Chris Offutt: My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

There are times in people’s lives when a significant event occurs and they’re not aware of it — the last time you pick up a son before he’s too heavy, the final kiss of a marriage gone bad, the view of a beloved landscape you’ll never see again. Weeks later, I realized those were Dad’s last words to me.

The day he died, I drove home a final time. The highway unfurled before me as if the car were a time capsule bent on depositing me in the past. I didn’t like how I felt because I didn’t feel anything. I hadn’t cried. I was aware solely of the burden of responsibility — firstborn, eldest son, head of the family.

Dad’s mother died in 1984. He was fifty years old, had outlived both his parents. The sense of feeling orphaned led him to address his own mortality by composing a legal will, which he sent to my siblings and me. The terms were simple — everything went to Mom. If they died together, the rest of us split the estate equally four ways.

Included with the will was a long meandering letter that referred to silver and gold hidden in the house. For two pages he discussed his relationship with the first Macintosh computer on the market, delighted at his own skill at modifying fonts and learning to program it on his own. He closed with instructions that he’d appointed me to deal with the contents of his office.

On you Chris, I decided, this task and onus must fall — and I’m telling the others this without the reason. The examination of the office and disposal of its contents is totally up to Christopher J. Offutt, and this is oh-fficial.

In a separate envelope with a return address of General Douglas MacArthur, Dad sent me a secret will that furthered the details of the public version. He included instructions about his porn, where it was hidden and what to do with it. An accompanying letter expressed his reasons for not involving my siblings — he evaluated each in a petty manner and found them all lacking. I immediately wrote to my brother and sisters, offering a copy of the secret will to alleviate any concern that I might be receiving special favor. They demurred, already bored by porn and weary of his secrecy.

The secret will explained Dad’s long interest in pornography. The major difference between his own books and current writers was attitude:

They obviously dislike women, or worse, and I’ve always been crazy about ’em. I am not a sadist: I have sadistic tendencies. That difference is enormous.

He expressed his preference for porn from the Victorian era and his reverence for the Marquis de Sade, who wrote detailed sexual fantasies while in prison. Dad lamented recent changes in the marketplace while firmly affixing his own status:

Pornography is not what it was in my day. Both bondage & torture pix and descriptions have become more violent & obscene. Publishers get what they pay for: garbage.

I was The Class Operator in that field, Christopher J.,& there will be no successor.

The letter ends with a fierce exhortation that I not cross him up by getting killed. If so, he’d have to come barrelling up to my Boston apartment and try to find this very letter.

I’d become accustomed to unusual letters from Dad. Often they carried the signature of “John Cleve.” The name began as a pseudonym for porn but developed into a full persona when I was a child. Cleve’s signature differed greatly from the others. It was less formal, with joyously looping letters that ended in a circle with an arrow — the symbol for being male, the planet Mars, and the chemical element of iron. Letters from John Cleve were filled with provocative comments about women, ebullient use of punctuation, and humorous wordplay.

In later years, I received an occasional missive signed by Turk Winter, the persona who eventually replaced John Cleve. Turk’s signature was equally stylized, with a horizontal line that crossed both T’s and flared upward. There was an intensity to the smallness of the signature, the individual letters legible and terse.

Though I searched the letters for clues, I could never quite discern a reason for the differing signatures. It didn’t seem related to content. I concluded that it was the personality he was embodying, or perhaps that embodied him. After I left home, the varying signatures were the first indication I had that explained my father’s drastic and sudden shifts in mood when I was a child. Arbitrary rules changed abruptly, with swift consequences for breaking them. It’s possible that each persona viewed his domain with different expectations and decrees. None of us knew whom we were dealing with at any given moment.

Of nearly two hundred letters I received from my father, only one was unsigned — the one that accompanied the secret will. The absence of authorial attribution lent greater credence to the document. I believed that it came from the core of my father’s personality, not a role or persona.

I’ve never been certain why he granted control of his legacy to me. I suspect he wanted someone to know of his prodigious output, the wide-ranging velocity of his mind. At the time he wrote the secret will, we had been at odds for over a decade. It bothered both of us, and we didn’t know how to overcome the distance, blaming each other, ensuring hostility through the steady maintenance of old wounds. Attack and counterattack, intimidate and ignore. We raised the art of veiled criticism to its finest sophistication and talked against the other within the family.

Because my father made it abundantly clear that he might die at any moment, I kept the secret will for twenty-eight years, through many moves about the country. Each new location meant discarding clothes, books, and furniture, but I always knew where the secret will was stored. I wrapped it in plastic for protection. Dad never mentioned the will, and I didn’t bring up the subject. His trust lay between us, unspoken and vital. When he died, it was the first item I packed before heading to Kentucky. As it turned out, I didn’t need it — my siblings still weren’t interested. I’d kept it safe for nothing. Nobody but me ever read the pages. No one cared but Dad.

On the long drive to Kentucky after his death, I watched for the Pottsville Escarpment, a geologic formation that indicated the edge of the Appalachians. Earlier I’d passed through Lexington, site of my birth, and wondered how my life might be if we’d stayed there, near my mother’s family. What if I’d gone away to college instead of attending the closest one? What if I’d married one of my first four girlfriends? What if I’d stuck with my dream of being an actor? What if I hadn’t hurt my knee so severely at age nineteen that I was forced back home in a plaster cast after leaving the hills forever, a pattern of departure and return that repeated many times until I realized the landscape would always hold me tight, that I could never escape, that in fact what I loved and felt most loyal to were the wooded hills, and not my father.

MY FATHER’S full name was Andrew Jefferson Offutt V. As a child, he saw his name on three tombstones in a cemetery, a chilling sight that instilled a lifelong fear of joining them. This resulted in his decision to be cremated. Before I got home, his body was hauled out of the county for official incineration. The cremators cut open his chest to remove his heart implant. They placed the body in a cardboard box and slid it into a crematory that generated a fire of fifteen hundred degrees. Two hours of searing heat vaporized all organic matter, leaving pulverized bone, salt, and stray minerals.

Dad was an avowed agnostic, repeatedly emphasizing that he was not an atheist. In his opinion, disbelief created a religion of its own. This made for a brief conference with the director of memorial services. My sister and I rejected most options, including an urn or wooden box for Dad’s ashes. We went home to choose appropriate music and an array of photographs that would slowly fade into one another on a TV during the service.