MY FATHER’S writing process was simple—he got an idea, brainstormed a few notes, then wrote the first chapter. Next he developed an outline from one to ten pages long. He followed the outline carefully, relying on it to dictate the narrative. He composed his first drafts longhand, wearing rubber thimbles on finger and thumb. Writing with a felt-tip pen, he produced thirty or forty pages in a sitting. Upon completion of a full draft, he transcribed the material with his typewriter, revising as he went. Most writers get more words per page as they go from longhand to a typed manuscript, but not Dad. His handwriting was small and he used abbreviations. His first drafts were often the same length as the final ones.
Manuscripts of science fiction and heroic fantasy received multiple revisions, but he had to work much faster on porn. After a handwritten first chapter, he typed the rest swiftly, made editorial changes, and passed that draft to my mother. She retyped it for final submission. Under financial pressure, Mom would be typing the beginning of the book while Dad was writing the end. His goal was a minimum of a book a month. To achieve that, he refined his methods further.
Industrial mass production is based on efficiency and speed. Faced with increasing demand, Dad invented a method that enabled him to maintain supply with a minimum of effort. He created batches of raw material in advance—phrases, sentences, descriptions, and entire scenes on hundreds of pages organized in three-ring binders. Tabbed index dividers separated the sections into topics.
Dad was like Henry Ford applying principles of assembly-line production with premade parts. The methodical technique proved highly efficient. Surrounded by his tabulated notebooks, he could quickly find the appropriate section and transcribe lines directly into his manuscript. Afterward, he blacked them out to prevent plagiarizing himself. Ford hired a team of workers to manufacture a Model T in six hours. Working alone, Dad could write a book in three days.
Eighty percent of the notebooks described aspects of women’s bodies. The longest section focused on their bosom. Here is a brief compendium.
BREASTS:
love-swollen little buds
nascent curves
quivering mound
gentle hillox of her acorn-shaped brsts
tight hard mounds w/pointed crests
tender curve of her half-ripe breasts
firm and tight-skinned as new pears dangling unpicked from sun-warmed trees
gleamed w/the bloom of ripe peaches—w/same firmness
thrusting artillery shells
cannister jutted
opulently jutting projections
slick-skinned titty curves
meaty pendants
cantilevered coneshapes
unnatural thrust of those conoid mounds
bulging sides of her shapely creamballs
loosely attached knockers swayed from her chest
unbelieveable pulchritude of her overripe balls
big hard bullets of brazenly firm flesh
Another binder listed descriptions of individual actions, separated by labeling tabs that included: Mouth. Tongue. Face. Legs. Kiss. The heading of Orgasm had subdivisions of before, during, and after. The section called entry received the most precision, with subheadings of Virginal, Anal, Vaginal, Standing, Oral, and Kneeling. The thickest notebook, designed strictly for BDSM novels, listed of 150 synonyms for “pain.” Sections included spanking, whipping, degradation, pre-degradation, distress, screams, restraints, and tortures. These were further subdivided into specific categories followed by brief descriptions of each.
One long section gave me serious concern—a twenty page document titled Notes for a Book on Cruelty: Man’s Oldest Pleasure—a succinct list of tortures used throughout history in twelve countries. Examples included the partial flaying of people, insertion of bugs and rodents into fresh stomach wounds, nailing objects through flesh into bones, legs masoned into walls, the dislocation of arms, and cutting away various body parts. All were legal punishments mandated by the courts or society. The majority ended in slow, painful death. One source was a long diary recorded by a professional torturer of suspected witches in 1621.
1) Woman bound on rack,
2) Poured oil over head and burned,
3) Placed sulphur in armpits, burned it,
4) Hands tied behind, hauled up to ceiling, dropped,
5) Torturer went to lunch,
6) Placed spiked board on her back, pulled to ceiling, dropped,
7) Toes pressed in thumbscrews until blood squirted,
8) Pinched with red-hot irons,
9) Whipped and put in vise, gradually closed for six hours,
10) Hung by thumbs and flogged.
“This was all that was done on the first day.”
The final sentence chilled me. My impulse was to skip over the material completely, but I couldn’t shy away due to my own distaste. Instead, I tried to understand. My father had read dozens of books, copied sections in longhand, then organized his notes into a chronicle of terrible human activity. It was not scholarship on his part; he didn’t seek the information in order to place it in a larger context to further human knowledge. At first I suspected Dad sought inspiration, but none of his own books included the specific techniques he’d compiled. It occurred to me that he was using history to justify his own obsessive interest, seeking precedent to indulge his fantasies. For thousands of years people have treated other people in a horrible manner. Humans systematically tortured one another for political, social, and religious reasons. Someone performed all these acts, and someone else made a record for posterity. My father’s imagined worlds were nothing compared to historic reality.
Later my mother called and invited me to watch her beloved Reds play the Cardinals. I went to her house, grateful for the respite. It was a short drive through the lovely landscape of northern Mississippi, the thick foliage heavy with green. The sky was violet at dusk. The road to Oxford dipped and a church came into view. Briefly I had the sensation I was in Kentucky, driving to Haldeman to visit my mother.
At Mom’s house we spent twenty minutes fiddling with the television remote control and discovered that the Reds game was blacked out locally. Mom found a cop show she liked, then muted the volume and asked how work was going on the book.
I laughed and said, “Porn, porn, porn.”
She told me about taking a box of pornography to science fiction conventions and selling the books to fans.
“They bought them,” she said. “They bought everything. I don’t know why. The books were pretty much all the same. Different settings and people’s names, but the same. People just like them, I guess.”
“It’s like Agatha Christie novels. Or TV shows. A satisfying formula.”
“With sex,” she said, and laughed.
I told her I’d found a notebook with scads of notes about torture. The extensiveness of the material surprised me.
“It shouldn’t,” she said. “Your father was interested in that, you know.”
“What did you think of that?”
“It was historical.” She shrugged slightly. “He had a lot of interests. Like you do. Remember when you did that magic show at the library? You had a lot of hobbies.”
She was right, I had many hobbies as a child, and at one time wanted to be a stage magician. Maybe Dad’s study of torture was similar, a short-term enthusiasm.
“Whenever I talk about Dad’s career,” I said, “people always ask about your sex life.”
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
“Why would they want to know that?”
“I guess because of the porn,” I said.
“What do you tell them?” she said.
“I say it’s not something we discuss.”
She thought for a moment, then spoke. “Tell them it’s none of their damn business.”
“Okay, Mom.”
We turned our attention to the silent flickering on the television. The lead actor presided over a team, and Mom explained each of the specialist roles: fighter, tech, rookie, weaponry. The sound was unnecessary. I could see the characters surrounding a floor plan and planning an assault. They walked through a house with guns and flashlights, then chased a shirtless man in a car. I knew the car would wreck and they’d arrest the driver, and I knew the team would later capture the real bad guy, the boss of the shirtless man. A predictable formula satisfied the viewers, the same as it did for readers of Dad’s porn.
Mom told me she was content, that she liked living alone, and wondered if she should feel guilty about that.
“Do you?” I said.
“No, but I think I should.”
“You’re eighty, Mom. You deserve a break. No need to feel guilty about having a life you like.”
“You know,” she said, “you’re right.”
“Do you ever miss him?”
“Not really. Sometimes watching TV at night. Somebody to talk to.”
“Well, I’m here.” I pointed to the silent television set. “Good show, huh?” I said.
We both laughed. Later I hugged her, setting off the high-pitched keening of her hearing aid, and said goodbye.
I drove home and watched thousands of lightning bugs float in a field against the dark tree line. Cicadas roared steadily. The sound of frogs rose and fell. A whip-poor-will called, then a barred owl. Despite the beauty of the night, I could not rid myself of the tortures my father had compiled.