices. American clients often had backgrounds in the military or engineering. All were incredibly lonely, having carried around their secret obsession without a chance to share it. The letters reminded me of film buffs or musicologists who established credentials by displaying the depth of their knowledge. Most hobbyists have meeting places such as a record store, a gun show, or a philatelist’s event. There they are free to bask in a shared interest. But a bird-watcher doesn’t have to hide his binoculars the way bondage enthusiasts conceal everything related to their hobby.
Clients treated Turk Winter with great respect. The more money they spent, the longer Turk’s letters were. With men of his own generation, Dad discussed health issues between paragraphs concerned with bondage and discipline. They exchanged VHS tapes, magazines, and photocopies of underground art.
Long-term pen pals included information about new cars, broken appliances, the weather, and popular movies. At least two thanked my father for photographs of his children and grandchildren. Instead of communicating with his family, Dad preferred an ongoing correspondence with people he never met. The mutual interest in bondage material was a powerful link, ingrained with sympathy and understanding. After carrying his secret throughout his life, he could be himself with strangers.
Since childhood, Dad had felt ashamed of his sexual proclivities. He knew they were unusual, possible evidence of something fundamentally flawed with his mind. This sense of difference resulted in an extreme degree of loneliness that was reduced by writing letters. One fan letter closed with a few lines that echoed a long-held belief of Dad’s: “Your stories allow our minds to be satiated without committing unspeakable acts. They keep us ‘civilized’ and sane. Maybe you have not heard it from others but it’s true.”
In the course of his fifty-year career as a writer, my father explored every sexual permutation except pedophilia. At the end of his life, still seeking a frontier, he wrote an intricate portrayal of cannibalism. His sole foray into bestiality was combined with the medical cloning of goats. In 2011 Turk Winter completed his final two serials. Gurlz encompassed nine installments for a total of 675 pages. Barbi’s World was over a thousand pages long. Stacked beside his chair were sheets of paper that contained his last writings: a list of real and invented nouns, and a succinct summary for a new book. My father was a workhorse in the field of written pornography. After five decades he died in harness.
Chapter Twenty-seven