People with eating disorders maintain distorted thinking that leads them to deny themselves food. The malady is cognitive, not organic, which means drugs don’t help; patients must reframe their thinking to make food palatable. I needed to do the same with sex but didn’t know how. I considered burning everything page by page, watching each piece of paper curl, igniting at the edges, flaring into quick yellow flame that would provide kindling for the next lurid depiction of sex. But I couldn’t light the match. Burning it would take hours. Most grandiose gestures are suspect—the couple who renew their vows just before divorce or the politician who publicly swears he’s clean, then enters rehab. Building a pyre of porn wouldn’t guarantee an automatic return of desire. I’d just regret it later.
The winter solstice clamped its lid on the earth. January’s chill led to weeks of short gray days with morning frost heavy enough to track a rabbit. Our home had high ceilings and a furnace designed for a smaller structure. At night I built a massive fire, effectively sucking warmth from the house but heating a small area before the hearth. My wife and I pushed the furniture near the fireplace and sat beneath wool blankets. During the day I shuffled about, shifting porn into ever-expanding heaps. Like my father, I’d transformed the entire house into a workstation devoted to the same material. In a lifetime of struggle not to feel bad about myself, I’d never felt worse. The future appeared bleak. I was a failure on all fronts.
Spring arrived in fits and starts. Each time I thought I’d built the last fire and resolved to cut my hair and shave my beard, cold weather declared its intentions. A woodpecker drilled a hole in the exterior wall. Two starlings used the hole for an entrance and built a nest inside. One morning I awoke early to the sound of young birds frantically calling from the walls of the house.
I stepped outside to watch ground fog lifting from the back field. Six deer browsed the yellow sedge grass. A flash of movement caught my eye—a fox pouncing on prey at the field’s edge. The deer froze in place. The fox turned with a vole dangling from its mouth and trotted into the herd, then halted. The deer were immobile, tails cocked, poised to flee. The fox slowly turned its head from one deer to another, then moved on, vanishing into the woods. The deer returned to their feeding. The animals had assessed each other, found a lack of danger, and continued their lives.
I continued to work, make fires at night, and write. The days warmed slowly, becoming longer, with more light. My libido returned like snow leaving a metal roof—the slight breaking of its icy surface, then the sudden cascade as the entire mass swept itself clean, the steep-pitched slope gleaming in the sun as if it had always been that way.
Chapter Thirty
AS CHILDREN, my siblings and I each had a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. They were special crayons, a gift from our father, along with high-quality coloring books he ordered by mail. Dad had his own set. After supper the family often sat at the table and colored together. Dad carefully read the name of each crayon before using it, explaining that he was partially color-blind. Soon we stepped up to sophisticated coloring books with more intricate designs, using felt-tip pens that we stored in cigar boxes. As we got older, we colored less often, until at some point we stopped altogether. Those evenings remain my best memories of family life.
After Dad’s death, I found hundreds of dried and useless felt-tip pens from various drawers of his desk. Each pen held a slip of paper taped to the shaft that identified the color, similar to the label on a crayon. I filled a box with eighty folders of original art. In Mississippi I opened that box and made my final significant discovery. Behind my father’s public identity as a science fiction writer and his covert life as a pornographer was yet another private enterprise. For over fifty years, he secretly made comic books of a sexual nature and neatly filed them away.
The first item in each file was something innocuous—a Reds schedule or an old bill—as if concealing the true contents. No one entered his office except by invitation, and even then, none dared go behind his desk. His children had been out of the house more than twenty-five years. Concealment was part of his creative process, born of shame and guilt, which he maintained long after there was anyone to hide it from. He needed the fetish of secrecy in order to draw.
My father never took an art class. He didn’t visit museums or draw from a model. He’d taught himself from studying comic books, illustrations in pulp magazines, and bondage serials from the forties and fifties. Scenes lacked perspective, and the anatomy was crude. His earliest work is reminiscent of Henry Darger’s drawings, based on imagination rather than observation. When Dad began drawing as a child, he didn’t comprehend female anatomy, and for a long time he believed the vagina was in the middle of the stomach because babies came from there. He didn’t know women had pubic hair.